This week we’re putting aside our usual design goals and focusing on a new one: creating cards good enough to hang in a high powered cube! Selesnya hasn’t gotten as much love as the other color pairs in high power formats, but our community is here to the rescue. Local cube organizer Eric is back on the pod to evaluate all of your great submissions to this tough assignment!
Lots of cards mentioned this ep. Most of them are in Eric’s cube list. I’ve also pulled most of them out into a big Scryfall gallery. You’ll specifically want to see the six Selesnya cards already in the cube that the submissions are competing against.
Topics and Tidbits
- Eric’s cube is “Legacy Plus”, contains cards banned in Legacy
- Some fast mana (chrome mox, ancient tomb) but no power
- double fetch double shock
- covering “the bar”, the existing 6 selesnya cards in Eric’s cube
- sneak attack with Torsten
- the frog plaguing cube
- green white board wipe?
- unusual to be attempting to design for very high power levels… need above 8/10 but not far above 10/10
- token decks like land decks? you need two different pieces to make the cards work, in roughly equal measure
- tokens vulnerability to bounce/flicker
- incidental vs all-in life gain
- undermine vs absorb
- how often does blocking happen vs just the threat of blocking
- not many riffs on the pact cycle?
- flickering creatures vs any permanent
- cards that are pure synergy pieces but have potential
- editing existing cards to be juiced… still nostalgic?
- graveyard value deck vs reanimator deck… different niches? colors?
- how good is tons of food tokens?
- containment priest vs dryad arbor
- hungry hungry urza
- rampant growth vs elves in cube
- using power creep against you
- most expensive power card with only 1 power
- “lightning focused” nice one Tim
- double fetching
- 10/10 with a berzerk
- annoying when archetypes are slightly different between sets (power 5+ vs power 4+)
- tutor tangent
- how hard is bargain outside WOE limited?
- designing for mechanics that aren’t even out yet!
- eric’s picks: sigarda’s revelation, hatsugarda, vanilla 10/10
- memories of the original rhox
Submissions
Larcent
I’ve never specifically designed for cube, let alone a high power cube, so be gentle! (Or not. I can handle it.) The idea here was pretty obvious. White and Green in this cube have a strong collection of token creatures. But because this is such a powerful cube with a lot of removal, I didn’t want to make a creature lord. An enchantment is slightly harder to remove. The ETB effect gives it a floor of a 2/2 flier with ward 2 that cantrips, so it doesn’t ever enter as a dead card. Plus, it’s a potential target for white’s flicker effects.
Combo cards: Hero of the Bladehold, Staff of the Storyteller, Dollmaker’s Shop, Pest Infestation, Elder Gargaroth, Esika’s Chariot, Flickerwisp, Phelia, Exuberant Shepherd, Torsen, Founder of Benalia.
AuxiliaryOtter
I have been working in dangerous spaces recently and 0 cost effects are for sure risky designs. My Pacts have been focused on being useful at 0 but really difficult to win without paying for them. (If a player stifles the trigger that is fine.) This card can really shift an aggro race in caster’s favor with a massive life gain and upgrading a creatures. This card should work really well with vigilance creatures, which is GW’s shared a keyword. Technically with Vigilance or other untap effects it could result in players winning without going to the next turn but I am ok with that for now. If players can’t take advantage of both parts of this spell I think the card will be lack luster, pure life gain rarely is amazing and conditional anthems can fail to live up to the hype, but I think at 0 upfront mana, players can work in powerful moments where this card will shines.
Pat
In my extensive research, by which I mean forcing green-white a handful of times on cube cobra, I noticed some blink effects in white and landfall effects in green. I ended up with a “blink any permanent” effect to combine those archetypes. The landfall ability is mostly there to make sure players realize it can blink lands, since that’s not a super common effect.
Specific cards that should play well with this:
BLINK: Flickerwisp, Restoration Angel
LANDFALL: Bristly Bill, Scythecat Cub
ETBS: Sandstorm Salvager, Steel Seraph
Craftedlavaistrue
I saw there was some +1/+1 counters going on in GW. But a +1/+1 counters synergy isn’t enough for near vintage powerlevel.
I intend to fix that by going overboard and synergyzing with ALL counters.
Atomsk
Redbay
Wobbles
kuyashiiPlays
Something exciting at all stages of the game. hits 56 cards in the cube (although 3 die immediately without support), maxes out grabbing things at 3/4 mv (4 only if you’re getting something offcolor), so while you can cheat some it might not be too egregious. makes you care about something slightly different.
Hworthy[Jared]
This card is a reason to put green and white mana into your deck. Maybe it’s a bit too strong but I’ve seen one too many last pick Knight of the Reliquary. It turbo charges your own strategy, while making opponents weary to put their own powerful abilities on the stack. It has more cool interactions than I can begin to mention, but I’m personally partial to copying a second trigger on a sythecat cub every turn off of the same fetchland.
Pat
Alright, this one’s a really intellectual card, so let me break it down in parts.
Part One – it’s really big
Thank you for indulging me in this design 🙏
Tom
JamesDaltonBell
Xena
I think a very selesnya thing to wanna do is create a bunch of little weenie tokens, but what if they weren’t tokens? Basically it’s a card that allows you to either go wide with excessive value or drop your bomb 3 turns early. Enables creature based combos, gets you off the ground, and can either let you put your whole hand on the board or just gets a wincon in play right away.
Goes well with Esper Sentinel, Haywire Mite, and stuff like that where it can either be the thing you throw out Ăłr the thing enabling you to go extra big, depending on your opening hand.
It’s effectively worthless when topdecked or with the wrong opening hand, but as an enabler or buildaround it can absolutely kick ass!
KennaKhaos
A simple yet effective design I reckon. A piece of premium removal that especially supports making the splash from mono white aggro, and the deck having such an effective counter to a reanimated threat seems nice for that deck
Khord
