How Heirloom Blade Made Me A Better Cube Designer

At Grand Prix Memphis in 2019, I handed out copies of Heirloom Blade like candy. To drive my point home, my friends and I had a rotisserie draft at the GP where I easily went undefeated with my Heirloom Blade deck.

I was an early adopter of Heirloom Blade, writing at the time in my review of Commander 2017:

My fandom for it hasn’t waned since. And I can even give Heirloom Blade higher praise: it’s made me a better cube designer. Here’s how.

One of the things that clued me in about Heirloom Blade’s power was a picture folder of decks that had gone 3-0 from my cube, dating back to 2014. When I was looking at how Heirloom Blade could work in a cube, my first thought was to look at what kinds of decks typically would play it.

Since the Blade looked a lot like Grafted Wargear in form and function, I imagined it slotting into the beatdown decks with lots of cheap creatures from my photos. I noticed that a lot of those decks’ creatures didn’t necessarily have strong typal match (like a deck having 10 Goblins), but many had small “chains” of matching creatures for the Blade to fetch. (The ensuing typal mesh looked like the string-covered wall of a conpiracy theorist.)

In 2012, I wrote that data can be useful for cube design, using spreadsheets to quantify things like mana costs, averages, and win records. Tools like CubeCobra ended up taking this to the next level, but I’m still surprised at how many cube designers leave value on the table by not capturing decks from their cube drafts. Occasionally, I’ll see posts that show off sweet decks that someone drafted, but it’s still very underutilized in in-person drafts for when someone fires their own cube. It made me think of the culinary concept of fond, the brown bits of food that are still in the pan, usually thrown away by those who don’t know you can make a sauce out of it.

Sure, photos don’t give you a lot of data points, or anything like statistical conclusions. It’s more like “the art of correctly generalizing from small sample sizes,” as Pro Tour champ Andrew Elenbogen puts it.

Obviously, Cube isn’t the Pro Tour circuit, but Pro Tour testers work with small sample sizes too. Yet the pros are still able to make insights into Constructed metagames. On a more granular level, I’m sure we’ve all played a deck (Constructed, Cube, Draft, etc.) and immediately known when our deck was trash, even with a sample size of just a few matches.

Deck photos are useful by the same principle - using these data points to make insights into your metagame. It isn’t definitive, but useful. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

I once was a guest on the Color Commontary podcast where we talked about Sickleslicer as the best-performing card in my Pauper cube. It wasn’t the most abstractly powerful card in my cube — that honor goes to Brainstorm, Battle Screech, Snuff Out, Lightning Bolt and countless others — but Sickleslicer clued me in that decks playing it had winning records. Looking at pictures of my Sickleslicer decks helped me focus that lens, showing that the decks playing it were artifact aggro decks and midrange decks, which reflected what I was seeing in my metagame, as those decks were doing well. The same goes for Heirloom Blade.

The information you get from deck pictures isn’t conclusive, but it provides insight. Use it. (Also, let’s be honest, taking deck pictures is also just a time-honored social media tradition for capturing decks that are just really sweet.)

I’m a long-time fan of the Rhystic Studies channel, so one of my favorite Cube memories is the time Sam wore a Christmas Cracker paper crown as The Monarch in one of my cube drafts. In his Giant Spider video, he talks about Giant Spider’s 7th Edition flavor text:

It’s easy to mentally shortcut and “watch the spider’s web” when looking at new cards. When looking at a card like Searslicer Goblin, there’s a lot of mental shortcutting involved. We mentally gloss over the fact that it’s a two-mana 2/1 because there’s been a billion of those printed. It’s the extra text that rightfully becomes the focus of attention (I recently wrote about this on my personal Cube Substack). When looking at new cards, we naturally look at what sticks out from the norm. There’s been a good amount of three-mana equipment over the years, but not many equipment that equip for free. Sweet, we’ve got a comparison point! Now let’s post our magnum opus on Gatherer: “The strongest thing about Grafted Wargear is that it equips for free and Heirloom Blade doesn’t have that, so it’s weak.”

It’s something I’ve seen time and time again; a thought-terminating pattern of looking solely at differences between cards, focusing on negatives and not the whole picture. It’s like if an evaluation has to be done in 10 seconds before a bomb blows up.

Consider the whole picture.

Don’t think you’re quite out of the spider’s web yet.

Generally, dedicated typal payoffs like Goblin King are weak in cube, at least from a raw power perspective. The “vampire” update of the 2015 MTGO Legacy Cube is one example of types-matter gone awry. It shouldn’t be surprising, since Vampires required playing severely under-rate cards like Rakish Heir in your final 40, and those support cards were competing against more powerful cards like Gitaxian Probe, Monastery Mentor and Monastery Swiftspear. These kinds of critical-mass decks are tricky in Cube, since those decks require:

• Lots of cards of a matching type in the cube, so that drafters are able to have enough matching types in the deck.
• Payoffs that you reward you for catching ‘em all.

Other linear strategies that rely on a “gotta catch ‘em all” type of gameplan (enchantress, Affinity for Artifacts) work similarly and essentially boil down to the same thing: raw numbers and payoffs.

It’s not impossible to make work in cube, but my experience has been that — for the most part — the juice isn’t worth the squeeze, unless you’re willing to build the entire cube around a handful of linear strategies.

Because of this historical precedent, it would have been so easy to mentally shortcut to think “because a typal strategy like Goblins/Elves is bad in cube, so is Heirloom Blade, because it’s a typal-matters card” without realizing why that statement isn’t a great apples-to-apples comparison.

Sure, it’s not easy to get 10 Goblins in a deck from my Legacy-ish cube, but a deck with four incidental Humans, three incidental Soldiers, and three incidental Rogues? Pretty likely!

Over the years, I’ve seen Cube curators and drafters underrate cards like Heirloom Blade, the cards that are similar to historically weak cards:

It’s all about managing your own expectations.

Cards from supplemental products are in this weird purgatory where they’re only legal in Legacy, Vintage and Commander, making trustworthy evaluations of power level quite scarce.

Usually with drafted sets, there’s an outsourcing pipeline: an underrated card makes its reps through a limited format, people realize that it may be worth playing in Constructed, and then play the card in Constructed. Back in the day, Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite was considered a solid top-end finisher (during its time), and that realization mostly came from the card being so dominant in Limited. Before the Draft format dropped, people assumed that Elesh Norn was way too expensive for what was perceived to be too-little impact to be playable (“too-small wrath” combined with a “win-more anthem effect.”)

Eventually, the Limited-to-Constructed pipeline did its job for Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite, but cards like Heirloom Blade don’t go through that same pipeline unless they get played in Legacy/Vintage, which can be a high bar to clear (Occult Epiphany never did anything in Legacy, for example.)

For cubes looking to find hidden gems, dumpster dives on sites like mtgtop8.com are nice for finding cards. I’d talked about how outsourcing to other formats isn’t a 1:1 ratio for something being strong in a cube, but success in another format is usually a potential sign of it being objectively powerful enough to stand in a cube. Potentially.

Cards like Night Scythe, Gut, True Soul Zealot, and Torsten, Founder of Benalia are good examples of this, since they went under the collective radar for years because they were in that weird purgatory realm.

Don’t be afraid to test the hidden gems.

In my own cube, after seven years of play, I’ve found that Heirloom Blade has aged a lot better than equipments like the Sword cycle — Sword of Fire and Ice and friends worked best in a world where decks weren’t playing to the ground as much as they are now, while Heirloom Blade’s dirt-cheap equip cost makes it significantly less risky.

But even if I someday cut Heirloom Blade for space or power, I’ll never forget the Cube design lessons it taught me.