Usman’s Deep Dive on Outlaws of Thunder Junction

Hey y’all, I’m back to talk about cowboys and Magic.

But before I talk about the cards, I’ll touch on the mechanics of the set.

While cards with Plot can help sandbag cards to let you get a higher storm count, I found that it was generally also very good at helping decks “play” cards while making them not vulnerable to removal, helping to make it so that threats could play around interaction-heavy decks. Where this was especially apparent against countermagic decks and, especially for Red’s Plot cards with Haste, being able to deploy and punch after coming off of Plot made it so that the tempo lost wasn’t a big issue.

Crimes work best in decks with a lot of interaction, but one nice thing is that it gives cards that typically don’t interact with an opponent’s board, like Elspeth, Knight-Errant, a way to commit crimes to enable them. Some cards like Raven’s Crime and Flame Jab get better with crime interactions, and even some cards like Relic of Progenitus/Unlicensed Hearse could be maindeckable with a critical mass of crime cards (but that’s doubtful, honestly) as considerations if you really want to go deep on that theme.

Here’s my submission to Lucky Paper’s community survey for OTJ:

We’ll start with one of my favorite cards of the set.

It makes me think of cards like Wall of Denial’s flavor text: “It provides what every discerning mage requires — time to think.” Aven Interrupter only delays the opponent, but for the most part, I found that didn’t matter that much, since it gave a lot of positive tempo. Think of it more like a Remand that delays something for a turn instead of something like Elite Spellbinder that purely taxes it.

I’ve heard comparisons to Spell Queller and I think it makes some sense - as a way to delay something and have a flashy evasive body to show for it, but I’ve found that Interrupter Jones isn’t as feast-or-famine as Spell Queller. Spell Queller can backfire at inopportune times, can be bad against opponents with multiple removal spells (somewhat similar to the problems that cards like Kitesail Freebooter can have against an opponent with two or more removal cards in hand) and can be a nonbo if your deck is packing symmetrical removal.

White threes have been getting so good that I’m hesitant to say whether it’ll stick around for a while (especially with MH3 around the corner) but I’ve been quite impressed so far.

Although non-land mana resources can help unlock its Baneslayer Angel mode earlier, for the most part this played as a split card with extreme late-game utility. What helped Dust Animus be a powerful threat was the ability to play to many stages of the game, and it wasn’t uncommon to plot this on a turn other than two, continue to hold up interaction mana, and then do something big later in the game - and doing so in a better way than Jace, Reawakened did. Dust Animus represents some of the best of what Plot can do in cube.

It might look “unbeatable in draft, unplayable in other formats” since it relies on big boards, but this doesn’t really represent how Collector's Cage actually played out.

Collector's Cage certainly gets better in cubes that play more to the board, either from fewer mass removal effects or just having ways to generate wide boards naturally, like with Ajani, Nacatl Pariah and other cards. But even without specific cards like the new Ajani, I found that it wasn’t hard to naturally unlock “Coven” with this, since it could sculpt bodies to suit.

Usually just getting a three or four MV card out of the Cage was a good deal, especially if you could rebuy the Cage via blink. Even in cases where the Cage can’t easily break open, if the opponent is on similarly sized creatures, combat math was a nightmare and the Cage would eventually threaten unlocking Coven because it’s not as if the game just ended if you couldn’t trigger the hideaway condition.

The following undefeated deck is a great example of a meat-and-potatoes creature deck in

The only reason that this piqued my interest is that it’s a 6-mana wrath at instant speed, which is pretty cheap for the effect and something that can be kicked to save your own things. Still, 6 mana is a steep cost, espeically against aggro. It might just be something that’s played in midrange mirrors, but the base rate looked so bad that I didn’t end up testing it.

I had pretty good feelings about Three Steps Ahead until content producer Takobyte compared it to Archmage’s Charm in a recent video. It’s true that Three Steps Ahead’s individual modes are worse than Archmage’s Charm on its card draw, and copying a random artifact/creature for an extra mana might be worse than stealing a 1-drop.

But, it’s also not just a discount brand Archmage’s Charm that’s easier to cast, but also somewhat a discount brand Sublime Epiphany that lets you do some kind of combination of drawing, copying and countering. But even on its base mode, having the flexibility to cash it in is nice on a counterspell, like a better version of Neutralize.

Honestly, in the abstract, being worse than Archmage’s Charm isn’t that bad of a deal - the Charm’s

I’ve been a big fan of this Quench variant. It’s everything I wanted Mystic Snake to be: I much preferred the floor of being able to hold up

It didn’t make a

Power-level wise, the closest comparison may be Make Disappear, a card that’s virtually a Last Word in decks with creatures but it’s a nice cheap counter that I’ve liked.

Aven Interrupter’s bigger cousin looks somewhat similar to his aven brethren, but it’s more like an expensive counter like Mystic Confluence, whereas Aven Interrupter is more a temporary answer. Attacking for value was often worthwhile, and pretty risk-free since the opponent can’t get their card back.

However, the steep mana cost is a lot for this effect, so I think that’s that will hold Smirking Spelljacker back from long-term adoption.

I hadn’t heard a lot of hype for this card and it may be because of how much I absolutely love cards with flash, but I had liked this when trying it out. A high power and a decent three toughness makes it so that Stoic Sphinx can be used as a big Ambush Viper in combat, and if the opponent doesn’t immediately have the removal spell, the Sphinx player is in near-complete control of when to expose their Sphinx to removal.

This made it so that when at parity or slightly ahead, Stoic Sphinx could just clock the opponent upside the head for 20 damage, making it incredibly easy to protect. The evasive big body was no joke. When behind, it meant that you were still mostly in control of its fate, but its hexproof was more inconsistent if you had to interact with the board.

I’ve been lukewarm on this as a generic Blue creature since he’s pretty middling on defense, but I think he has more potential when viewed more as a build-around as a “draw-matters” deck that can threaten to deal 7 to someone after a Wheel effect, or as a proactive threat in multicolor decks that can reliably commit Crimes on their own turn to trigger him.

On defense, a 0/3 statline is likely, since opponents generally will cast things on their second main phase rather than risk walking into a Counterspell that triggers the Duelist.

If Future Sight was an elusive creature, it’d be this Fblthp. It’s yet another value engine that rewards being able to deploy multiple cards a turn, but having Ward helps to make it not just get blown out by removal. Waiting a turn to deploy the Plotted cards is annoying, but not a huge deal.

Plotting is generally a nonbo with counterspells, but I found that Fblthp sometimes made this work out alright - there were times when I Plotted away soft counters when no longer relevant. It’s another card that may have a harder time in cubes that aren’t proactively pushing that direction for blue decks, since a generic

This Geralf can be very feast/famine where it needs a few cards to really be worth using - triggering off of any spell (creatures included) is a big help and multiple zombies can get out of hand quickly. It’s just that oftentimes, these kinds of big spell chains are difficult to attain without dedicated support like cheap cantrips. The right Storm-adjacent support can push this much higher in your cube’s rankings.

Another card that was difficult to evaluate but usually ended up very feast-or-famine, where if there wasn’t anything to attack it, it could act as a significant card advantage engine. But if not? Jace usually just didn’t do enough. Sometimes the works would gum up from having a hand that didn’t get that much better with looting and didn’t have much incentive to plot something away, and then Jace just died.

Mana cheat is usually dangerous and has high potential to be powerful and because of that, I’m going to give it more time, but my initial impression is not good.

I’d seen comparisons to this and Shriekmaw, but Thundering Carnosaur is a closer analog, since both Carnosaur and Harvester have the kind of modality that really helps its matchup spread. Even if played against a deck with a bunch of small creatures, being able to kill a 2/2 early is something that’s just nice to have access to if needed.

A sizable body with Menace is great too, and I think this midrange beefy threat is going to stick around for a while, even after Shriekmaw leaves cubes, because of its in-game flexibility.

Black three-drops have gotten so much better in recent years and this ticks similar boxes to other good “value creatures” where it gets a ton of card advantage (a virtual 3-for-1 when it enters) on top of a decent body. Although this isn’t the type of card that you’ll usually see non-singleton cube designers go non-singleton for, it does work incredibly well with copies of itself and other discard effects.

I hadn’t seen this whiff when played against a hellbent opponent, but a floor of a 4/3 for four is still an acceptable floor for this slab of midrange beef.

I hadn’t seen a lot of hype for this, but unlike Archmage’s Newt, this doesn’t have to live to get a trigger out of the deal and it’s a lot harder for this Bob to accidentally kill you. Having to attack is a real drawback, so it’s effectively a slightly worse Dark Confidant, but I think that’s a good place for a cube aggro beater since Bob is still extremely strong.

This is one of the best “blaggro” cards we’ve seen in years. Its recursion isn’t free, but it’s one of the easier recursion triggers, especially in Black decks packing a lot of spot removal and hand disruption.

I found that Tinybones had the same issues that a lot of other saboteurs had, where they end up looking better than they play, since it’s easy to imagine board states where it can swing in unimpeded if you Doom Blade anything that stands in its way. Unfortunately, the times where it just looked awkwardly at an opponent having a 1/1 or a 2/2 token to trade with weren’t an anomaly.

Not to say that this is bad, but my expectations of it being a

This set’s Heartless Act: kills most things, but not everything. Years ago, I’d have rated this as a 9-9.5 or so, but at this point, it’s mainly just tailoring for what your cube’s threats are. Although Shoot the Sheriff has fewer misses than a lot of alternatives, the marquee Outlaws like Sedgemoor Witch, the new Kaervek, Headliner Scarlett, or Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer definitely matter.

Although Kaervek does nothing on its own, its potential had piqued my interest in testing, since he works so well with cheap black spells - since it can enable some truly gross plays like being able to double-dip on cards like Duress and to turn Doom Blades into mini-Plague Winds. Since Kaervek’s “flashed back” cards aren’t beholden to timing rules, he can enable things like instant-speed discard if you play a burn spell on an opponent’s draw step or if you counter something and nab a sorcery. My main concern with it was its floor and unlike Freestrider Lookout, its body is under-rate but it’s going to be something that I’m hoping lives up to its potential (even though I feel like it probably won’t).

Slickshot does a lot of things incredibly well - triggering off of any non-creature meant that it usually represented a lot of burst damage out of nowhere, and even without help, a flying haster meant that it could steal Monarch (and Initiative) relatively easily. Pound-for-pound, it was one of the better two-drops I’d seen in my testing time and although I never really saw it plotted - just hardcast and swinging for the fences - but I’m sure that in time, its Plot will be combined with countermagic as a way to one-shot someone with protection up.

Even as a generic red threat? I loved it.

I honestly didn’t pay much attention to this until I saw someone analyze it as a 3/2 Menace for

I liked this as effectively a two-mana haste threat that could be Plotted to give a three or four-mana threat haste, which is really nice with the old all-stars (Goblin Rabblemaster and friends) and the new guard like Gut, True Soul Zealot, Carnage Interpreter and other things like Sheoldred, the Apocalypse.

It won’t have anywhere near the shelf life that Slickshot will and may just end up being a mid-tier Red creature, but may last longer in your cube if your Gruul and Rakdos decks have an aggressive midrange flavor to them.

I’m rating this highly due to how much potential it has. On base rate, threatening to make Golems at a great rate is powerful, but the Extruder needs synergy help. Thankfully, a lot of cube cards incidentally make artifact tokens and while some like Broadside Bombardiers are amazing even without a critical mass of artifacts in a deck, this still has enough potential for me to be curious on how it works in the long term. Short-term impressions from trying it out in my cube have been promising.

Freestrider Lookout’s little sister got my attention by virtue of being a red card that triggers off of Crimes, since Red has so many proactive ways to enable them - in both one-shot format and repeatedly via the many red planeswalkers that can burn an opponent and/or their creatures. I never saw this make a Dragon, but given more time and more treasure makers, this may not be a pipe dream.

I mention this card from trying it out as it had some absurd games where it was able to quickly get an extra combat step out for lethal out of nowhere; it’s a card like Embercleave that relies on having a few creatures to be worthwhile for each mode and a card that usually represents absolute domination of combat, if it resolves, especially if you’re able to set up multiple blocks where you eat several creatures and get an extra combat out of the deal and/or some treasures for your trouble.

It’s just that I’ve been burned by this kind of effect in cube too often - not necessarily extra combat ones, because they’ve almost always been awful, but - Red spells that aren’t either creatures/removal/absurd on rate, since usually those are the cards that end up in the sideboard and don’t make the cut, because proactive decks only have so much room for cards that aren’t threats. I want to like it, though.

For the most part, I’ve found this to be a better Blade Splicer. Even without combat shenanigans, Sandstorm Salvager was great to have as something to do in a color that can find itself with useless mana elves and tokens that get pumped by this. In a color combination that can spit out three-mana creatures on turn two, this is something that I’m excited to play in my cube for a while.

I’ve liked this as a ramp/cheat target that has a nice effect on entering the battlefield and has one of the better ways to shrug off removal, by making a copy of itself on death (and thus getting another trigger.) Usually this didn’t trigger off of other big creatures, but look at it like a Wurmcoil Engine style threat rather than a build-around card, and it’s a nice addition to slower decks.

This riff on Siege Veteran/Luminarch Aspirant was a nice threat as a virtual 3/3 that could, if need be, suit itself up to threaten a massive snowballing threat. It wasn’t uncommon to see this attack as a 5+ power creature, which was especially nice in decks that could accelerate this out on turn two. This set, along with Archdruid’s Charm and Sharp-Eyed Rookie from MKM, brought a lot of nice midrange beef to green decks. Welcome to the team.

This is yet another midrange threat that could be run out as a three-mana creature, but I found 5+ mana to be more common. Haste and Vigilance was a surprisingly potent combination since it could immediately present a threat and could hold the fort at the same time. Trample was nice to kill planeswalkers and take the Monarchy. Green, for the most part, doesn’t get trample and haste on their midrange threats, so this combination is rare and welcome here. Even its death trigger wasn’t flavor text, since killing it threatened the player untapping with a ton of extra mana to burst out a giant threat.

It isn’t so much that one of Goldvein Hydra’s abilities is great, but that they all combine to be an effective threat.

While this is absurd in cubes that are non-singleton for fetchlands, I found this to be closer to Luminarch Aspirant than you may think, and even when it wasn’t 100% Luminarch Aspirant, being able to mass pump your team at instant speed was another way to have threat-of-activation for the team when a single +1/+1 counter wasn’t going to blow out combat.

Like with Sandstorm Salvager, this doesn’t require a +1/+1 counter “theme” to be good, but Bristly Bill works incredibly well with +1/+1 counters and is a nice way to push attacking in your cube decks.

We don’t tend to see instant-speed creature cheat these days and six mana’s a pretty decent rate for it, reminding me of Tooth and Nail. Its one-mana Spree ability didn’t come into effect that often, but the modality was nice if the deck wasn’t cooperating on giving you a big threat.

It may just be that the two-mana Spree mode is the primary base mode on this and that cheating something into play is the gravy, since getting two cards at three mana at instant speed is a solid rate for Green. Because of that, I’ve rated this higher than most “cheat” effects, but this definitely gets a boost if your cube wants to support those strategies.

What I like most about this is that on top of being decent on-rate (reach gets better as we see more pushed fliers, like Slickshot Show-Off and Deep-Cavern Bat), this is a Crime payoff that doesn’t require additional mana. This makes it nice in Jund-style midrange decks that want to heavily interact with an opponent via removal and discard, and value being able to thin lands out - since this is limited to once a turn, Freestrider can’t just machine gun ramp, but it’s a nice subtle effect that can also just happen to accelerate you into big mana turns.

This isn’t so much a big beefy threat like the other three-mana cards, but I like it for how it complements midrange

These days, a trampling Juzam Djinn isn’t above-rate, but getting some Food tokens that can be cashed in for cards is a nice way to catch up to 2024 creature standards. The last ability may look like a niche synergy, but it helps the Farmer’s matchup spread for times when life totals don’t matter and you’d rather just have something proactive.

Izzet cards have historically been value burn spells like Electrolyze and friends, although they’ve generally just been fine on rate by killing something and then getting some kind of value. When trying it out, I found that Slick Sequence bridged worlds on this, by being slightly better-than-fine on rate and almost always drawing a card in low-to-the-ground decks. I’m unsure how long this’ll last in my cube since it effectively took the place of jack-of-all-trades Izzet Charm, but my overall impression of Slick Sequence was pretty good.

Oko has a lot to live up to when compared to his old self, which is why I think he should be seen more like a Garruk than an Oko, since it usually played out as a value engine that alternated between spamming out 3/3s and drawing cards to keep himself alive. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t go ultimate that often and usually, his passive wasn’t backbreaking but was nice to have as a way to give beefy creatures virtual haste.

Simic is one of the worst color combinations for proactively enabling Crimes, since countermagic is rare on your own main phase, but Oko saw some play as a splash in Azorius Control to take advantage of White’s ways of interacting with an opponent’s board.

A solid value engine; even though it was usually splashed in decks that had base green or white, it still positively contributed to decks.

The streamer Aspiring Spike compared this to Alchemy’s Assemble the Team and I think the comparison’s sound; I’ve played a lot of Alchemy and Assemble the Team was usually not a Demonic Tutor, but it usually found something that you wanted. Plotting this away isn’t useless either, since it can be cashed in on a later turn when you have more lands, and I found that Plot was best on cards that either had an immediate effect after coming off Plot (the Red ones with Haste) or a better effect later in the game.

If you pillage the bog with the expectation that it’ll be a good value play rather than a tutor, it’s a solid add.

If there’s any kind of card that I have a weakness for, it’s unassuming equipment, so I fully am expecting this to be significantly worse than I’ve rated it; when I looked at this as less of a Lightning Greaves and more of a Bonesplitter that trades +1/+0 for haste and ward 1, it looks much better. I’ve grown less fond of Bonesplitter and Eater of Virtue in recent years, even with their dirt-cheap equip cost, so when I tried Lavaspur Boots, I was surprised that it overall played better due to the ability to burst damage with Haste.

It’s odd because cards like Boots of Speed never really did much for me, and if an opponent responds to equipping a summoning-sick creature, they don’t have to pay Ward

Like with Lost Jitte, there’s some micro-synergies like being able to be tutored with Urza’s Saga and Trinket Mage, but I don’t think that’s going to move the needle that far, and I like these Boots as more of an aggro tool than a midrange one.

I saw this described as Inferno Titan meets Primeval Titan and that’s pretty close to how it played out, since it comes down, hits something for 2, and gets a couple of mana’s worth out of the deal. Mana rocks help to get more value out of her passive but for the most part, she plays like a modern-day Titan and can be seen as a Green card that can be splashed. It’s a card that I liked well enough but I don’t think has long-term shelf life because of the strength of midrange threats in recent sets.

Umezawa’s Jitte had a lot of its power in what it could represent when on the battlefield - killing something, pumping something massively or gaining life to represent the opponent not being able to race you.

This Jitte plays somewhat similarly, where having this on the battlefield messes a lot with expectations - the opponent’s ability to block, what you can play with your lands, and the permanent size of your creature. Like with Pillage the Bog, if you manage expectations accordingly and don’t compare it to one of the top-tier equipments and instead compare it to something like a Bonesplitter-type of equipment, it looks better. Utility lands like Gaea’s Cradle and others can move the needle, but like with Lavaspur Boots’ interaction with Urza’s Saga, it probably won’t be by much.

Stoneforge Mystic interactions aside, this works better than Drach’Nyen as a “removal on a stick” - this played best in decks that could reliably upgrade their creatures into larger ones once they got into the Aegis, usually either from having cheap aggressive creatures or utility creatures with enter-the-battlefield triggers. As an artifact, it is vulnerable to mid-combat hate but I didn’t see it that much.

Unfortunately, Azorius has such a strong A-team of control-leaning cards like Teferi, Hero of Dominaria, Teferi, Time Raveler, Shorikai, Genesis Engine and Fractured Identity that there may not be room in a cube that has even distribution across two-color pairs, but this was nice to have as an option for more beatdown-friendly

Along with Nexus of Becoming, this gets much better if you’re actively pushing giant threats and mana cheat since this does effectively represent a free spell + draw 2, although needing the cheat spell to be in the top three cards does hurt its consistency. Still, like with Collector’s Cage, it may be that the best use of it isn’t to plot something that costs six+ mana, but being happy with getting a four-drop plotted to play next turn and drawing 2. Unfortunately, this was one that was a victim of being unable to test it out in cube drafts; for that reason, I’m rating it a 5 but I wouldn’t be surprised if it just falls flat and doesn’t do enough for the cost.

Thanks for reading! You can find more of my Cube thoughts (spanning more than a decade) on Linktree, along with a ko-fi link if you want to buy some treats for my cats.