Usman's MH3 Cube Commentary

It’s everyone’s favorite time of year for cube - Modern Horizons time. The set seems to already be doing well in constructed, but like usual, I’ll be evaluating the new cards through testing my own cube, reading others’ opinions, and playing Arena.

I’ll mainly be talking about the cards that I’m interested in (there’s a lot) and I won’t be spending much time on things that I’m not interested in (these articles already are long enough). To break it up, I’ll be discussing these by a few major clusters and including some decks that went 3-0 with new cards, to illustrate how some of them were used.

The last time Energy was in my cube, the last holdout was Aethersphere Harvester as a way to give something flying, no energy synergy needed. Additive Distraction is a tale as old as time, and I’d seen concerns about if drafters may be confused if there’s an “energy theme” when looking at Galvanic Discharge (a 10 for me) rather than a super-charged removal spell. It’s understandable to not want to bother with the headache, since Energy is yet another resource to track and without there being a lot of representation in cube, it can represent a barrier to entry to a format that can already be imposing for non-entrenched players - think of how many cards in a cube are a sole representative of a keyword and how that can be imposing.

Thankfully, the group that I cube with is relatively entrenched and consistent, so it isn’t as much of a problem on my end, but it’s something to think about if you don’t have an experienced and/or consistent group, the latter was something I’d struggled with for years.

I was initially pretty down on the card as something that didn’t seem like the juice was worth the squeeze in a lot of cubes to have it hit consistently, but I’d recently been thinking of it more as an “upfront Abbot of Keral Keep” that puts the variance on a different axis - you’re still effectively bottlenecked by mana costs (with no additional energy, it’s at

I hadn’t gotten to trying it but I’m curiously optimistic.

When I played silver-bordered Un-cards in my cube, pre Unfinity, GO TO JAIL and Blast from the Past were the strongest of the cards from those initial Un sets. Usually, GO TO JAIL kept something off of the board for at least a turn, and it was a nice way to get a blocker out of the way for an alpha strike, even if it was a gamble against something with an ETB trigger.

Static Prison gates the lockdown at just two turns, but usually that’s enough to do what you want to do - get something out of the way, punch face. This targeting non-land permanents is a big upgrade, since this can also just exile a mana rock/elf for disruption as well. I only rated this an 7 because, even though I think it’s a very powerful card, even without other energy, usually white non-creature cards are incredibly tight and I tend to find myself cutting even objectively powerful ones (like Assemble the Players, which played quite well but, well, something’s gotta go when good white cards come in, ya know?) Focusing on energy, of course, helps this but it doesn’t need help to be good.

I’ve always found Soul Warden effects to be middling in most cubes because of their lack of impact in most games. Guide of Souls looks to break that mold by being its own payoff by getting three creatures into play for a benefit that fits well. After all, small creatures run into the danger of being outclassed quickly and, like Warden of the Inner Sky, it punches well above its weight class if it has game pieces to support it.

I tried this out and it didn’t really have much traction, but the raw rate is cheap enough at two mana per buy-in that I’m giving it some more time, since three mana is about the mana where you start to get critical mass for creatures with ETB triggers (the various Recruiters, Reclamation Sage style creatures, etc.) Like with Birthing Ritual, it may just need to be evaluated through a different lens, since this effectively loops those creatures with ETB triggers, instead of just going for pure mana cheat like Recurring Nightmare, which makes sense to gate those mana costs since it’s cheaper. This is another one that I’m curiously optimistic for, even though it hasn’t done much so far.

When I initially brought forth (and even years later) the idea of including Kird Ape as RG, it was heresy then and although it’s much more commonplace, it’s odd that I find myself pushing back on this for this cycle of planeswalkers, advising to slot these where they naturally fit in decks, rather than solely where they’re strongest as the latter is more driven by a designer’s POV rather than gameplay. A classic meme maps onto this well - we might put Kird Ape by design, but Kird Ape is RG by user experience, which is what really counts.

Sometimes, you absolutely need to have both colors for it to be “good”, but not always, depending on your cube’s power level.

This Ajani, along with Phelia, bolster the S-tier of white aggro 2-drops and it’s usually been impressive when played, as a Raise the Alarm style card that heavily disincentivizes the opponent from killing the 2/1. Since it’s usually on the opponent to kill the 2/1 (unless you’re able to do it yourself), it was slightly overrated by it being more a small army in a can than a consistent planeswalker, but it’s still just an S-tier aggro card.

Once flipped, Ajani’s stronger in WR but very playable and usually was played in just white and should stick around for a while as a component in winning white aggro decks.

This Tamiyo played pretty well as a draw engine that flips into a walker ala Jace, Vryn's Prodigy if you assembled enough natural draws, cantrips or clues (although this wasn’t hard to do in most blue decks) wasn’t the absolute worst on defense either and could, at times, pull the old trick where you’d have her block and then transform before damage happened. When flipped, she emulated Jace, Vryn's Prodigy and Jace, Architect of Thought, although unlike those, she was relegated to just using her plus on the first turn and although the minus looks like a marginal upside to flashback, being able to get back a counterspell to play later on was very useful.

Similarly to Ajani, she was more than good enough in her base color and I never really saw her played in UG, as her upside on interacting with green is so marginal - where it’s very playable in just blue, and the improvement from getting back a green card was only slightly useful since it was limited to instants and sorceries.

The other planeswalker options are much more niche and unsupported in my cube.

There are a lot of options for utility in a cube - in Blue alone, we have Shelldock Isle, Jwari Disruption, Sea Gate Restoration, Castle Vantress, Otawara, Soaring City and many others to effectively be stronger Islands.

With the mono-color MDFCs, seeing them can feel viscerally odd, since their front sides can look awful when they’re alongside Magic’s strongest heavy hitters, but I found the mono-color having the ability to bolt these lands in helped make them live much more often than their non-mythic Zendikar Rising counterparts. Compared to the mythic ZNR MDFCs, they were generally more for “big mana” effects where you mainly use them if you’re flooded - Sea Gate Restoration was too expensive, and Shatterskull Smashing/Agadeem's Awakening generally tended to work on an axis of being mostly late-game cards. Performance may be better or worse in your cube depending on how much getting bolted to the face matters.

During my MH3 trial runs, there was a 3-0 deck where some of the then-previewed ones in RW were quietly powerful in the deck by letting it be 17 lands and not flooding out:

Unsurprisingly, the ones that I found to be strongest, tended to be around the cost of where I’d want that kind of effect in a deck. Because of this, these were the stronger performing ones:

This was my favorite out of the cycle as having the ability to bounce a spell came in clutch as disruption for either the control game or tempo decks.

I’m still unsure if I like this or Flare of Malice more, but a nice feature of this was being able to turn this into a land if the Flare mode looked like it was going to be weak, when opposing threats cost much less than 3 mana.

This felt like one of the more overcosted ones, but it was another where having the effect in your final 40 is nice without using a “spell slot” on them. In years prior, cards like Reclamation Sage were considered to be cube all-stars since they gave you an out to the relatively powerful artifacts available in cube, but with cards like Sword of Fire and Ice losing their relative luster, so has the stock of those mid-cost type of cards (and cards like Pick Your Poison) risen - at least in cubes with power, since they operate so cheaply against powerful “small” artifacts.

The multicolor MDFCs were generally weaker than the monocolor, with Stump Stomp and Revitalizing Repast being the strongest of them.

Meanwhile, the cycle of new “Castles” were generally fine, like the original cycle. Stirring Wildwood (9) and Arena of Glory (7.5) were the strongest of the cycle - both slotted into their respective colors and are definitely worth “the slot” in their respective section as both had pretty easy upsides to make to work. Arena of Glory giving 2 creatures haste wasn’t a pipe dream and found it was live significantly more often than you’d think, usually representing a ton of burst damage out of nowhere for decks that aren’t just mono-red.

Since there are a lot of “goyfs” in this set, I’ll talk about them in one big chunk here as a card class.

Like the original Tarmogoyf, I found that they generally reward you for “just playing magic” but get better with more explicit help via cards that dump themselves into the graveyard other than instants and sorceries, which do that anyway. Creatures kinda do too.

Having several cards of that type can be something that designers can lean towards via things like Urza’s/Mishra's Bauble, Seal of Fire and other cheap things that put themselves into the graveyard. There wasn’t a lot of explicit payoff for doing this previously as the major ones were cards with delirium and the original Tarmogoyf, but these give some more rewards for doing that.

This is arguably the strongest 1-mana “fair” creature for black, as it was almost always at least a 1/2 and generally at least a 2/3; at first, I was concerned that it only counting your own graveyard would make it too small, but it didn’t matter that often. It never escaped but that’s fine since it’s so good on raw rate. I could see it leaving my cube if Black doesn’t want a pure stat beast, but I predict it hanging around for a while.

Pyrogoyf is stronger than Flametongue Kavu but not strictly so. I’ve seen some comparisons between the original Flametongue Kavu and Fractured Identity; while it’s an exaggeration, it does resonate since it gets rid of something and gives you something out of the deal. There were some concerns about it comparing poorly to FtK when Pyrogoyf was leaked due to its variability on its ETB trigger, but I found it generally wasn’t a big deal - it’s an awful feeling when your removal effect can’t kill a threat, but being able to dome was sometimes a worthless consolation prize in those cases, sometimes useful, sometimes game-ending. Usually, though, it emulated the old Kavu - cast it, kill something.

That said, it growing over the course of the game helped with the times when its trigger was an ETB consolation prize, since, even if it only domed an opponent for 2, it would grow to something bigger and become a sizable threat like Tarmogoyf. I didn’t see it come up in testing, but the ability to trigger off of other Tarmogoyfs is potentially great with things that make copies of other permanents.

Red aggro decks generally aren’t starving for finishers, and although Flametongue Kavu was, in theory, a curve-topper finisher, it was more a value play in more midrange and control decks. But, since this can dome someone, it did the job of aggro finisher as well, and it’s at least more flexible in that regard than your bog standard Hellrider.

Because of that, I see this having a lot of staying power.

This was a card that looked like it had potential, but it’s hard to quantify exactly how much mana Tarmogoyf is worth on average, so I tested it on a lark. A drafter took it P1P1 and went into Simic, making a 3-0 deck as follows:

I was honestly surprised to see it work out, but the drafter noted that if the first Tarmogoyf lived, you were usually in good shape and that the second one was usually a harbinger to winning the game.

In a way, it’s a six-mana card but one that can at least be paid off in an installment plan. Tying up future mana is annoying, but usually the rate of three mana for a Tarmogoyf on demand is a good rate to have.

During Oath of the Gatewatch, when colorless mana first came out, we had a house rule to have Wastes in the basic land box along with basic lands, but the decks never were able to compete with the other colors. Effectively, colorless was trying to make a color that had a greatest-hits over 30 years to compete with a lot fewer sets, and power-level wise, it didn’t really work, even when it was done in conjunction with adding in more artifacts and artifact-centric strategies to make the colorless mana requirements less taxing.

Even with the option to have Wastes in the basic land box as a house rule, the strongest that it did was act as an easy way to figure out the “bye” in pairings.

Competition’s only gotten stronger now and, like with the old colorless cards, the only real payoffs are on rate, which isn’t a competitive strength when comparing to the all-stars in other colors. There are some exceptions, like Sowing Mycospawn (4), but it’s more for “if you have colorless kicker” than trying to make that a theme, since it isn’t really a payoff.

You can add colorless-creating mana resources like Talismans, painlands or the new Landscape cycle, but in my cube, that’s a lot of effort for cards that have a very hard time competing with

This cycle using creatures as a resource does tend to restrict when you can cast these for free since they cost a game resource - things like recursive bodies and/or tokens do help with mitigating the cost, since you’re not trading a whole card for the free mode and in general, it wasn’t hard to enable the free mode on these.

My findings for these were as follows:

This was great as Cultivate is somewhat close to being in my cube, power-level wise, and found this was one of the more easily able to be “flared out” because of green loving its mana dorks and expendable bodies, leading to some very strong openers. Green has a ton of token generators, but I’m not running as many as I could. But even without it at max cheat mode, it still worked well.

In a generic blue control deck, this plays too closely to Cancel to be worth putting in the final 40 of a deck, but I’ve rated it highly because it’s significantly stronger in tempo - it’s counterintuitive to sacrifice your clock when you’re a blue beatdown decks, but usually it’s worth sacrificing your smallest threat when you need to protect something else. Being able to counter creatures was useful when you just want to stop whatever could stop your attacking force, since the opponent couldn’t just play a creature to block.

Even though the Cancel mode isn’t great, it was surprisingly live in those decks. If you’re a long-time reader of mine, you’ll know that I love tempo decks and you may want to temper expectations if you’re not explicitly supporting tempo decks like I am.

Like Fell the Profane, it’s overcosted by a mana and I’ve been relatively even on both, although I’d be leaning more into this with more recursive creatures.

Phelia might be my favorite white 2-drop in the set with either it or new AjaniAjani, Nacatl Pariah // Ajani, Nacatl Avenger being front-runners, but they’re both essentially 1A and 1B in terms of them being top-tier white aggro cards - Phelia only really surprised me with how flexible she was by blinking things other than just creatures, even if it was just to keep a planeswalker in check or blinking one back to reset your own. It might have more applications than aggro but like Nethergoyf, it’s so good at what it does that it’s likely going to stick around for many years.

Of all things, Ocelot Pride made me think of Geist of Saint Traft. Initially, designer Erik Lauer talked about how he compared Geist of Saint Traft to saboteur cards like Ophidian, a catch-all term for creatures that do something when they’re unblocked.

In 2014 I noticed another Ophidian, Kari Zev, Skyship Raider:

“Geist was more subtle as it attacking meant it dealt a lot of damage, and it living to tell the tale meant that it could do so for later turns. Saboteurs without evasion have typically been weak and Geist got around that by having hexproof, demanding that the opponent have a blocker or some other way to deal with it or lose quickly.”

The reason that I point this out is that, on its face, Ocelot Pride emulates Geist of Saint Traft as a saboteur style creature that - without additional life gain - needs to connect and live to do its thing.

As much as this sounds like dogging the card, I did like it a lot as an aggro card - it usually came down, beat down early and usually made a token or a few and had a lot more shelf life in the late game via token generation when ascended - there was a game when I saw it make a cat, and then make a duplicate of a token created by Nissa, Ascended Animist which is close to its ceiling, but still not that uncommon. It has the highest ceiling of any 1-drop since it can snowball, but that said, I found the dream of taking over a game didn’t happen that often unless the opponent was on either a slow start or a control deck. Still very solid, though.

While not quite the S-tier of Ajani and Phelia, this is a solid stat beast that subtly nudges players to just play it on curve since it’s disruptive via downgrading a land - at least, in cubes with a lot of lands.

While cubes aren’t in need of another “big draw” effect, this effectively is Quick Study to Brainstorm’s cantrip (to draw an analogy) and Quick Study’s closer than you’d think to getting there. Brainsurge played well as a way to just dig really deep into the library and sculpt your next few turns, which Brainstorm also does incredibly well, even without ways to shuffle your library.

Because of that, it’s a card that I wholeheartedly enjoyed playing with in my cube but it’s likely a card that may end up on the cutting room floor, as a solid meat-and-potatoes draw spell; overall, I liked how it played more than things like Impulse, etc, as something to do on your end step.

Emperor of Bones felt like a powercrept Scavenging Ooze, as something that incidentally hits graveyards but is also something that can be a sizable threat (even if it isn’t necessarily mana-efficient.) It looks like this can just randomly punk people playing with graveyards, but found that this is more just really good with removal and just let you get even more value if you killed something good.

Admittedly, I didn’t get a lot of reps in with this either, but the raw potential is certainly there for decks that can churn through cards in their hand and don’t care about life loss. This may just be one of black’s strongest draws to playing aggro and/or cheap things.

One of my main concerns with cards like Blood Artist was that their raw rate wasn’t very good, so that you’d have to make up for it with getting some number of death triggers (and have it so that the life loss/gain actually matters.)

Marionette’s Fabricate helps, since it brings its own token and can be a fine body and thus, was played in more decks. I don’t really push aristocrats so my rating would likely be much higher if so, but I liked it ok as a value threat.

Soultrader’s raw potential is there, since it converts things to mana, but I wasn’t that big on it myself. It gets much stronger if explicitly doing things like aristocrats, but I rated it low for myself since I don’t really push that archetype.

Although Pyrogoyf’s significantly stronger as a 4-drop that most red decks want, this is a much more offensively-slanted one, similar to the Hellrider variety. I’ve seen Ojer Axonil, Deepest Might in some cube lists but it never resonated with me because it requires specifically red sources from non-combat sources, and Sawhorn Nemesis casts that net much wider since it doesn’t care what kind of source the damage is, so things like burn and creatures all get doubled.

I’d liked it (and got some discourse that it may be “too good” although I think it’s many miles from being close to that) but my only concern is how many curve-toppers a cube necessarily “needs;” it’s one of the times where going for the like-for-like can make sense - since a cube only really needs so many curve toppers for aggressive decks, which is why I’m rating it as low as it is.

Like in Murders of Karlov Manor, green gets a lot of solid heavy hitters.

Six gained a reputation to kill it on sight, since you usually had to respect how much it could warp the game since it could easily recur at least one thing from your own graveyard and several more if it lived. Its recursion made countermagic and spot removal much less effective while Six was still alive and having a 2/4 body was relevant against aggro decks, as red ones usually had to two-for-one to chop down the tree. Six usually emulated a mini-Titan since its attack trigger meant that it could retrace a permanent, and helped to get longevity out of normally dead draws and, as can be expected, worked very well in decks with value permanents like Pyrogoyf.

This deck was a good example of a midrange deck that utilized Six well:

It’s everything I wanted out of Bramble Sovereign by being cheap if need be and something to copy creatures at a relatively cheap rate via its landfall trigger later on. Giving a power/toughness boost via Bestow is nice and lets it live longer, which is also a nice bonus against wraths if you go wide. Overall, I dig this for green midrange, even though I wasn’t able to try this one out.

A nice “off the top” card which is where the meat is with cards like Augur of Autumn’s coven and Ranger Class’ “ultimate.” Eladamri played well in green midrange decks - like with Ranger Class’ ultimate chapter, I found that getting at least one creature was great for the three-mana investment and getting more on top of that was extremely good. It usually didn’t cheat things into play, but that’s also more pipe dream than how I’ve found successful green decks to play out - churning through efficient threats rather than cheating out big things.

Fanatic’s base rate for tapping for just a green mana was a bit low, but usually played well in green decks as it wasn’t hard to enable ferocious and to, if need be, become embalmed (although that usually didn’t happen.)

This is one of the stronger Mulch-type cards which does a lot of little things well; card selection without being disadvantageous, making a chump blocker for matchups where you can’t afford to take off a turn’s development, potentially ramping into things and finding things that aren’t just creatures. It being a nombo with things that took advantage of things like Satyr Wayfinder (blink, reanimation, a warm body to attack walkers/get back initiative/monarch, etc) is annoying. But in our world, we don’t tend to get a lot of strict upgrades, but more so just general upgrades - I never got to trying this out in my own cube but I’m excited to.

Like the original Birthing Pod, this works best with a lot of creatures with ETB triggers, since you only lose the creature side when you sacrifice the original creature and you retain the mana value of its ETB trigger.

With Birthing Pod, you could rely on having spots on the mana curve that didn’t have much selection - so long as there was at least a creature to pod into, so that you could reliably spin up the ol’ pod to get something else, to repeat the process.

Limiting looks to the top 7 rather than the entire library makes getting hits significantly harder - requiring more “hits” in the curve to effectively function. Being able to Ritual into another card at the same spot on the curve helps, since sacrificing a Blade Splicer into another value 3 like an Elite Spellbinder doesn’t mean you traded down (and got about 2 mana’s worth.) That may be where it best works out, in decks that aren’t looking to “chain up”, but are able to use this as a pseudo-blink card to generate value via similarly costed ETB creatures and that may be more of a tempered expectation, which makes sense since it costs less mana to cast and activate.

An annoying thing with Kroxa, Titan of Death's Hunger was having to power through a mediocre mode on Kroxa’s initial cast, like powering through dry Thanksgiving turkey to get to the better things on the plate. For Kroxa, the promise of a 4 mana 6/6 that ate your opponent’s life and hand was the payoff, you just had to jump through some hoops to get there.

Like Uro, it was nice that it actually did something to the board when not-escaped (if there was something to kill) and like with Pyrogoyf, it usually boded very well if you killed something on its initial cast, since it gave some tangible return on your initial

Currently, this is in my “flex slot” in Boros that I’d had cards like Comet, Winota, Imodane's Recruiter, etc. but I get the feeling that this’ll stick around, since it’s stronger than the (currently underrated) Mabel from Bloomburrow, which I liked in testing. This may change for me, since I’ve been on the “multicolor balance doesn’t really matter train” for several years, so that’s less of a factor for me these days but it’s certainly been a top-tier Boros card.

There’s some potential Additive Distraction because of the Terrain Generator mode and how often that’s going to do nothing, but found it didn’t really matter that much since this is effectively another Horizon Canopy-style land. I’d heard some complaints that it doesn’t fix, but neither does Reflecting Pool, which Horizon of Progress emulates more than a generic Horizon land.

Psychic Frog was a solid Delver-style threat as something cheap to deploy and protect, and flying helped it connect in the later game. Like the original Psychatog, it was hard to block but didn’t feel like you were throwing away a bunch of cards to make it survive. There’s some cross synergies with using this as a proactive way to get cards into the graveyard, too.

Only drawback was that it was slightly annoying when outclassed, but discarding cards could help with that.

Its shelf life may also be extended from Dimir not having many staples, but it was overall just a solid tempo enabler, while also being a nice threat.

Initially, I had thought that Bloodbraid Challenger (7) was going to be the frontrunner for Gruul card for the set, since it hits the hits of the old Bloodbraid Elf but that it’s bigger and has escape. But then an unassuming Common took over MH3 Limited.

If you stretch it hard enough, Writhing Chrysalis could be 4/5 for two mana, which is a good rate and can threaten to just burst out a bunch of mana’s worth of things to do on your next turn.

There’s an old story about during the days of the dominant

This has a good base rate and threatens to turn other things into permanent acceleration, which is really nice with tokens and recursion and is, in general, a very solid payoff for doing graveyard things - things like this, Marionette Apprentice, Warren Soultrader and Grist, Voracious Larva are some solid additions to bolster Golgari graveyard decks, but I like this even without going deep on that strategy.

There’s been a lot of discourse on this being broken in Constructed formats when Nadu is combined with ways to repeatedly target it as a way to bury the opponent in card advantage, but I generally just like it as a solid on-rate beater and as a card like Kira, Great Glass-Spinner as a way to protect itself. My relatively low rating is because the busted stuff in Simic is busted, but as I’ve been moving away from perfect multicolor, this may not even be accurate for how I feel about it. I’m a big fan.

Both this and Aragorn, King of Gondor are what I want out of my tri-color cards - they’re well above rate but also tend to work well in decks that touch on their colors; Satya’s incredibly good on offense and acts like a pseudo-Kiki-Jiki style card that copies creatures (but stronger with small ETB trigger creatures since they are more likely to stick around via energy) while Aragorn tends to play defensively via having vigilance but can turn the corner incredibly well.

This deck used Satya to copy things even as innocuous as a 1/1 Esper Sentinel:

Both are solid and I don’t really think one’s better than the other, so you can definitely season to taste with inclusion.

I’m not including it for how weirdly polarizing it can be for outcomes via coin flip, but the raw potential for power is certainly there - winning the flip is mostly upside, but some things like copying a Wrath effect isn’t going to do much. I wouldn’t bat an eye seeing it in a cube (and thus, the rating isn’t an indictment that I think the card is weak) but I really don’t want to deal with it, myself in my own cube.

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