A bit of a blog post and some FF/Sonic thoughts.
You may have noticed that it’s been a while since I’ve done a theory-based article even though I’ve been posting podcast episodes on the reg (every other week on Thursday - new episode coming tomorrow!) - while set reviews are usually the heavy hitters in terms of view counts, I’ve been happy that in my post-Cubecon 2024 arc, I’ve gotten to writing a decent amount of cube theory articles, which I’d not done since 2015.
I’ve linked them in my Substack’s pinned post, but tl;dr, these are the ones I’d written and I’ve been very happy with how all of them have been:
It’s been nice not being on a set schedule to have to write every X number of weeks (it was awful) but a lot of these articles were ideas that I had stewing in my head but never got around to writing.
If my count is correct, I’m at my 58th theory article, and have something pretty big planned for my 60th article, but I’ve had some writer’s block for what I want to write my 59th one on. I have several articles that are in the 60-80% done range, but none that I really feel that I can push into a finished state.
That and my mental energy’s been focused elsewhere;
I finally beat Final Fantasy 8 (which had been on my bucket list for years) and beat Omega Weapon. I might do a longer blog post/article about this tying it to cube but it was certainly a journey.
Following the constructed impact of the Final Fantasy set and how Standard’s been.
Hitting Constructed mythic on Arena for the first time in a while as a personal challenge.
But I have no need to rush things, so I won’t. But I’m glad that all of y’all who are subscribed stuck around!
The FF cube review article hit the main hits of the set (and I’m very glad that Cori-Steel Cutter was in my top cards for Tarkir: Dragonstorm, even though I never actually bought one D:) and I’m glad that I was able to provide input on how the cards did in my cube (since I aggressively put in reps with the cards) to help with the inclusions for the recent update of the MTGO Vintage cube.
I do feel remiss in missing out on some cards so I wanted to do a brief talk about them here, along with talking about Sonic stuff.
I didn’t see much attention for this and I honestly missed out on it until I started checking on things on MTGSalvation’s cube forum. I haven’t had a chance to actually get reps in with it but a quick filter had it work well in a good amount of decks without effort, and even without it, he’s still a decent on-rate beater. Probably would have cracked my top 5 in red.
Lately, I’ve been limiting myself to talk about 5-7 cards per color/section, so that I don’t make these articles way too long (as opposed to just too long.) Meme potential aside, it was on my radar as well, but something I still don’t really dig that much in cube; mainly because I find its role to be more of a micro-level way of addressing artifacts/artifact decks than something universally powerful. It was something we didn’t talk about in the FF Quick Hits for thepaupercube.com, because it’s just so middling in a world without a ton of powerful artifacts.
On my radar but I have no idea why I didn’t mention this as a cheat target, since it’s solid with things like Sneak Attack and one-shot reanimation effects.
From the Sonic Secret Lair, the only card I cared about was Knuckles:
Pretty interchangable with most red curve-toppers at 4, it has haste and beats for a decent amount of damage. My gut instinct says that this is better than Rampaging Raptor since this lets you get some mana back and makes 2 artifacts for cubes that care about that kind of thing. I’m not really averse to Universes Beyond things, but I’m sure that’s going to be a net negative to sway some away from it and I totally get that.
I actually talked about this before but more people should be playing this card in their cubes. What an absolute beating. It’ll likely be one of those IYKYK cube cards like Heirloom Blade, Lazotep Quarry, Horizon of Progress and Giggling Skitterspike where when I see them in a list, I think to myself “they know what’s up.”