How Heirloom Blade Made Me a Better Cube Designer

I worked with Parker over at Lucky Paper on an article about what Heirloom Blade taught me about cube design.

This is another article that I’ve had in my brain for a while but never wrote. Heirloom Blade has become a namesake card of mine since praising its merits for almost a decade now. It indirectly taught me a few lessons about cube design and I’m happy with how it turned out and I’m hoping that the lasting impression remains of more overall lessons and less of “Heirloom Blade good.”

Some things from the cutting room floor:

When talking about the card comparison lists, I mentioned how it’s mainly about being realistic with expectations but not letting them taint your view on things. Cards like Soul Warden are generally not worth it in a lot of cube environments, since it does too little on its own unless you’re going out of your way to make it an archetype. There’s a great youtube channel, Majuular, that talks about RPGs and one that he brought up was Guardian War, in a video about 3DO RPGs. He briefly mentioned how the music in the game was the most pleasant surprise and how it sounds like it was by Steve Vai for its overworld music. There’s several songs on that soundtrack which just punch *way* above their weight class for being a pretty middling looking Tactics game, but the whole game soundtrack is just very solid.

The Steve Vai thing inspired by friend Erik to make this for the graphic and it’s too good to not just post somewhere.

And this:

Steel of the Godhead was the best example I could think of for an aura (“back in my day, we called ‘em local enchantments.”)