tl;dr I’m replacing the triomes/SNC trio lands in my cube with the Surveil lands to see what happens.
Back in 2011, I wrote an article for SCG about the inclusion of signets and bouncelands/karoos (like Azorius Chancery) in cube. At the time, WoTC staff member Tom LaPille (who had cut his design chops/got his WoTC gig through being an early proponent of cube) had written a post on Twitter about him taking bouncelands and signets out of his cube saying as follows:
“Signets put impossible pressure on green decks and attack decks. I’m less attached to axing the bouncelands, but I still like them gone.
Signets let midrange decks speed through early turns and non-green decks accelerate quickly, marginalizing attack and green decks.”
It was embraced by many in the cube world - with it only recently having no longer seen as dogma in MTGO cubes, but even at early glance, it seemed odd since I didn’t really find aggressive decks suffering in my cube despite the inclusion of both mana fixing cycles. Nowadays, the talisman cycle has mostly replaced signets in cubes, but even with Talismans replacing signets (due to being easier to curve out with and represent multiple spells with,) saying Tom’s claim would elicit some raised eyebrows for sure.
Since then, I assumed that the arguments saying “better mana = makes multicolor control decks too good” had been long dead, but there was a recent episode of Lucky Paper which talked about how triomes (and an abundance of mana fixing) made 5-color-goodstuff too good. I hadn’t gotten around to listening to the LP podcast and figured that this would be a good pilot to get around to listening to it. The guest, Jenn the Judge, referenced their own cube experiences and a Ravnica cube of their creation, an environment where mana fixing was curtailed to keep greedy decks in check and noted that the abundance of fixing makes 5-color goodstuff decks the best decks in the format.
Trust me, I’ve forced 5-color goodstuff in cubes where wincons ranged from Intet, the Dreamer to trash like Ambassador Laquatus, because of how lopsided their cubes’ metagames were. I’ve had greedy decks in my cube metagame but they’ve never felt dominant or problematic, since the early game decks do a good job of keeping them in check. I’ve always maintained that, in the cubes I’ve known, that in cubes where that’s a problem, it’s much more of a metagame problem than fixing being too good since usually 5-color goodstuff is the best deck at going *over the top* of other decks, when decks aren’t being pressured in the early game, a point that was brought up with Gatecrash’s aggressive decks trouncing the non-aggressive ones (Boros > Orzhov ~ Gruul > Dimir ~ Simic) didn’t get the mental calories that is arguably should have during the podcast.
A lot of the “anti-fixing” arguments felt like deja vu of the things I heard and felt back when I wrote my 2011 article, and creature decks have just gotten better since then (Sulfuric Vortex gets played in a LOT fewer cubes these days because decks are so much more proactive and creature power creep has certainly helped.) The players on stage may have changed, but from what I could tell, the story remained the same.
In my “Update” post, I talked about wanting to revisit some of my cube articles from back in the day and that podcast episode made me want to revisit that one, as it was a topic that I was particularly passionate about. It’s been almost 15 years and like the Lethal Weapon meme of old (NSFW language, if you’re unfamiliar with the meme) of feeling old for it, sometimes the old tricks still work well. So I’m going to employ a similar strategy where I replace the cards in question to cards that are similar in function (in this case, replacing the 10 trilands with the dual-typed surveil lands; when I do, I’ll update my CubeCobra list accordingly), for some number of drafts, see what happens and write an article about how the meta got impacted (I assume that decks will probably get less greedy, like they did in 2011, but the “macro” metagame likely won’t be too impacted.)
I may still do one as a follow-up to my experience making a Ravnica Cube in 2022 that went up on MTGO, but it may be worth at least noting; but either way - a small preview: 5-color-control wasn’t remotely close to the best deck in the format as some may have assumed, from looking at the format and its fixing.
White aggro, red aggro and Boros were. By far.