The Cube According to Gatherer – Sortable Spoiler
Hey everyone! I just wanted to link to According to Gatherer’s new online sortable spoiler. And also to thank Alex Churchill for both pushing me to put this online, as well as putting together that allows you to sort by name, by type, by power/toughness, or search for specific words in the card’s text. For example, you can search for the word ‘Human’ and find that there’s 28 Humans in the cube. Just be careful. Dearly Departed is a Human tribal card, but it itself is a Spirit. And Quirion Treerunner is an Elf Scout, but she mentions humans in her flavor text.
You can find the spoiler by clicking here. I’ll try to make sure it’s updated as we go along. And thanks again, Alex!
Yay. Happy to help. That’s great for inspecting the overall presence of various themes.
I typed in “Name” to see both all the Masquerade cards, and also all the things that care about them. The only printed cards that do are currently Liu Bei and Behemoth’s Herald – Arachnus Spinner doesn’t quite work given the way Masquerade is worded. (Also looks like Foolhardy Buccaneers might want its wording tweaking to work with Masquerade.)
And huh, your splice/Arcane theme was all added off your own bat based on Pull Under? That seems to be the only hit for Arcane that’s a printed card. I hadn’t realised 🙂
Aven Envoy is central to the Masquerade theme right now. Three other cards (Man of Letters, Unresolved Geas, and Political Attache) all ask for you to have a card named Aven Envoy to get maximum potential out of them. I’ll probably include a few more. The side effect, of course, is that an actual Aven Envoy may not be a 15th pick, if it’s turning on so many cards.
You’re right, though. I should edit Foolhardy Buccaneers to say “discard a card named Aven Envoy” as opposed to “discard Aven Envoy”. Otherwise, it should work with Masquerade. I roughly just copy/pasted the Changeling reminder text, swapped type for name, and added a line about Legends being cool.
As for the Arcane theme: Pull Under was just an early happy accident that caught onto a later theme. The actual card that started the Arcane theme was Grasp Meaning, which was lifted from your BNF Generator in Log 11 ( http://www.jmgariepy.com/2017/07/19/the-cube-according-to-not-gatherer-part-11-random-generator-blowout-bonanza/ ) BNF gave me a reasonable card that included the line “Splice onto Generated” and I did what seemed like the obvious thing and toggled “Generated” to “Arcane”.
I actually haven’t planned to make that many Arcane cards, and I wasn’t planning on making any more Splice onto Arcane cards (unless the mood hit me.) I just figured that if we got a card that Splices onto Arcane, it needs a few cards to Splice onto. It’s no so much a theme as it is me making sure a card ability makes sense.
Aha! I forgot some of the cards you were getting from other sources like the BNF Generator and RoboRosewater (even though Drood of Rantist should be a big clue). Yes, that all makes sense 🙂 I certainly agree it’d be nice to have a smattering of Arcane cards throughout the Cube to allow the one or two Splice cards something to work with. Especially Grasp Meaning would be awesome to see someone make it work, and in a sufficiently focused deck should have the power to actually tie the theme together. Probably no need to create another Splice card, but it seems a good place to continue to add type Arcane to various sorceries (especially sorceries for Grasp Meaning).
And yes, the Aven Envoy theme is funny (reminds me a lot of your Core Set 201X and 20d6) and is the primary motivation for Masquerade. Because Masquerade cards are mostly big to fit your Behemoth’s Herald, it’ll feel bad to choose to ditch a Masquerade card to Foolhardy Buccaneers – though it’s probably the right choice as odds are they’ll make you ditch it anyway if you don’t choose to. The rest of them are nicer – just gaining the ability through the Masq card merely existing.
Ah. I see what you mean. Maybe “If you discard Aven Envoy this way, return it to your hand” would be a better choice.
I got to admit, now that Envoy is playable, I’ve been thinking him as Envoy and not as a means to trigger Masquerade. Gotta keep the eye on the prize, though.
Oh cool! I am still really enjoying this series, I love your writing style 🙂
Always appreciated!