Greetings! We’ve got a sweet new set in Oath of the Gatewatch, and lots of potential cube cards to cover today, so let’s get right into it.
A couple quick notes: First, I’m saving everything with the new colorless mana symbol for the end, because that’s going to require some extra words. We’ll start with the traditional stuff. Second, while I might mention foils for commons and uncommons, my goal with my Cube articles is to keep costs down as much as possible, so the object here is not to find the cards that are going to go up the most, but to find the best time to buy the cards that we actually want to play with in our cubes. Got it? Let’s go.
Monocolored
This is a powerful card, but I’m not sure it beats out cards like Sun Titan or Elesh Norn at the top of white’s curve in Cube. It’s definitely one to test, but I’m not convinced it will make anything but the most expansive lists.
As for its financial future, Standard could bring its price up in the short term, but there’s no way it sees play in any eternal competitive formats. It’s probably fine in Commander, but it doesn’t seem insane. While it could surprise us in the short term, this should be way less than its preorder price in the long term.
(Note: All TCGplayer mid prices cited in this article were pulled on the day of writing, January 15, 2016. They may have definitely changed since that date.)
TCGplayer mid: $7.49
Likelihood to get a cube slot: Medium-low
Verdict: Wait to buy
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Really think this was all on point with relation to the cards called out and specifically the reasoning behind them.
I am going to add a stack of Wastes (I think 50 is overkill for the number of cards though!) but I will not be reworking the manabase (adding Pain and filter over others for example). I will add the 10 cards I am interested in over the triple color slots I run and see if people are interested enough to take them. Longer term as this is evergreen if we get say one card a set that’s good enough there may come a time there are enough to justify reworking the rest of the cubes mana.
My definite adds are the manlands and Oath of Nissa with the ones you listed as testers.
I think they’ve said that while the symbol change is evergreen, colorless-matters costs are on a theme basis and will not be in every set.
Makes sense would be odd seeing it outside of Eldrazi….
cant read your article as i’m not a pro member but in my budget cube I am already running Painlands alongside other colourless producing lands like ancient tomb, high market, mutavault, cavern of souls, etc. so fitting in a few of the colourless matters eldrazi doesnt seem like much of a hurdle.
excited to cube a couple of them up.
Thanks a lot for your article ! It’s nice to read some good content about MTG Finance and Cube. Would love to get some more often !
For my small cube (360 cards unpowered) I do want to include some new colorless cards (Thought Knot Seer and Reality Smasher) but I am not planning to add any wastes in the basic lands pool. So I will have to reshape a bit the mana base and include some of the new colorless producing lands (mostly Mirror Pool, Sea Gate Wreckage and a couple of the Blighted lands – U, B and G from BfZ) beside other old good stuff like Grand Coliseum, Ancient Tomb and Tectonic Edge already in my list.
A part from the colorless cards, I will also add Crush of Tentacles (as a fair Upheaval) and try to see if Jori En, Ruin Diver and Oath of Nissa will get some interest from my playgroup.
Finally, at least from my perspective the new set looks a bit weak for Cube…
I wanted to point out something that you said: “Real talk: some of these multicolored cards are sweet, but given that most cubes have extremely limited space for multicolored cards, I’m not at all convinced that any will make the cut.”
I’d keep an eye out for Stormchaser Mage regardless. For a blue and red you get a 1/3 haste flier with prowess. Maybe its not a cube card but this is already being experimented with in Standard deck brews. I’d imagine that new keyword abilities like Prowess might end up in a lot of new player cubes.
On the Standard front: Look out for Stormchaser Mage paired with Jori En, Ruin Diver and good ol’ Monastery Swiftspear. Wandering Fumerole is also in the list. I wanted to give a heads up to casuals and cube players that these cards might not go down in value. At $1 and $2 consider picking these up if you think they could see play in Standard. (I found that the 3 toughness of Stormchaser Mage is deceptively strong coupled with prowess! If you send 4 damage his way the opposing player can just put out some tokens and send 2 damage your way to pump him up to 5 toughness… Ya that just happened!
Anyway… it could drop to 50 cents but I doubt it… I think it will be one of the more expensive uncommons in the set. Probably $1-$2 and possibly $3+ if it makes a Top 8 standard Deck. Prowess players love this card. I’d be on the hunt for these, at least in trades. The foil price should come down but I don’t expect it to be less than $10.
Stormchaser Mage should be a great card in common/uncommon cubes, definitely. When you start comparing to cards like Ral Zarek, Dack Fayden, Dack’s Duplicate, Electrolyze, Izzet Charm, Prophetic Bolt, etc., I’m not sure it will ever find a spot in cubes that include rares. It will be interesting to see if it finds a place alongside Swiftspear in Standard!
Love this article. Thanks Danny.