It’s time for another cube review and I’m pretty jazzed about adding cards from the Spider Man set to my cube. Although there will be Omenpath reskins of these cards for MTGO and MTG Arena, I’ll be referring to these cards by their paper printing names for clarity. I’ve put my methodology for reviewing at the bottom of the article.
Before I talk about the cards individually, I’ll give a high-level overview of the Spider-Man mechanics and why they’re relevant for discussion.
Web-Slinging: Similar-ish to the survival mechanic from Duskmourn, as it requires being tapped to use, which requires either an attack or some other way to proactively tap them, like Vehicles, creatures with Saddle or Spacecraft. Having more of those cards can move the needle some, but so far at least, the keyword pretty much plays as “if this survived a combat step” which made them less of a given as was expected.
Jim Davis described the mechanic as “Nurturing Pixie meets ninjutsu” which makes sense as well, since ninjutsu asks similar questions of creatures that get bounced:
Are they cheap or evasive so that they can reliably get around/under deployment of blockers?
Do they have good ETB triggers to re-use, to get additional value?
Mayhem: Madness isn’t a heavily represented cube keyword but we’ve been seeing more ways to naturally enable discard in red without having to make power level concessions via Ivora, Tersa, Marauding Mako and others – so it’s a direction that can be built to in red, which is where I found Mayhem to work best.
The transforming MDFC legends: These played similarly to keywords like adventure, where there’s flexibility in being able to play the cheap side and the expensive side, without losing access to the latter if played early (like with mechanics like cycling.)
I’m going to talk about all of them since most are priced to move and incidental fixing that makes tri-color mana helps. I’m still off triomes in my own cube but even outside of that, sources of rainbow mana like Treasure tokens and 5-color lands like Mana Confluence are great for incidentally getting that third mana needed to flip these in decks outside of their respective triad, like this deck that was able to flip Gwen Stacy.
For the tl;dr, these are my 10 favorites from the set:
One thing you’ll notice from this list is how many good white 2-drops there are in this set. They all play a similar role – nice beatdown creatures that have some form of utility: either burst damage and/or multiple game objects, even if some are only temporary (Origin of Spider-Man.)
There are currently a plethora of good white 2-drops and these don’t crack the Ajani/Phelia tier, but there’s a lot of solid role-fillers here.
Cards like Selfless Spirit have always been nice as an on-board combat trick while being on real bodies and while requiring mana was a very real cost for using the indestructible ability, having flash adds another dimension to it by creating more unexpected combat scenarios while being a pretty good on-rate flash creature if it’s not doing that. I’ve already seen it ambush a flier in combat and being able to jump this, even if it required mana, was still very useful. Cards like Cathar Commando are an obvious analog for being a 3-power flash threat and I’m hesitant to say it’s better than that, but I’ve found its combat utility to put it in the “pretty good” tier of 2-drops in white.
This card was one that performed above expectations – it was slightly worse than Spectacular Spider-Man, but being close enough in power level to where they’re not far off in my power rankings.
What I liked about this was that it provided a lot of burst damage: with being a 3/2 on first attack, and 6 on the next one, without taking into account giving something else the +1/+1 counter or double strike (although that was usually the default mode.) Early beatsticks these days tend to focus more on utility than raw stats, since there are better creatures to fight with than the barren board states you’d see years ago. With it taking such a large chunk out of the opponent’s life total, I was a fan of how this played out in aggressive decks as a pile of stats. I didn’t see it often bounced but I’m sure that when that happens, it’ll be great.
Although her first impression wasn’t as good as I’d have hoped, I’m still cautiously optimistic on it as a disruptive tool that can also act as a way to bounce cheap things with white’s built-in synergy with self-bounce (Nurturing Pixie, Sunpearl Kirin, Ambrosia Whiteheart.) I didn’t see her web-slinging ability used to bounce things for value, but I’m thinking that’s likely her best home, in a deck that plays her as a way to recur creatures with ETBs and secondarily as a way to get a cheap 3/3 out.
That said, the floor of being a 3/3 that peeks at the opponent’s hand was still very good when it was played, even in times when the opponent didn’t have much to tax with the ability. The taxing ability was pretty small but it was usually just gravy to have on top of being a 3/3 that peeked, and even though white’s 3-drops are incredibly good now, I’m likely going to have her stick around for a bit to see how often she’s played as a 1-drop vs a 3-drop.
Generally, the plan with these kinds of cards is to ignore the smaller object, but leaving Peter Parker alone was a dicey proposition, because Peter Parker himself is a weak 0/1, but being able to flip represented being an actual threat.
Cube being a format of creating imperfect analogues of decks created a tension where it was never quite certain if a deck was able to flip him or not, especially in game 1 of a match. I mentioned above that rainbow sources incidentally helped to help flip, but you never really knew if someone was able to flip it if they didn’t have Bant mana on board. But, being a bargain bin Ajani meant that it *usually* was the case that he could be flipped and that was usually the case. But even then, that was usually enough, although your format may have its performance vary, since this was one that worked well with ways to blink/recur it, as a way to create a 2/1 spider.
Web-Slinging didn’t happen that much and transforming him was mainly just as a way to get a 4/4 on the field. Vigilance and reach were amongst the weaker keywords, but having the ability to either turn this into a 4/4 or play it for 6 via casting and flipping it to get a 2/1 spider was fine too.
I tried this out and I was relatively whelmed; requiring mana to use was weird, since it virtually cost 2 mana and I’m honestly unsure if this is better than a generic 4-mana token generating planeswalker like a Garruk or Gideon, Ally of Zendikar. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is better than I think, since it can represent a lot of burst damage, ala Elspeth, Knight-Errant – even if it’s much worse at that role, since being second fiddle that that role could still be fine.
This was another card that I didn’t see a lot of hype for (edit: although the Eternal Durdles podcast talked about how it’s the best card in the set, which was nice to see) since cards like Aether Vial never really took off in cube. Being restricted to artifacts doesn’t help either, but I had my interest piqued with how much potential mana this could cheat out and – at least for decks with a lot of artifacts – she performed very well, since it wasn’t hard to turbo-charge her getting counters via cantrips, especially cards that can draw 2+ cards on the opponent’s turn, like Brainstorm, Occult Epiphany and Archmage’s Charm.
In one of our test drafts, I took Lady Octopus and was able to shift to taking artifacts in the deck to ensure critical mass in the deck. The deck went undefeated and Lady Octopus was one of the better cards in the deck, since she was able to cast several artifacts over the course of the game without requiring mana to be used. The deck wasn’t doing anything broken like casting expensive artifacts for free, but being able to cast several mid-sized artifacts was more than good enough to accrue value over a game.
Unlike Aether Vial, Octopus’ trigger casts the artifacts, which has its own bonuses and negatives: opening the artifacts up to counterspells but being good with cards that care about casting multiple spells in a turn.
Sets like Edge of Eternities and Warhammer 40K had some nice cube cards that were incidentally artifacts, and with cards like Lady Octopus and Iron-Spider, it’s nice to see some more payoffs to pay off that setup that those sets laid the foundation for.
My initial thoughts were that it has a fine as a looter, but something that stuck out was how useful this was as a threat that slowly got larger via connive. Decks that want to proactively dump things in the graveyard like this undefeated deck found its ability to grow useful, even though it was ultimately secondary to dump things into the graveyard. It never flipped over and it’s interesting how the backside isn’t just a “strictly better” side, but one that’s generally better in the late game.
Norman didn’t transform into the Green Goblin but that’ll likely be useful, if anything, as a way to turn it into a bigger creature with evasion when drawn late.
This performed decently well as a virtual mana rock that entered untapped for blue, although it could die to removal, it usually didn’t. Not being a land on your turn was slightly annoying since the 2/2 body didn’t do a whole lot – in theory, it was something that could swing as a 3/3+ with blue cantrips, but it usually just was a 2/2 that hung around and occasionally swung if the coast was clear. I love blue tempo decks too much and it was in the deck with Lady Octopus with a lot of creatures, and even there it only occasionally swung with friends.
It’s another card that I’m trying out that I won’t be surprised if it doesn’t last until 2026 in my own cube.
Over the years, I’ve seen blink as a supported cube archetype and only in the past few years has it felt like something that can stand with other classic cube archetypes on a pure power level basis, bringing cards like Ephemerate and Parallax Wave back from being in cube maybeboards.
The blink cards that have stuck around are either great on an efficiency (Ephemerate) or some other utility (Touch the Spirit Realm) axis, but this piques my interest because of what it theoretically can do:
a protection spell against spot and mass removal, although it’s mana-inefficient at the former role
as a way to re-trigger creatures with strong ETB triggers
as a way to potentially a way to win a game out of nowhere, by exiling all of the opponent’s blockers
But, my spidey sense says that it’s a jack of all trades but not at an efficient rate, as I’m unsure what the “base rate” of what the card is – probably around 2-3.
The deck with Lady Octopus had Hide on the Ceiling and it was close to being in the main deck. It was something that I anticipated siding in against matchups where creatures had a short shelf life, but it never happened.
Of course, this is really really good with EoE’s Warp cards and if anything, I could see this working out because of how well it works with Warp but it may also just be more of a splash card in white, red and boros decks.
As often with these Baneslayer-style creatures, her value is mostly dependent on if she’s able to reliably survive to a combat step. Attacking with her was generally a sign that you were in the driver’s seat, as deathtouch did help to make sure that she could attack safely, but she often did find herself dying to a spot removal spell befor ebeing able to attack. Lifelink is something that’s been overlooked in her evalation as it helped make sure that you life to spare when doing the Bolas’s Citadel thing with her attack trigger, before hitting a land.
I didn’t think she was as good as something like Ouroboroid that had a similar weakness and being able to virtually solo a game, but it was fun when she was able to attack safely.
There’s been a lot of hype for this card in Commander and given the role of 2-mana rocks in the format, it makes sense. In theory, this is like a card like Virtue of Persistence as a card that does a small thing and that could incidentally take over the game if it drags on as a Sword of Damocles. Usually, these kinds of cards are defined by how much a deck wants the floor and this is no exception, as a 2-mana untapped mana rock is still fine in cube.
It’s just that its “go big” role didn’t happen that often, as usually I found it to be more the exception than the rule – like Virtue of Persistence, it was something to unlock if the game dragged on (having a creature to exile wasn’t hard to have at that point, but it was a notable bottleneck) and found that when that was unlocked, it usually resulted in the game being over, but it was relatively rare.
This was like Choco-Comet where it’s a fine-ish early threat that scales to the later stages of the game, but it doesn’t feel as bad to cast at mid-levels (or when X isn’t equal to the opponent’s life) since its body also scales up with mana input, and gaining life for your trouble was nice as an immediate return. It’s kind of like a trampleless Siege Rhino without blink shenanigans (and killing it with the ETB trigger on the stack can be annoying to prevent some life gain) but it’s a fine-ish midrange value pile, while also being an on-color way to flip Sorin of House Markov and supplement self-dealt life loss.
Eddie’s value is mostly reliant on having 1-drops in the graveyard – either via ones that get there proactively via sacrifice or ones that are high value that the opponent wants to kill ASAP, like Ocelot Pride and other 1-drops that retain value in the late game, like Voldaren Epicure. Casting it without anything in the graveyard wasn’t the worst thing, if the deck had the ability to flip into Venom, which somewhat emulates The Gitrog, Ravenous Ride in terms of function – eating useless things to get value out of them.
Midnight Reaper is relatively middling, but adding Flash really helps, so that an opponent gets gotten once from a creature dying; being a ⅔ body instead of something like a 1/1 helped it to be an actual threat unlike cards like Blood Artist. It’s another card that also supplements Sephiroth as a way to get use out of sacrifice, although the archetype still feels like it’s not quite as powerful as many classic and generically supported archetypes in most cubes.
This has some modality with being a way to push some damage through, but when it was played, it was always played for its Sleight of Hand-style mode, where it being limited for the timing of playing the card didn’t matter. While I don’t expect it to be a 100% use for that mode and while I expect its timing restriction to be relevant at times, I do anticipate its mode B of pumping some creatures to be useful – being a sorcery makes it unusable as a combat trick, but it’s still useful to push through damage and pump creatures like Heartfire Hero, Ouroboroid, Nadu and Gau that care about power or being targeted.
This gets bonuses for being something that red doesn’t get access to easily, 1-mana cantrips, as they’ve traditionally been not that great, like Crash Through.
My initial thought was that it’d play somewhat like Summon Brynhildr’s first chapter, but not being limited to a few turns did help with some more situational flips with Gwen’s trigger. Being a 2/1 that virtually drew a card was great for red aggressive decks and being able to represent a larger threat was excellent for being able to turn something that normally would have been stonewalled into an actual evasive threat.
This was one of the easier-to-flip legends, I found, as red has a lot of ways to make treasures via cards like Fable of the Mirror Breaker, Knuckles and others and even if the extra abilities that care about exiled cards was flavor text most of the time, it was still great to be able to represent a 5-mana hasty dragon mode (similar to Nova Hellkite.)
As one of the last previews, this innocuous looking Slickshot Show-Off style creature is a downgrade from Slick-Shot but not a 100% strict downgrade either, since discarding usually gets done in red without requiring mana, so there’s high potential for this to deal a ton of burst damage without mana investment with cards like Lion’s Eye Diamond and Psychic Frog.
My gut says that it’s still worse than Slickshot since it gets its pump as part of red aggressive decks’ natural game plan – play burn/removal to get things out of the way, but if it gets to swing for 3-5 in the air a few times, I’m still happy with it, although YMMV.
It’s a filler card that puts things into the graveyard and some archetypes that want to put things into the graveyard won’t mind playing this as a way to do just that. This mostly saw play as a Insolent Neonate, but one that played slightly better for aggressive decks.
I’m mainly listing it here as I’d seen some hype for it, but I’m honestly unsure why. A 2/1 with riot is mostly underwhelming without extra help and the extra abilities that he has don’t do much. Cards like Questing Beast and Rampaging Raptor get there by being well-statted beatsticks and this just isn’t.
Being a ⅔ is the base rate for a 2-drop these days and this almost always punched well above its weight class; since it was able to throw a +1/+1 counter on something else, putting 3 power on board for 2 mana was great but it was also nice for triggering things like Nadu in decks like in this undefeated deck. Being able to pump 2 other creatures was nice to help it act as a mini-Anthem as well if the stars aligned, but it was a nice way to be able to be useful in the later stages of the game too. I never saw it being bounced via web-slinging but that’ll be a great combo as well.
If he doesn’t have another creature to pump, he’s worse and doesn’t get to the amazing feeling you get by putting 3 power on the board for 2 mana, but usually he had a friend to buff.
Being green meant that, like red, it had the ability to make rainbow mana easier than other colors and like Gwen Stacy, it wasn’t incredibly difficult to flip this over and I saw some game states where this being drawn late meant that it was able to be cast as Miles, then flip + attack, pumping some creatures and turning a losing game around.
Since Sandman’s stats are tied to the lands that are in play, it’s usually something that’s “fair” on rate, improved by land ramp and something that’s not good to cheat into play. Most of the juice with this, however, is with its ability to recur from the graveyard – it isn’t very mana efficient, but it does let you return a land to play; by that point in the game, getting a land for ramp purposes isn’t that useful, but it’s nice for making Sandman larger, landfall triggers and being able to add up to improved draws if you’re able to use it a few times to recur a fetchland/landscape a few times.
I’m cautiously optimistic on this since, although it’s never absurd on rate in a given game, it still scales pretty well, even if it can’t recur from the graveyard and immediately block. Final Fantasy and Edge of Eternities have given some great landfall payoffs and this is a nice way to give the deck another way to get a land into play at instant speed.
This card’s obvious analogue is Tough Cookie, which is worse as an “artifact deck” card but better in more generalist green decks. Using my own cube, I found that it was best in the Naya colors, although arguably – do cards like Ocelot Pride, the 2-mana Ajani and Scythecat Cub need more help to be better?
My general barometer for cards like this is having about 5 cards in a deck to buff to be worth playing and the decks that I’ve been recording usually don’t have that critical mass.
This was one of the bigger surprises in how much better it played than I thought. 2 mana for a ⅔ is the going rate these days, but it’s one of the few web-slingers that had added utility by being a card with virtual kicker and making a mass of spiders in the late game, if need be. I’m hesitant to say if it’s a *good* aspirational thing to do in the late game, but it was something and sometimes having a bunch of warm bodies in the late game is good enough, which is what I found with some green midrange decks playing this.
I’m very cautiously optimistic on this as something to convoke out with 3-4 creatures as something to grind value with, but not as a way to mana cheat big things into play (which may be causing some issues with expectations.) AspiringSpike talked about this card in his Spider-Man video, comparing it to Ancient Imperiosaur, although Web is at least harder to kill.
In a bog standard green midrange deck, this should reliably get something via its trigger, but I’m unsure how many turns it’ll take to be worth it, given that it gets something. My gut says 2, which may be too much for a card of this cost – even if convoked.
As I mentioned in my early impressions post, this is an Overrun on a creature, like Earthshaker Giant. Although it’s slightly worse at burst damage, putting counters on creatures instead wasn’t useless for game states where an Overrun wouldn’t have ended the game either, making it more of a “big anthem” than with the gameplay polarity of an Overrun, where it’s either not useful or game-ending – overall, it played better than Earthshaker Giant did when I played it years ago.
That said, it mostly felt unnecessary in my own cube as a 6-drop. It’s a cliche that you want your big mana things to solo a game, but it’s not a wrong one, since on its own, it was just ok since it was just a trampling vigilant 5/5.
This is one of the cards that I’ve seen little hype for, but one that I was impressed with in the short time that I was able to try it out. Unlike with a lot of the web-slinging cards, Ben Reilly was one of the few cards where bouncing a creature with Web-Slinging didn’t feel like a big tempo loss, since trampling Scarlet Spider got a power boost which really helped (so it was a bargain on top of a bargain for efficiency.)
It usually ate a removal spell because being a large creature meant that it had to be dealt with ASAP, but for a 2-mana web-slinging cost, that’s not that bad of a deal since it was so much potential damage for so little mana – usually representing 5-6 power on its lonesome. I didn’t see it bouncing things for value that often, but it did work incredibly well with 1-mana elves.
Much like I did with Ouroboroid, I’m noting a wide power band based on the role of mana efficiency of removal in a cube since that plays a large part in how often this’ll be able to punch for a lot of damage.
Boros has a lot of strong cards and this punches slightly below the upper tier, but I’ve liked it more than Anim Pakal, Thousandth Moon as something that triggers off of attackers, giving it immediate impact. Arana’s exile trigger being a whiff when cast on turn 3 is slightly annoying, but it overall reminded me of another Lost Caverns of Ixalan card: Inti, Seneschal of the Sun, where it was annoying to lose out on value if played on-curve but it was usually live after. I didn’t see it trigger multiple times, but it’ll likely be GG if she’s able to virtually draw 2 cards in a turn.
Triggering on combat damage to a player was annoying but buffs via counters and equipment helped. That said, it wasn’t in the upper tier of Boros cards but a solid performer.
This mainly piqued my interest because it does something for free and usually that’s dangerous territory for a card. Being a cast trigger means that this works well with cards that are a 1/1 on their front and either put counters on themselves or have some other sort of intrinsic value ala Sandstorm Salvager or Thundertrap Trainer. It’s a nice Simic card that’s an option if not playing the broken stuff.
I really wanted this to be something that could be a fine play to protect with tempo as a 4-power threat to be played for 2-mana. As one of the early previews, I was able to get in a good amount of reps but it never really played to those expectations as it was usually too small of a body for the later stages of the game when it could be played – even though, theoretically, a virtual 4-power creature should be able to punch in that weight class. Sadly, it never did.
Imposing Sovereign is a card that has felt anemic on raw creature rates, but having an actual body really helps make it more competitive in white aggressive shells. I know that I said earlier that white 2s are already plentiful and good but having a unique ability in some matchups (ones with a lot of artifacts and/or beefy blockers) gives this some good utility to come in from the sideboard and not just being “a slightly worse 2-drop than what I have, so it’s not in my final 40.” Being useful in blue tempo decks too but I likely overrate that aspect because I love the deck so much.
The reanimator deck with Norman Osborn had this as well; my gut says that this is a worse Rotting Regisaur since it’s significantly smaller and it isn’t impacting enough to be an aggro 3-drop in red (which has a lot of good cards for the immediate-impact beatstick role) although the reanimator deck was able to cast it via mayhem.
Being a red discard outlet for decks that want it isn’t nothing, and having mayhem helps those pieces tie together. I didn’t see that happen, but it was another late preview, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see this mayhemmed.
I’m mentioning these as fine roll-fillers that do their respective job and being hybrid helps them do things for colors that don’t see the effect that often (fight in red, looting in black) which helps them see play in more decks.
This was, like Spider Man 2099, was another early preview that I had some hopes for, but it suffered a similar fate as other saboteurs without evasion – the inability to consistently connect, since it was usually brickwalled by other things, so I almost never saw this actually connect. Since it was only a 2/4, there wasn’t much of an incentive to kill it, so its ability from the graveyard didn’t come up very often either; its saboteur ability got better if the creature got to be bigger than a 2/4, but since it hardly connected, that didn’t really matter. Being hybrid, theoretically, helped it see play in more decks but decks… just didn’t want to play it.
It isn’t exciting but it’s a card that’s just been a great add for any non-mono-color deck. It’s played similar to Prismatic Vista with a few knobs (no synergy with things that care about lands in the graveyard or landfall, higher life loss to have something enter untapped) but I found the basic functionality to be about the same. It’s boring, but very good and a land that had yet to be in the sideboard.
This was another card that I haven’t seen much talk about, and when it does, it’s usually relegated to the “if you have an artifact cube” which isn’t too useful, since it relegates the card to those kinds of specific cubes without thinking of its more universal appeal.
The issue that I always had with Steel Overseer was how long it took to get to a *fine-ish* rate, taking several turns to be a fine creature by 2025 creature standards to get to being a 3/3. This doesn’t account for other artifact creatures getting boosted, but it performing poorly as a solo threat was a big strike against it. Iron Spider played much differently because of how well it scaled as a solo threat, since it attacks as a ¾ with vigilance and was nice when it was incidentally boosting other artifact creatures.
Decks including this undefeated deck still need to have a critical mass of artifact creatures/vehicles to make it work, but thankfully the bar is *much* lower than something like Steel Overseer. Think of it like Galvanic Blast, as a card with a pretty good floor but gets much better if you have the ability to incidentally boost other things – and thanks to sets like Edge of Eternities and Warhammer 40k, which had a lot of solid creatures that were incidentally artifact creatures. This undefeated deck that I had with it is a good example of that.
I’m mostly mentioning this here since when mayhemmed out, it’s significantly above rate as something that gives haste, evasion and a power boost which can turn a ham sandwich into a very real threat that can give a lot of burst damage without a lot of mana investment. Played fairly, it’s not great and I’m curious to see if it’s a good payoff for enabling madness, since haste works well in red aggro decks.
This was another card that I have some hopes for, since copying strong activated abilities is new territory for cube cards and something that works well with many cards in the environment. I’ve been a fan of Gogo, Master of Mimicry in decks with activated and triggered abilities, but usually decks with it tended to be decks with activated or triggered abilities that don’t require additional mana, ala fetchlands.
As another late preview, we weren’t able to get in a lot of reps with it, but initial impressions were good as it was usually able to get your mana’s worth out of the 1 mana to cast and 2 to activate for the first time. Synergy with Urza’s Saga, Trinket Mage and the new Tezzeret add some bonus points to including it in a deck.
I wasn’t that impressed with these when they were played, since they were mostly unfetchable triomes that required some extra hoops to use well. Usually, the juice didn’t feel like it was worth the squeeze as, especially with Oscorp Industries, the payoff was getting a land to play from the graveyard, but at least Urban Retreat ramped.
Still, I was pretty whelmed by these.
Thanks for reading! You can find more of my Cube thoughts and my cube lists on my Linktree.
*Rating Methodology
As I’ve been doing for years, my method of trying new cards out via seeding them in during bi-weekly cube drafts in my cube when preview season is occurring/cards are known. It’s a method that’s been letting me get real-world experience with cards, which has helped identify cards like Ouroboroid, Force of Negation and Cori-Steel Cutter that went under the collective radar.
In an age where cube design spans much more than “pauper, peasant, unpowered and powered” cubes, it’s difficult to capture all of those lenses, so rather than trying to capture all of those views, I’ve used a generalist Legacy-ish cube lens as it’s the cube space that I’m not only generally used to, but it’s a lens that applies broadly to cube spaces. My own cube (I haven’t updated my cube to reflect its current content) is a Legacy-lite list but as I make sure to spend time in various cube spaces to prevent viewing things myopically, these reviews take into account multiple cube lenses, not just my own.
Similar to Lucky Paper’s community set reviews, I use 0-5 as my guide for approximate power in terms of how well I expect/found cards to play in a generalist cube environment. They aren’t as rigidly defined as the scale used by ChannelFireball for their limited set reviews:
Wrinkles aside, the general idea is the same. Inspired by Scuffle D. Lux’s set reviews, I’m noting a power level band for some cards, since some are highly contextual and it’s about time that reviews do that more often using the “floor” as the average cube case with the higher number being its ceiling.
But, since cube designers include cards for factors aside from power, since the Aetherdrift review, I’ve been using a scale called “vibes” to cover non-power related factors for including cards. Some recent examples:
Universes Beyond changes the equation for vibes and Spider-Man is a set where I’ve seen more cube designers choosing to opt out of including cards for vibes reasons. While I’m only vaguely familiar with the Spider-Man universe through nerd culture and I’m not averse to Universes Beyond, I’ll leave it to you to determine how much of a factor that is for your cube’s vibe, since you are the flame of your Cube’s metagame.
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