Over the years, I’ve done a few follow-up articles on previous sets and mused about the
purpose of post-mortem cube reviews. In previous ones, I’ve done re-evaluative looks at how each card that I rated shifted in evaluation, but I’m going to take a more broad approach and look at either cards that I didn’t cover in the original Secrets of Strixhaven article that did well, or cards that underperformed/overperformed based on how they played out and change their power ratings accordingly.
Ceaseless Conflict: 3.5 -> 4.25
In testing, this performed pretty well as a 5-mana wrath but I’ve grown more impressed with it over time. The obvious comparison is still Sunfall, since Sunfall’s incubate token represents a body, and while Sunfall’s exile is very useful, the upside of making 3/2s has been great on Ceaseless Conflict.
Generally, playing wraths in proactive decks is a bad idea since killing all of your own creatures is counterproductive towards the deck’s gameplan of winning with creatures, but being both a wrath and immediately (generally) having warm bodies to break serve has made it work well in those decks, since it usually turns fallow mulldrifters who stuck around into very real creatures, and even in cases where it kills something larger like a Quantum Riddler, it’s still a consolation prize, even when the creature got downgraded.
To the inevitable question of “Is it better than Sunfall,” due to lack of other good 5-mana wraths – they’re at least in a similar ballpark, but while I wouldn’t advise anyone to play Sunfall in a proactive deck, I’ve seen this work well in those decks and I’ve been a big fan.
Practiced Offense: 2.5 -> 3.5
In the initial review, I said that this was a pretty replaceable effect and I’d still say that applies to this card since cube decks aren’t for lack of options for non-creature buffs and spells, and I’ve found that cards like Dictate of Heliod looked great in testing but found themselves riding the pine because they couldn’t break the “24th/25th card” problem of being a good card, but not *quite* good enough to beat out other cards in aggressive decks.
While that problem still does apply to Practiced Offense, being both a potential closer and stabilizer are some great upsides that I did see in testing, especially since it flashes back for so cheap – I never saw it proactively discarded so that it could be cast for 1W and I imagine that when cast with something like Royal Talon Fighter Jet, it’ll be gangbusters.
Exhibition Tidecaller: 2 -> 2.5-3.5
I tried this out in testing and it was mostly fine, since the opus was mostly aspirational. I’d say that still applies but iwanttobeacat from LSV’s cube discord, posted this about how it’s been working:
fwiw, we’ve seen more than once the following play patter with the Tidecaller…. T1 – Play Tidecaller on the play… sit back and counterspell everything to protect it for a few turns.. hardcast a Mystic Confluence, then brain freeze at the right opportunity at some later time with or without the Tidecaller on board. Please understand that no one is saying this is “plan A”, but lots of Breach/Freeze decks play plenty of counter spells to buy time already, so reducing the size of your opponents deck by 9-15 cards means you can freeze them out without the Breach, you just need the freeze. It’s a fun role player with a different dynamic.
Flow State: 2-3.5 -> 2-4
While I do think that this has a pretty bad floor of being a sorcery-speed Anticipate, which we saw in testing, with enough cheap sorceries (including Gitaxian Probe, Time Walk and Expressive Iteration at Vintage legality, for cubes that care about format legality), the ceiling is certainly there, as we’re seeing in constructed Legacy and Vintage. I haven’t had reps with it in my cube since, and haven’t heard a lot of other cube success stories, but this also likely has potential to jump up with more proactive cheap sorceries if they get printed in future sets, like if the Hobbit set gives us more.
Fractal Anomaly: 1.5-4 -> 1
I had a higher ceiling on this as I anticipated decks being able to naturally draw 2 to make this a 2/2+. I’m realizing more that cards that rely on having something else in hand (Sea Gate Stormcaller, Mercurial Spelldancer) are generally not good unless they’re Snapcaster variants, which have cards to flash back naturally end up in the graveyard. Occasionally, I’ll lean on a card’s ceiling being potentially good, even if I don’t see it in testing, because of idealized states but this card never did anything and don’t expect it to.
This may sound contradictory to bumping Flow State’s ceiling based on its potential, which I didn’t see in testing, and that’s because the ceiling is indeed much higher (virtually drawing 2 vs a 2/2 or a 3/3 for 1 mana, which is a good rate but hardly backbreaking later in the game.) On its floor, it’s just terrible.
Flashback: 2.5 -> 4
While this performed pretty well in testing, I had given it a lower rating than I should have because of it feeling like it wouldn’t perform as well compared to a generic Bolt effect. I found that this was easily better than the bargain basement Snapcasters and the other one-shot ones, and it’s just been a good generalist non-aggro card, even outside of the busted A+B combos that Vintage legality brings with things to flash back. Unlike Fractal Anomaly, this just finds a target as the game goes on, too, at least in non-aggro decks.
Tablet of Recovery: none -> 3.5
It seems like the weird uncommons are the ones that usually slip by, and this one was similar. It’s currently doing annoying things in Standard and Pioneer by being a way to do a 2-mana jump to cast either high-cost cards like Jeskai Revelation, and it’s not uncommon for the mill 1 to be actual useful text instead of just being flavor. This and Flashback do give some nice tools to non-aggro red decks; it may just be a balancing act to see how many of those options one would want in a cube, but I’d at least respect it if I saw it in a cube list.
Mind Into Matter – none -> 3
I’ve been back on my Alchemy nonsense and one of the better decks is the UG X-spell deck, that utilizes this and some other X spells, and I’ve been surprised at just how useful it is to cast for 0 as a ramp effect that can also just be a big spell later on. I’m still not gung-ho on it because Simic has so many cards, and while strict multicolor symmetry isn’t necessary, generally designers not to color too far out of those lines. When I talked to Kai during the weekend when we wrote the Marvel review, he said that he had liked the card in cube, finding it underrated. Here’s what he had to say:
Albeit not the strongest card we’ve seen from 2026, Mind into Matter has been one of my favorite wheel picks to draft with any permanent oriented Ux or Gx deck. A lot of the strength of the card that I have observed is that it is really difficult to be disappointed having this in your hand at any point in the game. In the early turns, this can simply be cast with X = 0 or 1 to act as a sorcery speed growth spiral. However, unlike Growth Spiral, this card scales incredibly well when you’re able to start casting this at X = 4 or more. The draw rate and the cheat rate scaling linearly with a single X value has just been better than it looks and with so many permanents in cube being so low CMC, it’s hard to not get great value from this card.
Professor Dellian Fel – 2 -> 3.5
I found this to be a good universally playable Golgari value walker, even though it had some “screw you aggro player” text since it gained so much life, but usually the decks that wanted it were value piles anyway. It really does feel like a current-day “value walker” done right, where ones like the new-ish Ashiok fell through and it’s another card that’s a good splash too.
Vicious Rivalry: none -> 3.5
Another card that’s been working better than expected in cubes with a lot of artifacts, since the text about nuking cheap artifacts has been useful in the Magic Online Vintage Cube and performed better than just being an overcosted Toxic Deluge, since the artifact rider text was generally worth the extra green mana. In cubes without a lot of artifacts, hitting small artifact tokens is a nice upside since it comes for free when nuking the board.
Even though this is a follow up, I’m sure that I’ll have forgotten to include some cards here. Be sure to let me know in the comments for engagement and I’ll give some thoughts on those too.
Thanks for reading! You can find my socials and my cube lists on my Linktree, as well as other cube set review articles and design articles that I’ve written since 2010.
If you want to get emailed whenever I post these articles, you can subscribe below. It’s less effort than checking the site!
Leave a Reply