If you missed the first installment, I'm part of a local friends' discord where we run a "cursed cube": an exploration of the rules of Magic through custom "cursed" cards that forsakes ideas like "new player experience" and "printability". I crave people thinking the things I do are cool and good, so I'm posting another ten cards from that cube today, in the hopes of Engagement.
Among other things, cursed cards are a love letter to Magic's storied history and rules. They're also an aggressive wondering of what Magic could look like if it didn't need to be marketed or sold or intended for a large enough group of people. This is a vision of magic with transgressive mechanics, sharp in-jokes, and neopronouns in oracle text-- things that don't sell packs in a short enough time span for Wizards to okay.
In case it's not clear, there are custom cards here. If you are contractually bound to avoid custom cards, leave.
...
Let's just jump in.
1. Creatures you control get +1/+1 and antimonarchism
Utopian Vision 3GU
Sorcery
If you control no Nobles, draw a card for each type among creatures you control.
flavor text is that terry pratchett quote. you know the one
"Diverse creature types matter" as an archetype is a fun concept. The thing is, when the cards are being designed for a constructed format (or, in the case of cursed cube, benefit from satisfying the illusion of belonging in a constructed format) the design always has to work around changelings. There are ways to deal with this-- Ikoria cared about non-Humans, Zendikar Rising used party and thus created wording for "largest number of creatures with unique types" that doesn't sound like a programmer wrote it. This is another construction.
The flavor color pie here is funny, too-- Simic is the most likely to take "diversity is our strength" at face value (by contrast, I think Orzhov, outside of its Ravnican guild interpretation, might quibble and "okay but are you implying you wouldn't like marginalized folks if it weren't profitable?")
Technically, though, "Draw 254 cards" isn't that busted of an effect-- in most decks, I'd rather draw, like, 3 There are jank combos, though-- I feel like if I were designing this for a set in the style of Modern Horizons, I might price it more aggressively, but make it "Destroy all Nobles, then...". I hate Laboratory Maniac effects with a burning passion, but I smile at the idea of indestructible changeling combos with Labman.
2. Taxation without board state representation
Tax Evasion (no mana cost)
(black) Instant
If you control two or more Swamps, you may cast this spell by paying {0}.
Add {B}{B}{B}. Spend this mana only to pay for the effects of spells and abilities your opponents control.
Tax fraud is just funny as a concept.
One thing I keep asking about this is whether it's a bend/break. The naive response would be "It's fine, black gets fast mana, and abilities are allowed to get more efficient when they're situational." To which I say: A spell for {B} that destroys target creature with flying uses all black effects, and doesn't really combine them in the obviously breaky style of "Create a guy with deathtouch that fights target creature", but is clearly a break, in the same way that Rosewater argues that Path to Exile is a break based on its efficiency.
In this case, I'm leaning on the side of break, but I'm conflicted. The bottom line, to me, is that you shouldn't be splashing black because you want to force your thing through counterspells. On the other hand, though, a lot of the effects this card stops are white, making this a sort of subtle color hate in the same way that blue's enemies frequently get "This spell can't be countered". And in the same vein of "Every color should get card advantage, but only blue's should be board-agnostic", it can be argued that every color should get stack interaction, but only blue's can be general and unconditional. Perhaps the more interesting argument to have than "Is this a break in current pie?" would be "Is this better for the game as an implied addition to the pie?".
The thing that's stopped me from changing it outright? The flavor. The greatness at any cost color doesn't have time for your silly little tithes.
3. If there's anything a werewolf hates, it's bad flavor text
Collared 2W
Enchantment-- Aura
Enchant creature
Enchanted creature has summoning sickness. (It can't attack, block, or {T} unless it has haste.)
If enchanted creature would transform, turn it facedown instead.
If there's anything a werewolf hates, it's a collar. Especially Avacyn's collar, the symbol of her church, which is attended by the Cathars, such as Thalia. While everyday pooches would be halted in their pawprint tracks by an ordinary collar, the werewolves of Innistrad, the plane we're on, are much fiercer, due to their supernatural strength brought by the full moon. These collars are made from silver by Avacyn herself. This is not unlike the talents of her sisters Sigarda, Liesa, Bruna, and Gisela-- although the last few of those won't be making any more werewolf collars anytime soon. Because Avacyn killed the one and the other two were melded together into Brisela, that is. Which is not good. In that, it's bad. Painfully bad.
//
Anyway-- about the flavor text for CW13: Cynthia proposed the following:
"Octavia looked up at the silver disk that gave her power, and down at the silver disk that took it away."
I don't think the reader necessarily gets that the silver disks are the moon and collar-- I know the art is there, too, and I'm sure they'll do a great job, but you know not everybody cares about the art. Spikes, am I right? I was thinking, what if we added a line? Something like "That is, the moon and her collar." I think the tropes should carry it from there. Let me know what you think.
Cheers!
Mark
Wow, remember when Ancient Grudge was the most heavy-handed Magic flavor writing in the public eye? WotS Forsaken is best known for its bi-erasure, but I really think that overshadowed lines like "something the two of them shared in that great chemical mix-- arcing between them like one of Ral Zarek's lightning bolts".
Anyway, this is the first card in the cube intended to have double-facedness purely for flavor text purposes. I think that's funnier than using a really small font.
Also, "summoning sickness" isn't defined in the non-cursed rules, but it's not a terribly difficult change. At least to me, using the words "summoning sickness" makes a card that usually compares unfavorably to Bound in Gold seems more powerful than it is. Makes me grin a leonin grin.
4. just a normal card don't mind me
Daydreaming UU
Enchantment-- Aura
Enchant tapped creature
You control enchanted creature.
This one's self-explanatory once you get the joke, and I don't have much else to say, so I'll present it as a puzzle-- why does this spell get to be significantly cheaper than the five-mana Enthralling Hold? (If you get stuck, the answer is found in CR303.4c.)
5. Sorry I'm late, I was avoiding the Hydras
First District Legionary WW
2/1 Creature-- Loxodon Soldier
Mentor, protection from creatures with earlier timestamp
Is this wording better or worse than the equivalent "protection from creatures that entered the battlefield before it"? Who can say? I like the charm of using an unnecessary technical word in cursed cube.
This is my spin on the classic "white low-drop with ability that makes it an okay topdeck". It should almost certainly not be able to block, or gain the protection through an activated ability, or something. But it dies to Bolt or a topdecked 3/3, and it seems like a fun card to push, so I want to playtest with the card as-is just for science. It's hard to evaluate, even if my intuition is that its real good.
6. A contemplation of the hyperreal
Just An Old Wives' Tale W
Instant
Exile target nonland, nontoken permanent. It becomes foretold. Its foretell cost is equal to its mana cost.
The most cursed part about this is that, unless I missed something, it requires literally no rules revisions to fit into black-bordered Magic. It isn't even unclear. It is a fiction that rivals the fictitiousness innate to reality. It is Borges' map that blends seamlessly into the territory it maps, a hyperreality. It breaks the color pie more offensively than the rules, by a wide margin.
Perhaps it is just an old wives' tale. Perhaps the grains of truth therein come from abundant seeds.
7. LEGACY IS RIUNED!!! !!!!!!1!!!!
Spell Gobble {sU}{sU}
Instant
({sU} is sacrifice mana. It can be paid for with {U} or by sacrificing an Island or blue permanent.)
Counter target instant, sorcery, or planeswalker spell unless its controller pays {3}.
Nothing to say here, other than fixed phyrexian mana being the Mel-baitiest Melbait, rivaling only sorcery-speed counterspells and WUBRG planeswalkers.
I like this one, though, even if it's """spiky""". "Sac an untapped island, counter most noncreature spells" seems admittedly pretty strong, especially with modality, but the modes of "super conditional Negate", "really awful Abjure", or "the most painful Daze of your life" sound okay. I also like how, unlike phyrexian mana, you have to at least pretend you're respecting the color pie to cast this.
Originally this was without the tax, though. Imagine not having that knob to turn.
8. Colossal Deadmeme
Colossal Dread 4BB
Sorcery
Target opponent chooses a creature they control. That creature gets -6/-6 until end of turn. If its toughness is negative, its controller loses life equal to the magnitude of that toughness.
hehe dreadmaw
At heart, I'm a designer of boring old commons and uncommons, which sometimes clashes with cursedcube's tendency to do complicated shenanigans. I let myself indulge in boring commons because when you're making a cube of 300+ custom cards, you sometimes want one that only takes one read.
I have the opponent choose the creature because I don't want the pattern of "Colossal Dread, burn you out" to occur with no counterplay, but now that I'm looking at it for the first time since last September I wonder if just hitting their biggest guy is better.
HEADS UP: These last two entries have math jokes, and a lot of numbers generally.
9. Number Theory 101
Denominate 1B
Tribal Instant-- Nerd
If target creature's power is greater than its toughness, it gets -X/-0 until end of turn, where X is its toughness. Otherwise, if its toughness is greater than its power, it gets -0/-X until end of turn, where X is its power. Then, if its power and toughness are positive and not equal, repeat this process.
Example: I have a 3/7, you cast Denominate. It becomes a 3/4, then a 3/1, then a 2/1, then a 1/1, then the spell is done.
There's a lot of math in this batch, and it's partially because of Strixhaven having a lot of math cards. As a mathematician, I have opinions on this. I can't be too annoyed at the color pie handling-- even though there's math to be found in all five colors, and most mathematicians I know have a relationship to math that's somewhere on a spectrum from azorius to grixis, in the context of STX it's understandable and expressive to say that Simic is the math colors.
What's profoundly unacceptable in 2021 is to make a card called "Golden Ratio" that has nothing to do with the mathematical concept. Boo! If Gwent can make a mechanic that subtly rewards you for knowing Fibonacci numbers so can we!
Anyway, the card. Absent of serious funny business, this process always terminates, and results in its stats both being the greatest common divisor of the creature's starting power and toughness. This is a corollary of Euclid's Algorithm.
There's plenty of funny business, though! To the card's credit, though, a lot of seeming edge cases work as you expect-- for example, if you cast this on a 1/2 with an anthem effect in play, it will work the same as casting it on a 2/3. The real corner case is if the power and toughness of the targeted creature are switched through another effect-- if you don't see why the word "positive" is on there, that's why. (The difference, for the rules-inclined, is that power-and-toughness switching happens in sublayer 7d, after stat addition and subtraction in 7c.)
This process always terminates under normal conditions, but unfortunately there are multiple effects in the cube that can switch the order of the layers, which can cause this process to keep looping. While fractions are fine, the card also breaks if it has, say, pi power. Literally can't win 'em all. If I really wanted to prevent those cases, I might make turn it into a spell that does only one step of the algorithm, but with a buyback or replicate effect.
The thing is, though, if I'm worried about a combo between this card and something that reorders the layers, that's not this card's fault.
10. Number Theory 401
Four-Square Theorem 4BB
Tribal Sorcery-- Nerd
Each player distributes X -1/-1 counters among creatures they control, where X is their life total. For each creature they control, a perfect square number of -1/-1 counters must be placed on that creature in this way if able.
I wish there were a more elegant way to express "perfect square" in this context, because the math in this card is super under-the-hood otherwise.
Anyway, this is cool because it looks like a busted board wipe-- if the opponent is at 20, that's 20 -1/-1 counters on their guys! Doesn't that kill their whole board?
Well, no. For example, if the opponent has a random 0/1 Goat, and they're at 16 life, placing 16 counters on their scape-Goat is a completely valid option, since 16 is a perfect square (as is the amount they're putting on their other guys, 0). Similarly, if they're at 17, placing 16 on their goat and 1 on a random other guy works. 15 would be worse for them-- there's no way to express 15 as the sum of three or fewer perfect squares, so no matter what they do, they'll have to place counters on at least four guys using 15 = 9 + 4 + 1 + 1. They have other options if they have a large board (e.g. 15 = 4 + 4 + 4 + 1 + 1 + 1) but they aren't appetizing.
The natural question is what the best life totals are! Luckily, a guy named Joseph-Louis Lagrange proved something relevant, presumably in the pursuit of winning in custom Magic (very popular in 19th century France). His theorem states, in part, that every positive integer is expressible as the sum of no more than four perfect squares. Basically, a player will never be forced to put counters on more than four of their guys.
The real judge calls happen when you want to place 7 counters, but your opponent has just two guys. (The only way to make 7 is 4 + 1 + 1 + 1.) At the time of writing, the rules don't know what to do with that "if able"! However, the card implies an update to the rules to the game, and the most obvious one mirrors the existing rules for combat requirements (i.e. the stuff that makes "~ attacks each turn if able" work). If that's the case, you satisfy as many requirements as possible-- so if you're placing 7 counters on two guys, placing 1 + 6 or 4 + 3 is fine. Sounds like a headache, though-- as the unofficial rules manager for the cursed cube, and as someone who absolutely will be writing up mock CR changes to accommodate these cards, I'd appreciate your support in this trying time.
But Natalie Libre! How do I support you in this trying time?
That's all folks! What was your favorite cursed card? Tell me in the comments or on Twitter! Even a simple "thanks i hate Demonimate, nice work" in the comments is super appreciated.
If this inspired thoughts or cards from you tell me-- it'll make my week! Until next time!
