Legacy Cube Cardlist

Howdy, gamers!

It's Legacy Cube time, and there are a ton of changes this time around, so I'm going to go ahead and dive right into those, as well as some lessons learned from the last Vintage Cube update.

What's getting stronger?

In short: some color pairs that had middling incentives to move in. Looking over the changes to some multicolor slots, there are some serious power buffs to colors that were severely underperforming during the last Legacy Cube. Golgari is the biggest winner here, with both Grist, the Hunger Tide and Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis serving as game-winning threats that are worth building around. Rakdos is getting a couple of upgrades to its threat suite in Daretti, Ingenious Iconoclast and Falkenrath Aristocrat. Both colors, and black in particular, felt like they wanted that extra bump in power to make sure that it was fun to draft the color pairs and not something you just fall into when other plans don't work out.

With the new cards that are being added to black's share of the cube comes some much-needed redundancy for archetypes that aren't always the best at coming together. Archon of Cruelty is a welcome addition as another reanimator target, with Dermotaxi coming in as another sideways form of reanimation (that doesn't always require you to be binning your own creatures!). Dermotaxi in particular makes the smaller creatures in black a bit more attractive than they were previously and can help them translate into the late game a bit better.

On Build-Arounds

Alright, time to eat a little crow here: when updating the Vintage Cube most recently, I lacked an appreciation for a few of the cooler build-arounds that lead to novel and fun experiences in-game. Niv-Mizzet Reborn is the card most emblematic of this, and I'm adding it to Legacy Cube as a result. Rest assured it'll be back in Vintage Cube before you know it, but there are a few new cards in this update to the Legacy Cube in similar space.

Selesnya is a prime example of a color pair that wasn't exactly lacking in good cards but was a bit lower on things that popped off the screen and told you to build a deck. Glare of Subdual is a way for go-wide decks to more reasonably compete with some of the big-creature combo decks in reanimator and Sneak Attack strategies that don't do all the mana denial stuff that Opposition does.

The other color combination getting a bit of a bump here is Boros. Outside of aggressively slanted near-monocolor decks, it could be hard to successfully play anything based in red and white. It's even harder when you factor in how having a mono-red or mono-white drafter can complicate things. Having a few cards in the color combination that don't exclusively point toward aggro is something I'm optimistic about this go around.

Redistributing Colors

As the cube evolves, cards aren't always going to be cut for something to perform the exact same role. Archon of Coronation, for example, is the card on the chopping block for the aforementioned Niv-Mizzet Reborn. There are a lot of factors that play into the decisions, including power level among colors, total number of cards in each color, how likely a color is to support monocolor decks (thus needing more monocolor cards and fewer multicolor ones), and so on.

This kind of thing is perfectly normal, and just like everything else, iterating the cubes is a process, and I hope you like this chapter in Legacy Cube. I'll see y'all in the queues!

Below is the full card list for Legacy Cube! Columns are sortable by clicking their header.

Last Updated: 8/19/2021