A Full 360 Brother, All Creatures should be Spellshapers

Longer title: A Full 360 Brother, All your creatures should have the chance to be a spellshaper selected prior once per game. Part One: Foreward and Spellshaper Ability Counters

Yup kids here we are again with another cube article. For any of my brawl true believers that haint tried this yet its basically this.

take some cards, one of each

folks draft em

bam

Let’s dial it back a bit tho. Remember when you were a kid having good old daydreams of wizarding it up high hog style. Fighting some evil beardy guy trading eldritch blast per eldritch blast. Lightning, ice spears, fire, the whole shebang. Then right as he is about to cast whatever dark power that is about to finish you off you prepare your grand finale and..

You make a portal and some dude comes out and you are like please sir go fight that mean man over there.

NO? Of course no! Nobody would ever daydream that AND YET, wotc seems to think that that is exactly what we all think wizards, mages, sorcerers, witchs, warlocks, Tom Sizemore, do ALL THE TIME. If games of magic were like real magic fights would end in like maybe 3 different ways.

Fireball, Drain Life, your opponent tries to become all powerful and accidentally explodes (sadly mana burn is gone)

Instead we are supposed to believe that some marmot the other person throws at you is what wins the game. Until Final Fantasy 7 came around, summoning magic was the Peter Tork of magical arts.

There was of course a good old days of Magic, Ricky Gars knew that people wanted to cast spells, but that for the 1% of the population that wanted to cast dudes that he best include a couple creatures. Admittedly they were a little overpowered but the east coast playtesters nipped that in the bud pretty well and we had a good long era of spells > creatures (we will refer to all good cards as spells, they try to trick us by calling creatures “spells” as well, but talk to someone the next time you cast Kaervek, nobody automatically thinks that a creature spell is an actual spell.) Sadly, the tipping point came in Legions (which sold horribly btw) which was an ALL CREATURE SET and things haven’t been the same since.

These days instead of keeping the lordly hallowed spells on their own, they just keep attaching them to these crappy bodies with lungs and hearts and areas and other such nonsense. Sure you may think that some creature’s power taking away your last life points lost you the game, but in reality it was probably some creature with a great spell shoddily pop-riveted to its back that did the real work three turns prior.

These days you try to teach someone magic , get the cards all dealt out and everything and young bright-eyed youth is all HELL YEAH TIME TO BURN OFF YOUR FACE, you then chide them for their language and have to say

“umm yeah actually you’ll want to cast that this combover Bilbo with the double-chin, the card advantage you get is insane, i mean he’s cool too right?”

You see the boredom just wash over their face as their eyes loll back into their head and you turn away for JUST A SECOND to get an energy drink for them to shotgun and once you turn back they’ve already disappeared to play Ultima Online or whatever.

Let’s zoom in now though on one great little piece of serendipity. The year, east 1999. The previous Urza block had most of the community in an uproar (probably because of creatures I’m not really sure) and wotc knew they had to JUICE THINGS UP. They realized the pandora’s box of creatures was open and there wasn’t anything they could do about that BUT LO, STILL LEFT IN THE BOX, an idea.

Turn crappy creature cards into spells

The Mercadian Masques set saved Magic the Gathering from oblivion, and it was almost entirely because of spellshapers. They could continue to print nastay creatures (hell these ones are too) while also letting you cash them in for WONDROUS EFFECT. It also really helped out with some of the weaker spells like Dark Ritual, since you could cast them every turn. “But CHRIS” you exclaim “I heard on the mean streets that this was “card disadvantageous””. Worry not young one, you heard quite incorrectly. For is a spell not a card? If you cast it does it not go to the yard? (originally the Merchant of Venice was a Spellshaper before billy shakes remembered how well racism sells)

BUT CUBE

oh yeah so, the easiest thing to do would just be to throw all the spellshapers in the cube, but depending on your size and everything else, and the fact that many of these cards may be too powerful it could prove either cube warping or some drafters may just not get a chance to use one as they are all infinitely first pickable

STRANGELY ENOUGH, that short i pronouncing set Ikoria just showcased their new mechanics and one of the things solves this quite easily. Companion? Nah, ABILITY COUNTERS.

So we are going to get into some “house rules” that will allow any of your rugged drafters the chance to spellshaper however they please. I lied though we will use a bit of the companion stuff to glue this together nicer than microwaved instant mashed potatoes. At the beginning of each game you can pick a spellshaper (we’ll nuts and bolts that further down) and by paying its mana cost (I tend to keep the color cost that way drafters stay a little more honest abe about things) and add a SPELLSHAPER ABILITY COUNTER onto target creature. Here are what the ones I use look like.

I know a few of you are worried that perchance this extremely easy way to discard (all spellshapers are basically superior versions of Survival of the Fittest, instead of tutoring for some goat or whatever you get to tutor AND CAST the spell you want right away) could possibly gas up reanimator to the point of unwarranted dominance. I don’t have a problem with that in my cube but if you do I have an alternate spellshaper ability counter that will help that out. If your drafters start to complain remind them that it is YOUR HOUSE YOUR RULES

So now we have a simple, streamlined way to be able to spellshaper in our cube games, but how shall we determine who gets what? I find the most fair way to do this is to predraft spellshapers rotisserie style before you draft the cube. This allows folks a chance to start to plan what archetypes they want to move into and also, with this information being public, leads to some interesting “draft counterplay” as folks try to foist each other off their spellshaper plan, like keeping the bog witch drafter off of black aggro. I value FREEDOM above all so I allow all spellshapers in this predraft but you are definitely FREE to curate your spellshaper list to get in tune to the straight and narrow of your specific cube.

I highly recommend trying this out, all you’ll wanna do is save your preferred ability counter image, open it in your preferred image editor of choice and make copies erasing the text “Blaster Mage” and adding in the other spellshaper names one by one (the font for the card name is “Metal Lord” it is very important to use this font, see album cover below for reference)

Then print them out and you are ready to go.

In PART TWO we will discuss some of the Jose Canseco level spellshapers and the archetypes they support.

Until then, hope to see you on the cube pitch.