Designing for a cube (in this case, I’m thinking of something similar to the non-holiday MTGO cube: unpowered, but powerful) is a somewhat different experience from designing for a regular set. For one, it’s usually fine to have a higher overall complexity. You also don’t need to stick to themes in the same way; it’s fine if a mechanic only shows up on a single cube card, and coherent flavour is pretty much a non-factor. That said, it’s a good idea to have some archetypes (and thus mechanical themes) in mind when putting the cube together – you just have a lot more opportunities to mix and match.

Balancing the cards also ends up being quite different. You end up having a lot more wiggle room for the higher end – it’s hard to make a card that dominates cube the way certain bombs dominate regular draft formats (think Pack Rat or Drana). On the other hand, you probably want a much flatter power curve in cube, with essentially no bad cards.

My own cube still consists mainly of regular cards, but I am adding more custom cards to it over time. Today’s cards were based on a request to add more flicker-style shenanigans. I haven’t yet added them to the cube, and they might go through a few more changes before I do.

Keyword: Shimmer

Shimmer [Cost] (You may cast this spell for its shimmer cost. If you do, return it to your hand at the beginning of the next end step.)

This mechanic represents the core of this batch of cards. This self-contained “combo” should allow these cards to be reasonably strong even without other cards to work with them. Putting Shimmer at a fairly high cost should make it hard to cast more than one Shimmer creature per turn, and encourages finding alternate ways of flickering or bouncing them. I decided to put this mechanic in white, blue, and red. The first two deal with flickering and bouncing your own creatures on a regular basis, while red has used the “Viashino” mechanic for quite some time.

Obviously, this mechanic was inspired by Evoke (I did really like my Elemental deck back in Lorwyn, after all). You may notice another difference other than where the card ends up: it doesn’t leave the battlefield until the end of the turn. This does introduce some potential memory issues, but it also opens up some more design space as well as limiting the number of uses per turn. The additional design space allows for things like this card, playing around with haste and a typical red drawback. If it weren’t for the issue of stacking triggers correctly, I’d consider this a pretty elegant design, with Shimmer implicitly negating the drawback. As is, it should still work fine in a casual setting with paper cards though. Sticking around on the battlefield for a little while also lets Shimmer cards use static abilities rather than triggers for some interesting effects.

Support cards So, what about other cards that support this kind of archetype? There are of course a bunch of existing options, such as Venser, Restoration Angel, and Venser I also created a few other supporting cards, like this updated version of Pemmin’s Aura. I’ll admit that this one has the potential to be completely broken. If it turns out that the dreaded Aura subtype isn’t enough to make this balanced, I might end up doing something similar to Gift of Immortality where it doesn’t return at the same time as the creature.



And then, sometimes, you just want a strange yet splashy card: His first ability began as a variation on Ral Zarek‘s +1 that kept the first permanent tapped down. I wanted something a bit more unique, and ended up with this. The second ability looks very strange at first glance, but in the context of Shimmer I believe it’s a bit more reasonable. It gives some bonus value and lets you rebuy your Shimmer (and other ETB/LTB) creatures, and also doubles as a defensive bounce effect. For bonus points, I included all the planeswalker’s colours in this ability. The ultimate began life as an emblem giving phasing to all your opponent’s permanents. Of course, I imagine few people actually remember what phasing does, and writing it out in the text box wasn’t really an option. Instead, I went for this exiling variant, which both feels cooler and lets you exile your own permanents for ETB effects. (A heads up regarding future updates: school’s starting in a few days, and I’m not sure exactly how busy I’ll be. As a result, I may end up posting on a biweekly schedule instead.)

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