Throne of Eldraine Cube Picks

, there was a cube builder who wanted to make room for new cards in his cube, but it was no easy task since the cardmaking wizards living at a faraway coast kept making new and better cards that all fit his cube perfectly. If you feel like that cube builder is you, I totally get it, and you would not be the only one lamenting that new cards appear to take the place of nearly new cards in your own limited environment before you and your playgroup have had the time to really try them out and let them shine.

This is, of course, a luxury problem, and the beauty of building your own beast of a cube is naturally that you don't have to keep up with anything or anyone. There is always time to update your cube, and you can even wait to see how the new cards of a set such as Throne of Eldraine interact and find their place within limited play and in constructed formats before making your picks.

Throne of Eldraine does seem to have a lot to offer cube builders when it comes to the functionality of the cards and of course the set presents completely new opportunities to bling out your cube with showcase frames and extended art versions of the cards. Throne of Eldraine is also a good place to begin if you have not yet built your first cube and you are looking for an interesting theme and flavor (and a pause from the, yawn — excuse me, Gatewatch telenovela).

In general, the set has great art and a nice variety in the styles of illustration, and honorable mentions on my top 10 cube picks from Throne of Eldraine goes out to the basic lands, which I think many cube builders will at least consider using for their cube. Well, there's no quest if things are too easy, so I won't be filling up half the top ten with basic lands. As another restriction for this list is, that I will only allow for a single mythic among the ten, because enough has been said about cards like [Brazen Borrower] and already.

Let's take a look at the cards that made the list:

10. Embercleave

Is jank? Well, it would not be the first piece of red jank to make an appearance on one of my cube-pick lists. To me, it's the 6 CMC equipment that will most likely always be cast for five mana or less and it looks like a solid combat trick for a go-wide strategy, where the price can easily be reduced to as little as two red mana. And as opposed to a combat trick, after being flashed onto the battlefield, sticks around to do more trampling double strike damage turn after turn, earning it the spot as the one and only mythic I have allowed myself room for here.

9. Wishclaw Talisman

Fairy tales are full of stories of three wishes granted to lucky protagonists (or the less fortunate, if it happens to be a Poe tale). With however, you ideally want the story to end before the second wish is granted, because it's your opponent that gets to make said wish. Since this black artifact can be cast and activated for a total of three mana, there should be a good chance that you can get something to end the game before your opponent gets their next turn.

In any case, Wishclaw Talisman looks like a card that will present players with some interesting choices beyond whether or not to attack with your 4/4 vigilance, deathtouch, haste creature that cannot be blocked by creatures with power two or less, and which makes the combat damage dealt by your creatures unpreventable, and that whenever it deals damage to an opponent also deals that much damage to a planeswalker that opponent controls (yes, I'm looking at you, ).

8. Wildborn Preserver

Being from the days of 1G getting you either a common 2/2 or a rare 2/1 first strike , this new elf archer with flash, reach, and a built-in mana sink makes me feel like and old man shaking his fist at clouds and endlessly yakking about the good old days and how kids nowadays are spoiled by 25 years of power creep. Oh, I am? Well even old geezers will have a soft spot for anyone awesomely charging through the forest floor on the back of a fox. If your cube has any elf synergies and if you on top of that have a selection of elf mana dorks, will feel right at home in it.

7. Piper of the Swarm

You may notice when going through this list, that every card on it either is available with a showcase frame or with the box topper style extended art. This is also the case when it comes to . However, the standard art of the card does not work super well with the extended art format, since Irina Nordsol's illustration has bordering walls at the edges that defy the very idea of borderless art. Furthermore, the dark and comic artwork of Jesper Ejsing from the Bundle (Fatpack) promo version just rings much better with this particular card and with the flavor text (that the full art treatment did not leave room for).

If cards were only chosen for this list based on their artwork, I would have had to include Allen Williams' [Merfolk Secretkeeper], Seb McKinnon's [Order of Midnight], and Shawn Wood's [Giant Killer] – the last of which some would probably say should be on the list anyway. But Piper of the Swarm also have other things going for it, especially if your cube supports an aristocrat strategy on the lookout for a steady supply of cheap creatures to sacrifice.

6. Fabled Passage

If your cube contains or [Terramorhic Expanse] or both, one of them may be due for retirement with the arrival of , which is a strictly better version of both cards. Often the card will even deliver the same effect as except that it will cost you one life less to activate and a lot of Euros less to acquire... at least in its normal frame, and perhaps even in the extended artwork version once the set is properly released and the boosters begin to be opened.

Prerelease prices are 40-50 € for an extended art version of Fabled Passage and 200 € if you want foiled extended art, which makes Prismatic Vista beginning at 25 € look like one of those irresistible bargains in What the Old Man Does is Always Right.

5. Stonecoil Serpent

Playing cards on curve feels great, and creatures that cost X generic mana always catch my attention when scout out new cards for my cube. Honestly, for flavor reasons I would have liked to be a Stonecoil Hydra, but WotC R&D threw in keywords like reach, trample, and protection from multicolored, so I guess I'll live with the less iconic creature type snake. The card is, of course, playable in many decks and it works especially fine with a ramp strategy or +1/+1 counter synergies.

4. Charming Prince

Breaking with the Jund color theme of the list, we have a who certainly is all that. No one will ask you what you see in that guy, if you choose to include this fair nobleman in your cube. Indeed, any cube with a blink deck will love him for his allure as much as for his flexibility. He lets you choose between three different effects when he enters the battlefield — one of which involves blinking another creature for its enter the battlefield ability.

3. Castle Garenbrig

Moving up to Top 3, choices may become a bit more predictable, like the happy ending of so many fairy tales, and most cube curators probably won't have to look too hard to find something to cut for . Being a land that can tap for two mana, or more precisely for six mana when you pay four mana and tap it itself, the castle joins a small and exclusive club of very strong lands of which most have much harsher downsides than merely needing four mana to activate and, once in a rare while, entering the battlefield tapped.

2. Murderous Rider

Flexibility is one of the strongest qualities a card can have in limited Magic formats, and it is flexibility that earned [Murderous Rider] the second place on this list. Of course, all the new adventure cards have built-in flexibility, but removing a creature or a planeswalker at instant speed and then giving you the option to later cast a 2/3 lifelinker for three mana for each is just that much better than what most cards of the new type have to offer (except for a certain pushed blue mythic that I promised to leave out of this).

1. Once Upon a Time

So, every story has an end, but I will leave this story open to sequels by ending it with ... Once Upon a Time has taken much flak for not always being free to cast, for only getting creatures or lands and probably for a bunch of other reasons as well. But let's look at the other side of the card (no, not literally, because we all know how the other side of a Magic card looks). A good number of times, Once Upon a Time will be free to cast. And even when it's not, it only costs two mana, which is not really a horrendous price to pay to look through 1/8 of your entire deck, fixing your mana early, or finding that creature finisher in the late game.

I think that this card has the potential to become a cube staple, and I will at the very least give it a thorough test run in my own cube. Because if there's one thing I heard many times growing up in the town where Hans Christian Andersen was born, it is that even someone perceived as a clumsy ugly duckling at first impressions can turn out to be a beautiful swan in the end. Or something like that anyways.

But I digress. These were my ten picks, but which cards do you see as the most important additions to your cube from Throne of Eldraine and what will have to go to make room for them? As always, your comments are appreciated and will be read with great interest, and thanks to the new and improved comment section, dialogue will flow even easier than before. Feel free to share your Insight below.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily Cardmarket.

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