dumb butch juice

We just added Kaldheim Runes to give some crossover to the various artifact and enchantment strategies the cube wants to support. This time, we're adding a cycle of Enchantment Artifacts from Theros; the weapons of the gods!

Spear gives us an anthem effect and removal on a stick, both great to have in white. This pushes white in an aggressive direction, which I'm keen to do.

Bident gives a looting effect and forces your opponent to swing. These will play nicely into a blue tempo/evasion gameplan.

Whip gives black players lifelink and the ability to reanimate creatures. I want black to have some sacrifice/re-animator cards, so this is great for those. The lifelink also allows a slower black deck to stabilise against an aggressive opponent.

Bow probably does the least to support the other themes in the cube, but deathtouch is a great keyword and the activated effect gives enough options that you'll usually be happy to use it.

Hammer is the card in this cycle i'm most excited about for the cube. I'm leaning towards a sacrifice archetype for rakdos, and this does that, in the process creating enchantment artifact creature tokens to use as further fodder! It's a wild card and exactly the sort of weird effect I want this cube to center!

Ok, so we have our big theme - high density artifacts/enchantments. Next, I want to include cards that care about both of these card types to the environment - I don't want to hem players into hard focusing on one card type, so finding some artifacts that care about enchantments or vice versa would seem to make sense. This brings us to a very small card cycle from Kaldheim.

The runes from Kaldheim are auras that can enchant a creature or equipment, giving each an additional effect, and cantrip-ing. They're perfect for the cube. They're cheap to cast, replace themselves, and if you enchant a reconfigure creature with a rune it will still apply the effect once the creature becomes equipped!

I'll also be including the two rune synergy cards also printed in Kaldheim.

These are both pretty solid if you have at least one rune, and become better if you have multiple, allowing a player to build around runes a little if they grab one early. As a bonus, Runeforge Champion is in white - the colour that got the most bestow cards. I'm leaning towards giving selesnya an enchantress theme as they are the two colours that got the least reconfigure cards, so enchantment support in white and green is very welcome.

Last time we kicked off the cube with Reconfigure.

This time round, I'll be talking about the other mechanic that was the initial inspiration for the cube! First introduced in Theros block, it's Bestow!

Bestow creatures can be cast as auras to enchant a creature on the battlefield. Once that creature is removed, they fall off and become creatures again. It allows creatures to double as beneficial aura (or in some instances less beneficial ones), and similarly to reconfigure the creatures that get it tend to grant the stats and keyword abilities they themselves have in creature form. For the time being, I'm going to add the ones I was able to find at UKGE, plus some of the more powerful bestow cards printed in Modern Horizons 3.