Bill Says About the New Cards From Cube

Coming to the free removal spells, Fireblast has a long history of removing opponents who are at 4. We've gotten a lot of burn options in the last year or so between Chain Lightning, Boltwave, Galvanic Blast, Burst Lightning, etc. I'm not totally sure which I'd be playing in non-madness red. I do think you want to maximize Amped Raptor so maybe this is a bad enough hit to leave out.

Lance Says: "this card seems nuts"

Lance Says: "I think that this would be good in a deck that could want 5-8 copies of Lavaspur Boots, like hammer or something else"

Free is always a cost worth looking at but this just doesn't seem necessary to me. Madness decks much prefer Lightning Axe and I really don't like how this is almost a sorcery. Perhaps useful for DRC/Violent Urge?

We've had storm payoffs for some time but have struggled to build the mana engines outside of Channel. Along with Dark Ritual there's definitely potential although access to Manamorphose would be ideal. In "fairer" things to do, there used to be an Extended deck called All-In Red that was focused on casting rituals to land a 5 drop creature as early as possible, in a format where people weren't running a lot of interaction to handle just a big creature. I could see something like that with Ancient Tomb working if a turn two... Eomer?? is a big enough threat. Maybe Breaching Dragonstorm.

Probably just better than Ponder and Brainstorm in a format where land fetching always costs a mana. We have a density of these effects in the format, but the question is always what do you do with all the selection?

This is a really wild one to have. Against aggro it will often get 2-3 creatures so it's not really even card disadvantage as it gives you an enormous mana advantage. Very difficult to play around at instant speed. Speaking of Stock Up I'm a little worried UR tempo/control will have too easy a time catching up against an aggro start.r

We've had storm payoffs for some time but have struggled to build the mana engines outside of Channel. Along with Dark Ritual there's definitely potential although access to Manamorphose would be ideal. In "fairer" things to do, there used to be an Extended deck called All-In Red that was focused on casting rituals to land a 5 drop creature as early as possible, in a format where people weren't running a lot of interaction to handle just a big creature. I could see something like that with Ancient Tomb working if a turn two... Eomer?? is a big enough threat. Maybe Breaching Dragonstorm.

Could be good in certain matchups if you're trying to go something like t2 Baleful Strix t3 Stock Up. 4 life or 4 mana just feels like a huge cost against aggro though.

Not really aware of anything in the format this enables. The rate is not awful to maindeck this if there's e.g. some artifact/enchantment with counters you'd otherwise have trouble with.

It definitely feels like this should have some application between Land Tax, Aftermath Analyst, maybe lifegain payoffs, and just generally being a 0 mana artifact. Interesting to see where this goes.