The updated version of the RAV-TSP Standard cube is on Cube Cobra! I’ve obviously been procrastinating quite a bit on this, and was pretty nervous about calling anything done. But after a bit, I’m finally embracing the truth that despite having the most data I’ll ever have access to about this cube because of CubeCon, no update could ever be “perfect” and even the data itself is deeply limited. I’m going to be embracing the vibes era of curation as of now, starting with a startling (to me) fact and a related promise: as of this post, I still haven’t drafted this cube in paper! I’ve run a couple of online test drafts (that I was mostly focusing on coordinating), a paper playtest, had it run three times at CubeCon, and gotten feedback from drafts run by Andrew and company (thanks again, it’s so rad to hear reports from you all!) but have yet to actually crack a pack myself.

So: I promise I won’t be making any more changes until I’ve drafted this cube twice in paper, and for the first of those drafts I will be doing my best to not have a single curation-related thought until round 3 is over. Some distance from the analysis and endless Scryfall searching will hopefully do both me and the cube some good! I’d also like to focus on other creative pursuits for a bit - believe it or not, my initial plan was for Magic to be a pretty infrequent topic on this site. The goal will be diving more into making music and sharing and writing about that here, shooting for posting something each month for the remainder of the year. With that all said, onto the changes!

The goals of the changes here were pretty heavily discussed in the last post, so I’m going to stick to calling out some specific ones I found interesting. First, not on the mainboard changelist, I’m looking at Juri, Master of the Revue as a potential out of format include. I like that it’s very keyed into sacrifice rather than incidentally good with it, set on Ravnica, and reminiscent in its own way of damage using the stack. Playing the cube as is should help me suss out how weird it might feel to have a card out of the era (or if it fits nicely alongside the time wackiness already present). For now, it’ll live in the maybeboard.

I struggled a bit looking for blink targets, but honestly the best looking one was Riftwing Cloudskate #2, a card that was all over standard decks at the time, with and without blink synergies. I also added Stingscourger as sac/blink utility piece - not amazing in either, but was played in the format and has its spots.

Ichor Slick isn’t a great or even a good removal spell, but it’ll fill the need while also providing synergy in the right decks and an okay failure case in game 1s. The brand new cards to the cube on the whole are in this spot - interesting and synergistic but should mostly fall to the people drafting their archetypes due to low general power.

A second copy of Pendelhaven hopefully gives a nice bump to tokens decks across the board, and how can you not love your army of 1/1s attacking through their bear? With both in the cube, I may cut Gaea’s Anthem, since the antisynergy isn’t the most fun and it and Glorious feels excessive when neither Anthem has been especially successful.

Thanks to everyone who’s participated in the creation and curation of this cube! I’ve had such a fun time working on it and talking about it, but now it’s time for a breather. Even in these idle times, please feel free to reach out with any thoughts or draft reports you’d like to share on Bluesky or Discord!