Tesseract #3: Single Card Discussion - Autumnal Gloom

Features Opinion

Spootyone

17 December 2018

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Hello internet, and welcome back to Tesseract, the series that goes hyperdimensional on cube!

Last time, in Episode 2, I gave a semi-brief introduction to the kinds of cubes that are generally played by the public, and attempted to make a case for not only building your own cube, but specifically deciding to build a Peasant cube like I have done. I also address some comments about my own personal cube, made some changes to it, and discussed those changes in finer detail.

In this episode, I want to move away from the more broad questions and discussions, and instead have our first single card discussion about one of my all-time favorite cards to cube with: Autumnal Gloom  ^Flip! My hope by the end of this episode is to convince the majority of you all who are cube designers to take a first or second look at the card and consider it for your own cubes. This piece is especially for those of you who have decided to embark on a peasant cube build, as I think autumnal gloom is a great card for that power level. But before we get into that, let’s catch up on what has happened since last episode.

Last episode seemed to go over pretty well with the majority of you. As mentioned, the main purpose was to inspire those of you without a cube to choose to build one. If even a single one of you read that article and decided that you were going to begin a build of your own, I will find that article a great success. My goal overall with this article series is not only to have a platform to spew out my ideas as they come to me, but also to bring the cube community and format to the greater forefront of the MTG community. And by the way, if you ARE someone who was inspired after that last article, please let me know in the comments! It would bring me great joy to know I had an impact like that.

Additionally, I have made a small handful of updates to the cube since last week. I have not been able to cube this past weekend to my own disdain. And furthermore, it appears I may not be able to cube for the next couple months. Yikes. As anyone with a cube will probably tell you, the most difficult part about building a cube is actually just finding a consistent playgroup to meet with and playtest. If you are someone with a consistent playgroup, you should cherish them because it isn’t as easy to have that as you may think it is!

As such, a majority of the changes that I make to the cube for the next half dozen or more episodes may not have playtesting behind them. This isn’t the worst thing in the world, but it does mean my decisions should be made with a grain of salt, and that some cards that stay in the cube may be incorrect to stay there, as I haven’t gotten the opportunity to find out they are bad yet.

Moreover, I will be attempting to focus on articles that can be written based on past experience or ones that are of a more broad and overarching mentality. Things like archetype and single card discussions will probably ensue until I can get more hands on experience with my own cube. That said, if I DO get the opportunity to cube I’ll be sure to let you know how it goes!

OUT

Fountain of Renewal

Promise of Bunrei

Ultimate Price

Blink of an Eye

IN

Pierce Strider

Cloudgoat Ranger

Go for the Throat

Narcolepsy

The majority of the changes this week all have a theme: Cards that were actually legal in my cube that I didn’t realize were legal in my cube. These cards were cloudgoat ranger, go for the throat, and narcolepsy. Apparently when I had been going through the original modern masters sets I was half asleep, as these cards are all staples that I absolutely would’ve been playing this whole time had I realized they were legal. I guess we all make mistakes.

Speaking of mistakes, I also made a mistake with one of my changes last week. I had originally removed Pierce Strider to bring the cube down in size, but failed to remember at first that strider is a critical card for a blink combo deck in my cube involving Ghostly Flicker and Archeomancer. I was under the impression that there were better cards for that combo than strider but there are actually few options at this point. Gray Merchant of Asphodel comes to mind, but I won’t miss Fountain of Renewal much anyway.

Now onto the main topic for this week!

Since the incarnation of my cube, delirium has held some role - be it in the form of Obsessive Skinner, Gnarlwood Dryad, or Extricator of Sin  ^Flip. I absolutely adore delirium. I think it might be one of my all time favorites. And unfortunately it’s one of those mechanics that hasn’t been printed all too much, given it only appeared for two sets - Shadows over Innistrad, and Eldritch Moon. I’m not very confident in it returning any time soon, either, as it strikes me as a mechanic that has a niche name and simply doesn’t fit thematically all too often in MTG lore.

For those unaware, delirium is an ability word that effectively boils down to “if you have 4 or more card types in your graveyard, x”. In other words, you will have a card that gets stronger or changes based on whether or not you meet that criteria. This is an alternative play on the mechanic “Threshold”, which follows the same logic, but requires 7 total cards of any combination of types to be in your graveyard instead. Both are fun abilities to build a set or cube around, but delirium is my personal favorite between the two. And one of my all time favorite cards to cube with that has delirium is Autumnal Gloom  ^Flip.

Autumnal Gloom is an uncommon enchantment that costs 1 green and 2 generic mana. The enchantment has an activated ability of milling yourself for 1 for a single black mana. It also has delirium, where at the beginning of your end step, if there are four or more card types in your grave, you transform Autumnal Gloom into Ancient of the Equinox  ^Flip. Ancient of the Equinox is a 4/4 green creature with trample and hexproof.

I have heard this card called the peasant Thrun, the Last Troll. While that is probably a bit hyperbolic, it isn’t wildly off base. Rarely is gloom a turn 3 4/4 trample hexproof - very rarely. But it is commonly a turn 5 4/4 trample hexproof. And in peasant cube that’s strong enough. A 4/4 body is nothing to scoff at, and it even comes with built in evasion and protection so you can feel mostly confident that once the card transforms, it won’t be gotten rid of any time soon. Of course, the real indicator of the card should not be the transformed side, but the front side, so let’s talk about that now.

The front side of Autumnal Gloom is clearly a weak card. It’s a 3 mana enchantment that does nothing without more mana being pumped into it, and in another color no less. To most, this would make the card appear slow and useless. And many cube designers would easily claim that their Golgari section of their cube is already too tight to include an enchantment that “does nothing” and “only goes in one particular deck.” That’s where I think people are wrong about gloom.

Gloom has been in my cube since it was created, and it quickly rose to be one of my favorite build-around cards to pick early and be conscious of during the draft portion. I think where people get tripped up over the card is that they treat the mechanic of delirium incorrectly, assuming you need to play mediocre cards like Commune with the Gods to get there, or that they need to spend a bunch of time and mana using gloom’s activated ability to get there, resulting in Ancient of the Equinox costing much more than just 3 mana and 1 card. But the truth is that how strong gloom is depends entirely on how the cube has been built.

Anyone who played Shadows over Innistrad block limited likely already knows this, but a trick to hitting delirium easily is not to focus on self-mill, but to play a high density of cards with multiple card types. Cards that are artifact or enchantment creatures suddenly can become quite high picks for a deck that has delirium cards in it because they count as double for the delirium count. Similarly, cards like Evolving Wilds and other fetchlands also gain value as lands are another card type. It’s really not unheard of to play a T1 evolving wilds, a T2 Baleful Eidolon, and then use something like Prey Upon on T3 to make the eidolon fight an opponent’s creature. Guess what? You just hit delirium. It really can be that simple.

And I think that’s one main reason why I value gloom higher than other cube designers in peasant, is that people forget how simple it can be to get 4 card types in the grave. As for whether or not there is room in the Golgari section, I agree that it’s too tight to make room for the card. And this is why I did something else interesting in my cube: Autumnal Gloom is in my green section and not my Golgari section. See, I found by playing with the card enough times that I simply didn’t need to use the activated ability almost ever in order to hit delirium. One time I did an experiment and threw the gloom into a GR stompy deck I drafted and sure enough it flipped easily. And this is because I drafted it and was conscious after the fact that I might want to play the card.

Autumnal Gloom changes the way a player drafts from the point in which they pick it up. From that point forward, they are checking to see if they have a few instants and sorceries in their deck. They want to take cards like Runed Servitor because of its card types and synergy with dying. Gloom gives incentive to playing fight cards where typically other forms of removal might outclass them, since you can craft a boardstate where your creature also dying is a good thing. And of course, the more delirium cards in your deck the better once things start rolling.

However, this is one of the few downsides in my opinion to cubing with delirium - the lack of playable delirium cards. Unfortunately WOTC didn’t push delirium very hard and it was only in the two aforementioned sets. I’ve cubed with cards like Gnarlwood Dryad before and they are fantastic in the same deck as an Autumnal Gloom  ^Flip, but the well isn’t very deep. Once you decide to start playing with cards like Tooth Collector just because it has delirium, you begin to lack the overall strength a deck would need to go up against something like Crackling Drake izzet control. So it’s important to find the right balance when designing around delirium.

The way I found to minimize the parasitic nature of delirium was by including other mechanics that benefit similarly from cards that are good in a deck with Autumnal Gloom. Cards with threshold definitely go up in value when you already care about self mill. Reanimation decks can also play a autumnal gloom to usual success. I’ve even toyed around a little bit with enchantment-matters themes where gloom is playable in something like GW. Ever traded with an Ancient of the Equinox, brought back the gloom with a Restoration Specialist, and then flipped the card again to enchant with On Serra's Wings? Because you can.

There are other reasons as to why I love cubing with autumnal gloom as well. I have had drafts where I only had 1 match win but still enjoyed myself because I went out of my way to build a ridiculous off color gloom deck. Why? Because there is intense satisfaction to transforming a card like gloom, or a card like Extricator of Sin  ^Flip for that matter. At that point, it almost doesn’t matter that you win or lose the game. You won the “mini-game” of transforming the card! From a cube design standpoint, I like including cards that can provide feel-good moments without it always having to involve winning the game.

Furthermore, hexproof can certainly be a point of contention among playgroups. Cards like Striped Riverwinder or Plated Crusher can be frustrating to play against simply because of hexproof. And even if its balanced, it can still result in people leaving the game upset. Gloom sort of gets around this problem by allowing for more interactability prior to it being a hexproof creature. If you know your opponent is piloting a gloom deck, you can have something like Forsake the Worldly ready to go to destroy the enchantment before it transforms.

I also like that the card gives another angle for green decks to play from. Green in cube tends to always end up as so one-dimensional it hurts. Play elves, get mana, make big dudes. Wow. I’m not saying there shouldn't be mana production in green, but I do feel like most other colors have access to a few different angles of attack when it comes to deck construction. Being able to give green drafters a whole other archetype simply by having one card in the cube is great efficiency from a design standpoint.

To conclude, I believe that Autumnal Gloom  ^Flip is an often overlooked card for peasant cubes. While I don’t think it’s quite good enough for unpowered cubes, it’s actually possible that it could merit testing in weaker ones. The card does not need to fit into a golgari multicolored slot. Nor does it need to be accompanied by large amounts of self-mill cards like Commune with the Gods in order to be played. Gloom provides angles of design, deck construction, gameplay and social interaction that many other cards do not, and that in my opinion, many cubes lack. I hope I have convinced you to at least test out autumnal gloom in your own cubes.

And with that, I will leave you all for this week. I hope I have convinced some of you to take another look at this quirky uncommon from the return to Innistrad block for your own cubes - peasant or otherwise. I definitely encourage you, if you’re on the fence, to just try it out. Maybe even seed it into a pack in your next draft and see what it can do. I think it just might surprise you!

If you enjoyed what you’ve read, make sure to let me know either in the comments below, or you can find me on Twitter at @Spootyone. For next episode, I’m not entirely set yet on a topic. I may do our first archetype discussion or I might discuss a few smaller topics for ideas I’ve had buzzing around my head that we haven’t really gotten to speak about in the past few weeks. I also have a small side project I’m experimenting with in my free time so perhaps that’ll come up. But who knows what may happen in the next few days? So with that said, I guess we will all be surprised by the next episode of Tesseract!

The Spooty Contemporary Peasant Cube