by Parker LaMascus
Early this year, nine years after I first began my Legacy cube, I scuttled it for parts. Some cards are the seed crystal for a back-to-my-roots project, but most of these cardboard curios, including the majority of the benchwarming hopefuls I’d cut over the years, went into a longbox to sell. Stacked all together instead of spaced out over years of cube collecting, I cringed a little at the purchasing decisions of my past self:
For the full picture of a decade of accumulated cube detritus, imagine two hundred more cards like these. Why did I ever buy these fugly game objects* in the first place? I no longer chase a high power level in cube design, but even when I did, most of these cards weren’t topping any power rankings. And it wasn’t because the zany art was the cheapest printing available to me – very often the opposite. I was paying more for less readable versions of weaker cards. Why, indeed?
* All respect to the designers and artists behind these cards. I love your work. Just not on a draft table with friends who don’t yet know Magic’s basic rules, much less kanji, Phyrexian, Mutate, and other foreign languages.
Honestly, I’m still unpacking it. But my best indications come from a book about status.
