Dear Cycle of Renewal, 

<3

I wasn’t actually going to write this love letter for you. I was going to write a love letter for Harrow. Harrow is in exactly one of my Cubes and I love it there. Plus the original printing of Harrow is so beautiful. 

Harrow is in is my Hanjo Masters #2 Cube. A Cube where there are 3 copies of each common in the Cube. So you can draft multiples, to mimic the feel of an actual draft, and to make sure players can really build around certain synergies. One of those synergies in this Cube is Landfall. And Harrow is such a great card in Landfall, turning into an insane combat trick when triggering cards like Akoum Hellhound, Snapping Gnarlid or Valakut Predator. And in my love letter to Thrill of the Hunt I wrote extensively how much I love myself a combat trick. 

But Harrow is so much more than just a combat trick for the aggro Landfall deck. You can also go big with Landfall, combining it with Domain cards. Because there is also a very potent Domain strategy in this cube that loves a Harrow. There is only one problem with Harrow in this Cube, and that is a card I am never going to cut from this Cube: Remand. My favourite Magic card of all time. And the fact that Harrow has an additional cost of sacrificing the land, makes for a very toxic play pattern. 

When starting to write love letter I always do a bit of research. The research for Harrow was to do a Scryfall search to find alternatives that have caught up with Harrow, losing the additional cost of sacrificing a land and just making it a part of resolving the spell. And the conclusion of that Scryfall search was that there is now a common alternative for Harrow without the downside. And I just realised, this letter wasn’t going to be about Harrow. It has to be about you, Cycle of Renewal. Because as a Cube designer I personally don’t design for aesthetics, I design for gameplay. And you, Cycle of Renewal, remove the toxic play patterns while keeping all the good play patterns. Today I fell in love with you because you are perfect for this Cube, removing that sharp edge it always had. I just wish you had that beautiful old aesthetic Harrow does. 

With love, 

Hanjo