Dear Riftwing Cloudskate, 

<3

Last week at our local Cube night we played my Peasant Cube. I drafted a very strong Boros agro deck and was playing my dear friend Tom in the finals of that draft. He drafted a very sweet looking blue and red Tempo deck. It was a finals as a finals should be: we went into game 3. Tom played first: Mountain go. I played a Mother of Runes turn 1. On turn 2 he had Fire//Ice ready. I followed it up with Shrine of Loyal Legions, an absolute banger in my deck and the matchup. On turn 3 he suspended you, Riftwing Cloudskate, and the rest is history. You were his only way in his deck to interact with my Shrine and keep it in check. 6 tokens wasn’t enough to win me the game. As always you were the perfect play at the perfect time, you always are. 

I absolutely love that Cube, everytime I play it I just want to play more of it. I’ve designed it such that it is very focussed on archetypes, not on themes. So I don’t support a Reanimate theme for example, even though the card Reanimate is in the Cube. I support archetypes: agro, midrange, control, tempo. For me this makes it so that the Cube ’s replayability is very high, which is nice because I’ve played this Cube over 100 times. I’ve had this Cube for 17 years now and still play it quite often, even though I currently have 19 Cubes. You have been in that Cube since day one. You play an important role in that Cube, you are the perfect tempo card. 

Tempo is one of the hardest concepts to define in Magic. The easiest way is saying that when you spend less mana on something than your opponent, it’s tempo. I agree with this, but I think cards can also be tempo cards if they don’t live by this definition. If a card has the ability to control or shift the pace of a game one could also see it as a tempo card. I think you are both. For only 2 mana, getting a 2/2 flyer with haste and bouncing something your opponent casts is going to be net mana positive, thus tempo. But getting rid of a game piece while adding evasive power to the board can also radically change the pace of a game whether at 2 or at 5 mana. It can speed it up, it can drastically slow it down. 

I’ve experienced this many, many times myself. If it was in UB Mannequin in Standard, or UW Reveilark in Standard, or in one of the 5 of my Cubes I play you in. I love the gameplay you offer, even when it’s used against me, like last week. I think that is a sign of really loving a Magic card. 

With love, 

Hanjo