I have owned every piece of Fractal gear going back to the AXE 1 and my go to amp was always the Freidman BE. I even purchased a real 2015 BE100, 2018 BE100 and lastly the BE100 DLX. Prior to Cygnus I was able to pretty much tone match my AXE 3 to the real BE100 DLX and found myself playing the AXE 3 exclusively so I sold off all my real tube heads. Once Cygnus hit, I can no longer gel with the Friedman sims as to me they seem super compressed now and choked off when the sat switch is engaged whereas that was never the case before.
To me after Cygnus these are the amps that sound the most appealing to my ears for 80's/90's high gain:
EVH 5153 100 red
EVH 5153 100 blue
Atomica High
Friedman Smallbox
I have been running the EVH red/blue with EL34 in the power section and that helps tame it down and open it up from my experimenting.