Electricity is involved with mining and masternodes require a VPS, however, the cost is about 2x as less than the cost of electricity.
If you are serious in mining, then just use the hardware as support facilities. This will be much more give the most but certainly also need sufficient facilities. I never tried the cloud and for the results that it is affordable so interesting and unsatisfactory.
mining is the cost of risk
But MN depends on your amount dude, if you are using small MN coin and then you get a few bucks only. As far as i know the only masternode that worh to invest just like dash and pivx. that needs a lot of amount to get decent money to become masternode.