Arena Powered Cube Design and Card List

Greetings! Today, I have the privilege of introducing MTG Arena‘s newest event: Arena Powered Cube. This Cube goes all out, allowing you to play with many of Magic‘s strongest and most storied cards of all time. This includes the famous Power Nine: Mox Pearl, Mox Sapphire, Mox Jet, Mox Ruby, Mox Emerald, Timetwister, Time Walk, Ancestral Recall, and, of course, Black Lotus.

Time Walk
Booster Tutor
Comet, Stellar Pup
Black Lotus
Sol Ring
Library of Alexandria

Slow Down! What’s Cube?

Cube is like Booster Draft but pulls cards from across Magic‘s history. There are all sorts of cubes, from high-powered to rarity-restricted, special rules to color-restricted, and many, many more flavors. Powered Cube is:

1. Powerful (and power-full): Powered Cube showcases many of the strongest cards available on MTG Arena, including uncollectible cards like the Power Nine. You won’t find a Limited format more chock-full of the biggest power-level outliers on MTG Arena.
2. Fast: Between the best mana acceleration, the strongest threats, and the most potent combos, this cube requires you to have a plan or be proactive. This makes Powered Cube the cube that rewards you the most for doing your homework and having a plan.
3. Singleton: Powered Cube contains exactly 540 cards with only one copy of each card.
4. Phantom: In tabletop, a cube is lent out to players who return the cards at the end of the draft, and the same is true here. Cards are not added to a player’s collection.

Ajani, Nacatl Pariah // Ajani, Nacatl Avenger
Flash
Hullbreacher
Animate Dead
Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer
Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary
Tolarian Academy

How to Draft Powered Cube

While some people have been drafting powered cubes for decades, for others, Arena Powered Cube will be their first foray. We want to give you a brief guide before you jump into the deep end.

In general, you should take intrinsically powerful cards like Sol Ring; Minsc & Boo, Timeless Heroes; and Strip Mine that can enable wins all by themselves. However, it’s ideal to draft around them to improve their potency. Sol Ring is absolutely busted, but you can find it twice as frequently with Urza’s Saga. Minsc & Boo, Timeless Heroes rewards you for having Ancient Tomb (or Mana Crypt) to accelerate the card out a turn or two early. Strip Mine becomes even more misery-inducing potent when combined with Icetill Explorer. This heuristic is true for the majority of cards in the cube—Underworld Breach isn’t the most straightforward to use, but combine it with Brain Freeze and Lion’s Eye Diamond, and you’ll almost certainly be able to win the game on the spot (mill yourself to fuel escape, then mill your opponent’s entire library). We won’t get bogged down by detailing every card and card interaction in the cube, but we want to give you a taste of all that you can discover in Powered Cube. Instead, let’s focus on some broad archetypes you can use as a guide.

1. Aggro: Pick a base color—usually red or white—and draft lots of cheap creatures and removal. You can load up on fixing and play multicolor aggro, you can find aggressive lanes in black or green, and you can even play a full Five-Color Domain Aggro deck.

2. Ramp: This is primarily found in green and artifact decks. Generate extra mana in the first turns of the game, then deploy a devastating finisher. This could be an early Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger off an early Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary or Channel, a Comet, Stellar Pup on turn two or three, or a massive Upheaval that leaves you ahead and your opponent discarding eight cards.

3. Cheaty: Many decks try to “cheat” a powerful card into play, putting an Emrakul, the Aeons Torn or an Atraxa, Grand Unifier onto the battlefield without paying its mana cost, for example. There are many flavors of this (heck, ramp is sort of a version of this). The most common is Reanimator, a black-centric deck (often paired with red or blue) that seeks to put a giant threat like Archon of Cruelty into its graveyard and then cast Reanimate or Animate Dead to bring it into play. There are also Sneak decks which avoid the graveyard by using Flash, Sneak Attack, Show and Tell, or Natural Order.

4. Artifacts: Most commonly found in blue and red, these decks take advantage of the cube having a lot of artifacts. Generate a ludicrous amount of mana with Urza, Lord High Artificer or Tolarian Academy; be aggressive with a giant Kappa Cannoneer or Nettlecyst; or Tinker out a Bolas’s Citadel.

5. Control: Remove all your opponents’ threats and win the long game, or keep your opponent off balance long enough and win as a Combo Control deck, such as using Hullbreacher or Sheoldred, the Apocalypse alongside Wheel of Fortune to instantly upend the game.

6. Mix and match: Hybridize archetypes, such as a Combo Cheat deck or an Artifact Aggro deck. Make no firmcommitments to any one archetype, take lands to keep yourself open, and combine multiple strategies to win.

These are the broadest archetypes, but there are plenty of other directions to go toward and card synergies to discover.

Expedition Map

Designing Powered Cube

We’ve talked about what Powered Cube is, now let’s spend a little time on the “how” and “why.” Perhaps the most obvious place to start is the name. If you’ve heard of any cube in this vein, chances are it’s Magic Online‘s Vintage Cube.

Why Call It Powered Cube Instead of Vintage Cube?

Vintage is the name of a tabletop and Magic Online format. Vintage contains almost all the strongest cards in Magic (cards like Gleemox, Booster Tutor, and Power Play aren’t legal there). It made sense for Magic Online to call it Vintage Cube, since its most iconic cards—the Power Nine—are Vintage legal. But the Vintage format doesn’t exist on MTG Arena, nor do we have any plans for it to exist on MTG Arena. Referring to a non-MTG Arena format feels wrong. We could call it “Timeless Cube,” but that name also feels wrong—cards like the Power Nine aren’t currently legal in Timeless, and we don’t have plans to add them to Timeless. We chose to call it Powered Cube because, well, it’s the inclusion of cards like the Power Nine that define the experience, not the specific format it pulls from. The format is not just powerful, it’s Power-full, and that makes the name Powered Cube feel right.

In addition to naming Powered Cube differently, we’ve chosen to intentionally differentiate the design of our cube from Magic Online‘s Vintage Cube.

Let’s Talk About Vintage Cube from Magic Online

We love Magic Online. Its Vintage Cube is wonderful, and the last thing we want to do is impact Magic Online by undermining their players’ appetite for Vintage Cube. So, with our first run of Powered Cube, we’re testing the waters with intentional restrictions. We’ll evaluate them and reassess whether they’re necessary after this first run of Powered Cube.

The first differentiator is cadence—Magic Online currently has an always-active Vintage Cube queue, while we’re scheduling Powered Cube into our usual Cube slot.

We will also distinguish ourselves through curation. Some of this is natural, as Magic Online contains the majority of all the Magic cards ever made, giving it an enormous library to pull from. While we have added 135 cards to MTG Arena for our first run of Powered Cube, we do not aspire to come close to having Magic Online‘s breadth of cards.

For this first foray, we’re also experimenting with additional restrictions. These aren’t permanent restrictions, but we’ll see how players of both MTG Arena and Magic Online respond. The biggest is not using Universes Beyond cards. Universes Beyond is 100% part of Magic, but this first Powered Cube won’t be using any of its cards, which is distinct from Magic Online‘s Vintage Cube. We are also not adding the monarch or initiative. That’s not a criticism of these mechanics (they were introduced for multiplayer formats that MTG Arena does not currently support), but we’re choosing not to use them at this time.

Finally, there are some individual cards and card combinations we aren’t allowing now due to issues they would have on MTG Arena. For example, Splinter Twin combo would work on MTG Arena but would be onerous to execute (and has fallen out of favor in many powered cubes). We’ve also excluded digital-only cards from our first list—again, they’re real Magic cards and have been doing good work in Arena Cube and Chromatic Cube, but we’re withholding from adding them to Powered Cube at this time.

Powered Cube is a big experiment, and with that comes many small experiments. Perhaps our curatorial restrictions will keep it distinct from Magic Online‘s Vintage Cube and delight MTG Arena players. Perhaps they will prove too restrictive or simply have a marginal impact. Time will tell. Furthermore, while we have added over a hundred cards to MTG Arena to make Powered Cube possible, we do not expect this to be necessary the next time we run it.

Why These 540 Cards?

The short answer is because we believe this is a fun list of cards that will delight many, many players.

The longer, more philosophical answer is there is no such thing as a “perfect” cube list. Every group of players has their own pet cards, their own expression of Magic that feels best, and their own tastes and desires for novelty, all of which change from time to time. And there’s likely no cube design space more explored or with more opinions than powered or Vintage cubes. Arena Powered Cube has been in the works for years, and yet we know it won’t contain everything for everyone. It can’t. And it’s not supposed to—we want it to be distinct from Magic Online‘s Vintage Cube, and we’ll be using data from this first foray to help us further determine how different we want them to be.

We can’t know in advance what the next powered cube staples from products not slated to be on MTG Arena will be, so it will take time to add load-bearing cards to the client. We are watching, listening, and learning what you all enjoy, what you would like to see more or less of, and what we can do to make the next Powered Cube experience as great as we can—even though we know there are many audiences with contradictory needs.

While there’s so much that can be said about our design approach to Powered Cube in particular, or Cube in general, we’ll leave it there for today for the sake of brevity not droning on for far too long. I can’t express meaningfully enough how many people at Wizards are excited to bring Powered Cube to MTG Arena and how many years of work went into making this moment happen. If there’s one thing I can leave you with, it’s a lesson from my colleagues: if you spend enough of your valuable time and energy tirelessly toiling to make your dream a reality, there’s a good chance it will happen; if only so you can be freed up to work on your next passion product making more Powered Cube content. That lesson comes courtesy of Alex Werner, and while he’s one of many, many people who made this happen, Alex is perhaps the person who did the most to make it possible.

We hope you have an absolute blast playing Powered Cube and experiencing over 30 years of Magic history. We look forward to seeing how you all feel about it. Until next time, I hope to see you in the draft queue!

Arena Powered Cube List