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Cube Draft

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Cube Draft is a casual Magic: The Gathering Limited format. Unlike a typical Booster draft, which requires players to open new, sealed booster packs for each round, players draw "packs" (usually a set amount of cards at a time) from a shared cube, and return those cards to the cube after play is finished.

Where to Play
Paper
Yes		MTGO
Yes		Arena
Yes
Limited (Draft)
Players 2+
Life 20 points
Decks 40+ cards (plus sideboard)

A cube is a curated collection of cards, specifically intended for Limited play and reflecting the design intent of the person or people who construct and update it.[1] Cubes typically contain at least 360 cards, which is the minimum number needed to support a traditional eight-player draft using 3 15-card packs. Cubes are commonly singleton, due to their historical beginnings of being a compilation of the best limited cards.

An Ultra•PRO deck box for a cube, sized to fit up to 900 double-sleeved cards.

Cube Draft is not an official format and has no official rules, but cubes are available in Magic Online and Magic Arena. Cubes have featured in professional play events, including the Magic Invitational, Magic Online Championship Series, and World Championship.

History

Inception and early adoption

Custom Limited environments started in 1999 with the parallel development of Big Box Drafts—all-inclusive collections of every card in Magic's history[a]—and Wagic, which was lightly curated and used Winchester-like drafts. Big Box Drafts and Wagic were both singleton formats. Patrick Chapin had started "Chapin draft" as a set of curated cards with set design principles in the late 1990s, which was where the roots of cube began but as a named concept, Cube itself emerged in 2000 in Toronto, Canada, within the playgroup of Gabriel Tsang, Mark Zadjner, Gary Wise, Elijah Pollock, and others in Ontario, with Tsang having named the format (per David Rood) as cubes were carried in 1k longboxes. The format was initially created as a compilation of the best limited cards of all time, with the main points of divergence being between cubes that were powered and unpowered. Some of the earliest cube writings were on the now-defunct MTGOntario.com page, which had a series of articles about a "Cube Pro Tour" in Ontario. Their original list is lost to time, but the list had house rules like one where Rukh Egg could make a 4/4 when discarded.

The format gained mainstream attention during the mid-late 2000s from online content like Sam Gomersall's article "Gleaming the Cube,", Noah Weil's "Fun^3" article, and Evan Erwin's "Gleaming the Cube" episode of The Magic Show. Writers like Tom LaPille, an early format adopter, wrote content about cube for Star City Games and on his own site, parlaying his experience to a job at Wizards of the Coast.

In these early years, cubes tended to be homogenized, with the card pool consisting of six equally sized "faces" of sixty cards each: one per color, plus one for colorless, multicolor, and land cards. Because of this, many thought of "the cube" as a singular phenomenon, rather than "cubes" in general; most early cube design iteration was done in spaces like MTGSalvation's cube forum, which was created in 2007.

Official recognition and growth

The 2007 Magic Invitational included two Cube drafts. The first DailyMTG article about Cube, written by Tom LaPille, was published in 2009; LaPille later wrote an intro to his personal cube for the site. Cube Draft was also featured at the 2012 Players Championship. With this recognition from Wizards of the Coast came visibility and legitimacy for the format; while the From The Vault: Twenty box set was never officially declared as a "cube product", its product page references cube several times.

The format first came to Magic Online in 2012 with a cube designed by Tom LaPille and developed by Max McCall[2] as a Legacy cube; later that year, the Power Nine was added with the 2012 Holiday cube, which was eventually rebranded to the Vintage Cube.[3] The format became more widely available than ever before, and it got another surge in visibility thanks to streamers like Luis Scott-Vargas, Caleb Durward, Jonathan "JBro" Brostoff, Matt Grenier and Kenji Egashira. Cube first appeared on MTG Arena in 2020 with the advent of real-time drafting.[4]

The scope of Cube by this point had broadened beyond its initial "box of the best limited cards in the game" premise due in part to writers including Jason Waddell, Usman Jamil, Justin Parnell, and Thea Steele. This was codified in a 2016 DailyMTG article by Melissa DeTora, which insisted that cubes did not need to be maximally powerful and that the ability to customize cubes was a selling point. The cube-management website Cube Tutor launched in 2013 (and was effectively replaced by Cube Cobra in 2019), lowering the barrier to entry for cube designers and leading to a new trend of highly experimental cubes.

CubeCon, a Cube-focused convention, was founded by cube streamer Jonathan "JBro" Brostoff and hosted in 2022, with yearly offerings as part of GameHole Con in Madison, Wisconsin. Since then, smaller Cube events have been started and are more local in scope. Cube Draft has seen occasional high-level tournaments from Wizards of the Coast and Star City Games.[4]

Magic Online

See also: Magic Online Cube

Cube Draft is a popular format on Magic Online which is held occasionally during selected periods. The Magic Online Championship Series occasionally adopts Cube Draft as one of the formats they play throughout the whole season. Over time, Magic Online featured several other cubes (Spotlight series, Modern) before having the Vintage Cube as its primary offering.

  • Magic Online booster pack graphics
  •  
    Original cube booster
  •  
    Legacy cube booster
  •  
    Legendary cube booster
  •  
    Holiday cube boosters
  •  
    Vintage cube booster

Magic: The Gathering Arena

See also: Magic: The Gathering Arena/Events § Cube Draft

Magic: The Gathering Arena released its first Cube experience in April 2020 with Cube Sealed, primarily to showcase the card list and potential gameplay. The pool was drawn from the Historic format. With pod drafting released during the Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths update, the Arena Cube premiered on June 12th and ran for two weeks, until the release of Core Set 2021.

A second iteration of the cube, the lower-powered Tinkerer's Cube, was released on September 4th in advance of Zendikar Rising. A third iteration was announced for June 25th, ahead of Dungeons & Dragons: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms, called the Chromatic Cube, with a greater emphasis on multicolor.

Cubes are usually available in the last week or weeks before the release of a new draftable set, as drafting interest is usually lower at that point. The payouts are in gold rather than gems, and events are all phantom.

In April 2024, a new form of curated drafting was released, known as "Remix Draft". Structurally, it differs by allowing collectability, normal prize structure, and uses the classic booster collation of ten commons, three uncommons, and one rare. The first Remix was shortly after the change to Play Boosters, which were more collectable-focused with a potential for multiple rares. The first rendition of the Draft was themed around artifacts, but since then, no new curations have been released.

In October 2025, the Arena Powered Cube was announced, being the Vintage Cube equivalent on Arena.[5] In the four set releases since it has been the only cube to be offered.

Tournament play

Cube Draft was one of the formats played at the 2007 Magic Invitational. The 2012 Players Championship also adopted Cube Draft as one of its formats.[4] The Magic Online Premier Play Program regularly uses it in their playoff tournaments,[6] and Arena events sometimes use Cube as their format. Star City Games hosted two Cube events in 2018 and 2019, each with a $10,000 prize pool.[4]

Cube Categories

The content of a cube is by nature highly variable, with individual cubes being built and curated in order to provide the desired play experience for their creator and their playgroup. Still, a cube can often be categorized into one or more different types.

  • Format-based (Vintage, Legacy, Modern, Pauper, etc.): These are cubes that are based on the legality of their respective formats, but occasionally use them more as a guideline. A Vintage Cube aims to provide high-power-level gameplay using the strongest and most iconic cards from the game's history. This often will use the full Vintage legal card pool, such as the Power 9 cards like Black Lotus and Ancestral Recall, hence the name. The Magic Online Vintage Cube is a notable example of a Power Maxed Cube, as well as the eponymous Powered Cube that is available on Magic: The Gathering Arena, but The Pauper Cube doesn't strictly use the pauper banlist, using the format's legality as a guiderail.
    • "Powered"/"Unpowered" is often used for any kind of cube that has Power 9 cards, while an Unpowered cube describes cards that do not have this, even if they include other powerful cards legal in the vintage card pool.
  • Rarity Restricted. These generally take the form of Pauper (commons only) or Peasant (commons and uncommons only) Cubes. These can be a popular budget option, and are also often Power Maxed or used as Bar Cubes. A notable example of a Rarity Restricted cube is The Pauper Cube, a long-established cube curated by committee.[7]
  • Themed. A themed cube can take many forms. This could be highlighting certain Planes (such as a cube that uses cards from all sets that take place in Ravinca and/or cards that depict the plane), characters within the game, being a tribute to a specific Standard environment, or be limited to cards with specific printings, such as retro frames and white borders.
    • Set. A Set cube is intended to replicate the retail Limited environment of a particular Expansion, or Block. This may be done faithfully, or changes could be made to remove problematic cards (such as Pack Rat in a Return to Ravnica set cube), improve fixing, or to better balance certain strategies or colour combinations. These cubes are seldomly Singleton, instead a ratio of four of each Common, two of each Uncommon, and one of each Rare and Mythic Rare is often used as a starting point.[8]
  • Context Shift. A context shift cube is designed to force drafters to re-evaluate familiar cards, play with weak or bad cards they might otherwise never have included in a deck before, and to provide a novel play experience. This may be achieved with rules modifications, such as in The Turbo Cube[9] by Anthony Mattox, where all spells and activated abilities are reduced by   mana. Alternatively, careful curation of the contents of a cube can drastically alter how players need to construct their decks. A notable example of this is 100 Ornithopters where the only creature able to be drafted is 100 copies of Ornithopter: a 0/2 flier for   mana.
    • Desert. While most cubes will provide players with an unlimited amount of basic lands they need to construct their decks, a Desert Cube does not provide basic lands after the draft, requiring that players draft all the mana sources they need. An example of this type of cube is the eponymous Desert Cube and The Amonkar Desert by Austin Hale.[10][11]
  • Bar Cube. This is a simplified, often budget, cube designed for quick pick-up games without the need for game aids such as Tokens or Counters. As the name suggests, Bar cubes could conceivably be played at a bar while enjoying drinks with friends.

Notes

  1. ↑ Excluding ante and dexterity cards.

References

  1. ↑ Tom LaPille (September 30, 2007). "The Cube FAQ". Play Magic With Tom LaPille. Archived from the original on November 24, 2007.
  2. ↑ Monty Ashley (March 13, 2012). "Magic Online Cube". magicthegathering.com. Wizards of the Coast. Archived from the original on 2017-10-11.
  3. ↑ Max McCall (November 27, 2012). "Power, Cubed". magicthegathering.com. Wizards of the Coast. Archived from the original on 2020-09-26.
  4. ↑ a b c d Parker LaMascus (February 16, 2023). "The History of The Cube Format". Luckypaper.co.
  5. ↑ Dave Finseth (October 20, 2025). "Announcing the Arena Powered Cube!". magicthegathering.com. Wizards of the Coast. Archived from the original on October 20, 2025.
  6. ↑ Daybreak Games. "Magic Online Premier Play Program". mtgo.com. Retrieved on April 6, 2026.
  7. ↑ thepaupercube.com. "The Pauper Cube – Good Common Fun (Website)". thepaupercube.com. Retrieved on Decembeer 22, 2025.
  8. ↑ Anthony Mattox (March 14, 2023). "Set Cubes & More". Lucky Paper.
  9. ↑ Anthony Mattox. "Turbo Cube (416 Card Cube) (website)". Cube Cobra. Retrieved on December 22, 2025.
  10. ↑ LuckyLooter. "The Amonkar Desert (480 Card Desert Cube) (website)". Cube Cobra. Retrieved on December 22, 2025.
  11. ↑ Austin Hale (November 15, 2023). "CubeCon 2023: A Cube Owner’s Retrospective (blog post)". Medium. Retrieved on December 22, 2025.

External links

Magic Online

Magic Arena

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