The Arena Cube Draft, October 29–November 12

Greetings! Welcome to Arena Cube October 2024 edition! The Arena Cube is a fan-favorite experience we're always excited to feature, and we've once again got some sizeable changes.

Slow Down! What's Cube?

Cube is like Booster Draft but pulls cards from across Magic's history. There are all sorts of permutations of Cubes, from high powered to rarity restricted, special rules to color restricted, and many, many more flavors. The Arena Cube is a powerful, classic Cube experience:

1. High Powered. The Arena Cube uses many of the most powerful cards available on MTG Arena.
2. Fast. Many of the strongest cards on MTG Arena are cheap, which means you need to have a plan either to be aggressive or to answer aggression. Accordingly, this cube is lower on synergies, combos, and giant plays more frequently seen in another of our Cube events, the Chromatic Cube.
   
3. Singleton. The Arena Cube contains exactly 540 cards with only one copy of each.
   
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.

Arena Cube Event Details

• Event Open: October 29, 8 a.m. PT (15:00 UTC)
• Signup Close: November 12, 8 a.m. PT (16:00 UTC)
• Entry: 4,000 gold or 600 gems
• Format: Arena Cube Phantom Player Draft
• Structure:
  • Best-of-One: Seven wins or three losses
  • Best-of-Three: Three matches
• Rewards: Historic individual card rewards (ICRs) not in Standard

Building on the Last Arena Cube

Back in July, the Arena Cube had some experimental changes. Well, the data is in, and I can both give you a peek behind the scenes at what the data showed and more of what we were testing.

Our biggest experiment was testing higher power level cards—the full set of fetch lands, the five Modern Horizons 2 elementals, and our biggest power-level outliers courtesy of Outlaws of Thunder Junction's Breaking News bonus sheet, Fractured Identity and Mana Drain. We also tested additional fixing by adding ten more lands to the cube, while the fetch lands were already making fixing stronger.

Behind the scenes, there was a bit more going on. Coming into the July 2024 iteration, monocolor aggressive decks had consistently been the best-performing strategies. That's not a problem—aggro should be strong so that games end, and we already have a format about trading expensive haymakers in the Chromatic Cube—but we wanted to see if we could shift some of these single-color decks into multicolor aggressive decks and possibly increase competition for aggro.

Our other experiment was with blue. It consistently struggled the most in Arena Cube, which makes sense given its tendency to be weak against aggro. We wanted to test how giving it some new-to-MTG Arena high-power cards would change its fortunes.

So, How'd We Do?

Data is a funny thing. If four people look at it, they'll each find something very different, and it depends on what they're looking for going in.

Mana Drain and Fractured Identity were the number one and number two winningest cards in the cube. Blue went from fifth best-performing color to first. So, obviously we went too far … right?

Well … Mana Drain and Fractured Identity's winrates are essentially the same as those of the best-performing aggro cards from the last Arena Cube. The list of top-performing cards contains all five colors rather than just red and white cards. And the best-performing blue archetypes win far less than monowhite, monored, and monogreen did back in January's Arena Cube. In fact, there's more balance across all archetypes—the best-performing decks win less, while underperforming archetypes win more than they ever have. For the first time, a three-color archetype is actually doing well (it's Jeskai, by the way). Our other big power level outliers, the Modern Horizons 2 elemetals, proved strong but balanced. And we have seen a marked shift from monocolor decks to decks with two or more colors.

The way I see it, we learned a lot and players had fun. Those are the hallmarks of a successful experiment. The format became more diverse and balanced while undergoing a seismic shift in color balance and how well it handles cards too strong to hang out with the rest of the class.

Glimpse the Future

The October 2024 Arena Cube

We aim to build on the improved balance and color diversity of the August 2024 cube while reining in the power level just a tad. Mana Drain and Fractured Identity are being taken out as they wait for a cube powerful enough to contain them. The Modern Horizons 2 elementals are being taken out, too. We're removing a bunch of cards that have been in the cube for a while, adding a bunch of new and recent additions to MTG Arena, and slightly reducing the amount of graveyard interaction to bolster cards that use the graveyard. We're swapping out the bonus cycle of fixing lands for more spells. Green, the color that had fallen to fifth place, is seeing the biggest change, getting 24 new cards.

What are we testing this time? We're aiming to maintain and increase archetype-level balance while aiming for a power level band that feels a bit less jagged. What else are we testing? Well, you'll have to wait and see for that. I hope you have an absolute blast playing this iteration of the Arena Cube. We look forward to your decklist pictures, your stories, and your experiences. I'll see a whole bunch of you in the queue.

Arena Cube Card Lists

The following lists contain all cards in the Arena Cube broken down by color.