Arena Powered Cube Draft on January 6–20

MTG Arena Jan 5, 2026

Zach Barash

Black Lotus | Art by: Chris Rahn

Greetings! Welcome to Arena Powered Cube, January 2026 edition. 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.

If you're already well-acquainted with Arena Powered Cube, you can skip ahead to our philosophy for this version of the cube.

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

Slow Down! What's Arena Powered 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. Arena Powered Cube is:

1. Powerful (and power-full): Arena 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. Arena Powered Cube rewards you the most for doing your homework and having a plan.
3. Singleton: Arena Powered 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 drafted are not added to a player's collection.

How to Draft Arena 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 and 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 and 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 fun 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 detailing every card and card interaction in the cube, but we want to give you a taste of all that you can discover in Arena 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 Unifiier onto the battlefield without paying its mana cost, for example. There are many flavors of this, but 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 to put these cards into play from your hand instead.
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 firm commitments 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.

Universes Beyond Comes to Arena Powered Cube Version 2.0

When we introduced Arena Powered Cube, we discussed restrictions for the first version and how we would analyze and experiment going forward. For the second version, our primary experiment is adding Universes Beyond cards.

Cards from The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth™ have been around for years and demonstrated their place in powerful cubes, like how Orcish Bowmasters is both a strong card on its own as well as a potent component of the "Draw Seven" archetype where you combine Wheel of Fortune and Timetwister with Sheolded, the Apocalypse and Hullbreacher, or how Samwise the Stouthearted interacts splendidly with Karakas. Cards from Magic: The Gathering®—FINAL FANTASY™ and Magic: The Gathering® | Avatar: The Last Airbender™ are newer, but Astrologian's Planisphere and Vivi Ornitier slot nicely into existing blue-red shells, while powerful cards like Phoenix Fleet Airship and Badgermole Cub are still new to the Cube scene. We are excited to add these cards into the mix, open up new gameplay space, support existing archetypes, and hopefully delight players. And as ever, we look forward to hearing about your games and experiences as we continue to iterate and experiment.

The Design of Arena Powered Cube Version 2.0

We're very happy with how the first version of Arena Powered Cube was received, and before its run was finished, we'd already rolled up our sleeves and started work on the second version. We are focused on learning, experimenting, and creating even more fun for even more players. I expect we will always be trying something new with all our cubes and designing for many audiences. There is no final form for this cube, just a variety of avenues to explore. With each version, we aspire to create a fun, novel, replayable, and powerful Limited environment.

What "Must" Be in a Powered Cube?

A powered cube can take on many different flavors. The core definitional trait of "powered" isn't being "highest power level," it's containing the Power Nine—and, for our purposes, all nine of them. Is Sol Ring a necessary card for a cube to be powered? Strictly speaking, no, but it certainly feels close to the Power Nine, as does Mana Crypt. The line spirals outward from there. Tolarian Academy has become a mainstay in many powered cubes (and is a sweet card), but it's not as central to the experience as the Power Nine. One might prefer that every powered cube they play to have Tolarian Academy, but its absence doesn't mean that cube loses its powered status. Psychic Frog is a best-in-class blue-black card and is common in powered cubes that maximize power level, but in our minds, it's further from the center of the spiral than Tolarian Academy. Cards like Grave Titan; Teferi, Hero of Dominaria; and Exploration are far out on the spiral. They're optional spices but not load-bearing pillars.

Putting Black Lotus into any environment sets a high-power-level floor for what can compete, but there are nevertheless many expressions of powered cube. A maxed-out powered cube strives for the most powerful threats and potent combos. A retro powered cube exemplifies a specific moment in the past, either one-for-one replicating, say, 2013's Magic Online Holiday Cube, or by being evocative of a particular era. A high-synergy powered cube swaps out mainstays to create novel gameplay with less-common archetypes and card interactions. One could even create weirder projects, like a cube with the Power Nine and 351 copies of Goblin Piker. Not that one should create that cube, but it illustrates the broadness of the format.

This is all very theoretical, but it hopefully helps get you in the mindset that powered cubes aren't just one thing or for one audience—there are many expressions of the idea. So, with that said, let's talk about the other sizable change we're making in tomorrow's Arena Powered Cube alongside the addition of Universes Beyond cards.

Let's Talk About Boros

One of the narratives from our first Arena Powered Cube is that Boros was not only strong but that it was too strong. And that's true—Boros was both the most popular color pair and enjoyed the highest win rate. In both Premier and Traditional drafts. It was more dominant in play and performance numbers than we'd have liked.

As far as strong decks go, Boros is a fine one. It's interactive and relies mostly on creatures—the most interactable card type in Magic. It tries to end games quickly, and it's better for a top deck to aim to push the match to conclusion rather than excessively draw games out. Its creatures aren't just simple and strong, its incidental value generation and its dynamism give it options when games go long. Perhaps most importantly, Boros is among the most approachable decks in Arena Powered Cube, playing more like a mega-powerful draft deck rather than a more novel deck built around Reanimate or Tolarian Academy. This approachability can cause it to be underdrafted, as players seek more distinct experiences in Cube from what they experience in Booster Draft. All that's to say, Boros is far from the worst top deck one could have. But we do not want Boros to always be the best deck; and even when it is, we don't want Boros to be as strong as it was in the first version of Arena Powered Cube.

To weaken Boros, we're starting with a relatively gentle touch. We're removing a few of the top-performing cards like Guide of Souls. Ocelot Pride might be the de facto stronger card, but Guide of Souls's slightly lower profile (it was picked noticeably later than Ocelot Pride) and more aggro-focused gameplay made it the highest-win-rate card in Arena Powered Cube. We're also cutting some of the density of support. Lightstall Inquisitor and Kari Zev, Skyship Raider weren't lynchpin cards for Boros, but the sheer quantity of replaceable cheap creatures made it too easy for Boros decks to wheel everything they needed to fill out their mana curves.

In their place, we're adding some red and white cards that better fit other archetypes for the colors, as well as shifting a few Boros card slots to other colors. We considered a variety of further adjustments and exclusions, but we settled on what we felt would be best to keep the format strong, competitive, and fun. We cannot please everyone equally and concurrently, but we can promise to continue experimenting and cycling cards in and out.

Wrapping Up

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

Arena Powered Cube 2.0 List