Arena Cube Draft, March 25–April 8

Greetings! Welcome to Arena Cube, March 2025 edition! Arena Cube is a fan-favorite experience that we're always excited to feature, and we've once again got some sizeable changes this time.

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 Cube is a powerful, classic Cube experience:

1. High Powered. 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, like Chromatic Cube.
3. Singleton.* Arena Cube contains 540 cards with only one copy of most.
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: March 25, 8 a.m. PT (15:00 UTC)
• Signup Close: April 8, 7 a.m. PT (15:00 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

Designing Arena Cube

A balance between change and stability

Design is a balance between novelty and familiarity. If we change too much, the design becomes something entirely new and disconnected from what people loved about it. If we change too little, the experience risks staleness. This isn't a difficult needle to thread—it's a foundational component of game design—and we aim to approach the challenge a little differently every time.

For this iteration, we've swapped out nearly a quarter of the cards that were in the last edition of Arena Cube. We've replaced underperforming cards and ones that've had their time in the sun with new additions from Magic: The Gathering Foundations, Pioneer Masters, Aetherdrift, and Alchemy: Aetherdrift. We've added buffed Alchemy cards and returned some old favorites to Arena Cube. These changes aim to be substantial but not the most substantive. You'll be playing with different cards, but the overall experience should still feel very familiar if you've been playing Arena Cube for years.

We are trying out something different. This experiment may be unfamiliar, shocking, or mundane depending on your experience with Cube. Cube can be many things, and while Arena Cube has followed the most common conventions of Cube, it's deviating from one of them this time. This version of Arena Cube is only mostly Singleton.

Making fetch happen

The biggest change we're making to Arena Cube is its mana base. Instead of having many different cycles of lands from across Magic's history, you'll see some familiar faces multiple times. We are including three copies of each fetch land and two copies of each shock land. While the Singleton rule applies to nonlands, there are multiple copies of land cards. This isn't the first time we've broken the Singleton rule on MTG Arena (Chromatic Cube did it from the very beginning), but this is new ground for Arena Cube.

So, why do this? Well, fetch lands like Arid Mesa perform many roles. They make splashing easier by effectively giving you additional copies of Steam Vents or Indatha Triome. They work great with Murders at Karlov Manor's surveil lands by letting you find them when you don't mind having a land enter tapped. They synergize with Brainstorm ; Mishra's Bauble ; Treasure Cruise ; Bristly Bill, Spine Sower ; and Deeproot Wayfinder to name a few. The shock lands are also powerful, being the only land cycle on MTG Arena that always provides two colors and can always enter untapped.

All of this potency is subtle; recognizing fetch lands' power is one of the steps in becoming a more experienced Cube drafter. We want to give more players the opportunities to play with and against these cards, but following the Singleton rule limits how much they can be played with and necessitates they be drafted highly. So, we have included three copies of each fetch land and two copies of each shock land as a treat and an experiment.

We hope breaking the Singleton rules for lands will enable multiple synergies, give green landfall and domain cards a boost, and show us how you all feel about this experiment. I want to stress that the rest of Arena Cube is completely Singleton. There is only a single copy of each nonland card. We're just trying out what some call Baltimore Singleton, where you double down (or triple down) on the specific lands that enable your desired play experience.

March 2025 Arena Cube

To recap, we are aiming for a balance of novelty and familiarity. While many individual cards have changed, the overall feel of Arena Cube's cards should stay very much the same, save for the changes to the lands.

As always, what we hope is that you have fun playing this iteration of Arena Cube. We look forward to hearing about your decklists, stories, experiences, and feelings on this new iteration of Arena Cube. See you in the queues!

Arena Cube Card Lists

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