Arena Cube Draft, September 9–23

Greetings! Welcome to Arena Cube, September 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. Mostly Singleton*. Arena Cube contains exactly 540 cards with only one copy of each nonland card. There are three copies of each fetch land and two copies of each shock land.
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: September 9, 8 a.m. PT (15:00 UTC)
• Signup Close: September 23, 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

A Moderate Adsjustment to A Moderate Experiment

Last time, we tried out something bigger by radically reshaping Arena Cube's mana base. Instead of being a full Singleton cube, we switched it to a Baltimore Singleton cube, meaning nonland cards only appear once but land cards appear multiple times. We included three copies of each fetch land and two copies of each shock land, with the explicit goal of encouraging more colorful decks and empowering cards like Brainstorm and Lotus Cobra. While this experiment likely isn't a permanent change, we were happy with how the first iteration went and are running it back with some significant tweaks.

As usual, we are testing out plenty of cards that have been added to MTG Arena since we last ran Arena Cube. This includes demonstrated power outliers like Cori-Steel Cutter and Stock Up that have come through recent Standard-legal releases, powerful additions from Arena Anthologies like Grist, the Hunger Tide and Mana Leak, and a few more oddball candidates that benefit from the preponderance of fetch lands, like Tannuk, Memorial Ensign and Hydroponics Architect.

Perhaps the biggest change this time around isn't about what's in the list, but what isn't. Over the past few iterations of Arena Cube, red-based aggressive decks—particularly red-white ones—have consistently dominated. In general, it's great for aggro to be the top dog. It means games play out on the battlefield, interaction matters, and the average game or match doesn't take long. To show my hand a bit, I love slow, controlling decks. Therefore, I make an active effort to ensure aggro is strong to counter my unconscious and conscious biases.

With that said, there's a limit to how good any one deck ought to be. If red aggro is too strong, then entire archetypes and colors struggle to compete. Getting to be on the play, which is outside of a player's control, becomes too large a determinant in who wins. The possibility space of the cube shrinks when red cards push you to play one style of gameplay and not playing red cards puts you at a disadvantage. We will want aggro to be strong—we are adding cards like Voice of Victory and Cori-Steel Cutter—but we're removing cards like Ocelot Pride; Ajani, Nacatl Pariah; Phlage, Titan of Fire's Fury; Fable of the Mirror-Breaker; and the mighty Goblin Bombardment (a card that's often picked late but has the second-highest win rate of the cube), along with some non-red-white outliers like Psychic Frog. These join Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer; Solitude; and Mana Drain as cards that are more powerful than we can currently handle in Arena Cube.

The September 2025 Arena Cube

I hope these changes will bring the cube a bit more into balance, allowing red-white to be strong without overly defining the entire play space. We want to see what players do with the high density of fixing when under slightly less pressure to interact every turn of the game. And as always, we'll try something new next time. Most importantly, we hope that you have fun playing this iteration of Arena Cube. We look forward to seeing you share your decklists, stories, experiences, and feelings on the experimental mana base. See you in the queues!

Arena Cube Card Lists

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