Chromatic Cube Draft on MTG Arena, July 2025

The Chromatic Cube is back and newly updated! As a reminder, the Chromatic Cube is about exciting and expensive spells, late-game swings, and going over the top of your opponent. The goal of the cube is to use ramp, removal, and early fixing to set up that epic late game.

If you're curious about what new cards have been added, check out this section of the article.

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 and special rules to rarity and color restrictions, and many, many more flavors. The Chromatic Cube is:

1. Aspirational: The Chromatic Cube heavily showcases cards with a dream. They create unique gameplay moments, have quests to make them stronger, or just have big, splashy effects!
2. Moderate speed: Most Chromatic Cube draft decks will play a number of expensive spells, but this isn't a slow format. You can't afford to do nothing during the first four turns of the game. In this format, you want to accelerate your mana, find your colors early, and interact with your opponent, or you'll fall behind.
3. Singleton: The Chromatic 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. This is a Phantom Draft event, which means that your drafted cards are not added to your collection.

Chromatic Cube Event Details

• Event Open: July 15, 8 a.m. PT (15:00 UTC)
• Signup Close: July 29, 8 a.m. PT (15:00 UTC)
• Entry: 4,000 gold or 600 gems
• Format: Chromatic Cube Phantom Player Draft
• Structure:
• Best-of-One: Seven wins or three losses
• Best-of-Three: Three matches
• Rewards:
  Historic individual card rewards (ICRs) grant cards from pack releases on MTG Arena. They do not include cards that were released outside of packs (e.g., cards from Historic Anthologies). Historic uncommon ICRs have a 5% upgrade rate to rare. Historic rare ICRs may upgrade to a mythic rare; each rare is twice as likely to be awarded as each mythic rare.

What's Changed Since Last Time?

The north star of the Chromatic Cube continues to be allowing players to consistently play multiple colors and a higher mana value than what is typical. Forty-five (45) out of the 540 of the cards in the cube have been changed, allowing for some new and exciting additions from Aetherdrift and Tarkir: Dragonstorm. Let's get into some of the rationale behind these changes.

Cards that were cut often fell into one of these categories:

Too weak: This is pretty straightforward. These cards are picked very late, rarely make decks, and/or have a low win rate.

Too strong: These cards have too high of a win rate for how fun they are to play.

Lacking support: These cards don't synergize well with the rest of the cube.

Opposed to what the cube is about: You should not be overly penalized for ramping and playing expensive cards.

Here is the reasoning behind the new additions:

Popular: These additions see play in other formats and are at a novel rate.

Aspirational: These cards are fun to think about and strive toward playing.

Fun to build around: Some cards in this space are an experiment to see if they encourage new decks and exploratory strategies.

Balance: Trying to create circumstances to promote the viability of as many color pairs and strategies as possible that are in line with the goals of the cube.

Last but certainly not least, with the release of Aetherdrift, the cycle of verge lands is complete! They are being added, and the cycle of ten scry lands are being cut. This will better allow players to have more access to their colors early on while having the added benefit of entering untapped so they're more useful at casting expensive spells. The addition of the Murders at Karlov Manor surveil lands has also had me feeling that having two cycles that are so similar in how they function is incorrect for the replayability of the cube.

And on that note, I'm looking forward to getting into the draft queues and seeing all the sweet decks players are drafting! Happy cubing!