Impressions on the current Magic Arena cube

07 Apr, 2025

I've been getting back into Magic: the Gathering, and to ease myself in, over the weekend, I played a bunch of the Magic: the Gathering Arena cube.

If you're unfamiliar, a cube is a curated selection of cards that is broken off into packs and drafted; a cube can be designed around almost any kind of play, but typically they offer high-octane version of Limited where every card is has a high power level and synergies are very strong. The Arena cube is a fairly typical cube made out of cards that are available on Arena, which is usually available to be drafted in the weeks right before a new set releases. The cube is an evolving thing, updated with new cards added (and some cards cut) every time it comes back.

Cube is a good way to ease back; I get to just draft and play a bunch of decks and they have a mix of cards I'm familiar with and new cards that have come out while I was away from the game. Given the timing, I don't want to invest time into learning the Aetherdrift limited format that's currently on its way out, nor do I want to invest into getting the cards for a constructed deck.

I played a lot of drafts of this cube, and came away with some opinions and impressions; a lot of this reinforces thoughts I already had about various cards and cube in general.

There are still 'orphaned' cards in the cube

In particular, Death's Shadow and its less-cool cousin The Last Ride¹. To me those are just not really cube cards; they are good in the context of a highly tuned Constructed deck that has access to four of them and the ability to consistently get to a low life total without dying.

Cards that cost life to play generally get worse the more of them that you have in your deck, and Death's Shadow ends up being too polarizing. If you draft around it, the games where you don't draw it leave you in kind of a precarious place.

I think the theory here is that having many more fetchlands and shocklands in the cube (it now has multiple copies of those lands) pushes Death's Shadow, but it's clearly not enough; there just aren't that many good cards that demand that you pay life, and you're not going to draw them consistently. And even if you do have a dream draw where you're fetching and shocking and thoughtseizing your way to a 4/4 on turn 2, it's not actually that impressive in the context of the format. What made Death's Shadow good historically was that it traded favorably with removal most of the time, in formats where the one-mana kill spell is Lightning Bolt and most curves cap out at three mana.

In the cube, of course, it just dies to things like Portable Hole and Fatal Push. It gets chumped by tokens. It has to contend with the excessively powerful four- and five-mana creatures that people do get to play because it's cube.

Sometimes cube is a venue to bring back cards that were at one point really good but have been outpaced by formats or no longer have a place. Sometimes cards just get outpaced everywhere, even in cube, and Death's Shadow was never a cube staple. I didn't see a single Death's Shadow on either side of the board over the entire weekend.

It's time to let companions go

At this point there are only two companions left in the cube: Lutri, the Spellchaser and Lurrus of the Dream-Den. I think they both should be taken out.

Lutri is just a card that causes the rich to get richer. Your cube deck is guaranteed to meet Lutri's deckbuilding restriction; this means Lutri is just free, you pretty much always want it if you can cast it, and sometimes even if you can't cast it. You should companion Lutri if it's in your card pool 100% of the time, because even if you have no way of casting it, it's still a card you can discard to a discard effect so there's a very marginal set of circumstances where you'd want to spend three mana to pick it up.

But Lutri's value is incredibly marginal. Over many rounds of cube I saw a lot of Lutri, but I almost never saw it getting cast, and even more rarely did I see it getting cast actually copying a spell. Lutri is worse than picking just about any card you will actually put into your deck. This means that the higher your card quality when you see Lutri, the more likely that it is correct to pick it.

Lutri contributes not at all to any actual deck archetype; even if you are some kind of blue-red spells-matter deck, you don't really want to play Lutri in your maindeck, and you're unlikely to get value out of it as a companion. As such, its presence in the cube just takes a slot that could have gone to a card that actually contributes to decks. It probably gets picked at a pretty high rate and gets played almost 100% of the time, making it look like a good and popular card, but qualitatively it makes the quality of decks in the cube worse on average! The blue-red spells decks would be better if Lutri was, instead, any of the many blue/red creatures that reward you for casting noncreature spells.

Lurrus, on the other hand, just has the opposite problem where you kind of never want to companion it. Lurrus fits most naturally on a deck full of cheap permanents and good spells, but it wants those cheap permanents to be value cards that you can recur with Lurrus, and there's just not enough of them in the deck. Post-nerf, it's just not worth it to companion Lurrus so you can spend six mana to put it into play and recur your Mishra's Baubles; you're forced to give up too much and too much pressure is put on your picks, and too many of the cards that go into the 'cheap annoying guys' archetype are not Lurrus-compliant - cards like Serra Paragon and Ranger of Eos. Lurrus is still a good card in this archetype, as a maindeck card, but the fact that it's a companion makes it essentially a trap that induces people to draft those decks wrong. For that reason, I think both it and Lutri should be taken out of the cube.

Landfall is really good now; perhaps too good

It's a bit hubristic to talk about the 'best deck' in a cube setting where there's so much variance and wildness going on, but it feels to me like 'domain landfall' as a very broad archetype is currently the best thing to draft in the Arena cube.

The reason for this of course is the multiple copies of the fetchlands, as well as the multiple copies of both the shocklands and the other duals with basic land types. It's very, very easy to draft 3-5 fetchlands, at which point you are pretty favored to be able to double-trigger a landfall card at least once. Cards like Scythecat Cub, Tireless Tracker, and Omnath, Locus of Creation all get a boost from this.

But what elevates this above a typical linear deck is that not only does it have some very good cards that only make sense in that archetype (Leyline Binding), it can also easily play every color and thus you can wrap these in any selection of generally powerful cards.

I'm not sure this rises to the level of being a problem; the deck is fun to draft and play, and if you're not passed the powerful landfall and domain cards, you are kind of just drafting a relatively slow deck with difficult mana.

Aggro doesn't feel relevant

Again, I really ground out a lot of these drafts and I don't think I faced monored even once. I drafted a monored deck at one point and it just felt underpowered and bad.

Right now it feels like the amount of value and board presence that decks almost always have is kind of suppressing the traditional monored game plan of playing cheap creatures and attacking with them. The Arena cube is very midrangey; there's not a lot of control and not a lot of combo, which also means there's not a lot of aggro. Everyone is just trying to value people out.

Even when I had or played against more aggressive decks, they tended to be built around grinding and value. There's the 'annoying creatures that recur' theme around white/black/blue, where you're using Unearth to bring back Extraction Specialist bringing back Phantasmal Image copying Extraction Specialist bringing back Ajani, Nacatl Pariah. Alternatively, they're landfall or big-creature decks based around turboing out large threats.

A thing I noted about this cube is that there's a huge gap between kill-anything removal and removal that only kills cheap creatures. The latter feels a lot more situational and sometimes kind of dead. A card like Nowhere to Run feels like it struggles for relevance because creatures are just big now; there's not as many 3-mana 2-toughness creatures or 4-mana 3-toughness creatures as there used to be. Look at Sorin, Ravenous Neonate who dodges so much of this kind of removal. The relative paucity of aggro tends to just make it less attractive to take those cards, whereas the Infernal Grasps of the world that can kill anything are much more premium.

I think this cube needs a shakeup of it distribution of value creatures and oversized creatures in general, perhaps with some thought to making aggro more viable. Or at least take out one of the random -3/-3 spells and put in Doom Blade instead.

Power level feels pretty flat, but annoyance level isn't

This cube is just so full of value cards that are all kind of vaguely on par with one another; there's not a lot of saliently powerful cards that are truly a step above the rest of the cube on rate.

But, there's one specific card that I repeatedly found unpleasant in this cube: Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines.

Norn is a polarized card, where her effect is extremely matchup-dependent; her text can do basically nothing or it can turn off every card in your hand. Polarized hate cards like this have existed for a long time and are generally fine. But Norn occupies sort of a unique place in the ecosystem.

Her hate is very wide-ranging, affecting all kinds of archetypes including both the landfall deck and the 'annoying value creatures' deck. And Norn is particularly resilient because she either shuts off or dodges almost all removal in the cube. It's very easy to draft a deck that can neither interact with Elesh Norn, nor win with her on the board.

Norn is also an extremely powerful proactive play; even if she doesn't instantly defeat your deck, she's difficult to kill, stabilizes the board, and generates a ton of value as she sits in play for a typical deck built to make use of her.

This combination of potent hate while being a card you want to play proactively almost all the time means you see a lot of Norn and it sucks every time. I think this card is just not particularly fun to play with or against, especially in a best-of-one format.

Alchemy still doesn't belong

My gripe with Alchemy cards comes down to two things:

• Alchemy cards don't seem to really meet the overall design and aesthetic quality bar of a paper Magic card, probably because they're not made on the same schedule;
• The design space of 'effects you can only do in digital Magic' and 'effects that you should do, that lead to good gameplay' is smaller than the increasing volume of Alchemy cards being made

I think these two things kind of combine to explain the distaste these cards have from much of the Magic-playing public. They feel like 'fake Magic cards' in that they have a lower quality bar, but they also feel like 'fake Magic cards' in that their imperative to use digital-only mechanics (because otherwise they have no reason to exist) gives them kind of a sort of sweaty insincerity.

Many of these cards just don't do anything you couldn't do on paper with a little tweaking. Two Alchemy mechanics that show up prominently in the cube are Heist and the Collector cycles. Heist is a keyword action that reads:

Look at three random nonland cards from target opponent's library. Exile one of them face down. You may cast that card for as long as it remains exiled, and you may spend mana as though it were mana of any type to cast that spell.

This is honestly not that different from 'Look at the top four cards of target opponent's library; exile one of them face down.' Similarly, the Collectors are all creatures with the gimmick that once you achieve some condition, they conjure a Mox in your hand; this could just as easily be creating a token.

Yes, there are meaningful differences where the digital implementation is a little cleaner or avoids memory issues (the Collector triggers are all meant to trigger only once). But they feel marginal enough that the digital-only aspect of the cards reads a a little forced.

On the other end of the spectrum there are Alchemy mechanics that can't be done on paper at all, but which also probably shouldn't be done anywhere. The premier example of this is spellbooks. A spellbook is a list of cards that a given card can conjure randomly. An example of a spellbook card is Tome of Gadwick.

The problem with spellbooks is that a spellbook is too much information to absorb in the time you can dedicate to reading and understanding a card, making these cards impossible to evaluate when you see them for the first time; Arena's UI isn't even good at showing you what the spellbook contains. Tome of Gadwick isn't even a major offender here; all of its spellbook cards are just one-mana blue cantrips, which are all pretty much equivalent. This, of course, makes the use of the spellbook mechanic kind of pointless as the variance in the card barely does anything. But other cards with spellbooks have much more significant variance and thus are much harder to evaluate.

To me this is a theme with alchemy cards: they up the complexity and cognitive load past the point where you can strategically evaluate what is going on, even if they are theoretically okay in a digital-only setting where you don't have to contend with actually implementing the rules by hand.

Ignore my griping, though

I actually had a good time with the cube, overall! Magic is still just a fun game, and cube still has a good combination of nostalgia and novelty. I wouldn't have kept doing it if I wasn't having fun. I think a lot of the new cards are cool and interesting; Mockingbird and Tishana's Tidebinder feel like classic cube cards.

But I do think there's some missed opportunities and wasted potential; I hope they keep improving it, and that they go with some more radical changes for the next iteration. The headlines for me is that there's some pretty clear cuts to make, which should make space for additions that help aggro and probably also some more 'sideways' cards; this cube feels very focused on a few core archetypes, with not many cards that are both weird and viable.

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