MTG Arena Powered Cube Overview, Archetypes and Combos

Intro

Earlier this week, there was an exciting announcement for all Limited enthusiasts. The Powered Cube is coming to MTG Arena!

Some members of Team TCGPlayer UltimateGuard had a chance to test the cube a bit ahead of schedule, and I am happy to report that there is a lot to look forward to!

You can find videos of our drafts from LSV’s and Cheon’s perspectives on their respective YouTube channels, and I believe Reid will be posting one on TCGPlayer as well.

Since you are going to be able to watch the games in so many places, I wanted to instead give you an overview of the Powered Cube and highlight some of the best archetypes and combos. This should give you a better understanding of the contents of the Cube and what cards to look for in specific archetypes.

Here are some important details:

- The Powered Cube will be playable on MTG Arena from the 28th of October, starting at 8 am PST.

- It does indeed feature the entire Power 9 (The 5 Moxen even have the old borders!) as well as other popular cards like the full set of Revised duals, Mox Diamond, Sol Ring, Grim Monolith, Urza’s Saga, Force of Will, Library of Alexandria, Mishra’s Workshop, and others. There are over 100 cards completely new to MTG Arena.

- I was very pleased to see that there are no Alchemy cards in the Cube. Everything is a paper version of a card that has been released before.

- The Powered Cube contains 540 cards. This means that you will open two-thirds of the entire card pool in every draft, making it very likely to find specific combo pieces.

- Most of the cards won't be immediately collectible; instead, just some of the cards will be slowly released into the Constructed formats. This means that you will now, for example, be able to play cards like Fireblast or Preordain in Timeless.

- The entry fee for the Powered Cube is the same as for a regular draft (10,000 gold or 1,500 gems), with the prizes awarding the gems, Historic Boosters, and Cube Prize Packs. The twist is that it is a phantom draft, which means that you don't unfortunately get to keep the cards.

Now, let’s dive into the best and most common archetypes and what cards you should be looking for if you are drafting one. 
 

Archetypes

Red Aggro

This is the most straightforward strategy to draft, you simply take cheap red creatures, burn spells, and top it off with a few heavy hitters like Hazoret the Fervent, Chandra Torch of Defiance, or Glorybringer. Bonus points for creatures with haste and high damage burn spells like Fireblast. Your goal is to have the game end before your opponent can use all their more expensive, powerful cards.

There are 9 one-mana red creatures, which are usually the most important pieces of your deck because you really want to come out of the gates quickly, so it is a very viable archetype. If you are going to splash or play a second color, it is usually going to be white for additional cheap creatures, removal, or Showdown of the Skalds, so try to pick up some red/white duals in case you end up in Boros. Also, look for some mana denial like Strip Mine, Wasteland, and Rishadan Port to slow your opponent down. 

White Aggro

This strategy is very similar to the red aggressive decks. You want to run a low-to-the-ground creature deck with removal and make your opponent’s life harder with mana denial and taxing effects like Esper Sentinel, Thalia, Guardian of Thraben, Containment Priest, Elite Spellbinder, and Yera and Oski, Weaver and Guide. Mana Tithe and Reprieve also work really well in these decks, and you also want to pick up additional ways to slow them down, like Strip Mine and Wasteland.

There is usually a lot more play to it and more interaction in these decks than in Monored, and you can draft a lot of cards that combo very well together, like for example:

Containment Priest + Parallax Wave, Touch the Spirit Realm
Stoneforge Mystic + Battlerskull, Kaldra Compleat, Sword of Fire and Ice
Guide of Souls + Ocelot Pride 
Solitude + Ephemerate

White also has access to 9 one-drops, so it is just as viable as Monored, though not as explosive, as your creatures don’t have haste and you have creature removal instead of burn spells, which can go face.

The one effect this cube is notably missing for these strategies is Armageddon and Ravages of War.

A general rule of thumb with the aggressive decks is that the lower your curve, the better. You need to be fast. The upside of these decks is that, usually, people like to draft the most powerful cards and try to do the most powerful things, which typically leaves these aggressive cards overlooked. If there is only one or two red or white drafters, they tend to end up with really strong decks. 

Blue/Red

Blue/Red in this cube is very similar to the Izzet Prowess deck in Standard these days, though obviously with a lot more powerful cards.

This cube features Dragon's Rage Channeler, Stormchaser’s Talent, Monastery Swiftspear (and all the other red cheap aggressive creatures), Tamiyo Inquisitive Student, Proft’s Eidetic Memory, Cori-Steel Cutter, Third Path Iconoclast (interestingly over Young Pyromancer, really inviting you to play blue/red), Expressive Iteration and cards like Mishra’s Bauble, Brazen Borrower, Saheeli Sublime Artificer and Enduring Curiosity. This makes for a nice tempo deck with a low curve, cheap aggressive creatures, and some interaction in the form of countermagic and burn spells.

Skullclamp can work really nicely in combination with Third Path Iconoclast and Saheeli in this type of deck.

Notably, Delver is Secrets is missing from this archetype in this cube. 

Green Ramp/Good Stuff Decks

Green Ramp decks can go in multiple directions because, thanks to all the fixing, you can usually play whatever powerful cards you find during the draft. The most important pieces are the cheap mana dorks like Noble Hierarch and Birds of Paradise, and cards like Gaea’s Cradle and the very flexible Green Sun’s Zenith. You also want to make sure that you have something to actually ramp into, which usually means powerful planeswalkers like Jace the Mind Sculptor, Nissa Who Shakes the World, and creatures like Loot the Pathfinder or Primeval Titan. These decks usually run a lot of utility creatures for the midgame, like Scavenging Ooze, Courser of Kruphix, Reclamation Sage, and Tireless Tracker.

There are 7 mana dorks you can play on turn 1 in this cube (counting Deathrite Shaman), and in addition to that, there is also Utopia Sprawl and Fastbond, so there are plenty of ways to get three or more mana on turn 2.

Two common directions with green ramp decks are Channel decks with big Eldrazi Monsters like Emrakul and Ulamog, and also Natural Order variants with cards like Craterhoof Behemoth and Woodfall Primus.

You can also include any of the easy two-card combos like Dark Depths + Thespian Stage (+ Expedition Map, Elvish Reclaimer, and Crop Rotation), Survival of the Fittest + Recurring Nightmare, or Strip Mine + Crucible of the Worlds, Wrenn and Six, Ramunap Excavator, or Icetill Explorer (+Crop Rotation, Elvish Reclaimer, Green Sun’s Zenith).

The Arena Powered Cube offers another take on green, which is aggressive variants with cards like Sentinel of the Nameless City, Bloodbraid Elves, Questing Beast, and Ulvenwald Oddity. You can have a rough time against the combo decks of the format, like Storm or Reanimator, but it is definitely currently a viable strategy as well. I actually ended up drafting a similar deck in one of our drafts, which you can see below. I ended up going 4-1 with it, which is a very respectable record considering the pod had some of the best players in the world. 

I was even able to fit Field of the Dead, which actually ended up doing a lot of work in grindy games. Leovold with Green Sun’s Zenith and Hullbreacher were key in stopping my opponents from drawing extra cards and enabling their shenanigans.

Another angle you can attack from is the Nadu Winged Wisdom combo. There are many additional pieces for this archetype, like Springheart Nantuko, Lotus Cobra, and Sylvan Safekeeper. Shuko is not in the Cube, but you can use Lightning Greaves, though keep in mind that the Shroud mechanic prevents you from targeting the same creature that is already equipped with it. 

Reanimator

Reanimator is one of the most powerful, but also most popular strategies. This means that it is often heavily contested, and a lot of players usually like to speculate on it. This deck is almost exclusively blue/black, sometimes with a red splash for Faithless Looting, so draft your lands accordingly. Most of the Reanimator cards are black and blue, providing card selection and stuff like Frantic Search or Jace Vryn’s Prodigy to help you get the big creatures into your graveyard.

These are the important cards you are looking for:

Ways to get big creatures into the graveyard - Entomb, Bone Shards, Bitter Triumph, Liliana of the Veil, Frantic Search, Collective Brutality, Jace Vryn’s Prodigy, Faithless Looting, Psychic Frog, Malcolm Alluring Scoundrel, Thirst for Discovery

Ways to bring them back into play - Reanimate, Exhume, Animate Dead, Persist, Necromancy, Recurring Nightmare, Unburial Rites, Life/Death, Emperor of Bones

Tutors and card selection to find your missing pieces - Vampiric Tutor, Mystical Tutor, Demonic Tutor, Wishclav Talisman (this one is quite risky though and is more of a Storm card where you can usually win in the same turn), Brainstorm, Ponder, Preordain, Night’s Whisper

Discard spells to clear the way - Thoughtseize, Inquisition of Kozilek, Duress

And finally, the big creatures to reanimate - Archon of Cruelty, Griselbrand, Atraxa Grand Unifier, Etali Primal Conqueror, Woodfall Primus, Myr Battlesphere, Triplicate Titan, Sundering Titan. There are actually not that many great creatures to reanimate, which can be a bit of an issue. Cards like Vaultborn Tyrant, Elder Gargaroth, Abhorrent Oculus, and Overlord of the Mistmoors can often not be enough. You really want the creatures that will immediately give you a ton of value, even if your opponent has something like Swords to Plowshares, so ideally, you pick up Atraxa, Archon, and Griselbrand.

Notably, this cube lacks the basic land-cycling creatures like Throll of Khazad-Dum, which made these Reanimator decks much better by providing you with a card that fixes your mana and puts a monster into your graveyard at the same time. There is also no Iona, Shield of Emeria, which used to be a staple of the Vintage Cubes in the past. Another card that is not included is Corpse Dance, so forget about getting Emrakul into play with the shuffle trigger on the stack.

Another way to cheat the creatures into play ahead of the curve is Show and Tell, though that is quite the double-edged sword in this environment, so be careful with that. Sneak attack is yet another good option for these decks.

I recommend picking up some removal spells so you aren’t completely dead to cards like Deathrite Shaman or Scavenging Ooze.

It is also usually easy to include the Dark Depths combo with Thespian Stage or Vampire Hexmage in this deck, so I like to speculate on those as well. Similarly, Flash + Worldspine Wurm, Woodfall Primus, or Torsten, Founder of Benalia is another option.

Storm

Storm decks are the hardest to draft because you need a lot of different pieces, and then the gameplay itself isn’t exactly a walk in the park either. I’d recommend this strategy only for the very experienced players; otherwise, it is way too easy to end up with a trainwreck.

The most important cards you are looking for are Fastbond, Brain Freeze, Yawgmoth’s Will and/or Underworld Breach, fast mana, and the draw-7s like Timetwister, Wheel of Fortune, Memory Jar, and Time Spiral. They go particularly well with Narset, Parter of the Veils, and sometimes that two-card combo is enough to make the opponent concede.

You want a lot of card selection, tutors, rituals, and cantrips like Manamorphose and Gitaxian Probe to build up storm.

Compared to the MTGO Vintage Cube, this cube is missing a lot of the usual storm pieces like Mind’s Desire, Empty the Warrens, Imperial Seal, Cabal Ritual, High Tide, Turnabout, or Gush.

Unless you have the perfect storm deck, you usually want to keep an eye out for alternative win conditions. This can be something like Tinker + Blightsteel Colossus, Sheoldred, planeswalkers, a small reanimation package, or Flash + Worldspine Wurm, or even something like a Grave Titan if you are really desperate.

It is really hard to go off with Tendrils in this cube, and experienced cube drafters will sideboard an Eldrazi against your Brain Freeze deck, which will cause them to shuffle their graveyard back into their library over and over to effectively counter your Brain Freeze, so you really have your work cut out for you.

Notably, this cube features Jace, Wielder of Mysteries, so you can mill yourself and win with Jace’s static ability, so this is a good anti-Eldrazi option and a secondary win-condition. There is no Doomsday or Thassa’s Oracle, though. Lion’s Eye Diamond + Echo of Eons is another nice combo you can look for. Tinker for Bolas’s Citadel is something you can include as well.

Milling yourself with Brain Freeze is also a good option if you have Underworld Breach with Black Lotus or Lion’s Eye Diamond. You can build up a big storm count this way very early on, enabling some turn 2 or turn 3 kills.

Let’s say it is turn 2 and you just played your land for the turn, so you have two in play. Cast Black Lotus, something cheap like a Duress, and one free spell like Manamorphose or Gitaxian Probe. Afterward, you play Underworld Breach and for the remaining two mana you cast Brain Freeze, targeting yourself to mill 15 cards. Then, you simply need to recast Black Lotus from the graveyard using Breach’s ability, and then you point the Brain Freeze at them. Easy turn 2 kill!

Displacer Kitten is another easy way to build up a big storm count or go “infinite”. A zero mana artifact like any of the Moxen + Teferi, Time Raveler, with Displacer Kitten in play means you can draw your entire deck while floating a bunch of mana and building a huge storm count.

Have Displacer Kitten on board, play Teferi, bounce something to draw a card. Next, play the Mox, flicker the Teferi, return it to play with full loyalty, and use it to bounce the Mox back to your hand after floating a mana with it. Rinse and Repeat. Use Brain Freeze or Tendrils of Agony for the win.

These are the types of combos you should be looking for. My personal favorite card for the storm decks is Fastbond, which enables some of the most busted draws and works particularly well with the draw-7s. Just look at this beautiful screenshot from my Vintage Cube game on Magic Online last week. 

Good luck beating that without a Force of Will. 
 

Blue Decks

“Blue decks” is a very broad category because you can go in so many different directions, or you don’t really need to have a specific one at all. Blue is the best color in Magic featuring some of the most powerful cards ever printed, so sometimes you just keep taking the good and see where the draft takes you.

I like taking mana fixing very highly in Vintage Cube in general, especially the fetchlands, because thanks to all the dual lands and Triomes, it is very easy to find lands that produce multiple colors of the mana your deck needs. Shuffling your deck is also valuable with cards like Brainstorm and Courser or Kruphix, and getting a land in the graveyard turns the mana-producing ability on Deathrite Shaman.

Similarly, I also like the mana-producing artifacts that let me play the broken cards ahead of the curve, so I take cards like Grim Monolith and even the Talismans fairly highly.

The more fixing you have, the easier it is to fit the busted multicolor cards like Leovold, Oko, or Teferi, so you are basically keeping all your options open and see what you get passed.

There is a lot of countermagic in this cube (Mana Drain, Miscalculation, Memory Lapse, Remand, Daze, Counterspell, Three Steps Ahead, Spell Pierce, Mana Leak, Force of Negation, Force of Will, Cryptic Command, Tishana's Tidebinder, Force of Will, Subtlety, Mystic Confluence, No More Lies), so if you are a control player at heart, you can end up playing Blue/White with counters, sweepers, card selection and finishers like Teferi, Hero of Dominaria or Fractured Identity.

Blue/Black-based decks are also good with cards like Psychic Frog, Tishana’s Tidebinder, or Sheoldred, and I often find myself running some tempo-ish Esper variants with creatures. One card that has been overperforming for me in these decks has been Fallen Shinobi, which you can even use for more value in combination with cards like Baleful Strix.

Thanks to all the card selection in blue, it is super easy to include the two card combos like Narset/Hullbreacher + any of the “wheel” effects like Timetwister or Wheel of Fortune, Dark Depths + Thespian’s Stage, or go for a small reanimator or Tinker package. One of my personal favorites that is relatively easy to come by is Dress Down + Phlage or Uro. If you time things correctly and play Dress Down at the end of your opponent’s turn, it stays on the battlefield until the end of your turn, so you can sneak Phlage or Uro into play on turn 3 without having to sacrifice it.

Don’t worry about finishers, all you need is a planeswalker, Hullbreacher, Sheoldred, or even a Snapcaster Mage or Faerie Mastermind. A lot of the decks in this format are centered around trying to do something powerful or pulling off a multiple-card combo, and if you manage to stop them from executing it, it doesn’t really matter how you win the game afterwards as they won’t usually have anything going.

Worth noting is that this cube has a lot of great Tinker targets, so that can be a very simple win condition for pretty much any deck and should be an extremely high pick. Besides the obvious Blightsteel Colossus, which is probably the best one, there is also Portal to Phyrexia, Triplicate Titan, Sundering Titan, Myr Battlesphere, The Endstone, Coveted Jewel, or even Bolas’ Citadel if you have a lot of cheap cards. 

Artifacts

One of the archetypes in this cube is centered around artifacts with cards like Mishra’s Workshop, Tolarian Academy, Urza’s Saga, Mox Opal, Kappa Cannoneer, Urza Lord Artificer, The Mightstone and Weakstone, Galvanic Blast, Third Path Iconoclast, Nettlecyst, and Pinnacle Emissary.

I haven't had a chance to try it yet, but at first glance, it does not seem supported enough or strong enough for me to be particularly interested in it. The Affinity angle seems like one of the weaker strategies to me because most players will be taking the cheap mana-producing artifacts from you, whether it's the powerful Moxen, cards like Mana Crypt, Mox Diamond, Chrome Mox, Mana Vault, Grim Monolith, or even the Talismans.  

This deck doesn’t necessarily have to be blue/red to utilize Pinnacle Emissary, Legion Extruder, or Third Path Iconoclast, sometimes, Monastery Mentor can be the card you are looking for if you have enough cheap artifacts. Similarly, Balance can be absolutely brutal in these decks. Tolarian Academy with Upheaval is also another nice combination.

The upside of this archetype is that if you are playing Bo1, you will dodge some of the artifact removal that players usually have in their sideboards, but I am missing some of the key cards for this archetype, like The One Ring, Lodestone Golem, Metalworker, or Walking Ballista. 

Power Tiers

My pick order is roughly like this

- Broken cards (Power 9, Sol Ring, Mana Crypt, Mana Vault)
- Individually powerful cards, cards that can easily win the game by themselves or create a ton of value (Tamiyo Inquisitive Student, Psychic Frog, Force of Will, Urza’s Saga, Oko, Solitude, Jace TMS, Balance, Library of Alexandria)
- Tutors and simple combo pieces or enablers (Demonic Tutor, Vampiric Tutor, Tinker, Reanimate, Flash, Channel)
- Mana fixing and fast mana (fetchlands, fetchable dual lands, Triomes, Grim Monolith, Mox Diamond, Chrome Mox) 
- Cards that help me stop my opponent from pulling off their shenanigans (Hullbreacher, Leovold, Narset Parter of Veils)
- Best cheap removal (Swords to Plowshares, Dismember, Lightning Bolt, Oust)
- Countermagic, card selection, and discard (Mystic Confluence, Expressive Iteration, Thoughtseize)

In a nutshell, I want to do the most powerful and unfair things, and I try everything in my power to put myself in a position to be able to do them. I like to speculate on the reanimation cards and two-card combo pieces because there are so many in the cube. There is nothing wrong with drafting an aggro deck, but make sure that you have at least some interaction and ways to slow the opponent down (Strip Mine, Thalia) or that your deck can do something more powerful than just cast 2-power creatures (Stoneforge + Batterskull, Phlage, planeswalker). The upside of aggro decks is that they are very often underdrafted because everyone is trying to do the most powerful things, and these cards often get overlooked.

If you aren’t sure what to take or if you are looking at a weak pack, taking mana fixing is always a safe bet.

One new card that has been greatly overperforming for me in the aggressive decks is Makdee and Itla, Skysnarers. What an absolute nightmare for the opponent if you cast it on turn 2. As far as underperformers go, I have been very unexcited by the Goyf creatures, the niche cards like Goblin Bombardment or Candelabra of Thawnos, and lately, I found the Strip Mine combo to be too slow as well.

In the future, I’d perhaps like to see more untapped duals. With Triomes, Surveil lands, and the creature duals from Wilds of Eldraine and Caverns of Ixalan, it feels like there are one too many enter-the-battlefield tapped cycles, especially considering that white, green, and red have so many one-drops in this cube that they really want to be casting on turn 1. Most decks just want to curve out. It is fine to have a tapped land or two, but you can’t run too many. 

Differences from other Vintage Cubes

There are some cards that are notably missing from this cube compared to most Vintage Cube variants we have played in the past.

Most notably, the Splinter Twin combo is not included. This means no Pestermite, Deceiver Exarch, Splinter Twin, and Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker.

Some individually very powerful cards, like The One Ring, Orcish Bowmasters, Bribery, Forth Eorlingas, or the Initiative cards, are not in the cube either. There is also no Kinnan to combo with Basalt Monolith, no basic-land-cyclers like Troll of Khazad-Dum or Lorien Revealed to fix your mana with, or give you an easy target for Reanimate.

If any of the designers are reading this, please add some nice basics to the deck-building editor. They really make the experience so much better than when you have to pair the old-bordered Power 9 cards with land station basic lands.

In general, I believe the Arena team is potentially leaving a lot of money on the table when it comes to old borders and original versions of cards, especially the most iconic ones. I know I’m not the only person who would love access to more old versions of the cards like Swords to Plowshares, Counterspell, Dark Ritual, Brainstorm, or Lightning Bolt. If it is an art ownership or licensing issue, then the retro style borders on whatever version would suffice. I’d be more than happy to splurge a little on these styles and upgrade my Timeless, Brawl, and Historic decks. It would also make the Powered Cube experience truly feel a bit more “Vintage”.

Conclusion

I love that the Powered Cube is coming to MTG Arena. Vintage Cube is one of the most fun ways to play Magic and with the convenience of playing from your own home, this is a great combination.

This version of the cube feels a bit more creature-centric and I love that there are so many small combos and simple two or three-card interactions to build around.

I am also a huge fan of some goofy card inclusions, which in this case is a Booster Tutor. Of course when I got paired against LSV in one of our drafts, he used it on turn 1 to pull a Black Lotus…

That’s it from me today, have fun drafting!