My Vintage Cube is 540 cards and fully powered. If you’ve ever played the holiday Cube on MTGO, it’s similar to that one. Luis and I were lucky to have our Cube featured once on MTGO - you can see that list here.
For this virtual tour, I went through the Cube and picked out the cards that were most notable, fun to play with, or had sentimental value. Let’s dive in!
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My Cube is fully decked out in Ultimate Guard gear (thank you UG!). This deck box is the Omnihive 1000+ Xenoskin, and it fits the whole 540 Cube on the bottom row. On the top row, I have all the lands, plus two deck boxes that fit tokens, sleeves, dice, etc.
Let’s start with the lands! I absolutely love the Mirage lands for Cube. The Swamp, Island and Mountain are some of my favorite basics in all of Magic. Fun fact about my Cube: we have so many players who love blue in my playgroup, that I have an extra 10 Islands to make sure everyone can get the basics they want.
Next up are my Grand Prix promos. These are just some promos I’ve collected from attending Grand Prixes over the years. I especially love the Lightning Bolt and Path to Exile. I generally like having cards that have text and are accessible, but I feel like the cards are so iconic that it’s not really a big deal.
Next up are the Signets! I’ve tried two variants of this Cube, one with the cycle of signets, and one with the cycle of Talismans. Personally, I’m a huge fan of drafting five-color Cube decks, and in that archetype you’d rather have signets than talismans. These signets are Secret Lair ones, illustrated by Dan Frazier!
Next up are judge promos. I’ve collected these through the years, some were gifts, some I bought, some I won!
Here we have a few cards that are (relatively) new to my Cube, and they’ve been playing out really well, so I wanted to give them a shoutout. Urza’s Saga has a lot of good interactions with different artifacts in the Cube. Echo of Eons has been powerful in a few archetypes, and Reanimator got a lot of juice with Archon of Cruelty, Persist and Unmarked Grave. If you have a Cube and you haven’t tried some of these cards yet, I’d definitely recommend them to you!
My duals! The key to any five color deck with bad mana. These duals are Collector’s Edition - Vintage Cubes are expensive and I’m not made of money, lol. I think they look wonderful and they make my decks come together.
Speaking of Collector’s Edition, this is my favorite card in the whole Cube. Luis gave this to me as a gift a few years back. It’s a Collector’s Edition Black Lotus, and the only Lotus I own. It gets a lot of play in our friend group.
Next up are my Silver Bordered cards. I generally prefer to have tournament legal cards in the Cube, but these five have been featured in the Cube for years. The Cogwork Librarian makes some drafts really exciting, and the Booster Tutor is a crowd favorite as well. The Chaos Orb uses Old School Magic rules, so you have to target the permanent you want to destroy, and then it also has to do a full rotation when you toss it. I’m quite bad at Chaos Orbing, but I still take it every time because flipping it is very exciting.
These are some of my favorite alt art / full art cards in the Cube. I’ve loved the trend in recent years to extend the border on premium cards. I think they look very classy. Also, check out the art on that Lotus Cobra on the bottom right. It looks sick.
These are the alters currently in my Cube. I altered the Thundermaw Hellkite myself, but all the other ones were gifts for the Cube. My favorite is the Ancient Tomb, but the runner up Necromancy for its spookiness level.
Iconic Art
No list would be complete without iconic art. As much as I like some of the new art styles being featured on cards, these are some of my favorite old school versions of cards. My favorites are probably Disenchant, Hymn to Tourach, and Swords to Plowshares.
There’s three cards in the Cube that are foreign, and funnily enough, they all have a lot of text. I hope you remember what these do during the draft!
Last but not least, these are my favorite tokens for the Cube. My favorite is the Oko Elk token that my friend Carolyn made for her fiance’s testing team. It’s transparent, so you can put it over any card to display that it’s now a green 3/3 Elk. Runner up is the LSV insect token, because of how ridiculous it is.
There you have it, a complete tour of my Cube! If you’ve ever thought about curating a Cube, let this be your sign to dive into it. Maintaining a Cube does require a lot of love and work, but it’s well worth it for you to be able to draft with your friends!
Magic: The Gathering, Member of Team CFBUltimateGuard
Gaby’s passion for Magic began in 2011, with her best friend giving her a deckbuilder’s toolkit. Little did she know that this was a trap… she’s been hooked ever since! Gaby is an avid streamer, playing various formats on her stream. Counting as a Limited fanatic, she will play anything Draft but also has a fondness for Cube. Learn more about Gaby!
