The Magic Online Vintage Cube Live Powered By Ultimate Guard event is officially in the books!

In case you missed the Finals event at Magic Con Las Vegas this past weekend, here is a quick summary. You can also check out the draft VOD here and the gameplay here.

For reference, here are the 8 players that made it through the series of MTGO qualifiers all the way to Vegas.

The format of the Finals event was a 540-card Vintage Cube Rochester Draft. You can check out the full Cube list here and the details of the Finals here. 

Each pack was seeded with one of the 24 special cards that was signed by and from the personal collection of some of the best and most iconic players of all time, Wotc designers and content creators.

You can read all about the cards here and here.

Once we sleeved all the cards, randomized and prepared the packs, it was time for business.

Seat 1: Jesse Hampton

Seat 2: Oscar Christensen

Seat 3: Rex Jakobovits

Seat 4: Luca Jakobovits

Seat 5: Fernando Palmero Garcia

Seat 6: Chris Bruner

Seat 7: Matt Abrams

Seat 8: Daniel Prosek

Unlike a regular Vintage Cube draft with your friends or on MTGO, the players were actually keeping the cards they drafted and played for the rest of the Cube! 

And boy did they open some nice ones.

About halfway through the draft, Rex Jakobovits managed to open the iconic Black Lotus. $12,000 secured.

Rex’s heart rate actually went so high when he opened the Black Lotus that his smartwatch started going off, saying “fall detected, call 911” because it suspected an injury.

Oscar Christensen pulled a Timetwister, which was the second most expensive card in the Vegas Cube.

Fernando Palmero Garcia got himself a Mox Emerald.

And then there was Luca Jakobovits who truly had a draft of a lifetime. The first pack he cracked had a Time Walk, arguably the best card in the Cube. He found a Mox Jet waiting for him in his second pack.

And that still wasn’t everything. 

There was also an Ancestral Recall waiting for him in his final pack, the perfect card for his deck with Spellseeker and Snapcaster Mage. 

Three packs, three pieces of Power 9. Incredible. 

Worth noting is that it really could have been anyone, as the players decided their fate themselves, drawing their seats randomly when they arrived with the packs already waiting on the table. 

Let’s take a look at everyone’s pool and the deck they submitted. 

Seat 1: Jesse Hampton

Jesse’s Pool:

Jesse’s Final Deck:

Seat 2 - Oscar Christensen

Seat 3 - Rex Jakobovits

Seat 4 - Luca Jakobovits

Seat 5 - Fernando Palmero Garcia

Seat 6 - Chris Bruner

Seat 7 - Matt Abrams

Seat 8 - Daniel Prosek

Looking at the final lists, you could say that Luca showed up to play Vintage while the rest of the players played Cube... Chris’s deck with Channel, Show and Tell, Eureka and 3 Eldrazi Monsters + Portal to Phyrexia also looked pretty good. 

For those keeping track, 6 pieces of Power 9 were opened during the draft, which means 3 went undrafted and there were a bunch of other expensive cards to play for.

This basically guaranteed everyone with a positive record another piece of cardboard worth $2,000 or more. 

So how did it all play out? 

If you want to rewatch the whole show, you can find the Friday draft portion here and the Saturday game play here. 

Round 1 results:

Fernando > Jesse 2:1

Chris > Oscar 

Rex > Matt 

Luca > Daniel 2:0

Round 2 results: 

Fernando > Rex 2:1

Luca > Chris 2:1

Matt > Jesse

Oscar > Daniel

Round 3 results: 

Luca > Fernando 2:1

Rex > Chris

Matt > Oscar

Jesse > Daniel

In the end, despite some of the games being quite close, it was Luca Jakobovits who took it all down. His deck was simply on another level.

The Jacobovits really managed to clean up the event, with Rex going 2-1 and coming in 3rd. 

This is how the “prizes draft” went down. 

1st - Luca Jakobovits - Mox Sapphire

2nd - Fernando Palmero Garcia - Mox Ruby

3rd - Rex Jakobovits - Mishra’s Workshop

4th - Matt Abrams - Mox Pearl

5th - Chris Bruner - Bazaar of Baghdad

6th - Oscar Christensen - Sol Ring (Beta)

7th - Jesse Hampton - Underground Sea

8th - Daniel Prosek - Volcanic Island

Afterwards the last 172 underdrafted cards went to Luca as the winner of the draft. 

And that’s all folks! For this season of the Vintage Cube Live anyway...

We would like to extend our deepest gratitude to our partner in this project, Daybreak Games and Magic Online. This project would never be possible without the Magic Online infrastructure, which allowed us to offer the chance to play to everyone around the world for just $6 without the need to travel anywhere. 

Special shout out to Ryan Spain, the Creative Director of MTGO, who put in a ton of overtime hours and if it wasn’t for his passion for Magic and it’s history, the final product would never be the same. 

We would also like to give a huge shout out to the folks from Nerd Rage Gaming who did all the production work behind the scenes and put on an incredible broadcast. 

Likewise, Marshall Sutcliffe and Reid Duke absolutely crushed it in the booth despite having very little time to adjust after commentating and playing Worlds the entire day before we started.

Huge shout out to all the players, Wizards of the Coast employees and content creators who signed and donated one of the 24 cards. Special thanks to Shuhei who was able to get the signed cards from some of the Japanese players who don’t play competitively anymore and everyone else who went out of their way to help us make the project happen.

And last, but certainly not least, thanks to everyone who participated! Our goal was to create an awesome and unique event for the community. Judging by the demand and the feedback we’ve got, it looks like we were successful!

Congratulations again to Luca Jakobovits, the Vintage Cube Live 2024 Champion!