Arena Powered Cube Draft, October 20–November 10

If you're already well-acquainted with Arena Powered Cube, you can skip ahead to our philosophy and what's new in the October 2026 version of the cube, the changelog, or you can head straight to the card list.

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Slow Down! What's Arena Powered Cube?

Oracle of the Alpha Time Walk Black Lotus Booster Tutor Sol Ring Library of Alexandria

Cube is like Booster Draft but pulls cards from across Magic's history. There are all sorts of permutations of cubes, from high-powered to rarity-restricted, special rules to color-restricted, and many, many more flavors. Arena Powered Cube is:

1. Powerful (and power-full): Arena Powered Cube showcases many of the strongest cards available on MTG Arena, including uncollectible cards like the Power Nine. You won't find a Limited format more chock-full of the biggest power-level outliers on MTG Arena.
2. Fast: Between the best mana acceleration, the strongest threats, and the most potent combos, this cube requires you to have a plan or be proactive. Arena Powered Cube rewards you the most for doing your homework and having a plan.
3. Singleton: Arena Powered 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. Cards drafted are not added to a player's collection.

Flash Hullbreacher Animate Dead Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer Natural Order Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary Tolarian Academy

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How to Draft Arena Powered Cube

While some people have been drafting powered cubes for decades, for others, Arena Powered Cube will be their first foray. We want to give you a brief guide before you jump into the deep end.

In general, you should take intrinsically powerful cards like Sol Ring; Minsc & Boo, Timeless Heroes; and Strip Mine that can enable wins all by themselves. However, it's ideal to draft around them to improve their potency. Sol Ring is absolutely busted, but you can find it twice as frequently with Urza's Saga. Minsc & Boo, Timeless Heroes rewards you for having Ancient Tomb (or Mana Crypt) to accelerate them out a turn or two early. Strip Mine becomes even more misery-inducing fun potent when combined with Icetill Explorer. This heuristic is true for the majority of cards in the cube—Underworld Breach isn't the most straightforward to use, but combine it with Brain Freeze and Lion's Eye Diamond, and you'll almost certainly be able to win the game on the spot (mill yourself to fuel escape, then mill your opponent for their entire library). We won't get bogged down detailing every card and card interaction in the cube, but we want to give you a taste of all that you can discover in Arena Powered Cube. Instead, let's focus on some broad archetypes you can use as a guide.

1. Aggro: Pick a base color—usually red or white—and draft lots of cheap creatures and removal. You can load up on fixing and play multicolor aggro, you can find aggressive lanes in black or green, and you can even play a full Five-Color Domain Aggro deck.
2. Ramp: This is primarily found in green and artifacts. Generate extra mana in the first turns of the game, then deploy a devastating finisher. This could be an early Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger off a Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary or Channel; a Comet, Stellar Pup on turn two or three; or a massive Upheaval that leaves you ahead and your opponent discarding eight cards.
3. Cheaty: Many decks try to "cheat" a powerful card into play, putting an Emrakul, the Aeons Torn or an Atraxa, Grand Unifier onto the battlefield without paying its mana cost, for example. There are many flavors of this, but the most common is Reanimator, a black-centric deck (often paired with red or blue) that seeks to put a giant threat like Archon of Cruelty into its graveyard and then cast Reanimate or Animate Dead to bring it into play. There are also Sneak decks which avoid the graveyard by using Flash, Sneak Attack, Show and Tell, or Natural Order to put these cards into play from your hand instead.
4. Artifacts: Most commonly found in blue and red, these decks take advantage of the cube having a lot of artifacts. Generate a ludicrous amount of mana with Urza, Lord High Artificer or Tolarian Academy; be aggressive with a giant Kappa Cannoneer or Nettlecyst; or Tinker out a Bolas's Citadel.
5. Control: Remove all your opponents' threats and win the long game, or keep your opponent off balance long enough and win as a Combo Control deck, such as using Hullbreacher or Sheoldred, the Apocalypse alongside Wheel of Fortune to instantly upend the game.
6. Mix and match: Hybridize archetypes, such as a Combo Cheat deck or an Artifact Aggro deck. Make no firm commitments to any one archetype, take lands to keep yourself open, and combine multiple strategies to win.

These are the broadest archetypes, but there are plenty of other directions to go toward and card synergies to discover.

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What's New in October 2026's Arena Powered Cube?

Arena Powered Cube's First Anniversary

Just over a year ago, we launched Arena Powered Cube. The response was immediate, clear, and overwhelmingly positive: a lot of you love Arena Powered Cube. Now, we expected people to really like it based on how beloved the Magic Online Vintage Cube is, but our expectation was that Arena Powered Cube would be a sometimes food; one of several cubes we'd rotate though annually. Instead, not only has it become MTG Arena's default cube experience, but its enduring popularity has led us to increase the total amount of cubes we run annually.

We've set out to learn from every iteration. From the beginning, we needed to know whether the experience would feel authentic despite pulling from a very different card pool than Magic Online's, while at the same time, it also needed to feel distinct from that experience. After the first iteration where Boros aggro proved too potent, we had to test whether the experience would still feel authentic and fun if we intentionally held back, leaving some cards on the bench to improve the overall experience. We've tested packages of cards for different archetypes, like Landfall, Black Midrange, Artifact Aggro, and Storm, both to see what can compete and to give each version a unique texture. Beyond what cards go into each cube, we've experimented with booster design (like whether you can open multiple pieces of power in a pack), timers (you start with a timeout to compensate for how impactful and complex the first turns of Arena Powered Cube often are), and several backend improvements you don't see directly but benefit from (more on those later).

One year in, we've learned so much. We're quite happy with Arena Powered Cube, we're hungry to learn more, and we aren't resting on our laurels.

Reality Fracture Is Here!

Magic's newest set looks awesome for Cube. Stingcaster Mage, Seasoned Cryomancer, and Simulacrum Shaper are twists on proven Arena Powered Cube cards, adding redundancy and novelty to beloved play patterns. Prophesied End; Theorist's Proxy; and Garruk, Curse Breaker are novel takes on staple effects. Flickering Hound, Dark Matter Manipulator, and Roiling Canopy (with Yavimaya, Cradle of Growth) are open-ended tools that might establish a foothold of something new. Ginger, Queen of Sweets and Memnarch, the Warden provide new top ends for artifact, ramp, and cheaty decks. Avacyn, Angel of Horror brings a new class of threat to flash onto the battlefield. Carnivorous Cultivator adds another way for lands decks to find and replay Strip Mine, Wasteland, and fetch lands. As always, we're bringing backlist cards off the bench, like Sanguine Evangelist, Restoration Angel, Flow State, Zealous Conscripts, Bejeweled Warg, and Augur of Autumn. Some of these cards can definitely still compete in Arena Powered Cube, while others might look a little out of place, especially since some of the cards they work best with aren't on MTG Arena … or weren't, until now.

New-to-MTG Arena Cards Have Arrived!

Back in Magic: The Gathering® | The Hobbit™, we added a package of seven cards with the Monarch. That was the first time we added cards to MTG Arena for Arena Powered Cube since its release, but it was just the tip of the iceberg. Now, we're releasing 22* new-to-MTG Arena cards and another 16* pieces of new-to-MTG Arena artwork.

We've finally got Through the Breach! It's an integral piece of cheaty decks and the best redundant part for Sneak Attack. It was the number-one card we wanted to add to MTG Arena for Arena Powered Cube at the beginning, but we couldn't due to the immense technical challenges of splice onto Arcane, an ability that almost never comes up—but might—because you can Booster Tutor for a second Through the Breach.

Baloth Prime is another card we've been wanting for a while, but it wasn't on our radar when we locked the initial Arena Powered Cube card request list in November 2024. Along with Titania, Protector of Argoth, it provides a major power boost to green, one of the two colors most in need of one (a little more on that later; we're spinning several plates already). As for why it didn't make our initial card request list: When we made that list in late 2024, we were so focused on being authentic to what high-powered cubes already were that we were exclusively looking backward for card inclusions. Now that Arena Powered Cube is here, we're increasingly looking forward and trying to get cards onto the client like Archnemesis and Avacyn, Angel of Horror that might prove themselves fixtures of the cube.

We've got Hexdrinker thanks in no small part to how much work Spacecraft and station did to make level up easier for our RULE team to implement. It joins a host of other cards that didn't make it into our initial card list for a variety of reasons, like Walking Ballista, Jacked Rabbit, Oath of Druids, Blightsteel Colossus, and Exhume.

We're also doing a bit of a visual overhaul to some cards in the cube in the form of using some older art and card frames. Jace, the Mind Sculptor returns with his original Jason Chan art and Worldwake card frame. Tolarian Academy, Upheaval, and Vindicate return in their old, bordered glory. Persist, Lion's Eye Diamond, and Pest Infestation use their original artwork. If you own some of these cards already, these alternate versions will all be collectible. And as the pièce de résistance, Ancestral Recall and Black Lotus get their original Mark Poole and Christopher Rush artwork from Limited Edition (Alpha).

*Some of you are still thinking about those asterisks from the beginning of this section. Why 22 new-to-MTG Arena cards and 16 new pieces of artwork? Well, the truth is, we've added slightly more than that, but you won't see those cards in this version of Arena Powered Cube. The process of adding cards to MTG Arena for Arena Powered Cube can be slow and uncertain. And this time, we happened to request a few cards we ended up not using in the final list—Deceiver Exarch, Gravecrawler, and the original artwork for Phantasmal Image. Fortunately, we've been working on backend improvements, so if this is an area that excites you, we're happy to hear about what you might like to see in 2027.

Jet Collector

Arena Powered Cube contains two cards you won't find in most other digital cubes but can enjoy in tabletop powered cubes: Booster Tutor and Oracle of the Alpha. After a year with only these two, we're dipping our toe back into the water and adding one more such card: Jet Collector. It adds both power and novel gameplay to green, which is always in search of both. With it becoming available in tabletop Magic thanks to Mystery Booster Commander Edition, it felt like the right time to test it out. We'll be reading and listening to your feedback and watching performance data to see how it lands.

Splinter Twin and Click-Intensive Combos

From the beginning, Arena Powered Cube has showcased powerful, decisive combos. Flash into Worldspine Wurm for three 5/5 tramples on turn two (or earlier with any mana acceleration). Entomb an Archon of Cruelty or Atraxa, Grand Unifier then Reanimate it? You're probably winning that game. Channel can be inconsistent, but Emrakul, the Aeons Torn will turn around almost any game. Painter's Servant and Grindstone do little on their own but instantly win the game when combined. What do these combos all have in common? Very few clicks.

Sure, Arena Powered Cube has a few combos that involve more putting cards into play and activating them. Underworld Breach, Brain Freeze, and Lion's Eye Diamond requires three cards and a few loops, but not that many before the game ends (or your opponent's Emrakul, the Aeons Torn reshuffles their library and you need to find a Plan B). Probably the biggest click-intensive combo involves Fastbond, Zuran Orb, and Crucible of Worlds—this combo is inconsistent as it requires three pieces, two of which are completely irreplaceable. MTG Arena was designed to be fast, fun Magic for everyone, anywhere; and while combos have a place there, click-intensive combos have a harder time fitting into that experience. But they do have a home in Arena Powered Cube, and Reality Fracture gave us the perfect opportunity to test the boundaries a little.

Splinter Twin is now on MTG Arena. It's an iconic combo card from both 2011 Standard and early Modern which generates infinite hasty tokens when combined with a creature that untaps upon entering. It notably has a replacement component in Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker, which we've added to MTG Arena to double your chances at building your combo. With Divining Duelist, Glamermite, Pestermite, Restoration Angel, and Zealous Conscripts, there are enough creatures that combo with it while also having applications elsewhere. While we've added Deceiver Exarch to MTG Arena, we've decided not to include it in the cube list as it only works as a combo piece (Pestermite is mostly a combo piece but can be used in a tempo and/or ninjutsu shell in a pinch) and requires two to three times as many loops as the other creatures do in order to create a lethal number of tokens. Which brings us back to the crux of this section: the click-intensiveness of Splinter Twin combo.

We're going to watch and see how players react to Splinter Twin combo. We know it's not one of the strongest two-card combos out there—we expect it will be weaker in 2026 Arena Powered Cube than it was in 2016 high-powered cubes because most decks nowadays run creature disruption and apply pressure early. However, it will not only help us gauge MTG Arena players' appetites for getting to combo off with dozens of clicks but, more importantly, see what happens when they're on the receiving end. How many players concede to a deterministic combo (which this time around doesn't have to fear Settle the Wreckage)? How many players play it out? Is this an experience players want to see more of? A sometimes food? Or something people are happy not seeing, by and large (as has been the case the past year)?

Prize Pack Changes

With the addition of new cards to the client, we're also making more changes to Cube Prize Packs:

Hero of Bladehold replaces Leovold, Emissary of Trest

IN	OUT
Deceiver Exarch Flametongue Kavu Gravecrawler Guardian Scalelord Hero of Bladehold Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker Lose Focus Nature's Lore Qasali Pridemage Through the Breach	Death-Greeter's Champion Dress Down Leovold, Emissary of Trest Mine Collapse Preordain Seething Song Snuff Out Unmarked Grave Winds of Abandon

As mentioned above, Gravecrawler and Deceiver Exarch were added to MTG Arena to be used in Arena Powered Cube. We ended up not including them but decided to make them collectible.

There are no pre-bans for any of these cards. All of them will be playable in Historic, Timeless, Brawl, and Competitive Brawl.

Finally, we did not cut anything for Deceiver Exarch. There simply is one extra card available in Cube Prize Packs.

End step

As ever, we're excited to present another iteration of Arena Powered Cube. We hope it lands close to the razor's edge of feeling familiar and nostalgic while also feeling distinct from prior versions, that its archetypes are in close enough dialogue with each other that everything feels possible (even if Ad Nauseam will likely be very hard to make work), and that there's something for a variety of audiences and playstyles. We hope you have an absolute blast with it. And as always, I look forward to seeing you in the queues.

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Changelog

IN

OUT

Ad Nauseam Applied Geometry Augur of Autumn Avacyn, Angel of Horror Baloth Prime Bejeweled Warg Blightsteel Colossus Bloodbraid Challenger Bountiful Landscape Carnivorous Cultivator Chainsaw Chandra, Chill of Compliance City of Traitors Crucible of Worlds Dark Matter Manipulator Divining Duelist Eiganjo, Seat of the Empire Exhume Flametongue Kavu Flash Thompson, Spider-Fan Flickering Hound Flow State Garruk, Curse Breaker Gideon the Oathless Ginger, Queen of Sweets Glamermite Goblin Rabblemaster Guardian Scalelord Hero of Bladehold Hexdrinker Hungering Puppetbeast Jacked Rabbit Jet Collector Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker Lich's Relic Liliana the Faultless Lose Focus Memnarch, the Warden Mightform Harmonizer Multiversal Passage Nature's Lore Oath of Druids Occult Epiphany Omnath, Locus of Creation Orcish Lumberjack Otawara, Soaring City Pestermite Pompous Battlemage Prophesied End Qasali Pridemage Repurposed Enforcer Restoration Angel Roiling Canopy Samut, Hazoret's Champion Sanguine Evangelist Scion of Draco Seasoned Cryomancer Sheltering Landscape Showdown of the Skalds Simulacrum Shaper Sokenzan, Crucible of Defiance Solarium Sentry Solitary Cell Spider-Woman, Stunning Savior Splinter Twin Stingcaster Mage Stitcher's Supplier Takenuma, Abandoned Mire The Theorist, Jace Beleren Theorist's Proxy Through the Breach Tidehollow Sculler True-Name Nemesis Twisted Landscape Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth Ursine Monstrosity Walking Ballista Yavimaya, Cradle of Growth Yawgmoth, Thran Physician Zealous Conscripts

Abandoned Air Temple Arcbound Ravager Astrologian's Planisphere Baleful Mastery Blooming Marsh Botanical Sanctum Brightclimb Pathway Captain Marvel, Earth's Protector Court of Bounty Court of Garenbrig Craterhoof Behemoth Dark Fortress Dark Petition Dig Through Time Displacer Kitten Doctor Doom, Unrivaled Elite Interceptor Empty the Warrens Emrakul, the Promised End Ephemerate Eternal Witness Fall from Favor Fanatic of Rhonas Forth Eorlingas! Gandalf, Goblins' Bane Gathering Place Gleaming Bastion Glen Elendra Guardian Graveyard Trespasser Hellrider Hidden Lair Inspiring Vantage Intrepid Adversary Kappa Cannoneer Karn, Scion of Urza Keen-Eyed Curator Kytheon, Hero of Akros Liliana of the Veil Loki, God of Mischief Lotus Cobra Magmatic Hellkite Miscalculation Molten-Core Maestro Monastery Mentor Mutagen Man, Living Ooze Myr Battlesphere Night Nurse, Healer of Heroes Nissa, Resurgent Animist Ob Nixilis, the Adversary Palantír of Orthanc Primeval Titan Pyretic Ritual Riddles in the Dark Riverglide Pathway Sauron, Dino Devotee Scrapshooter Scrapwork Mutt Seething Song Settle the Wreckage Shadowspear Shifting Woodland Skyclave Apparition Sword of Fire and Ice Tendrils of Agony The Queen of Dale Thor, God of Thunder Three Steps Ahead Training Compound Trumpeting Carnosaur Usher of the Fallen Vastlands Scavenger Verdurous Gearhulk Vibrance Virtue of Persistence Wishclaw Talisman Wistfulness Wolverine, Fierce Fighter World War Hulk Yawgmoth's Will Young Pyromancer

Select a symbol to see card lists.