2024 Standard Rotation Cube Retrospective

The 2024 Standard rotation affects every Standard-legal set from Innistrad: Midnight Hunt to Streets of New Capenna — over 1,500 cards if you include Commander products. Our prerelease surveys tracked which of these cards were most popular, hot off the press, among Cube designers. Even though Cube is rotation-proof, now’s the perfect occasion to tie off our loose ends. How accurate were the Cube community’s spoiler-season predictions about which cards would make an impact in our cubes?

If we were a sane Magic website, here’s where I’d go buck wild with my “top X cube cards from MID” opinions and you’d drown in my hindsight bias. Lucky for you, my sanity has never been more questionable, so instead I used hard data and spent 15 hours wrestling a Python in the name of journalistic integrity.

The set prospective surveys we publish usually get responses from 100 Cube owners or more. It’s a decent slice of the Cube world, far better than Just One Guy’s opinion even if it barely scratches the surface of the 90,000 cubes currently on Cube Cobra. I use our survey data, including the history of our respondents’ cubes, to look back on every just-rotated card, computing its success in Cube as PresentCubes - PastCubes. A positive result means that the card is seeing more play now than it was before, and vice versa.¹

Just for completeness’ sake, we also look at how well our survey respondents represent the rest of Cube Cobra. Here, we calculate %LuckyPaper - %CubeCobra for every card, and a positive result means that our respondents were higher on the card at release than the average CubeCobra user is now.²

You can follow along using your own survey results with our handy tool.

You may have noticed that most ex-Standard cards are now seeing less play than they were at their release. Why all the attrition? As a case study, here’s the current status of my 2022 survey response for NEO:

Of the 23 cards I rated initially, only nine remain in my cube, but it’s not like the unlucky 14 were cut for being “underpowered” — far from it! I never picked up an Otawara, Soaring City because its Modern play made it too pricey. I cut Twinshot Sniper and Tameshi, Reality Architect because I got bored of the artifacts-matter archetype they were meant to support. I cut Tamiyo, Compleated Sage because I was trimming complexity, and The Reality Chip to shrink the cube’s overall size. And I swapped out The Restoration of Eiganjo without ever testing it, just because I couldn’t find a copy locally!

Imagine all those silly little cuts and swaps (hardly at all related to play pattern), summed up over 200 cubes in our survey, and you’ll get the picture. The odds are stacked against any one card surviving long-term.

From a data standpoint, that’s no biggie, because our surveys explicitly ask for curators’ subjective opinions, even the tentative ones. On the other hand, the Downward Trend makes the few cards that do see increased play shine like diamonds in the rough. Cards like that are something special.

Often, a “most improved” card will be one that flies under the radar early, garnering little Cube interest. If that card later makes a big splash in Constructed, pros and creators will flood the Internet with deck techs, videos, and gameplay, until every savvy cube owner knows exactly what makes the card tick. Our survey respondents already like powerful cards more than the average Cube Cobra user (seeing as they’re engaged enough to fill out a survey pro bono), so they’ll likely jump aboard a good ol’-fashioned Constructed hype train. E voila, a recipe for one Most Improved piece of cardboard.

Innistrad: Midnight Hunt is tied for the most impactful Cube set of the 2024 rotation, with a median of eight cards still played in our respondents’ cubes. The most popular set in our survey’s history (with 301 respondents), with the all-time most popular card we’ve ever surveyed, the only surprise is MID’s longevity.

The most-improved cards of MID are mostly Pioneer and Standard breakouts. One surprise is that Consider is seeing even more Cube play than its already-sky-high 72% popularity. The average Cube Cobra is significantly lower on Consider than our average respondent, but even so, Consider might be one of the few cards that actually deserves status as a “cube staple”. (I would be remiss not to mention The 'Gurk as another contender for that title — boy, did I 360-no-scope that card evaluation! i <3 the ‘gurk)

I also investigated “cards we ‘got right’” by sorting our Results by Testers, to see which popular cards haven’t budged in either direction. For MID, those who picked up The Meathook Massacre, Cathar Commando, or Augur of Autumn seem to be pretty content with their lot. These cards were strong Constructed staples, so we didn’t under-rate them initially, but their more niche synergies mean that curators didn’t over-rate them, either.

Many of MID’s top prerelease survey performers aged poorly two years on. Bloodthirsty Adversary and friends were obviously strong, highly rated, and therefore had the furthest to fall (another reason why Consider is so exceptional by contrast!). Throughout the retrospective, these poorly aged cards will follow a pattern of one- to three-mana beatsticks and stat monsters. Standard needs a constant influx of creatures, and that churn backwashes into the Cube world, leading to high turnover relative to standout noncreature spells. (I also suspect we curators are a little biased against “boring” attacking-focused critters. Since everyone knows the point of cube is to make your opponent suffer, why not cut the one thing that ends the game?)

Ending with a whisper, Midnight Hunt Commander made negligible impact on your cubes compared to the Standard set; no cards notable in any direction.

Despite being the year’s least impactful Standard-legal set, ahead of only the Commander-legal releases with its median of three surviving cards, Innistrad: Crimson Vow wasn’t all bad. Its premier mechanic, Blood tokens, seems to be quite the sleeper hit in Cube as it was in Pioneer. Crimson Vow Commander also premiered the flexible and increasingly popular Occult Epiphany for a little power-crept Secure the Wastes action.

Conversely, the impressive stat blocks of VOW tended to age as poorly as those from its sister set. Cleave also seems to have aged like milk (hopefully because people just realized they could play two copies of Duress instead?). In fact, not a single VOW card tested by more than 10% of our initial respondents increased in play rate! (Only Occult Epiphany, from VOC, bucks that trend.) I speculate this might be due, in part, to these cards also whiffing in Standard.

Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty is tied with Midnight Hunt for most impactful Cube set, with eight surviving cards in our median respondent’s cube. Moreover, its most-improved card, Fable of the Mirror-Breaker, is the dictionary definiton for a breakout Cube success. Not only did the pros miss this one, Fable went on to be banned in Standard, and is now a dominant force in Pioneer and Modern. Yes, it’s a pile of stats, but unlike other poorly-aged rate monsters, Fable’s stats are distributed across several currencies, so it enables the synergies of nearly any cube deck. That’s medical-grade catnip for our audience of cube owners (and, if you can believe it, the average Cube Cobra user is even more enthusiastic).

Cards that we nailed on the first try: Lion Sash, Rabbit Battery, Twinshot Sniper, Eiganjo, Seat of the Empire. The synergy-heavy threats with some amount of Constructed impact continue to be crowd-pleasers.

For all of NEO’s successes, we were collectively wrong about some other aggressive threats, including the overall most-declined card of the 2024 rotation, Blade of the Oni. I’m trying to peer through depths here and see how Blade is meaningfully different than Rabbit Battery or Lion Sash in Cube, and it’s a struggle, so I’m left to assume that the Blade’s lack of Standard play was the albatross. The card rules, but maybe it just didn’t get the exposure it needed from Constructed.

By process of elimination, Streets of New Capenna falls between the other sets of the 2024 rotation, with a median of five cards surviving in our cubes.

Let’s hone our working theory that Standard play is a big predictor of Cube success. The pillars of 2023 Standard were Ledger Shredder, the Triomes, and Raffine, and — oh wait, those are exactly the most improved SNC cards. Ledger Shredder gets a special boost for being another “Fable,” missed by all the pros and later a multi-format all-star.

If we dig a little deeper into Standard, some SNC role-players included Titan of Industry and Unlicensed Hearse, and, wouldn’t ya know it, those are the same popular cards that we evaluated correctly before release, with about zero change in respondents’ play-rate since 2022. The feedback loop between Constructed and the most invested Cube owners isn’t airtight — for example, Make Disappear was important to Standard and yet has decreased in Cube play — but the correlation is still deeper than I’d guessed in 2022.

New Capenna’s poorly-aged cards again don’t have much to distinguish themselves from the set’s successes, except that they might have been overhyped for Constructed impact. Pour one out for Sticky Fingers, Andy Mangold’s favorite Aura.

For being a straight-to-Legacy set that broke that format, Baldur’s Gate’s paltry two Cube survivors (at median) makes it the least impactful main release from this time period. The cards seeing more play than in 2022 are, unsurprisingly, Initiative-makers, because the mechanic scales in 1v1 like King Kong scaled into the Monsterverse. And the cards that are seeing just as much play now as then… ding ding ding, more Initiative. And also Choose a Background, I guess.

Most of the other offerings from CLB are seeing decreased play. The one surprise to me is Minsc & Boo, Timeless Heroes, who turned out even more powerful than folks thought back then, yet still declined in play. Honestly, I’m proud of us — good in cube isn’t the same as good for cube, and this is as timely a reminder as any of the truth in Jason Waddell’s axiom.

As always: We are (still) poor prophets of our own preferences, myself included (see again my receipt for fourteen axed NEO cards). We habitually cut more cards than we keep. Bearing this in mind is probably the best way to save money and conserve energy when updating a cube for new Magic sets.

Constructed is the proving ground for many cubes. It’s not just about the cards that become Greatest Hits, although between Fable and Ledger Shredder that certainly can matter. It’s also that Standard is a great way to get playtest throughput on new cards, even when your cube pods aren’t firing. This year’s data made that connection clearer to me than ever.

There’s green pastures outside the fence of Standard. At the same time, using Constructed to vet options for cube has its blind spots. A card that misses in Standard might still be perfect for your cube — it’s okay to trust your gut, follow a less-trodden road, and/or update more slowly to let the playtests percolate. Also: give Blade of the Oni another try!

Thanks to everyone whose enthusiastic surveys made this study possible! Until next year, may your cube pods always overflow. Cheers!

• 2021 Standard Rotation Retrospective
• 2022 Standard Rotation Retrospective
• There wasn’t a 2023 Standard rotation, since that’s when they changed to a 3-year Standard!
• Complete list of set prospectives