Community Voices
2025 — Cube in Review
With 2025 on the books we look back at another tremendous year for Cube. Amid continued firehose of new products, cross branding, and uncountable card versions, players continue to find community and a safe for creative exploration in our favorite format. This year, we asked members of the Lucky Paper Cube Fellowship for their reflections. The Fellowship, started this year, has been a way for us to give back directly to the community, sponsoring players to attend Cube events using funds that exceed covering our operating costs.
is a community organizer from northern Wisconsin who has been playing Magic since she was a kid. She believes coming away from an event with new friends is better than any trophy or prize payout.
is an inventive, unconventional Cube designer who prefers to play with low power junk. Her cube Showdown at the Okk Corral is the subject of an episode of Recross the Paths and is featured at Cali Cube Champs 2025.
is the organizer of Inland Northwest Cube Fest, a co-host of The Pack One Slick Ones podcast, and the designer of The Ball Pit — a novel cube that was the talk of CubeCon 2025. She is a welcoming and influential voice in multiple online Cube communities.
is a disabled trans woman who strives to make Magic a welcoming place for marginalized people. She loves playing Commander in addition to Cube and enjoys watching competitive players push the game to its limits. is a member of the cube fellowship
is a Chicago-based artist and game enthusiast. He has been playing Magic on and off his whole life but is a fairly recent Cube convert! Andrew is interested in the various design sensibilities and community building aspects of different cube groups around the world. “I wanna be the first one to see ‘em all.”
, at a young age, is already working hard to prove that Cube is for everybody. She organized the Magic club at her small, rural high-school and attended her first Cube event at Cube for a Cause SS 2025, where she took home a trophy pin.
Cube “Hit” of the Year
The cube hit of the year in my opinion is the Lucky Paper Fellowship! Bringing more people to large Cube events makes them more fun. It allows for more creativity from different people with different perspectives on Magic and Cube. I’m excited to see how this project grows and the impacts it has on these events in the long term!
My biggest Cube Hit of the year is, as cheesy as it may seem, the people. My Cube community has grown and developed and my favorite thing about Cube this year has been doing non-magic activities with people I have grown to care a lot about. We ate a lot of good food, played a lot of other games, traveled to events, watched movies, and have gotten a lot closer this year and that’s been wonderful.
In July of this year, I held the first inaugural Inland Northwest CubeFest in Spokane, Washington. This was the Inland Northwest’s first midsized Cube event — the only such event between Seattle and Madison, to my knowledge — and also the first Cube event that I had ever designed and ran on my own.
It was grand. There were around fifty attendees, coming from at least five different states. Eight unique cubes, of diverse sorts, hand-picked at my discretion. Fun and funky prizes, immeasurable entertainment, dozens of 8.5″x11″ custom cards designed for a side event… the list goes on. I met up with people I’d been friends with for years without ever having had the chance to interact in person. I debuted The Ball Pit. I had some truly unforgettable experiences. In short, it was an overwhelming success.
I learned so, so much. How to organize an event (energetically). How to advertise an event (chaotically). How to get set up and check people in and answer questions and navigate Hedron Network and judge two drafts at a time and handle prizing and cleanup and broken air conditioners and loud jazz musicians and wonderfully unprepared Stone Soup drafts and dinners and memories and a whole lot of wooly wonder (wistfully, now, looking back on it all). It was hectic, and time consuming, and occasionally rather stressful.
I can’t wait to run it again next year.
In a year filled with more Magic than ever you’d be forgiven for thinking my Cube hit would be a card, set, or even event. But mine is a little more personal than that. This year at CubeCon I was lucky enough to celebrate my anniversary with three wonderful girlfriends I started dating at last year’s event. If it wasn’t for Cube, and especially a wonderful queer-centric Cube Discord, I wouldn’t have three amazing people by my side. They have gotten me through dark times and brought immeasurable joy into my life. And that’s to say nothing for all the other connections cube has brought me.
Drafting Jane McKinney’s The Ball Pit at CubeCon in October. It was such a weird, fun draft to navigate that upped the ante on a desert cube environment by throwing deck building away altogether. Jane’s design is truly inspiring and helped me really rethink what a cube could do!
My Cube hit of the year has to be the incredible experience that I got at Cube for a Cause in August. It was pretty extraordinary for me as someone who might be one of like three Cube fans in my entire town to see so much Cube happening in one room at once. I am so grateful that I got to meet some awesome people and play some awesome cubes including my favorite of the weekend, Etherium Landscape, and the close second, Doubleton Synergy, where I even won the draft! All of that was only possible because of the great Andy Mangold and every patron and pin owner. Thank you!
Cube “Miss” of the Year
This year’s biggest miss in my opinion is events that don’t allow proxies. There are 2 things I want to mention right away: 1. There were many proxy-friendly events this year (<3) and 2. I know that CubeCon is a WOTC-affiliated event, and they have a profit incentive to force people to buy their product or whatever -_- but prohibiting proxies puts a price tag on being a Cube creator. This greatly limits the creative potential of the cubes in the event by excluding lots of people. If we truly believe that Cube will outlive magic (which I do), then we have to find a way to move past this.
I’ve been on my hobby horse about metrics becoming standards. People have taken useful starting points or milestones about Cube (this much fixing, this much removal, this close of a power band) and changed them to requirements for a good cube. All my favorite cubes this year had terrible fixing, big power outliers, bad curves, SOMETHING that bucked conventional wisdom. I implore Cube developers across the globe to break rules more freely and not check any metrics when you look at another person’s cube. Magic can take it, it’s an incredibly flexible game and remains fun through a lot!
I’m a dyed-in-the-wool stick-in-the-mud when it comes to Universes that are Beyond, and this summer’s Final Fantasy set was my Cube “miss” of the year. There are actually a decent number of things that I think the set did well. It brought in new players, for starters, and though I am a big “numbers go up” hater, I DO still want more people to play this wonderful game of ours. FIN reprinted some expensive Cube staples as cheap bonus sheet cards. It had a decent prerelease experience. It also saw ground being broken on a decent amount of new mechanics.
But it’s actually that last positive which was my main negative about FIN for Cube. Final Fantasy was the first set in Magic’s history to have Land cards with Adventure modes. It was also the first set in Magic’s history to have dual-typed Saga Creatures (there were cards that flipped from sagas to creatures in NEO, and from creatures to sagas in MOM, but never any single-sided cards that were Enchantment Creatures of their own). These cards are named things like Fenrir and Brynhildr: real-world mythological characters, spun up in the Final Fantasy games as magical spells, like the real-world characters from Magic’s own Arabian Nights that the franchise no longer seeks to represent. They create game pieces like Black Mage tokens. They are, largely, for someone with my personal scruples, not cards that I would want to be running even if they were untied from outside IP like Square Enix. And yet they are all that I’ve been given in these fun, new design spaces.
I’m selfish like that. I would be much more happy with Universe Beyond cards if they were fun little side projects that kept the main stage clear for game pieces that feel more like Magic cards. But FIN was also the first UB set to be standard legal. It replaced a “regular” Magic set. It devoted large amounts of RnD time to the development of new mechanics that were debuted and (so far) constrained to only be in said Universe Beyond sets. And, like it or not, it was just the start. UB standard sets seem to be the norm, moving forward, and I’m a crusty old turtle who wants more Crovaxes than Clouds in my Magic.
As someone on disability, budget is on the forefront of my mind when it comes to Magic. And with the glut of product released this year you’d hope there would be numerous meaningful reprints to go with it. But with half the sets released being “premium” Universes Beyond products and most reprints being relegated to limited printings, it seems Magic is only getting more expensive. In fact, as 4 Universes Beyond sets loom over Magic for next year, it can feel like Wizards of the Coast is slowly pricing out poorer players like myself in favor of people who can spend reams of money on their product.
A powered cube coming to Magic Arena instead of something less conventional. 🙁
The general MTG miss for me is probably not unique among the vast ocean of opinions in the magic space, but it certainly feels true to me. It is simply the amount of cards being released. I’m a relatively new magic player. I started actively being involved in the community — going to prereleases, etc. — around Streets of New Capenna, but even then it felt feasible for me to read the spoiler site every time a new rare was shown off, but this year, I doubt I have even heard of half of the over 2,000 non-reprint cards released this year. The silver lining on this is that Cube is one of the only formats where you don’t have to be up to date on every new card, and that’s part of the magic.
Cube Card of the Year
Icetill Explorer. I just love this card. I really like doing silly things with lands and this card just does the 2 things that are usually needed for that. 1. Playing lands from your graveyard 2. Playing an extra land a turn so that you don’t lose parity when you sacrifice lands for things. It also has the added effect of finding more lands as you go, and on a 2/4 body, it’s resilient to 3 damage removal (bolt, abrade, etc.). Best paired with Glacial Chasm!
My Cube card of the year has got to be Okk. My Okk cube got into a cube convention! Also it has incredible art across the printings and has a very high density of synergy packed into very little rules text. Truly a spectacular design. Best Set for Cube
My 2025 Cube Card of the Year award goes firmly to Chromatic Sphere. The Mirrodin printing, to be specific.
I released to the public a project called The Ball Pit in March of this year, while I was recovering from bottom surgery. It was wacky. It was divisive. It was fundamentally joyful. I’m rather proud of it, just as I am rather blown away by how warm and uplifting the community’s responses to it have generally been.
It was the beautiful ugly duckling of INW CubeFest. It was the second-most popular Cube at CubeCon 2025, landing just below a WOTC employee’s powered vintage cube. It was derided by many for very expectable and understandable reasons: namely, that it breaks the basic rules of Magic, and feels almost like a different card game, and it makes your brain hurt (so good). To my continued deep joy, it also spurred dozens of Cube designers to ask themselves some strange questions about the thing they call “a draft,” and then to go off and design their own weird cubes that are only very, very loosely connected to my original brainchild, and yet may never have sprung into being without that first little spark of creativity.
The Ball Pit shaped much of 2025 for me, when it comes to Cube. And however much I adore the Myr Enforcers, Energy Chambers, and bonkers old foil design mistakes that made The Ball Pit shine, it was Chromatic Sphere which truly made it possible.
As a sapphic lover of Avishkar there is almost an abundance of cards that appeal to me. But there was one released this year that might just be my favorite. Not only does it feature my favorite pair of women on my favorite plane, it is in my favorite color pair and creates numerous game objects. The only issue for Wish Good Luck is that it wasn’t printed this year, it is an Arena only card. But as long as you have a printer, or a local library, there is no problem with running it in your cube.
Weapons Manufacturing is such a fun card to build around and I will happily trainwreck any draft to do so. 😉
My Cube card of the year is Cryogen Relic. I just love this card. So many cubes, including pauper and peasant, have large artifact themes, where it fits perfectly. It has great utility and value, and it gets a few bonus points for me over Ichor Wellspring in that it does a bit of color signaling. The mode of stunning a tapped creature usually doesn’t come up, as you’d probably sacrifice this to another outlet, but when it does, it can be just what you need to buy another turn in an otherwise losing game state. 10/10 design. Beautiful art. Go Cryogen Relic!
Best Set for Cube
I think the best set for Cube this year was Innistrad Remastered. While it didn’t bring new cards to Cube, it helped bring the price down of some once-pricy cards. Aside from making cards more accessible, it also came with some sweet new promos and retro-framed remakes (for true connoisseurs).
Since I was told to take these questions however I please I’m going to say my Set for Cube of the Year is Foundations. I love Foundations and every time I’ve seen a card I was really excited about lately when I looked in the corner the Foundations set symbol was there. I know it didn’t technically come out this year, but it’s so clean and so excellent that it has persisted as my set for the year.
2025’s best set for cube was Time Spiral Block.
- Time Spiral (2007)
- Planar Chaos (2007)
- Future Sight (2008)
2025 was the year of new horizons, found in old sets. There was a time, once — when, Jane writes, dripping with self-aware chagrin and laughing at how much of an old lady she is, yelling at the clouds as she does — a time when card design was full of fresh-faced wonder, and card art was compellingly vivid, and card frames were more aesthetically pleasing. And it wasn’t earlier this year. It was in old sets that strove to break boundaries within the confines of Magic, instead of going through the pockets of other franchises for loose change.
Weird artifacts. Cards that were once “cube staples,” but have long fallen by the wayside. Messed up rules nightmares of desert cube fame and infamy.
2025 was a return to sturdy roots. A return to finding what YOU love about this game. For some, that included all the Universe Beyond sets. For me, that included a metric buttload of goofy garbage from Time Spiral Block. To each their own. That is, after all, the beauty of Cube. And this year, that beauty shone brightest for me in the sets from when Magic most felt like it was reveling in its own creative potential, peering over new horizons, and wondering at what would come next.
Avishkube is perhaps the cube I’ve created that I’m most proud of. It is a celebration of all things Avishkar. Not just mechanics, but flavor, characters, and art. And without the release of Aetherdrift, it simply wouldn’t exist. While Avishkar makes up a small part of Aetherdrift, and as such Aetherdrift makes up a small part of Avishkube, its release prompted me to finally create a cube centered around my favorite plane. Whatever anyone else thinks of the vehicle centered set, I’ll always be thankful for that.
Tarkir: Dragonstorm brought some fun new takes on old mechanics with Omen and Harmonize, as well as some new tri-colored mana dorks. Also, dragons are just bread & butter badass; can’t go wrong.
This one is really close for me between Tarkir: Dragonstorm and Edge of Eternities but I think I have to give it to the latter. EoE really had something for every cube. On the higher power side, the set was jam-packed with cards like Quantum Riddler and Pinnacle Emissary, with Cryogen Relic and Timeline Culler also standing out to me as elegant designs to include in a lower powered or peasant cube. The art and flavor of the set, while not being on the level of TDM for me, were still very evocative, and felt cohesive with the rest of Magic despite the outlandish setting. Wizards knocked it out of the park, well done.
Personal Cube Level-Ups
I feel like this year my world of cube exploded. Since my friend told me to go to CubeCon, all my previous perceptions have been shattered. No longer is Cube something I just do once in a blue moon when we can gather 8 friends for 4 hours crammed around someone’s dinner table. Now I’m in like 6 Cube Discord servers and I try to make it to every Cube event I can. I also built a cube — The Oasis — for the first time in a decade this year after feeling so inspired after CubeCon!
My biggest level up achievement wise was that I got a chance to be featured on Recross the Paths! It was a pleasure and I’m very happy to have gotten a chance to talk to Kade. Philosophically I feel like my biggest level up has been non-land fixing. I think land fixing is obviously the best in the business, but I think people have become too comfortable with it. Removing land fixing and replacing it with mana rocks, land fetchers, and basic land cyclers has made color choices feel more thoughtful in draft without making gameplay much different. I think looking at how you’re filling critical roles that every cube needs and trying to match your solution more closely with your cube is something that will always improve the experience and make your cube feel more unique and exciting.
Break every rule you didn’t give yourself.
In 2024, I’d never designed a desert cube. Never modified a rule of Magic. Never broken singleton for more than a couple cards. Never changed how deckbuilding works. Never designed a cube from the top down on flavor alone. Never designed a cube from the bottom up on exclusively the cards in a gamestore’s inventory. I’ve done all of those, now, in December of 2025
No one told me I couldn’t build a desert cube. I just hadn’t. It didn’t seem like a rule I needed to break. But I figured I should try at some point, and boy howdy did I learn a lot along the way. It’s now a rule for me that my desert cubes don’t have extremely convoluted colorless land bases. Not because anyone told me that was a rule, but because I decided it for myself. The neatest part is that, after drafting The Ball Pit, I’ve already seen a few other Cube curators go the other direction, and make their colorless land bases even MORE complex. One woman’s yuck is another’s, uh, yum? I guess? Don’t think about it too hard.
Similarly, no one told me I couldn’t run thirty-six copies of Myr Enforcer in a cube. The “rule” of singleton always seemed to be built on shaky ground, anyways. So I ran thirty-six copies of Myr Enforcer in a cube. Turns out, sometimes your first mortar shot is short, and you REALLY send that second one over the horizon. I’m down to sixteen Myr Enforcers, now, but that was me drawing my own lines in the sand—not following the decades old guidance of how many copies of a card should or shouldn’t be run in a cube.
So ponder the rules you’re currently following. Critique them. Break some. Step back. Refine the lot. Mess around. I challenge you to design something truly dumb in 2026, and to design something deeply wise and wonderful as well, but believe me when I tell you this:
Sometimes you have to brave the former before you can get to the later.
If Magic is getting more and more expensive, what’s a budget minded Cube enjoyer supposed to do? Why, proxy of course! While having the actual cards does feel much nicer, there is a lot of appeal to proxying a cube. Some may be drawn to the price, others the opportunity to play with powerful cards. But as I started to proxy almost an entire cube, I felt that the greatest opportunity this afforded me was to support my local library. Proxying a cube takes a lot of printing, and while I do have a home printer it isn’t of high quality. Using it would have taken a lot of time and ink. But for just a few cents a page I can quickly get all my cards printed out in color while supporting a local establishment that provides much more vital services.
I built a cube that was described by my playgroup as “very balanced” which is like the sickest compliment and made me feel really cool and smart.
A LOT about my design has changed this year since it’s pretty much my first year interacting with cube at all, but one thing that sticks out to me is my relationship to color restricted and color imbalance cubes. I have long known the mono-colored cube. My very first introduction to the format was not through vintage or pauper cube but Ben Wheeler’s mono-black cube, and my friend toyed with making a mono-blue cube a year or so back as well, so it was no surprise that one of my first ideas in my Cube Cobra was a mono-red cube. It was only later in the year that I realized, in part thanks to Lucky Paper, that, while color imbalance can be fun, fully removing the color pie kinda takes away an aspect of the game of Magic. I’ve had a ton of fun recently with semi-desert cubes. One of my main projects right now is a modular desert cube, where I’ve tried to play with the color pie a lot more than just getting rid of it.