2025 Standard Rotation Cube Retrospective

The 2025 Standard rotation affects every Standard-legal set from Dominaria United to March of the Machine: The Aftermath — over 2,100 cards if you include non-Standard products in this time-frame, like Lord of the Rings, Unfinity, or Jumpstart 2022. Our prerelease surveys surveyed Cube designers prior to each set’s release about their most exciting cards. Even though Cube is rotation-proof, now’s the perfect occasion to follow up on those predictions, three years later.

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 my individual opinion even if it barely scratches the surface of the 100,000+ 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 Cube Cobra user is now.²

If you’re a glutton for punishment, you can follow along using your own survey results.

I’m going to cut to the chase with my interpretation of this rotation’s broadest trends:

Two thousand new cards in one year. No wonder our results show a downward trend – somehow, five extra sets got jammed into the calendar! You could build, from scratch, without ever reusing a card, five 360-card cubes from this time period. As you’ll see below, this volume of new cards began to overwhelm the cube community’s abilities to evaluate and test.

Contemporary tentpole mechanics are harder to build around. In 2012, you could easily jam all of Magic’s headlining mechanics into a single cube. Morph and Suspend are weirdos, sure, but I’m shocked at the number of old Magic sets whose whole gimmick amounts to “you’ve NEVER seen multicolor Kicker” or “introducing… Flashback costs that aren’t just mana!” These innovations are, compared to the rotating sets of 2025, like calling Homestyle Vanilla and Vanilla Bean radical new ice cream flavors. Now we’ve got Toxic/Corrupted, The Ring, Battles, and more: each oozing with individual pizzazz, but at the cost of rules overhead and clashing flavor. Even for the real sickos (hi, Paul), cube designs that ignore complexity are getting increasingly unsustainable.

It’s easier to predict niche synergy roleplayers than cube staples. The cards we collectively “get right” during preview season aren’t the powerful removal spells or the splashy bombs — it’s synergistic stuff like Atraxa, Grand Unifier, Vraan, Executioner Thane, Serra Paragon, and Reprieve. Choosing cards that fill an intentional niche might be a more error-proof method of Cube testing, and that’s because:

The printing presses will just keep rolling. Remember when Zurgo Bellstriker revolutionized the aggro sections of power-maximizing cubes? Twelve more “strictly better Jackal Pup” have dropped since then:

pow=2 mv=1 c=r year>2013 -is:reprint -o:return -is:dfc

(Is your cube interested in twelve Red one-drops in the mold of Jackal Pup? What about just four of them? Yeah, me neither; I’m too busy choosing from the 92 other options.) They’re just gonna keep making these, people, just like they print the same Doom Blade variant in every set.

Cubeheads are starting to get wise: we gotta stop chasing marginal power upgrades. The power chase is unending, and its pace will only ever accelerate. We shouldn’t let Hasbro’s printing presses dictate the churn of our cubes. Better to actively choose the few play patterns that will lead to the most satisfying gameplay, and stick to our guns.

If you’re not convinced, well, just keep reading.

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 DMU:

Of the 16 DMU cards I rated initially, only four remain in my cube. Most of these were perfectly strong, even in an Eternal cube. Instead, I cut a few for size reasons, others for card availability reasons, others just because I got bored. Evolved Sleeper was the only cut due to undesirable play pattern (the deathtouch counter, as silly as it seems).

Imagine all those quotidian little cuts and swaps 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.

The most popular set from the 2025 rotation is Dominaria United, with 7 cards still in the cube of our median survey respondent. Most of the cards that have enjoyed increased adoption in Cube since their debut were unhailed Constructed staples, including mulit-format all-star Sheoldred, the Apocalypse and Pauper powerhouse Tolarian Terror. The Wooded Ridgeline cycle of lands also saw increased adoption, likely due to their simplicity, affordability, and fetchability.

I also investigated cards our respondents assessed accurately during preview season. Sorting our results by Testers reveals which popular cards are about as popular now as they were then. DMU had two such popular cards, Serra Paragon and Tear Asunder. Each card is a “you’ll know if you’re in the market” synergy roleplayer.

On the other end of the spectrum are the cards whose popularity declined. Cut Down, among DMU’s most declined, is also the card with the biggest gap between our respondents and the rest of Cube Cobra. Our survey respondents sure love their cheap removal – or at least, they think they do during previews, and then a lot of them end up cutting down on the Cut Downs. Some other assorted cube catnip (Man-o'-War nostalgia bait, Black aggro cards, “interesting” aggro cards) round out the list, a pattern we’ll see repeatedly.

I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to see Scrapwork Mutt as the most-improved card of The Brothers’ War. This beautiful little roleplayer, as many BRO Limited drafters discovered, supports a bazillion synergies, helps fix mana issues, and doesn’t shortcut its way to playability with absurd stats. And it’s a dog! Anyways, Dreams of Steel and Oil turned out to be the strongest Divest yet, and Haywire Mite made a Modern splash as an Urza's Saga target that kills The One Ring.

Thanks to these successes, The Brothers’ War was the second-most enduring Cube set from the 2025 rotation, with a median of 6 surviving Cube cards for our respondents. The number of survivors is down from DMU, and as we proceed through the 2025 rotation, that number will continue to go down and down. In other words, each 2025 set is less durable than the one before it. The sole exception is the Modern-powered Lord of the Rings, whose 5 median Cube survivors is still less than a third of what MH2 had over a similar interval.

This piqued my curiosity, so I looked at the endurance of prior set rotations. This time last year, NEO and MID each had 8 Cube survivors of a 3-year Standard. The rotation before that, a 2-year Standard rotation in 2022, Zendikar Rising had 9 survivors and MH2 had 18 (an unsurprising high-water outlier due to its overwhelming appeal). It seems like the 2025 rotation’s cards are less enduring than in years prior, and upon a closer look, eight of 2025’s fourteen rotating releases have zero cards that survived in the median cube. (In this category are all five Commander releases, Jumpstart 2022, Aftermath, and Unfinity.)

Why this decreased enthusiasm? One explanation I discount: the idea that our 2025 respondents are developing refined, ultra-picky cube palates. Our median survey respondent consistently tests 7-10 cards per set (with as many for 12-13 for ultra-popular Standard sets like MID and NEO). The average rating assigned hasn’t appreciably changed from year to year, either. Yet the middle-of-the-pack rotating sets from 2022 or 2024 retained more cube cards than they did in 2025. In other words: in 2025, we aren’t testing any fewer cards, we’re just more likely to cut them within three years.

That leaves a few possibilities. Cubeheads might be simply burned out from the accelerated pace of new cards. They might be facing fatigue from increasingly complex tentpole mechanics (I personally felt this way when, after bending over backwards to fully explore MOM’s Battles in my cube, LTR immediately debuted an equally arduous mechanic). Or they might feel something subtler, like a disconnect from some of the big flavor swings of 2023.

As a group, we didn’t get any popular cards “right” from BRO; all the cards we tested most highly have declined in playrate. Arcane Proxy, the “new Snapcaster Mage,” failed to make a Constructed impact, as such cards so often do. The “new Elite Vanguard,” “new Skullclamp,” and “new True-Name” also failed to live up to the hype.

Most of the Commander products that were released in this time period made negligible impact in Cube. Unfinity and Jumpstart 2022, similarly, have medians of zero surviving Cube cards. (Frankly, it’s easy to cut a card nobody has ever read in its entirety, and that goes for most of these sets that skip Standard.)

That leaves Warhammer 40,000 as the most impactful straight-to-Commander release, but that’s not saying much, with the median respondent still playing only two 40K cards. The few cards which increased in playrate were initially tested by so few people that it’s hard to draw meaning from any change.

On the other hand, the big rate monsters from 40K have all declined in play. I Tinkered a Chaos Defiler into play once to kill a True-Name Nemesis, and my opponent and I agreed that was cheesy, and that design excess happens over and over in these card files.

Tyvar's Stand is the most-improved card of ONE, but two White standouts from the Commander release did even better. With only 3 cards surviving in our median respondents’ cube, ONE continues the decline of Cube durability over this time period.

However, the respondents who tested Atraxa, Grand Unifier and Vraan, Executioner Thane had little cause to regret those decisions. I’m struck by how synergistic these cards are. Atraxa plays extremely well with all kinds of cheat strategies, while Vraan is catnip to the aristocratically inclined, but neither card reads like it will be “good in a vacuum.” The obvious synergistic leanings of each card probably weeds out any aspirational tests from power-motivated cube designers, leaving only the folks who are on the market for synergistic support. My takeaway: testing cards with a clear intent for their role might lead to more satisfaction.

More cube catnip, fallen by the wayside. Cankerbloom deserves better, honestly.

Sunfall was the only popular card from March of the Machine whose playrate improved. MOM had only 3 surviving cards in the median respondent’s cube, although those who tested the awesome Faerie Mastermind or Chrome Host Seedshark seem satisfied, as those cards didn’t budge from their high prerelease popularity.

Most of the double-faced forays of MOM are seeing less play two years later. Joining them are most cards from Aftermath, including Ayara's Oathsworn, the overall most declined card from the whole rotation. (See aforementioned comment about cards nobody’s heard of, even if they’re powerful.)

Tales of Middle-earth displays a fascinating departure from the prior sets. First, the average survey rating given to LTR cards was a full point higher than other sets (likely partly due to the iconic franchise, and partly due to the straight-to-Modern power level). Second, even though Orcish Bowmasters was LTR’s most declined card, it declined less than the biggest losers of every other major release. Then, LTR’s most improved, featuring Lórien Revealed (and several other

These declined cards follow the pattern of Orcish Bowmasters, with less decrease than other sets would lead us to believe. (This is borne out by the 5 survivors LTR boasts that stuck around in median cubes, similar to sets like KHM and STX from prior years.) Maybe LTR’s Universes Beyond status created a similar effect to Atraxa’s mana cost, where some people get warned away from testing too aggressively, and those left are more certain of their preferences.

Thanks for reading, and a heartfelt thanks for lending your voices so eagerly to our surveys. Until next time, may your palate for cube cards grow ever more discerning.

• 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!
• 2024 Standard Rotation Retrospective
• Complete list of set prospectives