Drafting a High-Power Cube: Fast Mana, Power, and Discipline

Some Cubes hold the most powerful cards ever printed. The best known is the Vintage Cube on Magic Online, a 540-card list that includes the Power Nine, a group of famous early cards such as Black Lotus and Ancestral Recall. Some owners build paper versions too, often with playtest cards standing in for the rarest cards, as the building lesson discusses.

Drafting these Cubes uses everything from Levels 1 to 3, but a few priorities flip. This lesson covers what changes.

Why speed rules

In a typical Cube, the strongest cards are strong threats or answers. In a high-power Cube, the strongest cards make mana: artifacts that cost zero or one and add mana every turn, or once in a burst.

A deck that plays a three-mana card on turn one, or a five-mana card on turn two, skips a turn or two of the game. Few single threats are worth that much. That is why experienced drafters often take fast colorless mana over a powerful creature or spell. Our piece on fast mana in Cube goes through these cards one at a time.

Colorless fast mana has a second advantage: it fits any deck. Taking it early keeps all your options open.

Lanes, not colors

In a typical Cube, you draft two colors. In a high-power Cube, decks are often defined by an engine rather than a color pair. A deck that puts big creatures into play early, a deck built around artifacts, a fast aggressive deck, a blue control deck full of the best card draw ever printed.

So when you settle, settle on a lane: what your deck does, not only its colors. Each lane has key pieces, and you need enough of them to work. Our guide to drafting Vintage Cube lays out the main lanes in the current Magic Online list and what each needs by the end of pack one.

Discipline: the main skill

Power is everywhere in these Cubes, so the hardest picks are about turning it down.

Do not take power for a deck you are not building. A card that is a first pick in one lane can be close to useless in another. After the first several picks, judge each card by what it does in your deck.

Do not play everything because the fixing allows it. High-power Cubes often include lots of dual lands. That makes four-color decks possible, and they often lose to a focused two-color deck that curves out. Two colors and a light splash is a sound ceiling for most decks.

Respect cheap interaction. Fast decks punish slow hands. Cheap removal and cheap counterspells hold more value here than in a lower-power Cube, because the games are decided earlier.

Aggro is still a deck. Cheap, efficient creatures and burn can race the most powerful cards in Magic. The aggro lesson’s density rules still apply.

Mana and building

Fast mana changes the mana math. A deck with several mana artifacts can play fewer lands, but each artifact you count as a land is a card that can be destroyed. Our Vintage Cube guide suggests sixteen or seventeen lands, dropping to fifteen only with three or more of the zero-cost artifacts. Treat it as a judgment, and test it.

Playing high-power games

Games are faster and swingier. Three habits help:

• Mulligan for speed and action. A hand that does nothing for three turns is often worse here than a mulligan.
• Count the opponent’s possible mana, not just their lands. Artifacts can let them cast something much bigger than you expect.
• Do not panic at power. Opponents will draw broken starts sometimes. Variance is part of the format, and a best-of-three match evens it out more than one game does.

Where to draft one

Few people own a powered paper Cube. Two common ways in:

• Magic Online runs the Vintage Cube in limited-time leagues. Our explainer on the MTGO Vintage Cube covers how it is curated, and When Is Vintage Cube on MTGO? tracks when it runs.
• CubeCobra lists many high-power Cubes you can draft against computer drafters, for practice at any hour.

For the step down in power, the MTGO Legacy Cube drafts without the Power Nine, and our guide to Cube power levels compares the bands.