Omniczech's Cube & Premodern Blog

The Changing face of Cube as a Format

I've been playing some sort of cube format for at least a decade now, and a lot has changed over those years. While there's a great many things in the game of Magic that I could sit here and opine negatively about, this is not one of those things.

My murky memories of the CubeTutor era (for the zoomers, imagine if CubeCobra was way worse in most every way and looked way less appealing) are mostly just a few categories of cubes.

While there's some things in the modern cube landscape that are just not great, I rarely see the first two categories even discussed, the third has withered considerably and the last category now feels like the dominant mode of cube in 2025. This sort of progress is great and worth seeing the many MANY uninspired and worse takes on "100 Ornithopters" that plague CubeCobra for the time being.

I've been long of the opinion that we're finally entering an era where cubes like the one I help admin, The Pauper Cube are no longer even remotely the cheapest or easiest on road into the world of endless limited. Back in the day I think the fact you mostly saw either modes of power maxing the cube or the rarity restrictions was due to the fact that commons were just the cheapest class of good card back in the day. I don't think that's remotely the case any more, you can assemble a cube that costs less than a new video game that is just as fun of a limited format as any, hell I've seen the handful of folks who have "bar cubes" that run $25 bucks, cheap for a full on deck in this goofy game.

So what am I, an old boomer in Magic years, trying to say here? Despite the corporate insistence that we turn this game into flat Funko Pops with unrelated IP, cube has never been better and I think that the future has never been brighter for folks wanting to get into the format. Get out there, make a cube and have some fun on your own terms.