The Edge of Eternities Vintage Cube Update

Posted on Aug 15, 2025

Let’s talk Cube again! As usual, we’ll be looking at what Edge of Eternities has to offer for the Magic Online Vintage Cube, starting with an overview of our thinking going into it and the ideas behind the changes, and ending with a card-by-card changelist with individual comments. 

Learnings from Last Season 

The two major themes we leaned harder into last season were Izzet Spellslingers and Creature Cheating. Eureka is pretty much a known quantity at this point and while it’s not a card with a high win rate, the fun of pulling off the massive hand-emptying appeals to many players, so we will continue to cycle it in and out as needed. For this run, we’ve moved away from it once again to make room for something fresh for green.  

On the other hand, the Izzet Spellslingers archetype impressed—so much so, that we are diving even deeper into it this run, expanding on the “Noncreature Matters” space that worked well for blue-red players last season. 

With 540 slots to work with, moving around some fringe cards doesn’t change the general, familiar experience too much, while also allowing for new cards and strategies to increase the variety and replayability of each iteration. Let’s take a high-level look at the incoming fun before going over the changes card-by-card. 

“Power Matters” + Landfall 

Regular Vintage Cube enthusiasts might remember (or might rather forget) the pump-spell archetype we ran previously in the Cube and wonder why it’s making a comeback in this iteration. It’s not an arbitrary change—several appealing new tools for a “Power Matters” theme have seen print since we tried this the last time, and testing bore out that it was worth revisiting the archetype. 

Interestingly, it was the success of the Izzet Spellslingers archetype last season that first planted the seed for pump spells to make a comeback. The archetype gained a lot of redundancy between Cori-Steel Cutter, Proft’s Eidetic Memory, Astrologian’s Planisphere and especially Vivi Ornitier, and people found a lot of success with the archetype—it represented half of Cube designer Chris Wolf’s 36 trophies by the end of the season! We found ourselves wanting more cheap/free spells for Vivi to convert into rituals, and the first ones that came to mind were Monstrous Rage and Mutagenic Growth. These were appealing because they can do some work in aggressive decks as well as Izzet Spellslingers, and after some playtesting, we were impressed enough with the results to keep them in. Check out the playtesting screenshots at the end for some examples (and let us know if you enjoy the playtest screenshots—a new addition to this article series).

Slickshot Show-Off was another perfect fit for the archetype that wasn’t available the last time “Power Matters” made the curation. The cocky bird also happens to be a wizard, as is Dreadhorde Arcanist, another key piece for the archetype, so Flame of Anor became an appealing addition as well. 

Two other cards we’ve had our eye that didn’t have enough support to bring in last time reach the tipping point with the inclusion of a Power Matters archetype: Tifa Lockhart and Traveling Chocobo. Tifa Lockhart plays fantastically with pump spells, and Traveling Chocobo lends a potent doubling of her landfall ability. These power/landfall themes extended nicely into some new cards from Edge of Eternities that sold us on the Power Matters archetype. 

Icetill Explorer is a new take on Ramunap Excavator that firmly lands on the landfall side of things while Ouroboroid benefits from pump spells, and Mightform Harmonizer is harmonious on both fronts, simultaneously acting as a combo piece for Nadu, Winged Wisdom that also allows for a quick kill when coupled with Nadu’s ability to drop lands onto the battlefield. 

Finally, we’re rounding out the Power Matters archetype with Unruly Krasis and Rancor. Both are solid-rate cards that should perform fine on their own while also helping with the synergy aspect. Invigorate justified its return as a top-five green card on win rate the last time we ran it, but that isn’t the main reason we’ve decided to give it another shot—Tifa Lockhart is. Curving Tifa into a fetchland and responding to the first landfall trigger by getting your third land and casting Invigorate on it makes it a clean 20/6 trample on turn three! 

Additionally, many cards that we’ve added to the Vintage Cube since the last swing at Power Matters help make this archetype thrive without changing anything! Landfall has been an expanding theme with additions like Bristly Bill, Spine Sower and Scythecat Cub, as well as Springheart Nantuko and Omnath, Locus of Creation. 

Fetches are in high demand for most decks, so we’re adding a few of the Modern Horizons 3 landscapes as landfall enablers that should make it around the table to the landfall-specific players who can make the best use of them. Unlike the OG fetchlands like Wooded Foothills, the landscapes can tap for mana without sacrificing them, allowing landfall players to cast their spells while stockpiling triggers for later in the game when the time is right. And while we’re leaning into land-centered combos… 

Titania, Protector of Argoth plus Sylvan Safekeeper or Zuran Orb has been a staple Vintage Cube combo for a while now, and we’re finally getting some redundancy from outer space in Baloth Prime! We’re also adding Greater Gargadon to combo with both Titania and Baloth (and Balance), using its abilities from the rift in space-time. You could also find worse targets for a Berserk than this nine- and ten-powered pair.  

Bonus Screenshots! 

Our Testing Team got in a lot of playtest drafts this season, and we captured some fun moments to share that showcase the potential of our new additions. Here’s a cool sequence that tester Leovold managed to pull off in one of our test drafts of this iteration of the Cube: 

Do you have an answer ready for a 64/2 trampling Tifa? 

And here’s Chris doing the Mightform Harmonizer + Nadu, Winged Wisdom trick and swinging for lethal (3 triggers was all it took): 

That covers the structural changes this time around, but don’t head out just yet, because there are a bunch of great new general additions, each explained in detail in the card-by-card changelist below. We’d love to hear what you think of the changes and how they play out for you—head over to the Discord Vintage Cube channel and tell us all about it! And until next time: Happy Cubing! 

Changelist