Presenting the 2025 Horror Cube

Posted on Oct 28, 2025

If this is your first time encountering the Horror Cube, welcome!

If you’ve played it at any point during the past couple years, welcome back!

For those who don’t know me, my name is Frank Lepore. I’ve been a Magic content creator for over 15 years, as well as a former pro. I also consider myself a Cube aficionado, and this is the third year that my Horror Cube has been run on Magic Online during the Halloween season. For that I am both extremely excited and extremely grateful.

Frank Lepore

The first year it debuted, it was known as the Innistrad Horror Cube, and was primarily Innistrad-themed with different archetypes based on the different tropes and creature types from that plane. The following year, since no new Innistrad sets had been released and with Duskmourn becoming available, I decided to adjust the Cube to just be a Horror-themed Cube de-emphasizing the heavy Innistrad theme. Are there still a ton of Innistrad cards in the Cube? Absolutely! But the Cube is also filled with cards from other sets that are either thematic or sometimes horrifying.

This year, the new sets that cards have been added from include Foundations, Jumpstart 2025, Aetherdrift, Tarkir: Dragonstorm, Magic: The Gathering®: FINAL FANTASY™, and Edge of Eternities. Having branched out from a majority Innistrad Cube means we can find more scary cards from other sets and include those.

This year, there were 58 total changes which you can find below. The theming, however, has pretty much remained the same. Let’s take a look at some of the current themes of the Cube.

U/B: Self Mill, Zombies, Horrors

Blue-Black decks are focused on things like milling yourself to some effect, building around Zombies, and building around Horrors. Laboratory Maniac is also still in the Cube, so feel free to try and win by milling yourself. The Cube has gone from 29 Zombies down to 26, with three of them now being white.

B/W: Tokens, Vampires, Zombies

Black-White focuses on making tokens and building around Vampires thanks primarily to Ixalan. In addition, I’ve added three zombies that fall into B/W in case players want to go in that direction as well.

B/R: Madness, Vampires

Black-Red is another color that focuses on building around Vampires as well as voluntarily discarding your spells to trigger madness spells. There are 51 total Vampires in the Cube across the three Mardu colors, and 17 total madness spells.

R/G: Werewolves, Wolves

Red-Green is primarily a beatdown color that focuses on building around Werewolves and Wolves, of which there are a whopping 37 in red and green, along with numerous cards that interact with them. A lot of times both creature types are on the same card, but sometimes they’re not.

G/W: Angels, Humans, Tokens

Green-White is the combination of Angels, Humans, and tokens. Oftentimes these overlap and can benefit from each other, such as the various Sigardas in the Cube. Humans also might be the most common creature type in the Cube.

U/W: Spirits

Blue-White focuses on spirits, with 24 total to draft. Just like with Vampires and Zombies, Spirits also have a number of lords in the form of Drogskol Captain, Patrician Geist, and Supreme Phantom.

B/G: Delirium, Graveyard Matters

While there are only six delirium cards, there are a good number of cards in black and green that care about the things in your graveyard. Cards like Spider Spawning and Crawling Sensation are just two of the many cards that you can focus on while putting cards into your graveyard.

U/G: Graveyard Matters, Investigate

While there aren’t a ton of cards that investigate overall, there are some key investigate cards in Blue-Green you can build around, like Ulvenwald Mysteries and Ongoing Investigation.

R/W: Aggro

Red-White doesn’t have much in the way of its own creature types or associated mechanics. It’s simply one of the aggro archetypes, supported by a range of cheap, aggressive creatures, burn, and removal.

U/R: Spells Matter

Blue-Red is primarily focused on noncreature spells, whether you’re getting them back from the graveyard or having them affect your creatures in various ways.

Bant: Investigate

This is basically the same as Blue-Green, but with the addition of white you gain access to Thraben Inspector and Dennick, Pious Apprentice to help you investigate.

Esper: Demons

Not only are Demons very cool and powerful creatures, winning with Liliana's Contract is a fun and viable plan. Calling the demon archetype “Esper” is generous, for sure. The only important cards in the archetype that aren’t monoblack are Possessed Goat, Tasha, the Witch Queen, and Clavileno, First of the Blessed. But they are worth considering for your black Demon deck if you can pick up the blue and white fixing.

Grixis: Wizards

Blue, black and red are the primary colors of Wizards in the Cube. While Wizards don’t have the same synergies as Vampires or Zombies, it’s still a great anchor point for the Spells Matter archetype. Sometimes the Wizards even overlap with other archetypes through cards like Geralf, Visionary Stitcher or Havengul Runebinder.

Mardu: Vampires

Mardu Vampires is simply what you get when you combine the Vampires in black and white with the Vampires in black and red. Whether to go three-color vamps or stick with two will depend on your card depth, but aggressive three-color decks are risky without excellent fixing, and the best ones tend to be base two-color with a splash, not an even spread across three colors.

Sultai: Self-Mill

Like Vampires, smashing the two self-mill color pairs together lands you in blue-black-green, where you can capitalize on maximum millage to feed the archetype.

Mix and Match

Some of my favorite cards are the ones that thematically overlap, such as Rodolf Duskbringer, who is a Vampire Angel, or Bloodletter of Aclazotz, who is a Vampire Demon. Psionic Ritual is another fun one that works well with Horrors but also fits into the Spells Matter decks.

Get Horrified!

That’s pretty much the Horror Cube in a nutshell! I look forward to seeing you all in the queue, and I hope you like the changes this year. Feel free to find me on either Bluesky, Twitch, or YouTube, as I’ll likely be streaming the Cube quite a bit as soon as it goes live!