Commander Cube on MTGO

Posted on May 15, 2025

Commander Cube is coming to Magic Online ... draft four 15-card Cube boosters dense with legendary creatures and Commander favorites, build a 60-card Commander deck, and battle with it in four-player Commander games! 

The fun begins next Monday, May 19th with the two-day, single-game Preview League. Enter code CMDRCUBE2025 in the MTGO Store for a free-play Token for that League – one per account. Then the regular two-round Commander Cube League kicks off on Wednesday, May 21st. 

Overview 

We designed the Magic Online Commander Cube with the idea that in a good game of Commander—and especially in a format where you only get a couple of games with a given deck—every player should have a chance to do something threatening or pull off something interesting they intended for their deck to do. Accordingly, the curation leans towards the slower boardgame-style Commander games that typified the format in its earlier days. The Cube is “Bracket 2” by the standards of the new system, containing no Game Changers, no mass land denial, no two-card infinite combos, and no chained extra turns. Additionally, there are no effects that search libraries, and no mana artifacts that produce multiple colors of mana and cost less than three. 

While the curation contains many powerful cards that can end games, they generally require a sufficiently large battlefield such that they can only work once a game has been played to a satisfactory point. 

Clocking in at 810 cards, this is a large Cube with lots of variety. In each pod, four players will draft two cards per pack from four 15-card boosters and then construct 60-card decks. With only four players at a table, players will see about 30 percent of the Cube’s card pool each draft. This means you’ll see a wide variety of cards and decks across multiple drafts, but it also means that the themes and synergies are only loosely supported. There are utility cards that allow a wide variety of strategies to function, but there aren’t dedicated archetypes the way you’ll see in a lot of Cubes. 

There are some special rules in the Magic Online Commander Cube that differ from the rules of both traditional Draft and traditional Commander: 

• All colorless and mono-colored legendary creatures gain the partner ability – this will not appear on the card itself in the draft. These can partner with each other, or a 1-color card printed with partner - including Prismatic Piper (see below) 

• Any cards that were printed with partner or partner-like abilities (partner with, Choose a Background, and friends forever) can pair with each other. 

• • 1-color printed partners can pair with 1-color non-printed partners.  

• • 2-color printed partners cannot pair with 1-color non-printed partners. 

• • In this way, you can end up with as many as four colors in your deck’s color identity – two 2-color cards with printed partner. 

• Three-color legends cannot partner with anything. 

• Backgrounds can only be paired with creatures with Choose a Background. 

• Prismatic Piper has the partner ability, but it can pair only with mono-colored legends (printed partner or not).   

The Magic Online Commander Cube is a League event, i.e., players will draft in pods of four players and then play two out-of-pod games whenever they wish. Full event details can be found in this week’s Weekly Announcement Blog. 

Details and Tips 

Over 800 cards can be a lot to parse, and many of the cards in this cube will be different than cards you’d regularly see in a cube. Let’s walk through what each color is up to at a high level to give some context to the card-by-card decisions you’ll be making in the draft. 

White 

While Commander games are designed to last a little longer and powerful expensive cards play an important role, you’ll still want to draft a curve. There are a lot of effects that lead to players drawing extra cards, so it’s easier than usual to keep cards in your hand and generally advantageous to use your mana early as well as late. There are a lot of cheap creatures in this cube, but they generally shine because of their abilities rather than their power and toughness, as you’re not likely to win by attacking with cheap creatures. 

White’s cheap creatures mostly protect you or your other creatures, enable synergies, or draw cards. Blinking creatures as a theme is relatively well-supported in this Cube, and you’ll see a lot of creatures with abilities that trigger when they enter. 

Many of white’s more expensive creatures support the blinking theme, as “enters” effects scale with cost to become much more powerful, giving you a bigger bang for your buck on the blink spell. 

White’s spells offer a lot of spot removal, mass removal, and some protection, blink effects, token creation, and card drawing. 

Blue 

Blue’s cheap creatures offer some protection, some copying, and some card advantage. Blue creatures contain a lot of clones, further support for blinking, and plenty of ways to draw more cards. 

Blue’s spells feature a lot of counterspells, cantrips, and ways to draw cards, as well as a few bounce spells and ways to return cards from your graveyard to your library, which can be important to avoid decking yourself with all of blue’s card draw. 

Black 

Black creatures have a lot of synergy around creatures dying, with several creatures that make tokens, sacrifice tokens, or trigger when creatures die. As with all colors, a lot of black creatures have powerful “enters” abilities. 

Black has a lot of spot removal, some mass removal and card draw, and several ways to reanimate creatures. 

Red 

Red offers a lot of creatures that make tokens—it’s easiest to go wide with red, which can play well with white’s payoffs for having a lot of creatures and black’s payoffs for losing a lot of creatures. 

Red spells have a wide range of effects. There are some efficient spot-removal spells, several cards that deal damage to every creature, and red-style card draw that either requires discarding or playing the card(s) right away. Red also has multiple ways to gain control of multiple creatures, a classic way for red to end a game. 

Green 

With no cards that search libraries, Green is missing the typical cards that put lands from your library onto the battlefield, but it can still give you extra mana with creatures that tap for mana. Almost all of the green creatures that tap for mana can tap for any color of mana, so green is a great base color if you’re trying to play three or more colors. While it can’t ramp with traditional Rampant Growth-style library-searching spells, it does have ways to play additional lands, so you won’t always lose your mana advantage to a sweeper. Green also has a handful of landfall effects to pair with cards that allow you to play extra lands. 

Green has the mammoth creatures, Naturalize effects, and graveyard recursion you would expect, as well as some support for going wide. 

Artifacts 

The cube has no traditional color-restricted signets, but it has several artifacts that tap for any color or for colorless mana that can go in any deck as well as a lot of artifacts that draw a card when they enter to support artifact-based Commanders. 

Multicolor 

Most multicolor cards will be potential Commanders, but you can always play them in your deck instead. For each color pair, there is only a single card that can’t be your commander, and every three-color card can be your Commander. There are notably no four- or five-color cards, and the only way to play a four-color deck is by partnering two multicolor partners. Most possible Commanders will be pretty open-ended but offer the ability to provide some direction without needing anything too narrow. 

Lands 

Because lands are difficult to interact with, the utility offered by lands outside of color-fixing is minimal. The indestructible tapped artifact lands are present, and you can find synergies with them as artifacts and their indestructibility can protect them from the few land destruction cards. 

Deckbuilding 

Because players tend to draw a lot of cards in games with this cube, it can be particularly punishing any time you don’t have a land to play on your turn–players are recommended to generally play more than 26 lands in a 60-card deck. 

This cube features several cards that allow you to return cards from your graveyard to your library–games can last a long time, and players often draw a lot of cards. While you won’t need to have one of these effects in most games, they can offer easy insurance against decking, which can happen with 60-card decks in long games of Commander. Unlike normal Commander, you are allowed to play more than 60 cards in this format, and it can be a reasonable consideration if you have concerns about running out of cards. 

Commander Cube is a new feature on Magic Online, and we’re excited to offer players this great way to play balanced games of Commander against strangers without needing complicated sorting, a long conversation, or playing at the absolute highest power level. This cube is designed to capture the magic of low-power Commander for which it was originally designed, presented in a format that delivers all the benefits and fun of Draft. 

Iteration Considerations 

In choosing the initial set of rules for Commander Cube, the guiding philosophy was to leverage as much as possible the rules for Commander draft that were already in place from our support of the Commander Legends and Commander Masters formats. We will iterate on the rules and event structure for any future Commander Cube offerings based on player feedback and the data on player participation and individual card performance.

We hope you give Commander Cube a try—remember you can do so for free on May 19th—and then let us know what you think! Join our Discord and share your thoughts on Commander Cube and any other Magic Online topics on your mind! 

Cube List

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Magic Online Commander Cube (810 cards)