MenguCube!!!

Posted on Nov 04, 2025

Magic Online’s Season of the Cube continues with the victor of the MTGO Creator Cube vote – the MenguCube designed by Pro Tour Champion Andrea Mengucci! This Cube returns for its second time in the MTGO spotlight. 

Read all about it here, then go play it starting tomorrow, November 5. Hurry – it's on for just one week! 

Welcome to the MenguCube! Thank you for voting my Cube out of the amazing options that our MTGO creators had available!

What I offer to you is a Vintage Cube with some extra love for high-power Magic and Blue! 

Cube Origin

I started the MenguCube in 2017 with my local play group, first inspired by the Magic Online one and then changing it little by little.

In 2018 I decided to foil out the paper cube and that was an amazing decision because getting to play with fully-blinged out decks in paper is a fantastic experience! On MTGO, it not quite the same, but we’ll make sure to use all the proper art for maximum eye pleasure.

In 2019 I brought the Mengu Cube to MagicFest Las Vegas, and thanks to ChannelFireball I was able to host side events letting people play my cube! Since then, it’s been chilling in my house but I play that very regularly with my group of friends.

4-player Cube is our preferred way to play this Cube (mostly because it’s hard to find more players) and we do Teams 2 vs. 2.

We always add the results of the Cube to a spreadsheet that’s going since 2017 and it has right now a whopping 5,424 matches recorded! We also write down Deck Archetypes, Win Rates and Trophy Win Rates. So yes we play just for fun, but the stats matter to us!

Whenever I host guests of my Youtube Channel or Magic friends, they can’t wait to play the MenguCube and so the spreadsheet has honorable names like Simon Nielsen, Thoralf Severin, Carl Perks and Liam Kane!

Last year I decided to showcase the MenguCube on my Youtube Channel, so if you want to take a look at some pretty foil cards as well as getting an idea on what’s the MenguCube like that, click this link. 

Why Play MenguCube? 

The biggest difference from the MTGO Cube is because our play group loves higher power level Magic, more Blue cards and more Artifact, which are the best “colors” in the game! 

Some of the cards that you can find in MenguCube and not in the MTGO Vintage Cube are White Plume Adventurer and Seasoned Dungeoneer, Initiative isn’t a balanced mechanic in 1 vs. 1 Magic and White Plume Adventurer is even banned in Legacy, but I love it in Vintage Cube to push fast strategies like Mono-White or Boros Aggro. Creature decks tend to struggle against Combo and I love to give them all the support they need. 

The power level we’re aiming for is the highest there is with one main exception: Time Vault. We tried it in the past but the combo with Manifold Key or Tezzeret, the Seeker was simply too broken and not fun. It was super hard to interact with very few tools to fight. 

In the MenguCube you’ll find all the broken combos you want: Hullbreacher + Timetwister; Witherbloom Apprentice + Chain of Smog; Auriok Salvagers + Black Lotus; Flash, Channel, Oath of Druids, and of course Reanimator and Storm. 

Contributions from the Omenpaths

The newest set on MTGO, Through the Omenpaths, has lots of cool additions from it that we still haven’t tried in paper, but I’m eager to try on MTGO as soon as possible! 

Kavaero, Mind-Bitten looks like a very solid addition to UB Reanimator, but also any Midrange deck that can get value with it especially copying creatures with enters-the-battlefield effects and blinking Kavaero over and over. 

Goben, Gene-Splice Savant is a better version of Suspicious Stowaway, a card I love in UB decks. Conniving lets you grow it out of range and the ability to flip it into Fleem, Goben’s Creation is rather cheap and definitely a nice bonus to a card that’s already solid. 

Multiversal Passage is a super useful land that will happily fit in most decks, especially two color one- like Boros Aggro, who desperately need to hit their color requirement as early as Turn 1. We’re trying it over City of Brass! 

Nia, Skysail Storyteller is a card advantage tool that you can happily cast on Turn 2. Unlike Abbot of Keral Keep where you needed to cast the card right away, you can curve out with Nia and then play the card you reveal next turn (as long as Nia survives) and that seems pretty good for a Red 2 drop that can flip into a lategame threat! 

Finally Cren, Undercity Dreamer is a very aggressively-costed creature that you can play on Turn 2 to start your aggression or on 6 mana to attack with a hasty threat! 

Archetype Breakdown

Artifacts is probably the most fun archetype to draft, and when it comes together it can easily be the best one undisputed. 

The MenguCube has a ton of support for it with very many cheap artifacts that you can exploit for Tolarian Academy, Urza, High Lord Artificer or Paradoxical Outcome. 

Tinker is the strongest card in the archetype and leads to some very quick wins with cards like Bolas’s Citadel or Inkwell Leviathan. 

Reanimator is another classic: good old Turn 1 Entomb for Griselbrand, Turn 2 Animate Dead never gets old. 

The addition of 10 Surveil Lands has facilitated this archetype a lot which now has more chances of binning the needed creatures to help you go off. Definitely take those higher than you would normally in other decks and don’t be afraid of playing them off-color here. 

Red strategies are safe and will work! Red decks have the highest win rate in our spreadsheet. Whether they are Mono-Red, Boros or Izzet, attacking the opponent is consistent and will punish durdly opponents or whose deck focused a bit too much on their late game. 

The same goes for White Aggro, who actually has an even higher win rate than Mono-Red (although with a smaller sample size) and that can go very well with Blue, Red, or Black, but don’t for any reason draft straight Selesnya, that’s a forbidden combination! 

We worked very hard to make Green look good in Cube, but it’s honestly the worst color in Magic, so when you put together all the best cards ever Green will look a bit weak. You can still get your wins with a nice Gruul Aggro deck powered by Minsc and Boo, Timeless Heroes, but the Green Ramp strategies with Elves and Nissa, Who Shakes the World tend to struggle. 

The best Green deck involves Nadu, Winged Wisdom, a card so powerful that it can carry a whole color and one of the few reasons to start your draft in Green. The Nadu archetype is supported well and you can find all the important tools to tutor your Nadu and combo with it in the MenguCube. 

Another good green card is Natural Order: that’s still a one card combo with creatures like Progenitus or Craterhoof Behemoth, but that’s going to struggle against the faster combo decks. 

Vedalken Shackles is my pet card and one that I tend to pick and play any time I see it. Lots of people underrate it, but the card can easily take over against Aggro or Midrange and it’s not hard to make work especially with Triomes and Surveil lands that also count as Islands. 

So my final suggestion to you is to draft blue and take that Vedalken Shackles when you see it! 

Card List