Chris Wolf's Vintage Supreme Draft

Posted on Jan 12, 2026

After a couple of fits and starts, we’re ready to show off our curated take on the Magic Online Vintage Cube in the pick-two-and-toss-’em world of Supreme Draft. But be hasty – this League is only on from downtime on Wednesday, January 14 until the release of Lorwyn Eclipsed next Tuesday, January 20 ...  

A Supreme Overhaul

Greetings, Cube enthusiasts! As most of you know, this is not our first attempt to introduce this fresh take on the Supreme Draft format. There have been many Supreme Drafts on Magic Online before. Usually, the format involves drafting your card pool by opening 18 booster packs of a single set or Cube, picking two cards from each pack and discarding the rest. Essentially, it’s a Booster Draft where your pool is made entirely of first and second picks, creating an ultra-powerful version of the usual Draft experience for a given format. 

While simply drafting an existing Cube or set with the “pick two, toss the rest” rule has proved fun enough to bring back many times, there are some problematic aspects to the format. Due to the “oops, all first picks” nature of it, Supreme Draft creates extremely powerful decks. Strategies that might be powerful in regular Vintage Cube—like ramping to Minsc & Boo, Timeless Heroes with Birds of Paradise or beating down on your opponents with Ocelot Pride backed up by Swords to Plowshares—just aren’t effective when your opponent is casting Tinker to fetch Bolas’s Citadel and storming you out on Turn 1.  

This dynamic creates a Vintage Cube environment where only a quarter of the cards are even worth considering, to the point that entire colors—white, green, and most of red—were rendered unplayable to the competitive player. In addition to the dead-card issue, traditional Supreme Draft offers 18 packs, yielding 36 cards. With dual lands and fast mana like Mox Jet and friends taking up land slots in your final deck, it was easy to end up with too few playables, bad mana, no sideboard cards, or all of the above. With Vintage Supreme Draft, we have attempted to solve those problems. 

Drafting Constructed Decks

First, while we have run many sets and Vintage Cubes in the Supreme Draft style, we have never offered a Supreme Draft experience with a Cube curated specifically with Supreme Draft in mind—until now! By building a curation with the “all first picks” style in mind, we were able to craft an environment where every card in the pack has a home in an archetype and could be a justifiable pick for the player in that lane. 

After running into system-related issues earlier this year, we once again had to switch things up a bit, but feel that we have found very workable solutions to all these problems: 

1. We increased the number of packs from 18 to 23, yielding 46 cards. This is much closer to what you would get in a regular Draft, allowing for ample “land slot” picks, and bolstering potential sideboard options without leaving yourself short on playables.
2. We introduced duplicates into the Cube itself. This increases consistency both for colors that have a lower total number of impactful cards in a format like this and the combos you might be gunning for, which helps make every direction a viable option. 

While this Cube contains a ton of duplicates, we also decided to respect the Vintage restricted list, because ultimately this Cube is looking to provide you with the unique opportunity to “draft your own Vintage deck”. To deliver on this promise, every key piece that doesn’t find itself on that restricted list is doubled, yielding a 90% chance of seeing it any given draft. 

That said, Vintage Supreme Draft still has a ton of variance. Even if highly likely, you might not open the combo piece you wanted the most or be faced with tough packs that have two pieces of Power and a card you really want for your deck. So, it’s still a puzzle that takes skill to solve. With that, let’s dig into what this Cube has to offer! 

Card Categories

Fast Mana - Lots of It

This Cube is all about going hard and fast, whether you’re trying to lock your opponents out of the game, establish control and overwhelm them with card advantage or combo them out. No matter the strategy, you want to draft and play at least some of these all-time great mana producers.

Combos Galore

Time Vault plus a way to untap it is one of the most powerful combos in Magic, and while it does not actually win the game on its own, it’s not difficult to find a way when you’re taking as many extra turns as you like.

Thassa’s Oracle is one of the centerpieces for various combos in this Cube. If you can find a way to empty your library, “Thoracle” will win you the game.

These cards form a well-known combo from regular Vintage Cube that uses Brain Freeze to provide fuel for escaping Underworld Breach over and over again, while Lion’s Eye Diamond, Lotus Petal, and Black Lotus provide the mana until you’re able to mill your opponent out, or cast a Thassa’s Oracle from your graveyard.

“Regular” Storm is certainly a thing here as well. Tinker + Bolas’s Citadel is one of the more powerful enablers, especially when you toss in a Sensei's Divining Top, or simply cast a bunch of Dark Ritual effects and rebuy them with Yawgmoth’s Will until you’ve assembled enough of a storm count to Tendrils of Agony or Brain Freeze them out.

Another Vintage Cube classic that is represented here as well are the Draw-7 combos. Hullbreacher usually wins you the game on the spot after a Timetwister effect, but Orcish Bowmasters and Sheoldred, the Apocalypse are powerful combo options as well, but are much riskier in this environment than in regular Vintage Cube.

Top + Forge do a lot of heavy lifting on their own, but throw a Fleshraker into the mix and you’ve got yourself a kill as long as you have more cards left in your deck than your opponent has life total. But even if not, you’ll likely find a way to win because you’re drawing your entire deck to boot!

Krark-Clan Ironworks is pretty powerful when you just happen to have a bunch of Moxen lying around, but can go a lot larger –and even infinite—when you throw in Myr Retriever and Scrap Trawler.

Last, but not least, we have a combo that doesn’t necessarily win the game. But drawing your entire deck while putting all lands directly onto the battlefield will yield one most of the time. 

Disrupting Their Plan

With the combos and ways to speed them out established, we’re now turning our gaze on how to stop them.

Counterspells, especially the free kind, are important in this sort of environment to stop your opponents from resolving powerful spells, especially when you happen to lose the die roll.

Discard is another way to disrupt your opponent, but here it will often be used to Peek and make sure the way is clear for your combos.

Naturally, artifact hate is plentiful in this Cube curation given all the fast artifact mana. Artifacts not only lead to very powerful combos, but at least some amount will appear in every deck to speed up whatever strategy they’re following.

Against decks full of Moxen, trying to stop, disincentivize, or punish their deployment represents a viable path for counterplay. The most powerful decks in this Cube are very powerful indeed, but can also be very fragile, so this angle of attack can be quite effective.

There are also several other avenues of disruption that are mainly focused on stopping opponents from going off on multiple axes. The key to open this pathway is redundancy, because barring a couple of unique cards and effects, you don’t want to pick these cards very highly. So there’s lots of them in the Cube so you can find them when needed.

Anti-Hate

When you are trying to combo your opponents out on Turn 1 but happen to lose the die roll, you don’t want to be dead to a Null Rod. So, much like with the hate cards, the Cube has a bunch of anti-hate, which gives combo decks a chance to wiggle their way out of a lock.

Mainly, you’re trying to deal with permanents, such as Chalice of the Void and Thalia, Guardian of Thraben, so you need ways to get rid of them. A couple of removal and/or bounce spells should usually do the trick if you can tutor for them. Just make sure you have at least some amount of counterplay, otherwise you’ll be in a tough spot.

Archetypes

There are several different themes to explore here, but the main thing you might want to do before diving in is explore some actual Vintage decklists. However, this being a singleton Cube, there’s still a bunch of variety.

Combo

This section is largely explained by the “Combos” section and is mostly based in Dimir and Artifacts, with some dipping into Red for Underworld Breach or Wheel of Fortune. Just make sure to pack some anti-hate, so you don’t get hosed by a single Collector Ouphe and the likes. Here are a couple of examples: 

Aggro

Creature-based aggro decks rely heavily on disruption and hate to stall or lock-out the combo decks long enough for their creatures to end the game. These decks are largely based in White and/or Red, but can also make use of Green and its hate-pieces, or even Blue or Black for disruption. Artifacts also present the ability to draft Sphereshops-type decks that make use of cards like Sphere of Resistance and Trinisphere to disrupt opponents while beating down with Patchwork Automaton, Scrawling Crawler and the like. 

Midrange & Control

These decks rely less on explosiveness and focus more on grinding out opponents. This still requires a bunch of disruption and hate, but it usually comes in the form of permission like Force of Negation and Force of Will. The advantage of building more grindy decks is that you don’t need a whole lot of Moxen for them to function and thus are generally more consistent. Once you have taken control of the game, you can start grinding out your opponents using almost anything, but generally speaking you either want powerful engines like Lurrus of the Dream-Den or powerful threats such as Phyrexian Dreadnought.

The Simic decks function in a very similar fashion. As long as you have your core of disruption, you can take it into several different directions

So, this is it! For full information, check the complete card list below or visit the full card list on Cube Cobra and below. Special thanks to our testers, as well as shoutouts to Magic Online creators Justin “IamActuallyLvL1” Gennari and Caleb “CalebD” Durward for their input! 

Card List