Checking In with the Magic Online Vintage Cube
Posted on Mar 07, 2025
Checking In with the Magic Online Vintage Cube
Greetings, Vintage Cube enthusiasts! I want to look back and look ahead at the Magic Online Vintage Cube, but first we have three exciting announcements for you today:
Free Vintage Cube Preview: We are celebrating major advances on the performance front with a free Vintage Cube preview next week! Check out this week’s Weekly Announcement Blog for all the details – win a single game during this League to get the exclusive Scythecat Cube avatar!
Also, be sure to check out the article on the changes to the Cube coming next week.
The Bundle Returns: Our popular Holiday Bundle is making a special return appearance in the MTGO Store next week - $27 USD will get you 3 Vintage Cube Draft Tokens plus this bundle’s exclusive avatar – Loot, the Pathfinder! We’ll have full details about this in next Tuesday’s Blog before it goes on sale on Wednesday, March 12.
Always-On Vintage Cube: We are trying out an “always-on” Vintage Cube queue to Magic Online! No more wondering if some type of Vintage Cube is up—starting with the new Vintage Cube coming next week, the answer is always Yes! Full details are at the end of this article, but this is something Vintage Cube enthusiasts have been wanting for a long time, and we think we have the right approach to both give new sets their time in the spotlight while also making the fan-favorite Vintage Cube experience available.
OK, let’s take a look at where we’ve been and where we are going!
2024 Vintage Cube in Review
We learned a lot from our Vintage Cube offerings in 2024, and many of the lessons are informing where we are headed from here. Here are some of the innovations we introduced in ’24, and what we learned from them.
MOAR CUBE: First, we looked to find more places to run Vintage Cube while still giving new Magic releases their time in the spotlight. We kept a close eye on queue health and overall participation to make sure the demand was there, and everything stayed healthy. This success has led to our decision to make Vintage Cube available whenever Magic Online is up starting with next week’s Cube launch.
Vintage Cube LIVE: In partnership with Ultimate Guard, we pulled off one of the coolest, most unique events in Magic: The Gathering history: a live, tabletop Vintage Cube draft in which the competitors kept the cards they drafted!
We were thrilled to have pulled this off, but we are unlikely to repeat it soon—if ever—in the form it took last year. The physical component represented a significant cost and logistical challenge, but it taught us more about the appetite for exciting Vintage Cube events with top-heavy prizes. We are exploring ways to meet that demand without the context of a complicated live tournament while still rewarding players without adding excessive in-game resources into the economy.
Themed Vintage Cubes: Historically, when a new Vintage Cube has appeared on Magic Online, it was part of the lineage of changelists dating back to the first Magic Online Vintage Cube launched in 2012. We tried two standalone “themed” Vintage Cubes in 2024 that were not part of the “changelist lineage” of the Magic Online Vintage Cube
- Nostalgia Cube: The online version of the Cube used in the finals of the Magic Online Vintage Cube LIVE event was a nostalgic, retro-leaning Vintage Cube showcasing more classic old-school cards that you will find in the canon Magic Online Vintage Cube.
- No Holds Barred: The second was our “No Holds Barred” Vintage Cube in which we did not make any cuts for play-pattern purposes. If a card or strategy warranted inclusion based on power level and it was possible to support it in the Vintage Cube context, it went in. Time Vault and the Initiative mechanic are the poster children for what this Cube was about.
These alternative Cube experiences went in different directions: In one case we had less powerful but nostalgic cards in an environment where some older strategies that have lost a step in modern Vintage Cube were still effective. In the other, we took the promise of “the most powerful strategies Magic Online has to offer” to the most extreme we could support.
In a result that matched our expectations, “No Holds Barred” was significantly more popular than the Vintage Cube LIVE! “Nostalgia Cube “experience, and we are planning 2025 accordingly, with a return of No Holds Barred later in the year while the retro Cube will stay on the bench.
Archetype Rotation: Last year we made four high-change, archetype-driven Vintage Cube updates with small “polish” updates shortly after. You can’t please everyone with every Cube iteration, so the archetype philosophy was about offering more variety in the strategies that appeared throughout the year so that more players would enjoy the return of a personal favorite.
While this did make a wider variety of strategies available during the year, there was a cost in turnover complexity with the high changelist counts, and in having Vintage Cubes that were less powerful overall than they could have been in service of variety, so we are looking to tune this approach a bit in 2025.
Looking Ahead
The guiding principle of curating the Magic Online Vintage Cube remains “the most powerful, fun, and supportable strategies that Magic has to offer,” but lessons learned in ’24 are influencing how we are executing on that philosophy in ’25.
A New Cadence: With six Standard sets this year, we are increasing the number of major updates to six from four to match. We are reducing the average size of each changelist, and we are eliminating planned “polish pass” from our Cube schedule. Each iteration will look to audition Vintage Cube candidates from the newest set(s), rotating in archetypes and cards from the past more organically as they serve a given iteration as opposed to archetype-rotation being a specific goal for each round.
We will not force anything when it comes to new cards—there is no minimum quantity we aim to include, and we never use Vintage Cube slots with the goal of promoting a new set. To iterate on the Vintage Cube properly, though, we must take some chances on cards with clear potential that might prove underpowered—you can only do so much elimination through theory-crafting before you need to run the borderline card to see if it can hang. Creatures, in particular, are more powerful on average now than they have ever been, and there can be a fine line between “new staple” and “close but not quite” when it comes to the plethora of historically-potent creatures we are seeing in new sets these days.
We will consider small polish passes on a case-by-case basis, and implement them when there are some clear tweaks we want to make to improve the current experience. This is particularly important in a world where a given iteration will be available to play for a couple of months instead of a couple of weeks.
Unbar All the Holds: The No Holds Barred update of the Vintage Cube was successful enough last year that we plan to revisit it later this year, probably in the same Thanksgiving timeframe we ran it last year.
Always-On Magic Online Vintage Cube: Historically Magic Online has not offered Vintage Cube all the time—we bring it out to offer a fresh experience once a new Magic set has been out for a bit and interest in drafting it has declined. This usage philosophy has been rooted in a few key ideas.
- Overall queue health: The more event queues we offer, the slower each of them fires as the audience is further split among them.
- New-set focus: When promoting something new in your entertainment business, you generally want to clear the docket of other distractions and put all the focus on the new thing. Not having a Vintage Cube available at the launch of a new set helps keep the focus on the new set, which then helps with the next consideration.
- New-set card supply: When a new set launches, demand for the cards is at its highest and supply of cards at its lowest. If we have a Vintage Cube league available when a new set launches, we are offering drafters an experience that detracts from solving the supply/demand pinch present at the launch of a new set.
- Vintage Cube queue health: There has been an historical concern that if we offer Vintage Cube for long stretches, interest will wane to the point that the experience would degrade from a declining fire rate.
Last year we ran more Vintage Cube than ever before, and for longer stretches than we had before. We watched for the concerns above, and while not absent entirely, the level to which the concerns manifested themselves with the increased Vintage Cube availability was not significant enough to suggest we shouldn’t proceed with a trial of always-on Vintage Cube!
There are three main event types we have traditionally made available during a Vintage Cube run: a play-when-you-want League with out-of-pod play, an in-pod single-elimination queue in which you play your matches immediately after drafting, and some amount of 64-player single-elimination scheduled events.
Given the results from last year, we feel comfortable offering a new always-on single-elimination Vintage Cube queue because participation requires setting aside a few hours to play out the event. That fact combined with a more top-heavy prize structure than traditional Leagues should predominantly attract players for whom Vintage Cube is the primary reason they play Magic Online. We hope it will generate mostly additive play instead of diverting problematic numbers of players away from our new Standard set offerings.
This is the biggest risk in this experiment, and if we decide to roll back always-on Vintage Cube, it will likely be because we found the negative impact on the new-set queue population to be too damaging to the already-strained supply/demand cycle that starts with the launch of a new set.
The other factor that could lead to a rollback is poor queue health. If interest in this new Vintage Cube Single Elimination queue slows to the point that players are leaving the queue before it fires at heavy rates, that will be a sign for us that we may need to pull back from “always-on” availability and keep it to focused windows as before.
We are excited to offer this queue—we think it will be powerful for Vintage Cube enthusiasts to have confidence that a Vintage Cube Draft queue will be waiting for them on Magic Online regardless of the event calendar. No schedules to look up and memorize—just drop in and play!
Here are the full details of the new Single Elimination Vintage Cube queue:
8-Player Single-Elimination Queue
Location: Limited Play Lobby -> Draft
Players: 8, fires immediately upon filling
Structure: Draft, then play up to 3 match wins or 1 match loss. Cards drafts will not be added to players’ Collections.
Entry Options:
- 10 Event Tickets
- 100 Play Points
- 1 Vintage Cube Draft Token (only when offered – currently March 12-April 2)
Prizes:
- 1st Place – 400 Play Points and 3 Qualifier Points
- 2nd Place – 200 Play Points and 1 Qualifier Point
- 3rd-4th Places – 1 Qualifier Point
Good Luck, Have Fun
A big thanks to the Vintage Cube community for all the support and feedback as we have explored what the format should be on Magic Online. We hope that with all we’ve learned and all we’re trying, 2025 will be the best year for Vintage Cube we’ve ever had! Be sure to check out the article on the latest Vintage Cube Update to get ready for the free preview league next week, and we’ll see you on the battlefield!
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