Last year I took a dive into one of Magic's best formats, Cube. Cube is one of the best ways to play this amazing card game as it allows you to extract your favorite aspects of the game and turn it into a unique experience. This past year was my first time digging my teeth into this concept and I absolutely fell in love with it. I built my own Commander Cube and it has become a passion project of mine. I am incredibly motivated to build a new Cube, but that is a story for another day. Today I am looking back into last year to see just what cards spark inspiration in the hand of a Cube drafter.

What do I look for in a Cube card?

Cube is usually built around a theme surrounding color combinations, just as a draft set does. Cards need to be flexible and be able to fit into many facets of the themes surrounding a set. Individual cards that live in a Cube need to be just as flexible. The other thing I look for is something that challenges a player. Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis is a powerful legend that needs a lot of set up in order to play. This presents a player with a puzzle to solve while drafting, which is incredibly fun in my experience.

Cards that present multiple avenues to fit into the themes surrounding your Cube and/or cards that make your players start to assemble a puzzle of your design are the best cards to look out for when making a Cube.

So, what did we get from 2025 for the color White?

Honorable Mention - Team Avatar

We received Team Avatar at the tail end of 2025. This flexible piece of removal is a great option for draft, as you can decide to either discard it to deal some damage OR cast it and turn one of your creatures into a threat. This fits both categories of being flexible and assembling a puzzle. The goal is to put a bunch of creatures into play and then use this to remove a problematic creature or just start swinging for lethal. Token strategies are prolific as a draft archetype for White in a lot of different Cubes and I think this has some serious potential for those archetypes.

5. Will of the Mardu

Will of the Mardu is very similar to Team Avatar, but it can create a board of tokens or be a piece of removal instead of buffing one of your creatures. This card obviously shines better in the context of Commander or a Commander Cube, but it's also an extremely flexible card outside of the realm of Commander. It becomes a snap keep for decks focused on going wide with tokens, and it's a nice, clean removal option for anyone playing White. Instant speed combat tricks are invaluable when it comes to turning the tide in a Limited game and if this spell is cast at the most opportune time, it will be back breaking. I also find it amusing to put Commander-specific cards in the hands of Limited players that might not normally interact with that format.

4. United Front

United Front is a powerful X spell that helps grow your board in the blink of an eye at sorcery speed. The power of X spells grows dramatically when you look at them under the lens of Limited Magic. Most games, unless a perfect Aggro strategy is involved, will eventually reach a lull or standstill. Both you and your opponent start trying to assemble a way to break through each other's defenses or establish a crushing advantage engine. United Front goes the route of smashing straight through your opponent by creating an army of 2/2 creatures and growing the rest of your army. This card also plays perfectly in a token strategy or a +1/+1 counter strategy, which not only makes it powerful, but flexible!

3. Starry-Eyed Skyrider

The more I read and study this card the more I fall in love with its simplicity. Starry-Eyed Skyrider is a three-mana White creature that gives all your tokens flying. It also has flying itself, and gives yet another creature flying when it attacks. Evasion and removal are two of the best things you can have in a Limited environment. This card is evasive and provides a blanket of evasion to much of your board if built around correctly. I am a huge fan of cards that incentivize attacking and breaking stalemates, and one of the ways to do that is to include cards like this that can enable your whole team to go in for an alpha strike.

2. Cosmogrand Zenith

Cosmogrand Zenith is one of the strongest cards White has received in some time. This self-contained engine creates bodies and grows them all on for a three-mana investment. It fits perfectly in a token or +1/+1 counter shell as well as just being a solid 3-drop. Cosmogrand Zenith requires you to play two spells a turn to get full value out of it, which isn't impossible to do, but still will help guide your decision-making later in the drafting process.

1. Airbender Ascension

Airbender Ascension might be at the top of this list just because it feels like such a fun puzzle to solve, and boy do I love puzzles! It airbends a creature when it enters the battlefield, which is great for clearing a path for important combats or doubling up on creature enters abilities. Then, if you get four experience counters on this card, it becomes a Flicker engine. I love this design for Cube and the Enters/Blink strategy. It shares a lot of DNA with Soulherder in that it begs you to find the best way to build an engine with it. I love crafting engines and Airbender Ascension is a perfect candidate since it also pulls double duty as a tempo spell early on.

I hope this list has inspired you to go back and dig into the mountain of new cards release in 2025 and really consider them. If you do not have a Cube, this is the perfect time to start building one! For those of us that do have Cubes, let us continue to understand the joy of creating and maintaining our pet projects.

See you on the battlefield!

-Nigel