Tinkerer’s Cube Comes to MTG Arena

Tinkerer’s Cube is a Phantom Draft format. Players will draft three 14-card packs, but cards you pick will not be added to your collection.

Event Details

Dates: September 3–16, 2021

Format: Phantom Draft Best-of-One and Phantom Draft Traditional Best-of-Three

Entry: 4,000 gold or 600 gems

Match Record:

• Best-of-One: 7 wins or 3 losses (whichever comes first)
• Traditional Best-of-Three: 3 matches (regardless of win/loss record)

Rewards:

Historic individual card rewards (ICRs) grant cards from pack releases on MTG Arena. They do not include cards that were released outside of packs (e.g., cards from Historic Anthologies). Historic uncommon ICRs have a 5% upgrade rate to rare. Historic rare ICRs may upgrade to a mythic rare; each rare is twice as likely to be awarded as each mythic rare.

The Tinkerer’s Cube focuses more on card interactions than individual power, and new additions from Jumpstart: Historic Horizons haven’t changed that. This draft experience emphasizes cards that fit together in multiple ways, even surprising ways that you didn’t expect going in. Each color pair features multiple mechanical themes, and cards that can interact with several possible themes (both on- and off-color!) will be especially useful to players trying to make the most out of their picks. Decks will often end up dabbling in several different archetypes, and it can easily be your second or even third theme that provides the key to victory.

Themes emphasized in this Tinkerer’s Cube include:

• White/Blue: flying creatures and blinking
• Blue/Black: discard-and-reanimate and on-hit effects (dealing combat damage to the opponent)
• Black/Red: treasure and sacrificing creatures
• Red/Green: large creatures and fighting
• Green/White: tokens and enchantments
• White/Black: lifegain and +1/+1 counters
• Black/Green: deathtouch and self-mill
• Green/Blue: lands and artifact tokens
• Blue/Red: looting and spells
• Red/White: equipment and graveyard matters

You may be thinking that many of these themes push up against each other and steal from each other’s territory—and you would be right! These themes and the cards that feed into them create a lot of interlocking pieces that can be put to a variety of interesting uses. Each deck will have a unique blend of this, that, and the other. How you put those pieces to use will be the key!

This iteration also includes a learn and lesson package from Strixhaven: School of Mages, allowing players to put even more of their picks to use in each game. The lower raw power level of Tinkerer’s Cube leaves room for learn cards to still make the grade, and their versatility plays directly into the modular, interactive gameplay that this cube is all about. And to better flesh out players’ lesson plans, the cube contains four copies of the mana-fixing lesson card, Environmental Sciences. (Of course, since each draft only uses two-thirds of the cards from the entire cube, you’ll still need to properly prioritize your studies if you want to make sure you have access!)