Cube is the greatest way to play Magic: the Gathering. To celebrate the game’s upcoming 30th anniversary and our favorite format, we analyzed cube data to understand what card first printed in each year of the game’s history most-utilized in the format that’s often viewed as a museum of Magic history.

But what is Cube?

Cube is a a custom limited format that treats Magic: the Gathering as the base rules for a draft of the Cube creator’s imagination, using any combination of the game’s library of over 25,000 game pieces to make as complex and replayable experience as they desire. Wizards of the Coast’s own Melissa DeTora wrote a guide to building your first Cube, if you’re interested in reading more about the format!

Methodology

To generate these results, we analyzed the lists of the 120 most popular cubes on Cube Cobra that fit the following criteria: 1) the cubes were active: they had been updated during calendar year 2023; 2) the cubes were non-restricted: they did not exclude cards based on rarity, constructed legality, expansion, flavor, etc; 3) the cube is intended for 8-person draft with 1v1 games: which requires a list of at least 360 cards with rules close enough to retail draft.

The top 500 most-followed cubes on CubeCobra were vetted with these metrics, and many of the parameters were judged based on the written explanation from a Cube’s curator. The purpose of these restrictions was to remove biases that other cubes would introduce. For example, as you can see from a quick tour of Lucky Paper’s Cube Map, the combined volume of Peasant, Pauper, Commander, and Set cubes make up what appears to be a slight majority of CubeCobra’s volume, and we wanted to represent curator’s unrestricted preferences.

Infographic: MTG Cube’s Most Popular Card by Year

If you’re active in the Cube community, whether on Discord, on the new Cube sub-Reddit, or, if you prefer old-school styled Internet chat, on the excellent Riptide Lab forum, none of these are particularly surprising, except perhaps Retrofitter Foundry, a card that was, until a few years ago, considered a “hidden gem” among Cube curators.

Lightning Bolt, from the game’s first expansion, tops the list in more than one way, seeing a higher play rate than even the fetch or shock lands with 93% participation in the 120 cubes studied here. Excluding this year’s result, which is liable to change (and also reflects many Cube curators’ penchant for being a set or so behind in updating their lists), the lowest-performing card on the list is Opt, a card that I was surprised was as high as it was, considering the great diversity of cantrips in the long history of Magic.

Year	Top Card	Expansion	Play Rate
1993	Lightning Bolt	LEA	93%
1994	Chain Lightning	LEG	78%
1995	Brainstorm	ICE	91%
1996	Force of Will	ALL	65%
1997	Wasteland	TMP	73%
1998	Mana Leak	STH	86%
1999	Mother of Runes	ULG	75%
2000	Opt	INV	59%
2001	Firebolt	ODY	67%
2002	Allied Fetch Lands	ONS	93%
2003	Carrion Feeder	SCG	50%
2004	Eternal Witness	5DN	76%
2005	Shock Lands	RAV	90%
2006	Shock Lands	GPT	90%
2007	Thoughtseize	LRW	88%
2008	Vendilion Clique	MOR	81%
2009	Enemy Fetch Lands	ZEN	93%
2010	Preordain	M11	81%
2011	Snapcaster Mage	ISD	90%
2012	Faithless Looting	DKA	87%
2013	Young Pyromancer	M14	84%
2014	Monastery Swiftspear	KTK	79%
2015	Monastery Mentor	FRF	74%
2016	Tireless Tracker	SOI	87%
2017	Abrade	HOU	84%
2018	Retrofitter Foundry	C18	66%
2019	Bonecrusher Giant	ELD	83%
2020	Skyclave Apparition	ZNR	82%
2021	Ignoble Hierarch	MH2	84%
2022	Boseiju, Who Endures	NEO	71%
2023	Atraxa, Grand Unifier	ONE	41%

We’ve got more Cube analysis coming in the next few weeks and new Magic: the Gathering infographics and analysis every week, so if you’ve enjoyed this article, please sign up for our newsletter to find out first and make sure to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and now, Threads!!