Magic: The Gathering’s silver-bordered “Un-sets” — Unglued, Unhinged, Unstable, and Unfinity — were built as joke sets, and for most of their history they weren’t considered deep wells for serious Cube drafting. Unstable changed that by being designed with cube play explicitly in mind, and Unfinity went further by making some cards tournament-legal outright. Here’s what actually earns a slot, and what to know before you build an Un-cube.
Unstable vs. Unfinity as a base for your cube
If you’re mixing Un-set cards into a cube rather than drafting a standalone Un-set, Unstable is the more complete draft experience on its own and is the backbone most Un-cube builders use, layering in Unglued, Unhinged, and Unfinity cards on top. Unstable’s white-blue (Azorius) archetype is a genuine synergy package built around artifact creatures you sacrifice to assemble Contraptions, which plays like a real draft archetype rather than a novelty. Unfinity’s uncommons lean heavily on set-specific mechanics — stickers, dice rolling, attractions — that need extra physical components to work, which is part of why some cube builders find Unfinity more polarizing to include wholesale even though individual cards from it are strong.
Individual Unfinity cards worth including
- Embiggen — one of the small number of genuinely tournament-legal cards Unfinity released; it usually grants a creature at least +2/+2 and opens deckbuilding choices without needing any of the joke-set physical components.
- Saw in Half — flexible enough removal/combat trick that cube builders cite it for having a wide range of good plays depending on the board state.
- Nearby Planet — functions like Transguild Promenade with extra upside, and is particularly strong in a cube that supports a five-color “Domain” strategy.
- Killer Cosplay — called out specifically as a strong include for any cube running a heavy volume of artifacts, fitting the same sacrifice-for-value shell Unstable’s Azorius archetype wants.
Individual Unstable / Unhinged cards worth including
- Everythingamajig — the highest-value non-foil card from Unstable and a real cube include on its own, valued around $6.49 for the non-foil single — a high-impact artifact that Un-cube builders single out by name rather than including the set wholesale.
- Old Fogey (Unhinged) — plays into the loose tribal support for chickens, expansion-symbol creatures, and donkeys that runs through the Un-sets, and is worth including specifically if your cube leans into that tribal joke synergy rather than as a generic value card.
Practical notes before you build one
Un-set cards are silver-bordered and not legal in sanctioned non-Un tournaments (with the small exception of Unfinity’s black-bordered, tournament-legal subset like Embiggen) — treat an Un-cube strictly as a casual/kitchen-table format, and say so up front to anyone you’re drafting with. A vanilla, retail-accurate Unstable cube generally runs 4 copies of each common, 2 of each uncommon, and 1 of each mythic/rare to mimic the actual booster experience; a mixed Un-cube pulling from all four sets drops that structure in favor of singleton picks like the ones above.