Crucible refractories are very important for the quality of titanium alloy smelting. In order to develop novel crucible material with high performance, in this work, Y2O3-Al2O3-MgO-CaO composite refractories were prepared with commercial yttrium oxide and Al2O3-MgO-CaO powders (AMC) as raw materials, and the effects of sintering temperature (i.e., 1 500 ℃, 1 600 ℃) and AMC contents (i.e., 0, 25%, 50%, 75% and 100%, in mass fraction) on the phase compositions, sintering properties (i.e., linear shrinkage, volumetric shrinkage, apparent porosity, and bulk density), compressive strength at room temperature, thermal shock resistance and microstructures of as-prepared refractories were investigated. The results show that the most properties of the composites are improved, compared with Y2O3 and AMC. The performance becomes better as the sintering temperature increases. Moreover, the linear shrinkage, volumetric shrinkage, bulk density and compressive strength at room temperature of the composites increase with the increase of AMC contents. At the AMC content of 75%, the composite sintered at 1 500 ℃ for 3 h has the optimum comprehensive performance (i.e., the apparent porosity of 4.37%, the compressive strength at room temperature of 274.99 MPa, the residual strength after three water-cooling and thermal shocks of 161.60 MPa, and the residual strength ratio of 58.78%).