MTG: Arena Articles

By: Thyane In Magic: The Gathering Arena, Wildcards are the single most important resource for building powerful, fun, and competitive decks in the constructed formats like Standard, Pioneer, Alchemy, Historic, Timeless, and Brawl. For new players to the platform, optimizing how you earn Wildcards can save you hundreds of dollars. This guide will show you […]

Dimir Reanimator is a very powerful deck that is a bit slept on in my opinion. It offers incredibly high card quality, a fantastic combo match-up, and rewards its pilot massively for good play, mind games, and understanding the meta. It also has a good amount of options in deck building to adapt to the meta game.

This guide goes over different lines with Scapeshift, Sideboard options, and much more. It is primarily geared towards players who are new to the deck. This guide won’t cover every possible situation, but it is meant to be a starting point so others can be more comfortable picking up the deck.

Post Strixhaven, Mardu sits in a very unique position where it can leverage both Strip Mine and Library of Alexandria effectively. The deck excels at pivoting roles based on the match-up, so these lands will be swapped in sideboarding frequently! I’ll explain which on a deck-by-deck basis.

This is a small write-up on some of the math for finding the probability of drawing certain cards. For the average game of magic, this won’t matter too much. Most decks just draw their card for the turn and maybe an extra card for some card advantage. This will primarily apply to combo decks that rely on some amount of randomness, such as the Pioneer Breakfast Bears deck.

Pioneer is a 60-card competitive format in Magic: The Gathering that includes all of the standard legal cards from Return to Ravnica to now! Started in October 2019

Something has to change. The format needs recognition again. 

With the release of Secrets of Strixhaven, the Pioneer format has some fun tools it now has access to.

In Timeless, games are often decided as early as the deck-building stage. If your goal is to spike the format, then each card you put in your 75 (or 95) should be there for a reason.

This is a truly amazing draft set. 

Many of you know how difficult it is for me to admit that. For those who don’t, just know that I was expecting MTG Final Fantasy to be terrible, and went in wanting it to be bad.

Like the original Strixhaven, SOS includes a Mystical Archives bonus sheet packed with spells that have historically dominated older formats.

Golgari Midrange is a powerful attrition deck that has arisen in Pioneer, mainly in response to the Izzet Prowess strategy. It has many strong answers to the problematic permanent proliferating play patterns of prowess in Culling Ritual, as a way to sweep up almost every card in the deck and use the excess mana to play out a powerful top-end threat.

Disclaimer: They also announced Library of Alexandria after I wrote this article, so it will not be included in this discussion. During their debut stream, Wizards of the Coast spoiled some mystical archive cards that will be added to Arena to be crafted and played with in their Arena formats. Some of these cards have […]

This league primarily focused on the post Eldrazi ban, pre Food Chain metagame that existed just before TMNT was released on Arena; as such, the lists do not reflect a metagame with Food Chain decks nor decks to combat them!

I didn’t find the format that I fell out of love with; I found innovation and a healthy ecosystem where there is a healthy push and pull. Skill in deckbuilding is rewarded.