Dannng bros, 6 months since someone made a post up in here.

Arena historic format has the perfect amount of memeing and variety to be pretty fun. There are a few t1 decks like grull cleaver, mono red and jeskai fires, but all in all the format has a lot of different decks and is pretty fun.

This is what I'm playing in at the moment. My other deck is monored cleaver. Charming prince is a real allstar and almost never bad. I've been playing some variant of the reefer deck and 3feri is such an asset compared to just simic or temur elementals. The lands don't really work in standard so the deck is kind of dead there were cat combo make short work of the reefs anyway.

I'm sure the lands could use some adjustment and I'd cut a WU and a fabled passage for 2 hinterlands if I had them. Maybe 23 lands is too few but it is ok most of the time. The knight of autumn, deputy, mentor of the meek and vanifer are the main flex slots in my opinion. It runs pretty well if you cut those and put in the rest of the play sets of jadelight/branchwalkers. Autumn is there for a better game 1 against nexus of fate and fires, occasionally saves the day against frenzy or other problem enchants. Deputy is either great or terrible and I'd be pretty happy to put a couple in the sideboard only. Mentor has been pretty solid and if you can draw a couple of cards off of him hes generally worth.

Timewipes in sideboard are to win against boardstalls were we get behind and can be outclassed by a lot of decks. Nissa and teferis are anti control. Healer of the glade against mono-r mono-b and rg ofc.

Wizards lost me due to how they keep approaching monetization / rewards of this game. There was a time when the "State of the Beta" posts were exciting rather than fearing what was being taken away or what new gold/$ sinks awaited. I know they reverted the change but I just hung up my gloves when they announced 2x wild cards to craft historic cards. Just a moment of clarity that it was always going to be an uphill battle to keep the game fair for the playerbase.

Been playing Eternal again for the time being but planning on getting in on Runeterra at Day 0 later this month.

It doesn't seem great if you are the type who needs to play a dozen different formats, but I end up generating more gold/gems than I can find ways to spend just from drafting a few times and standard. The mastery pass is an excellent addition and you can finish it easily playing like twice a week.

2019 warped so many formats that it's kept me from playing too much anymore outside of Cube. Modern got broken by Hogaak and is still warped from Urza. Legacy is the Wrenn and Six show now. Standard went through Field and then Oko being miserable. Modern Horizons was a fun format but it was a terrible idea to make it modern legal.

Wrenn & Six was banned in legacy two months back at the same time Oko got banned in standard.

Agree that 2019 was absurd.

jvs

It's all about cube. Super cheap, tons of fun, lots of variety.


how else can you end up with a meatball this spicy:





or experience true triumphs of the spirit such as this one:

there we go that's better

Whoever decided Escape should be repetitive instead of exile should be added to the long list of shame the last year+ has brought

I think its pretty clear that with Hasbro at the helm they are willing to push powerlevel beyond past cards in the creature department and its not really debatable. Why we can't get a 4 mana wog or 2 mana rampant idk but its where we are. In other news, probably not breaking any formats but here's my current memer post-theros.

I feel like something is wrong with the manabase.
With this kind of deck and mana costs as well as drawers, you always have spell to cast so you need untapped lands and you will almost never make use of the white castle for example. It is really not worth the risk to have multiple of those lands in your hand

Ill try out thx for sharing. Do you have any sideboard yet?

Kinda playing a similar deck with just Prince and 3feri but the monoblue devotion shell (no nyx artifact, 2 wish faerie for wraths etc out of the 'sideboard'). Seems a bit more dependable as there is not really too much aggro at the moment. I do miss cav of dawn thassa combo which is a gigantic house. Mostly more dependable mana/play sequences and getting to agent of treachery has the same effect. Oracle of thassa is basically the exact same as birth of meletis.

Honestly I don't play much bo3, as it requires more wildcards as the best sideboard cards are rare or mythic with a few exceptions like duress and aether gust.

Other suggestions fur current standard decks? I play hushbringer combo for the moment and it does not work as well as expected

Esper Doom foretold is really strong at the low ranks. Not sure how it holds up at higher ranks. If you play this, I'd suggest going the 8 egg route, with 3 treacherous blessing and maybe 4-5 wogs, 3feri. Menguci is playing Orhzov Doom and I've had pretty good experience running any of his decks.

Monored is great because Anax really takes the deck to the next level, not as back breaking as the best chainwhirler but overall its a much better card for the deck. Also, he has amazing synergy with the best card in the format... Embercleave. Could probably play frenzy if you really wanted to but SCG open decks seem to just be playing the cleaver. If you go this route play both of the red knights. Robber of the Rich is nice if you have the wildcards but totally optional and just 'the best 2 drop we have' but not really overwhelming or having a great synergy. Overall the deck is pretty budget and maybe you have a lot of the cards from last season.

Thanks for suggestion. I do not quite like decks like monoR even when they happen to have equal chances in the meta compared to the top control, aggro-control decks because they do not make you improve your magic game. Any player who always play aggro would have little clue how to play long complicated games when he has to (draft/sealed) in my opinion. On the other hand it is very convenient to move up in ranks fast if playing on mtga

I removed two of each castles for the lands and might remove even more because I actually never used one so far (lol sample size). The white seems quite useless in standard

I removed 2 dances, 1 spark double, 1 omen of the sea (maybe should remove the white instead with the wogs?), 1 Teferi and added 3 wog 2WW, 1 saga kraken 8/8 and 1 dream trawler. It is going alright so far but it needs some more improvement for sure

Yeah Cav of Dawn is amazing and solves a lot of problems, but the 3W is killer, even in Azorius. Prince is very good with Agent and should run at least 3 Agents imo. The other card that I started to play with W is Elspeth Conquers Death, which is amazing and shouldn't be underestimated if you have targets for chapter 3.

Starting in a couple hours, the world championship, live on Twitch.

Let's go Gab!

Crazy how everyone loves him. (in a good sense) If he played the giant instead of the ritual he would have been (might?) be in finals

I didn't get to see his quarterfinals match unfortunately. Gabe has been my favorite magic player since way back in the day, 2005 time frame when he was the best deckbuilder/brewer in the world.

Kind of glad to see that fires didn't ship the tourney and that RDW made a solid showing. Meta full of fires and jund sacrifice would have sucked pretty bad imo. Marcio came off as a bad manner player in his match against Seth, so glad PVDDR won over all. I thought that the match format was pretty good, allowing a nice mix of sideboarded and unsideboarded games. Entertaining and interesting, lots of interesting spots and topdeck sweats without being overly decided by RNG. Nicely done in my opinion, then again I mostly play Arena now a days, so I'm sure the older format players feel a bit left out this year.

Marcio's been DQ'd from two different tournaments for cheating (including hiding a key card under his playmat to ensure he always "draws" it) and banned from the game for a period as well. Not surprised the guy comes off poorly.

Yeah, twitch chat was like '!card Hornet Queen' the entire match, so mtgbot would give the card description for Hornet Queen. I don't follow pro magic very closely so I had to look up the incident and am not super informed on the topic. Didn't realize he had been DQed another time.

Against Seth there was a point in one match where it looked like he sealed things up, almost preemptively GGed but barely stopped himself from BMing, then topdecked 3 lands for the loss. I don't believe he gg'd when he lost to PVDDR. He didn't shake with Seth afterwards but I believe they had said some stuff between matches so its hard to know who is right or wrong.

!Hornet Queen

I see what Wizards is doing. Wizards doesn't want to print cardboard anymore. Wizards will soon be paperless, I mean cardboardless.

Also, I think Wizards is competing with Hearthstone and trying to take back their players.

Believe it or not, soon WSOP will be cardboardless as well. You'll be on a table where all 9 seats have a tablet or iPad for your hole cards. The community cards will be on a giant screen in the center of the table. No more dealers!!!

Chess is moving that way as well. Hell, there are numerous high level chess tournaments played by grand masters and super grand masters on chess.com!!!

So, if you still have Magic: The Gathering paper/cardboard cards, I advise that you sell them off soon before that market collapses like the global markets did in 2008. You'll have a Black Lotus worth $400 instead of $4,000!!!

Pretty hot take considering the absolutely unprecedented number of paper products WoTC has been producing for the last 2 years or so, to the point where the playerbase is clamoring that it's too much and they can't keep up with all the new releases.

jvs