I started at the beginning of open beta with guilds and, after only spending 5 on the welcome pack, was able to build Izzet Drakes, a tier one deck. The current version people are playing is even cheaper, since it replaces the mythic Phoenix with uncommon pteramanders.
It won’t take much to build one or two top tier decks. Building your third and fourth top deck will take some larger expenditures, especially if you are completely changing colors and need to start over with rare lands.
This is a pretty cool little webtool to see what cards you should target for which deck. Just requires zipping up a file of your collection and uploading it.
That tool is theoretically helpful, but it’s pulling it’s meta-game data from MTG Goldfish, which is brutally out of date with the current standard meta.
Which leads me to a question, does anyone know where to get up-to-date decklists for this crazy standard that is evolving on a daily basis? Well other than what I’m doing now, which is trawling Twitter manually.
I’ve used this one, but honestly, I think it changes on a regular basis. If you want to be really up-to-the-minute, you’re probably doing the best you can with Twitter.
Well, it’s pulling from the Standard tour and SCG tourneys every weekend. I’m sure it’s not up to date with the current Arena meta, which I have no doubt shifts much faster. Given the number of tracking tools out there, I’m not even sure how anyone could keep up with Arena’s meta, especially in Bo1.
I ran into someone playing a deck that was just mana and a huge number of the Persistent Petitioners. It’s common but they must have spent a ton of wildcards to make like 36 of them. They just milled my deck out 12 cards at a time until I died. I never was able to kill them fast enough to stop it.
You only need 4 of cards like Petitioners or Rat Colony in Arena. Once you have 4, you can put as many as you want in your deck.
It’s pretty vulnerable to control with lots of cheap board sweep available in the current meta…and then big stompy creatures, of course.
I’m trying to keep up with the meta by reading copious amounts of /r/spikes on reddit. And it’s not helping me keep up. So instead I’m just playing the decks I find fun, and avoiding Ranked. It’s kept the game entertaining, as opposed to the frustration of always lagging slightly behind the meta and getting stomped by the new hotness.
I’m finding my Drakes deck has been consistently good in this meta. So I’m splitting my time between Ranked constructed and draft. Having a great time. Both draft and standard formats for Ravnica Allegiance are amazing.
Good-bye sweet Nexus of Fate. We hardly knew ye.
EDIT: this is Bo1-only, obviously.
Are there bots on Magic Arena? I’m just playing against someone who plays like the old Hearthstone bots used to.
Not sure about that.
But I just came across the ‘Resolve All’ button, which is excellent. Playing against white just became bearable.
Thought I’d share a current low-rare pile of jank that I found, and boy, it’s a lot of fun when it goes off. It’s obviously pretty gate-dependent, but it manages to make Amplifire a centerpiece which I was pretty sure was impossible. It kinda sucks when the card Amplifire turns up is another Amplifire, but when Ghalta pops all of a sudden you have a 24/24 creature and that’s never not a blast. Even better if you have a Crash Through in hand.
2 Blink of an Eye (DAR) 46
2 Gatebreaker Ram (RNA) 126
4 Gates Ablaze (RNA) 102
2 Thud (M19) 163
4 Growth Spiral (RNA) 178
4 Guild Summit (GRN) 41
3 Gate Colossus (RNA) 232
2 Electrodominance (RNA) 99
3 Crash Through (M19) 133
3 Dive Down (XLN) 53
2 Ghalta, Primal Hunger (RIX) 130
1 Carnage Tyrant (XLN) 179
4 Amplifire (RNA) 92
1 Mountain (RIX) 195
3 Plaza of Harmony (RNA) 254
4 Gateway Plaza (GRN) 247
4 Simic Guildgate (RNA) 257
4 Izzet Guildgate (GRN) 251
4 Gruul Guildgate (RNA) 250
2 Forest (RIX) 196
2 Island (RIX) 193
So what are people playing in Preseason 3? I’m running Blue tempo while I get enough wildcards to craft a functional mana base for Esper control.
Unrelated, I’m drafting a lot of Ravnica Alliegance and really enjoying it. I think this may be best draft deck in all formats:
Started off with that janky but fun Gates deck. That got me almost to Platinum. Then I crafted enough Deputies of Detention to switch to Esper Midrange, which took me to Diamond 4 before I stalled out. Now I’m going to back to Esper Control, hoping to get to Mythic but I may just not be good enough…or I just don’t have the cards to build one of those Sultai or white weenie decks everyone seems to have.
People are still playing Sultai? Maybe I’ve been playing too much best of one, but all I see are red aggro, a few different builds of white weenie and Esper control.
What’s the best strategy for building decent decks without putting a ton of money into the game? I built mono blue a month ago but I guess the meta adjusted because I’m finding it hard to win with over the last couple of weeks. I also made improvements to the prebuilt white deck so that it can compete, but it’s still kind of bad against more refined decks. I spent many of my uncommon/common wildcards to build the mono blue, but I still have a bunch of rare and mythic wildcards that I have been afraid to spend. Should I just wait for the old sets to rotate out at this point? I have a decent collection of the two Ravnica sets at this point since I play as much draft as I can as well as getting those packs as rewards. But I’m getting bored of my two decks losing frequently.
No reason to be afraid of crafting rares from Guilds or Allegiance. Cards from those sets will be in the meta for a long time yet.
I’ve stopped spending wildcards on rares from Ixalan or Dominaria, since those will be rotating soonish. It does tend to cut down on the kind of decks I can build, but I’ll be in better shape come September’s rotation, I think.
OTOH, if you plan to play in whatever the eternal format is that Wizards comes up with for Arena once rotation hits, then any card is probably fair game.
Woo hoo, cosmetics! March 27th!
-New 3D/fullart promos
-New sleeves, avatars
-New practice mode against the AI “sparky”
-New mastery tree for early-progression for specific cards and promos
Styles:
Common: 400 Gems Uncommon: 600 Gems Rare: 1000 Gems Mythic Rare: 1200 GemsAvatars:
Huatli or Angrath for either 500 Gems or 3000 gold, each. You can unlock additional avatars inside store bundlesSleeves:
Standard: 600 Gems Exquisite: 1200 Gems
Yeah, just watched the video, it looks amazing.