I’m primarily a paper edh player, but I’ve been dabbling in arena lately. There’s so many different formats, it’s hard to know where to start and I don’t want to waste my wild cards on a standard deck only to realize I like historic or brawl more.
So my question is what formats do you all play in MTGA and why?
I play historic brawl. It can be slow to get into for someone new to Arena, but here are some ideas for budget decks: https://mtgazone.com/budget-historic-brawl/. Once you’ve been playing for a while, historic brawl is the cheapest, least wildcard intensive format. That’s because it’s singleton and non-rotating. I also like the randomness that 100-card singleton provides.
I should mention, however, that it’s not as similar to edh as you might expect. For starters, it has a smaller card pool, 25 life instead of 40, and no commander damage rule. What makes a bigger difference, though, is that it’s 1v1. Effective historic brawl decks usually pack more interaction, because you can’t rely on the table to keep an opponent in check. Some people start historic brawl expecting to be able to use edh-style decks that build their position slowly or focus heavily on the commander without much protection for it. They are quickly disappointed, because those decks don’t work nearly as well in historic brawl. Control is prevalent, aggro is fairly viable, and if you want your commander on the battlefield, be sure to run things like Slip Out the Back, Tamiyo’s Safekeeping, etc.
Good writeup, my answer is Historic Brawl as well. It definitely requires more interaction than Commander.
I do like it as something of a middle-ground: it’s still the most casual format on Arena. Importantly, the matchmaking system is nice (if imperfect) because you can play jank without getting murdered by Kenrith/Golos/Rusko or other hell queue commanders in every match.