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?
Depends on what you’re looking for. Do you want to play competitively and gain ranks for the season rewards, or just have fun with it?
For just having fun with it I’ll echo the recommendations of Brawl (probably Historic Brawl). For competitive, Explorer is probably the safest bet. It’s a bit more competitive than Standard, but Standard is pretty high power nowadays anyway.
I somewhat reject the “play competitive” vs “play for fun” distinction. I’d call the later casual play or similar. I mostly play competitive, but for me, that’s playing for fun. It’s not a decision between fun and competitive.
As for the formats, I enjoy explorer a lot. In competitive formats, make sure to play BO3, as that’s what they are balanced around.
Many people enjoy historic as well, but I dislike the Alchemy exclusive mechanics and also like that explorer is close to Pioneer paper.
Fair point. While I mostly play Brawl, I do have a mono-Red Standard deck, a Rakdos sacrifice Explorer deck, and a Golgari Elves Historic deck; I wouldn’t play them if i didn’t have fun doing it, even if it is competitive. I guess I mean just for fun as opposed to playing for rewards too.
I know BO3 is more balanced and all, but I’ll admit I do prefer quicker matches with BO1.
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.
I enjoy Explorer lately although the meta is very stale some days.
Otherwise Historic Brawl is fun. When I feel particularly casual I just skip opponents on there if I stare down the 6th Atraxa pile in a row.
Also, for me Explorer feels nicer than Historic lately due to the digital only mechanics taking hold in the meta. Just not my favourite style of play.
Same, I enjoy Explorer, I cannot stand the digital mechanics. Greasefang decks are almost as bad though.
Yeah i aggressively sideboard for greasefang.
Genrally the meta-whoring is pretty rough, especially on low ranks.
I just wanna sling my colorless ramp and see how far i can push it
