Entering the Arena

One of the first games I ever got really deep into was Diablo 2. It was so addictive, but in a really good way. What I really liked was how there was always multiple goals, one to win the fight you were in, but also to upgrade your character. Creativity was rewarded when you figured out a new build for your skills, grinding was rewarded when you got new sweet items and your character got more powerful, and straight up being good at the game was rewarded, because the fights were actually pretty hard. I spent countless hours playing that game, looking for items and fighting monsters. The social aspect was awesome, too, because the end goal was to be able to PvP your buddies with your decked out Amazons and Barbarians.

When I spent more of my time in Magic, starting out was a lot of the same, except real life. I went to battle at FNM every Friday night to try and practice, test out my creativity (aka badness), and hopefully win some battles and acquire new loot. I started out playing some less than stellar decks, but eventually made friends with some players who kinda sorta knew what they were doing and hooked me up with some cards and practiced with me until I could start consistently doing well at FNM. That beginning couple years of playing Magic was some of the most fun I've ever had with the game, even though I was quite a doofus and never won anything of consequence.

Over the past few years, new online games have popped up that recreate the Magic experience. Deep one-on-one decision driven battles, but rewarding players for grinding and collecting and becoming better. Solforge was really fun. I loved it, and I dove in deep in that game. I backed the Kickstarter, and even though I haven't played for a long time because the servers were taken offline or whatever, it's still my most played Steam game by a long, long time. I also started playing Hearthstone quite a bit. I started out small, but went pretty much free to play to having a sizeable collection and playing some cool decks.

Magic is still just the best game, though, and MTG Arena is super awesome. I love that I'm going in on the ground floor again and starting from nothing. Opening an uncommon that's potentially usable is really exciting again. The decks that you get to start with are pretty much garbage, so transforming one into something playable is a long road, and to go from that into something that is actually good is a journey. It's so much fun.

To make it even better, new Standard seems great. The rares I crafted for my new deck were Overgrown Tomb, and I haven't looked back. Vraska, Relic Seeker has been awesome in the format for me, District Guide has been great, The Eldest Reborn and Ravenous Chupacabra are great for turning the corner. I think that with some more good uncommon curve fillers I can get somewhere I'm happy with. Oh, and Underrealm Lich has been absurd. Untapping with that is game over a huge amount of the time, and it's super easy to untap with it since it protects itself. It's very Scarab God-esque in that way.

What's really cool is that when the next set comes out, I'm going to be pretty well set up to transition right into Jund. If you were playing Standard back in the days of Return to Ravnica and Innistrad, you'll remember that the mana for format was awesome. The Woodland Cemetery lands meshed so well with the Shocklands and every three color combination was playable and good. I obviously gravitated to Thragtusk and Huntmaster of the Fells, but you could pretty much do whatever you wanted. That's where we're going to be at going forward when this set comes out. Currently, I could play Rootbound Crag and Dragonskull Summit and try and get there with Mountains, but it's pretty tough. Eight more dual lands would help a lot. And who knows what awesome multicolor red/black or green/red cards will come out, or maybe some busted black/white card will be printed and we play Abzan instead.

Straight Golgari has been solid, but maybe a little underwhelming. I'm running into the 'wrong half of the deck' problem that arises when you play Doom Blades in a format with a good control deck. Teferi is definitely enemy number one, but enemy number two is Steel Leaf Champion, which is also brutal and requires a completely different set of answers. One of my next moves on the account is going to be trying to craft a playset of Knight of Malice as a card that can slip under countermagic but also plays well against the Boros and Red decks. Duress is a blank so often, and Llanowar Elves is a terrible late game draw, but I've got both of them in there at the moment because I don't have access to anything much better. Luckily, the good two and three drops in the format for this color combo are uncommons instead of rares and mythics.

My end goal is for the deck to look something like this:

4 branchwalker
4 jadelight
3 knight of malice
4 district guide
4 doggo
2 vraska
2 Underrealm Lich

3 eldest reborn
2 walk plank
2 moment of craving
2 vraska's contempt
2 cast down
1 AT

3 Memorial to Folly
4 OGT
4 Woodland Cemetery
7 forest
4 swamp
1 golgari guildgate

I decided that I'm going to stream all of my MTG Arena playing, going from the ground up. It won't supplant my MTGO playing or videos, but it's pretty easy to just flip the stream on and battle some people, so I'm definitely into that. Also, Twitch saves all your videos, so you can watch me work from my humble beginnings to something more meaningful (hopefully). Check it out here and check out my YouTube channel here. I'm going to try to keep a schedule of one video per week, and not Jund every time, just most times. Especially when I'm super psyched about Narnam Renegading people.

Thanks for reading!