MTG Arena is only a few years old, whereas Magic the Gathering is pushing 30. Arena has translated the game very highly effectively to a digital space. While Magic the Gathering Online has been around for about 20 years, and that game arguably more directly replicates the paper card game, Arena streamlines things considerably to flow quickly, tapping your lands automatically and doing other quality-of-life things like showing cards you can cast from places other than your hand next to your hand.
I'm a huge fan (though I wish it hadn't taken them so long to make a MacOS version, which only came out last year) and it's gotten me back into this game that I've been playing off and on for the past, well, like 27 years.
Arena has a special format called Historic, which is basically just whatever sets they've released for Arena. The game got started in the Ixalan block, and so that and anything that came after it have all seen normal releases and thus are available for the format. More recently, they've come out with "Remastered" sets for Amonkhet and Kaladesh, which combined those multi-set blocks into a single release, and added them to the Historic format.
Because Historic is an online-only format, Historic Horizons, taking a queue from Modern Horizons (which is built to add cards to the Modern format, which is everything going back to Eighth Edition - you can tell because the card frames are the modern ones, as opposed to the old ones), is taking the radical step of making digital-only cards that have effects you couldn't really do in paper magic.
For instance, there's a card called Davriel's Withering, which is an instant that gives a target creature -1/-2 perpetually. That means that even if it's in the graveyard, scooped back into the hand or the library, or in exile, the creature retains this. In fact, this card has been the engine for an infinite combo loop - there's another card whose name escapes me, but when it enters the battlefield, you can put a creature card with a low cost from your graveyard into play. And you can make it a permanent -1/0 with Davriel's Withering, so that every time it comes into play, it'll immediately die, and thus can be a target for its own ability. So you get that going with any permanent that causes the opponent to lose life or whatever whenever a creature you control comes into play or dies, and you've got an automatic win.
But brokenness aside, it's interesting to see them playing around in this new design space.
It's also interesting for me, as a relatively new Arena player, to see this format. Given that I only started playing last year, most of the cards I have in Arena are still Standard legal (though about half of them, including the wildly powerful Eldraine cards, are going to be rotating out soon) so I haven't really been compelled to play in that format.
Standard is, I think, probably the most popular way to play Magic. The benefit is that no deck remains on top for a super long time. Each new set added to the format is a larger proportion of the total cards, and thus has a better chance of upsetting the balance, and every year, half the format gets rotated out. So even if there's a period in which one deck type always wins, it won't last super long.
On the other hand, if you're looking for diversity, Historic (and other larger formats) seem pretty compelling, as you'll encounter way more types of decks. This makes it a bit of a challenge to figure out the metagame, as your Eldraine-based Mono Green Stompy deck might not be quite so powerful in the face of some really powerful deck from three years earlier.
I suspect that if I keep up with Arena for a few years, the format will be less intimidating given that I'll have amassed a decently large collection myself.
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