SD here.

In general I am a ftp player so focus is normally on building decks to suit the play quests in play queue and favouring mono coloured decks (for mana issues concerns) or specific quest based decks e.g kill creatures, play 40 lands etc. This earns packs through the quest progress and ICR’s and of course gold for purchase with a decent number of cards (booster box’s worth at least) so usually 60 packs so 60K gold.

Standard ladder usually to Platinum 4 for 3 packs as a decent time effort / reward. We all know that at Platinum the climb just gets much tougher due to time and number of matches even with a deck that can get over a 50% win rate (arguably getting to 60% without skill and a costly deck wildcard wise is probably true).

Magic Master (son) is an advocate of Brawl as he thinks Brawl is fairer and wishes there was a Standard for Brawl (unlikely to happen as Standard BO1/BO3 is ‘flagship’ Magic for WOTC in both Standard and Historic).

Historic Standard can be arguably harder as there are so many great historic decks (in particular if building Sets of key Mythic / Rare historic cards - the Pro matches demonstrate that well.

The question for this ftp player is whilst Brawl is arguably easier due to singleton to convert a few key wildcards to create a competitive Brawl deck it can be more difficult in historic if your card pool is potentially more limited, in particular for new players.

The store at times has deals for older packs or remastered e.g. Amonkhet and occasionally historic bundles.

I guess you can build a reasonably competitive Historic deck using a lot of the recognised stronger standard cards (rare / mythic) and crafting fewer historic cards to fit the deck design.

There are very good players in the NGA camp and in particular specialise in and are very good at building strong historic decks {Thinking of Cucho L in particular}.

So what is the view? For Brawl and Historic what is the best strategy deckwise in having the right cards to build decent historic decks in particular but also Brawl.

For this ftp player who is out of trying both limited (not really ftp accessible) or aiming for higher than Platinum (for time and sanity reasons) the variety in match play comes from historic and Brawl play modes.

Interested in views / comments from the NGA Crowd.

SD

In general Arena rewards you for crafting the "good" cards and punishes you for crafting "bad" ones .

i.e if you craft 4x Thoughtseize it's probably going in every single black deck you try to make in Historic for the rest of time, however if you use them same 4 rare wildcards on say Calamity Bearer it's going in exactly one deck and if Giants bad you'll never get use out them.


Probably the Historic deck with the best wildcard/power ratio is U/W Aura's, it's a very strong deck and only needs Kor spiritdancer and the manabase for rare wildcards, everything else is uncommon/common

That’s a good shout brother! Yes I tend to make decent enough choices with crafting with Wildcards. It can pay off when there are as you say there are strong archetypes that stand the test of time and of course whilst people may have an aversion to crafting rare lands it has always been the case that investing in decent land cards is a good investment. Certain land cycles like the shock lands or the castles or the current pathways are always going to be a good investment. Usually the majority of Planeswalkers too with some Standouts.

The other good thing about ftp and Play is you get a decent view of the meta and plenty of unique and at times clever and of course janky decks. There are too many good cards and very clever combinations that tend to be show cased in the top decks but experimenting (and it’s where Brawl) as a format is decent as it does make you consider more of the cards to make a decent deck that covers all the angles (mana base, life total, removal, win cons etc).

SD