MTGNexus

While I love both pioneer and historic, pioneer kinda just lost steam with the pandemic happening early on its existence and their handling of bans and whatnot.
Historic was just much easier for arena because it exists of cards already on arena and whatever they wanted to cherry pick into the format, which was so much easier than having to add the entire pioneer format to arena.

Pioneer as a format seems like it could be in a lot of trouble as it doesn't seems to be getting much players

So I've been having fun with the historic pauper event. What is even more fun is that I've been winning with Gruul Squirrelstorm, which actually seems pretty strong.



It's a lot of fun to be able to play something like storm in pauper and have it be competitive. Nothing like killing your opponent with a bunch of hasty squirrels after all. Might see if I can translate it into regular historic.

So this is the deck I used to get Platinum in Bo1 this time around. It really surprised me how well it did as it can play the long grindy games, while also capable of lightning fast starts (think 12 or 13 power attacking you on turn 4). It's Sultai Tribal Tribal.


The mana base feels really good as Temple of the Dragon Queen does a ton of heavy lifting in the deck as it is basically a free untapped produce any color land in the deck. Shoreline Scout lets the deck play fewer lands, while fixing mana when needed. And the deck actually has a ton of removal (if a bit slow) in the form of Ayula, Queen Among Bears, The Bears of Littjara, and Crux of Fate and good amount of card advantage. The biggest problem with the deck is that it can get run over by faster decks like Elves (and probably needs another Crux of Fate or two in the sideboards), just draws all payoffs and no changelings or vise-versa, and extremely linear decks like Mizzix's Mastery // Genesis Ultimatum. It does well against decks trying to play fair like Jeskai Control and Selesnya Company.

The one question mark is Oona's Blackguard which has been a rotating mix of different tribal lord effects (in the two to three mana range). Oona's has felt best, but it is the spot that I am really looking to add something.

what are the queues looking like for historic now? a lot of podcasts I listen to make it sound like the format isn't in a great spot rn

motleyslayer wrote: ↑

2 years ago

what are the queues looking like for historic now? a lot of podcasts I listen to make it sound like the format isn't in a great spot rn

I'm speaking solely from Bo1 queues, but it isn't that bad. The main issue is aggro decks are in a bad spot due to the prevalence of lifegain. And there isn't an easy solution unfortunately due to how many lifegain cards there are, dedicated and incidental, plus the redundancy of so many effects. There are anti-life gain cards like Rampaging Ferocidon, but it usually a speedbump, and only available in red.

But like I said, it isn't the end all end all. I got diamond playing a mix of Mono-Red Burn and GW Cats, both of which can probably handle lifegain better than other aggro decks. Humans and Elves players are in a real tough spot right now. Other than that there is a nice mix of Jeskai Control, Phoenix, Angels, Helios Company, Jund Food, Goblins, Rakdos Arcanist and to a lesser extent Auras.

I will add that I still think there are decks waiting in the wings that are problems. Mizzix's Mastery, Indomitable Creativity, Unburial Rites, and Faithless Looting are all still in the format. And they are all cards that can win the game by turn 3 or 4 and are hard to interact with in Bo1 if you aren't in blue (and black for Mizzix and Indomitable). But they have seem to dropped off the cliff in best of one, but I don't know why.

I always tell myself I'm gonna put the effort into playing the Jund food deck but can never find the motivation to do so. It's a deck that seems to be always at the top of the meta. The meta seems like it's been pretty solved for a while though