Roy Tang

Programmer, engineer, scientist, critic, gamer, dreamer, and kid-at-heart.

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Now that I’m playing MTG again regularly on MTG Arena, maybe I’ll start writing a bit more Magic stuff. With War of the Spark now out and the metagame not yet established, I thought I’d be foolish and waste my wildcards on some brewing. As a reminder, I’m still an F2P player on Arena, so wildcards are precious and few lol. I did have some 50k in gold and a few gems saved up when War of the Spark hit, so i have already played a few sealeds (only 1 got to 7 wins) and opened quite a few packs. One of the nice constructed decks I’ve seen is that Grixis control shell with Nicol Bolas Dragon God, but since the previous, I’ve always wanted to finish off opponents by exiling things with Ashiok, Dream Render and then ultimating Kaya, Orzhov Usurper. Luckily I had most of the cards needed for an Esper control shell, just needed to burn some rare wildcards to flesh out the manabase and a couple of mythics here and there.

Here’s my first totally unoptimized draft:

No sideboard, since I’m only testing in BO1 for now. (For some reason Arena gives me a warning that Teferi requires a sideboard!) The control matchups seem manageable, depending on draws. Fast decks (i.e. RDW) are a bit more challenging, might need some cheaper spot removal like Moment of Craving. I did manage to ultimate Kaya for 20+ damage a couple of times already, so that’s fun. I don’t have that much time for testing though, so I imagine this is a list that I will be optimizing over time. Any suggestions are welcome.

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