I used to play a lot of MTG Arena, back when it first started. I even participated in the early Beta program. I found it rather enjoyable… but being a player of the modern format, I didn’t stick with it over paper MTG and MTG Online.
MTG Online offered an experience I enjoyed, similar to paper… sort of a way of owning the cards. At least… the digital collection has value because cards can be traded for among players. A feature I still feel is missing from MTGO. I feel as though Wizard wishes they could just make that go away, MTGO that is.
I’ve never really been a big fan of the standard format in Magic, but ultimately found that MTG Arena was a good testing ground for ideas with standard material. And while cards aren’t free, or tradeable … they’re not too extremely hard to obtain. It can still be a costly venture build a decent competition worthy deck… or 42 if your an MTG Deckbuilding Maniac like myself.
Recently, I decided to step back into playing Arena… first time since before the recent Innistrad sets. Which I determined by the lack of cards from those sets in my collection. And while I had some semi decent decks built up from the last time I played, they were no longer valid in the current standard.
So, first I began trimming my deck collection of all the useless experiments from my last days of play… which freed up a great deal of deck space. Then, I started the process of converting the decks that I found enjoyable before, into the new Historic format. I found that my Rouge Mill deck could be turned into something a bit more powerful in the Historic format, with fast lands, better counterspells, and kill cards.
After playing for a few days and getting used to the user interface again… and some of the new changes to the interface… I go confident enough to try out the newly modified Rogue Mill deck in ranked. It’s such a great deck. I’m sure there are some things I could do to trim it out better… but It’s been working well for me.
I started working out a mono-red deck build to hopefully counter act that dreaded mono-white weenie deck everyone is playing these days. But It’s not been as successful as I’d like. However, I’ve used a combination of the Historic Rogue Mill and the Mono-Red Burn decks to climb to the platinum rank in MTG Arena Constructed Ranked. It’s been a pretty steady climb over 3 days, about 3 hours of play a day.
Hopefully the pace keeps up and I can hit Mythic by the seasons end.