MTG Arena March 2021 season in review

Hello and welcome to my first ever month in review for the Magic the Gathering Arena ranked ladder! This is not a review on the meta, but rather a retrospective on my climb up the ranked ladder over the past month.

The climb to mythic

Coming off of last month playing mostly standard, I kind of felt like going back to playing a bunch of historic. The historic anthology 4 was releasing early in March so I figured I may as well get a feel for the meta before it released and everyone started playing weird brews. I ended the season before last in Diamond 2, so at the start of this season I was started in Gold 2. I started using Untapped.gg's arena deck tracker a couple months ago and oh man, do I regret not using this app earlier. I now have a ton of historical data for all of my matches and it conveniently plots it all out for me. Below is a chart of how my rank went up and down over the course of the season.

I had a very strong start shooting out of gold and low platinum. I think this is pretty normal for me at the beginning of most new ranked seasons. However after hitting mid plat, I had a fairly modest climb towards diamond. I will note that up to this point I was playing mostly Jund Sacrifice in best of one, with a little bit of mono-red in standard in between some longer historic sessions just to mix things up.

After hitting diamond, I decided to see what the standard meta was like in the best of one queues. I built the cycling deck and tore through some people. I lost to a really cool B/W midrange enchantment deck that main decked some number Lurrus and topped its curve (assuming) with Archon of Sun's Grace. At this point I decided to go back to historic with my recently made B/R Arcanist deck which I immediately lost multiple games to U/W Control playing Grafdigger's Cage on turn 1, causing me to log off out of frustration (AKA rage quit).

I'm a big fan of many recent cards and strategies for the enchantment subtype, so I decided to make a version of the B/W enchantment deck that I saw on ladder. I could not find a listing for anything like what I saw on deck aggregator websites, so I had to piece together a deck based on what I saw. My end result worked out pretty well. I won a bunch in a row, but then lost a bunch in a row. It was at this point that I decided I should try and hit mythic and took my laddering a little more seriously.

I went back to my B/R Arcanist deck which had been treating me quite well up until this point. I also started to play in the big boy best of 3 queues again. In the past I was not one to play in the best of 1 queues, but I had started doing so more in recent months due to the fact that I was playing maybe only a handful of games a day. Arcanist took me into Diamond 1, but I went back to ol reliable to finish my push into mythic — Jund Sac. Only this time I took out those stupid collected companies and went with a more modern go big build main decking multiple Korvold. I only played a handful of games in mythic itself as I got to the rank only a couple days before the end of the season.

Breakdown of the decks

Most of my season comprised of B/R Arcanist and various builds of Jund Sacrifice. Jund Sacrifice is a pet deck of mine and I love playing it. It's reasonably skill intensive, is fairly deep, and it is extremely powerful. I was a big fan of the B/R version while it was in standard. The cat / oven / devil combo is just so insane and has the ability to win games completely by itself. Dragon Sacrifice is basically a standard Jund sac build swapping Collected Company for Immersturm Predator and more consistent mana. I was getting frustrated at my collected companies whiffing so I decided to try a different top end.

The rest of the decks are pretty self explanatory. Eldraine Block is just standard mono-red. I named it that since mono-red relies on pretty much mostly Throne of Eldraine cards to be playable. When historic Anthology 4 came out I had a brief stint trying out some Death's Shadow, but it did not feel good. I have seen a version on the ladder that is essentially a B/R Arcanist build that subs out some of the graveyard strategy for a bunch of shadows and scourges. It seems like it has legs, but I won many a game off the back of recurring Archfiend's Vessel, so I'm not too certain if Death's Shadow is the way to go. It certainly would be better in heavy anti graveyard meta.

Closing thoughts

The variety of decks I played against in historic on the way to mythic was quite varied. The meta did not feel overly saturated with anything. Although I don't know what the meta is like in higher mythic ranks, historic feels quite good right now. One interesting stat in my matchup history is that I played against mono-red 19 times, and achieved a 16-3 record against it. I probably matched against it a higher amount because I played a fair bit in best of 1, but who knows.

After spending the past week or two playing primarily in best of 3, I have been invigorated by the true way to play magic. Decisions have so much more meaning to them since they carry weight through multiple games. The better player generally wins. There are less non-games where you may just lose to people trying to meta-game the ladder with pre-boarded cards, hard counter strategies, or aggro decks relying on the hand smoothing algorithm. I will still play best of 1 occasionally as it is certainly convenient for shorter play sessions. But I'm a born again best of three-er.

Thanks for reading!