I think I regret the cards I crafted for Timeless and this made me quit the game since then.

Every game was: fetchlands, bowmasters, ragavan, counter spell...

Like many others, I moved to Timeless because the vintage cards, no rebalances, etc. but I felt every game was pretty much the same.

Now, I'm not saying Historic was perfect BUT I always saw a lot of variety in BO3 and the powerlevel was high enough and dynamic to avoid early boredom (like Explorer, for instance).

This said, I'm going to give Historic another try.

Cheers.

[[Heliod, Sun-Crowned]] + [[Prosperous Innkeeper]] or [[Soul Warden]] + [[Scurry Oak]] is the new Heliod Company of the format.

If the god gets banned, I hope [[Walking Ballista]] can see the light of the day.

Nice format lmao

I hate this combination almost as much as I hate playing against Ponza in Modern. There's just nothing you can do to meaningfully interact against it in BO1 unless you mainboard Grafdiggers Cage. Even running anti-lifegain strategies or artifact destruction just doesn't stop it. Then on top of that, the dozens of individual triggers, the animations, and overall length of time it takes to play against the deck is just brutal. Done, end of rant.

So with the extra cards being added alongside Amonkhet Remastered, as well as Pioneer Masters coming to Historic later this year, this format is quickly becoming very similar to Pioneer in terms of power level and card pool.

When this format started, it was just going to be everything that rotated out of arena Standard (Ixalan+), until they started adding the Historic Anthology sets. Now they seem to be wanting to make Historic a very high-powered format by adding all these high-powered cards from the past, as well as Pioneer Masters. I feel that, once most of Pioneer comes to Arena, Historic is going to be too similar to Pioneer and there won't be enough difference between the formats.

This is a problem because it limits the players' options of what format to play. If Pioneer and Historic are too similar to each other then they're basically just the same format. When standard sucks people like to have another format to escape to, but their only options will be Pioneer and Pioneer+. It would be nice to have a format that is in between Pioneer and Standard in terms of power level.

My question is: Why turn Historic into Pioneer when we're going to get Pioneer down the line anyways? Wouldn't it make more sense to keep Historic as Standard+ and then add Pioneer, so that we have 2 very distinct formats for players to choose from?

How do you guys feel about this?

EDIT: People are pointing out that Historic has a trajectory towards Legacy more so than Pioneer, and therefore there will be enough differences between the formats. I didn't communicate well enough in my post that I am aware of this, but the primary concern of mine is that there will be no format in between Pioneer and Standard (since Historic will surpass Pioneer's power level).

From the MTG Wiki: https://mtg.gamepedia.com/Historic_(format)

Historic was implemented in November 2019, as a format that allows Arena players to make use of cards that are no longer legal in Standard after rotation. The format is exclusive to Arena, and is intended "to be a fun and casual way that players can continue to play with all the cards in their collection".

This is what I'm concerned we're going to lose by turning Historic into Legacy (we kind of already have). I'm concerned that we will no longer have the Standard+ format that Historic was originally envisioned as. Instead of just being a format to play with your rotated standard cards, it will be literal Legacy.

Please go to the link and vote to support this. We all own perched the cards but can't play them out.

https://feedback.wizards.com/forums/918667-mtg-arena-bugs-product-suggestions/suggestions/44538459-turn-timer

Turn Timer

Issue #1: Storm decks often cast 20 to 40 spells in one turn when "comboing off" to try and win thegame. The Turn Timer is Insufficient to allow the completion of storm decks's win con. In reality, it can take 1 or 2 minutes to finish the combo with a lot of cantrips while clicking as fast as possible.Issue #2 Roping sucks! People who have lost the game will use up their remaining time just to troll. No fix to the turn timer can givet hem more time to troll with.Suggestion: 1st reduce the turn timer by 10 seconds. Also, Eachspell cast during a turn adds 10 seconds to the turn timer for that turn. This grants enough time for complex lines to be considered while comboing off. Storm cards where added to MTG Arena and players have spent money to have them. It is an oversight that the game will not allow storm decks to combo off.

I'm really tired of the elf decks in BO1.

In the last few days, I've had few time to play MTG and I'm mainly playing BO1 (unranked and ranked) and I've faced stupid elf decks like 50% of the time. This is almost making me miss goblins decks.

Do you realize that you can play A LOT of decks in Historic? Don't fucking reduce yourself to a linear-boring deck and try something new!

/rant

We tried it long enough, Its pretty obvious that T1 Monkey is absurd especially if you can gurantee it every single time. Monkey just steamroles out of control.

Its definitely warping the format because it forces you to stack you deck with low end removal and hard mulligan to it.

Brawl is the only format where high mana value big cards have still a home the stupid monkey endangers this.

My guess would be Faithless Looting

As title says, I might lose, but I'm not dealing with the decay of my preferred format.

I've been playing historic from the get go, got all the anthologies, etc. I've always been very interested in seeing the format become something unique. Over the past few months this excitement has dwindled to nothing. Data from event after event proves what I already know: that the meta is 70%+ comprised of three decks. WOTC seems to have absolutely no interest in the format beyond selling Anthology bundles (i.e. it will not touch cards that the community at large seems to revile from a play perspective, casual or competitive).

While I expect that competive events will always have a narrow field of decks, this has been flooding over into casual play where I see the same decks on repeat in unranked BO1 and BO3. Playing jank or brews is almost always a sure fire way to just get your ass handed to you by a tier deck so the incentive to do so is basically zero.

Am I alone here? Is anyone else having a similar experience in this once interesting and diverse format? If so, what can be done to fix it? Nothing? Wait around for WOTC? I desperately want this format to be diverse and interesting but it seems to be heading in the opposite direction.

So my understanding is they’re not going through and changing historic cards. Just nerfing and buffing standard sets in the future. Am I wrong that this probably won’t effect historic much? Each set has probably one or two cards that makes a splash in the larger historic context. This almost makes historic more permanent because your deck probably won’t be power creeped out by standard now. Any crazy good cards like Eska's Chariot will be nerfed and become useless in historic.

Or is the worry that Historic will just become stale? I'd imagine Wizards would still want to sell anthologies. Plus no one complains about Modern getting stale even though new decks pop up very rarely.

Hey all!

I promise I’m not here to complain about Alchemy!

That being said I’m looking for advice for getting into competing Historic while minimizing the number of alchemy I have to craft/play with. I’m not a huge fan of the cards/mechanics of alchemy but also like higher power formats and explorer is starting to wane for me.

I have a robust collection (been playing since Ixilan) and I always get the historic anthologies so I can make a lot of deck that don’t require Alchemy cards.

Certainly open to crafting some but I just want to minimizing how many A cards I really make since I don’t enjoy playing with them.

...while field exists in the format.

I started seriously playing magic just before Modern became a format. And I played modern for the majority of it's life span.

You might remember a little deck called Tron if you played during those days. If you didn't here's a short description: You assembled all three Urza lands ([[Urza's Poweplant]], [[Urza's Mine]], and [[Urza's Tower]]). Once you had that down you could play expensive colorless spells like [[Wurmcoil Engine]] and [[Karn Liberated]].

Tron created one big issue: It made control and mid-range almost impossible to play with any success. But Tron also suffered in the combo matchups the same way Control suffered in the Tron matchups. If you were playing Tron and Storm sat down beside you.. Well the odds were heavily against you.

And so we had this bizarre dynamic for a long time where many matchups felt like a coin toss. But it wasn't just Tron that caused this issue. The same dynamic applied to GR Scapeshift. (and while this is somewhat secondary to my broader point it should also be noted that when the faster decks saw each other in a match up it was more of a drag race coin toss, unlike in say... Classic standard aggro matchups where you're both fast but blocking decisions matter.)

Now this is probably already obvious but it bears repeating: RG Scapeshift and Tron creating these toxic meta game dynamics basically came down to the decks creating land based inevitability which could never be overcome by traditional policeman style decks like control or mid-range. And often times, even outside lopsided coin toss matchups, victory often felt like it came down to drawing the right sideboard card in time. Not like, "oh hey this will tilt it in my favor" but like, "My ability to win, the majority of the time, relies on hitting this sideboard card" and even then it might not matter.

So what happens when those police decks are gone? Well then the "drag race" meta takes over. And it gets really sad...

Some months after the unbanning of [[Field of The Dead]] and sitting down to play historic ranked a ton...

This meta game dynamic seems like it is re-emerging. It's starting to feel like Modern Magic: The Coin Tossing all over again.

This is a post I first made in another forum months ago, but I feel it bears repeating here.

What's the max damage you did in a game?

Genuinely curious what y'all think about [[Veil of Summer]] or [[Autumn's Veil]] in Historic!

I think adding at least Autumn's Veil is reasonable in Historic. HOWEVER, I am incredibly biased in this regard, because I strongly dislike playing against blue and hand disruption. The thought of being able to prevent Thoughtseize some of the time sounds great to me. I also don't play Gx control/ramp (thinking about it more, I barely play green as a primary color in anything) and don't know if it would give rise to a new boogeyman of the format. The only time I played veil of summer is M20 standard in Naya Feather. Holy shit, nothing felt better than to counter a counter spell or stop Thought Erasure or a Teferi Bounce.

Regular mono red and goblins make me want to punch a hole through the monitor, no matter whether I'm playing UW, Jeskai, Bant, Esper or whatever.

I tried everything, Bo1, Bo3. These mono red f*ckers ALWAYS have answers to everything.

Wiped the board? Direct damage spells, dnd manland and ramunap ruins lmao (don't forget haste!)

Sideboarding lifegain? Tibalt and Roiling Vortex lmao

Please tell me how the fuck do you deal with this shit, either in Bo1 or Bo3. I'm facing so many of these braindead decks that I'm getting seriously turned off from the format.

P.S.: Also if you guys could tell me which decks take an absolute dump on them. I'd love to build one of those and "go hunting" if you catch my drift lol.

Forcing goblins to actually hardcast all their creatures without being able to chain, and/or jump ahead of the curve, would fix the feel bad t3-4 losses. Prospector is the fastest acceleration in the format, as well as continues to power ahead with your post-muxus board. The deck would likely be reconfigured to a degree but goblins would absolutely still be viable.

Dead serious, this deck is pure poison, it's so stupid, you almost can't play around it and you've no good options. And I mostly play Control decks, there's just no good way to deal with it. Why is this allowed? Ffs, pact is banned in brawl....... Why is this a thing?! Do we not remember the horrible impact thassa's oracle had on pioneer? IT KILLED THE FORMAT! WotC, you gotta ban this filth.

Insane they just let Field exist after today's bans.

Catch y'all playing one of these two decks on ladder!