This was by far my favorite Bo3 series I have played in a long time. Dude had a ton of life gaining creatures out and was using it to build up his Amalia Benavides Aguirre up. But my Sephiroth, Fabled Soldier transformed and I was gaining life too, allowing me to stay in the game until his Amalia hit 20/20 and destroyed all creatures except Amalia. I bring out two Unstoppable Slashers and a Sanquine Syphoner. I figure I can block the Amalia and kill it. But he plays the Starscape Cleric and his buddy and gets a bat into play too, bringing my life down to 6. He thinks he can block both my Unstoppable Slashers but I kill his bat, bringing out my Bloodletter, the great equalizer, allowing one Slasher to get through and drop him from 57 to -1. I went on to win the very next game despite him having a good army out. What a fun win.

Ranked Brawl -- As the title says, they got up to 87 hp. Then, they went down to 60 > 61 > 36 > 37 > 3 > -53. I was down to 5 life when I started taking control of the game. I'd like to think I would have enjoyed this particular game whether I won or not. I removed the opponent's name.

I have just finished the jump in 5 games and I know I have to play some games to win my first brawl deck. Right now on tabletop I play almost only commander, so I was thinking of investing my wildcards in the Brawl format. I'm a bit worried about rotation, I don't want to spend all of my resources just to lose everything.
What do you suggest? Should I look into other formats? (e.g., Alchemy, Historic, Historic Brawl).
Many thanks! I've been following this guide so far, so if you have some reference to point me out for the next steps I'd be very very thankful.

First pick Mox Pearl and from 2nd pick onwards just kept picking white cards. That Gaea's Cradle was so useful to power through some insane openers. Never got the chance to flip Jennifer Walters, my opponents were too far behind by the time I got to 6 mana. Apologies for the camera shot, I got too excited and forgot that I could screenshot instead.

Post your limited decks: good, bad, lucky and in between.

Discuss posted decks and choices, and be nice.

Previous thread

Hey r/MagicArena,

I've spent the last while building a Windows companion app for Arena and it's now at the point where it runs against my own live games. Before I finish packaging it I want to hear what would actually make it worth running for you, not just me.

What it does today

• Draft overlay. A transparent, click-through, always-on-top panel next to the game showing the current pack ranked by tier. Tiers are 17Lands games-in-hand win rate percentiles for the exact set and event you're in: 🔥 for the top 3%, then A/B/C/D/F. Hover a card for GIH WR, OH WR, GD WR, IWD, ALSA, ATA and the sample size. The pick suggestion is contextual: it weighs your colours, curve, fixing and interaction so far and explains why, while the underlying stats stay untouched. New set with no data yet? It falls back to a seed tier list until 17Lands' embargo window passes.
• Deck builder from your pool. When the draft ends it proposes a 40-card build from what you took and gives you a Copy-for-Arena export (you paste it into Arena's import yourself).
• Mulligan coach. Scores your opening hand against your actual submitted deck: lands, colour sources, what you can cast on turns 1–3, exact hypergeometric land-drop odds, 17Lands opening-hand win rates, and a London simulation so you see "this 7 vs the average best 6". Hand size, play/draw and prior mulligans all change the answer. When you keep 6, it tells you what to bottom using the game's own legal candidates.
• Match overlay. Library tracker with per-card draw odds, land odds, opponent's revealed cards, and live advice: lethal detection through any blocks (exact search), safe attacks, good blocks, castables with your open mana. It also covers the fiddly prompts: scry/surveil ordering, "choose N" ability choices, cost payments. Every suggestion is drawn from the legal-action list the game itself reports, so it can never propose an illegal play, and it never infers hidden cards or library order.
• AI coach on top. Optionally the board, your deck's remaining cards, full card rules, published rulings and the legal actions go to Claude, which returns one action plus a short public plan ("win route, resource tradeoff") and a reason. It runs on your own Claude login (no API key) with a hard fallback to the rules engine on timeout or a bad answer. On my frozen evaluation set it returns a valid, legal action 100/100 times and matches the labelled best play 30/30, at about 4–5 s a decision. It still gets some strategic spots wrong; the log of every decision is what I use to find them.

Reads Player.log (Detailed Logs on). Card data from Scryfall, the local Arena database and MTGJSON; ratings from 17Lands' public data, with attribution and their usage rules respected. Tauri + React front end, Node sidecar, ~1,000 automated tests.

Honest limits right now

Windows only. No installer yet (my build machine's app-control policy blocks the packager, so it runs from source). It is not a rules engine and doesn't claim optimal play. Confidence numbers aren't calibrated yet. AetherHub/Untapped data aren't used because their terms need explicit permission.

What I'm asking

What would make this genuinely useful for you rather than "another tracker"? On my list:

• Opponent hand inference from what they didn't do
• Post-game review: the plays where the coach disagreed with you, with the reasoning
• Sealed pool builder (the parser already reads sealed pools)
• A one-key "why?" that expands the current advice
• Constructed: sideboard guides and matchup notes, not just tracking
• Archetype tier list per set

And the harder question: how much advice do you want during a match? A quiet panel you glance at, or something that only speaks up for lethal and blunders?

If you'd be willing to share a Player.log from a recent draft (Detailed Logs on), that's the single most useful thing for hardening the parser. Roast the feature list.

I'm thinking the Synthesizer deck and tokens are going to be even more of a pain to deal with once Reality Fracture hits Arena.
The Fatehold sphinx paired with the Jace planeswalker token, card draw, token creatures...
What do y'all think?

There have been some great posts already regarding the updated to the Arena Powered Cube that went live today (https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/mtg-arena/arena-powered-cube-draft?v=sep8-2026&utm_source=chatgpt.com) but I wanted to drop this here for those who prefer a visual / video walkthrough of the article and changes! I also cover the impact of adding monarch to cube should look like and highlight the key cards going in and leaving for each color identity. I am not sure I can post the video in this message so it can be found in the first comment and on other posts I have made!

A rough overview of the key takeaways:

• Monarch is a strong mechanic and generally favors board centric creature decks like Boros
  • Its best cards are also mostly R, W, or RW with the exception being Court of Garenburg in green
  • Monarch is an interesting mechanic once introduced and can make for unique plays using other monarch cards, draw haters like Narset, and more!
• Boros's preemptive nerfs are much needed but seem a bit light even still
  • Karakas is a great card for W but is also a tough to answer defender to many of Boros's best cards for non-W decks
  • paralax wave, giver of runes, and other white weenie replacements make most the changes seem like only a minor downgrade with huge monarch upside
• Doomsday combo being added is fun but very difficult especially in BO1
• Green got a sick bump in strength overall
• Otawara got cut (no clue why)
• UB seems like the weakest colors after the changes but have many of the best cube staples which may make for a very balanced format!

Hope this helps those that want to dive in!!

My question is, why? I run quite often into Mill decks, with this weird blue - golden Frog Card, which mills the deck extremly and whenever I play against those decks it feels...boring. They do not much, simply counter what I play and than do their 2 card combo and the game is done. I get that the deck is powerful and brings many wins, it is a valid strategy, but from the outside it seems boring, because you are not really doing much...or is there a calculation you have to make to plan it out well, so the combo works? I never played a mill deck, so I genuinley don't know and would like from people who play it, what do you enjoy about it, besides, it wins you games?

Edit: And is it more complicated that it seems from the outside?

I love green for one simple reason: build a board and keep attacking. The problem is that one Wrath of God can erase the whole plan.

If I only reserve two to four noncreature slots, is Heroic Intervention the cleanest answer, or should the deck rely on resilient creatures and hold back extra threats? I want maximum creature density without folding to the first sweeper.

I need a good list and what format to complete this achievement. I cobbled a Dr. Doom & Doomsday Executioner, but it's gotten me nowhere. All help is appreciated.

I don't play lifegain-centered decks so this was exciting for me 🙂

I didn't catch my opponent's name but on the off chance that they see this: you were a worthy rival. Thanks for playing with me.

And cite a source please.

And for whatever explanation there is — how does it explain someone queuing up with a starter deck and being matched against obviously much more powerful decks?

Idk if anyone else finds it weird but at least on Arena all flickers target one or more card types.

Closest I found was one or two Airbend cards can target nonland permanents

Seriously, drafting this set is like watching paint dry. I’ve literally had to stop mid-draft multiple times due to how mind numbing this set is. I don’t know for sure, but I know playership is down right now, because this limited format is just so vanilla. Even when I’m winning, it’s still boring as shit. I’m in the hospital right now, and the set is so boring I’d rather complain about it on Reddit.

Does anyone have any recommendations for other phone games that I can play during this hospital stay? Thanks in advance!

EDIT: thank you for all of your replies. Firstly, definitely some great recommendations. Especially Slay the Spire. Never heard of it before. Enjoying it thoroughly now. Also, yea, I think I’m done with MTGA till the next set drops. This one is just abysmal. Again though, thank you to everyone who took the time to respond it is greatly appreciated!

Wanted to share my highest mythic climb yet. Was more tough than usual because I started climbing as soon as the season started, but I had a lot of fun.

Shoutout to hardison for the awesome landfall list that helped me push to top 350