I was able to get permission from my friend and teammate Oliver to use his Magic: the Gathering Arena account. This lets me access the variety of decks that he uses for Standard and Historic as well as a huge card pool wherein I can get to experiment with a lot of deck builds. I can also copy deck brews from sites online and make some minor edits on them.

For today, I decided to play his Temur Lukka deck into the casual BO1 format as his current daily quests need him to cast Blue and Red spells. The decklist was based on the popular deck that finished in the Top 8 or Top 4 of the major MTG Arena tournaments in the past month. The deck has core components similar to that of the Gruul Adventures but its end game spells are very powerful, given the access to Blue to tempo and countermagic.

Check out the Youtube video I made of my gameplay today of the Temur Lukka deck for BO1 Standard.

Winning one game rather than the traditional Best-of-Three match makes the deck build look like having a taste of innovation. That is because of certain matchups wherein you’d need answer cards to counter their deck strategy.

I am a bit used to the usual sideboarded gameplays where you won’t really mind if you lost the first game, as your sideboard cards can help in the goal of winning by shifting your deck strategy that can handle a certain deck archetype. For example, for control decks, you have discards spells like Duress and counterspells such as Negate.

Going back in the BO1 scenario, you can have generic cards that are usual answers, for example, Thrashing Brontodon, where you have 3/4 body that can destroy the opponent’s artifacts and enchantments. That said, you tend to be considering more of these kinds of cards rather than having Duress in the deck which can be awkward when drawn against an aggro deck.

My current BO1 deck in Standard Ranked in MTG Arena is Red-Green Adventures and so my adjustment in the decklist somewhat reflects on my persona of being a fan of one-of cards. The Standard sideboarded build also has a few one-ofs in their main deck so I think it won’t really affect much of the gameplay but there are a few cards that are only counted two but I would add another copy.

One example is the Scorching Dragonfire, where I’ll have three copies in the deck as I expected more aggro matchups in my current rank and also that it can deal with planeswalkers.

My one-of card choices at the moment are Vivien planeswalker, The Akroan War, Radha, and Terror of the Peaks. I make sure my spot removals are enough in the probability of drawing them on the starting hand.

The next concern here is when the metagame would lean more on the midrange and control deck and so another adjustment will be made by cutting out the dragonfires for more two-drop creatures. We will see if that happens in the coming weeks.

That is a wrap for now. Until the next blog post.