Table of Contents
ToggleWhat Is Brawl on Magic Arena?
If you’re new to Magic Arena and are curious about the Brawl format, you’ve come to the right place! I’ve been playing on Arena for five years now, and playing Brawl for much of that time. It’s my preferred way to play on Arena for a quick game.
Brawl was originally designed as a spin on Commander for multiplayer paper games that only used the Standard card pool. The biggest difference with the two formats is that in Brawl you can choose a planeswalker as your commander, instead of the usual legendary creatures allowed in Commander.
Like Commander, the creature or planeswalker you select as your commander determines the color identity of the cards you can play in your deck, and also like Commander, you can only have a single copy of any particular card in your deck, other than basic lands. This is one of the big appeals of the format, because you only need a single copy of a card for your deck, unlike the other competitive formats where you typically want to have up to four copies of your key cards, which will eat up your wildcards quite quickly.
Arena’s version of Brawl is very different because Arena doesn’t currently support multiplayer gameplay. So Brawl on Arena is just another duel format where two players duke it out for victory. As such, it’s typically just as cut-throat and competitive as any of the other competitive formats like Standard or Historic.
Arena offers two versions of Brawl, with both being best-of-one play:
Brawl – 100-card (including your commander) singleton of eternally-legal cards
Standard Brawl – 60-card (including your commander) singleton of Standard-legal cards
If you’re just starting to build your Magic Arena collection, I’d recommend building a Standard Brawl deck first. Over time, once you’ve cracked open older booster packs and accumulated wild cards you can turn in for older cards that you may want, you can start to build 100-card Brawl decks drawn from all the cards available on Arena, including the Alchemy cards!
Building Your First Standard Brawl Deck
Go to the Decks folder, and then click on the big plus sign to add a new deck.
Select Format as Standard Brawl.
Once you’ve done that, you’ll go to the deckbuilding screen, and the first thing it will ask you to do is pick your Commander, and it will display all of the available choices that you have available in your collection. Notice that you can choose legendary creatures such as Giada, Font of Hope
Scroll through your choices until you find a commander that looks fun to you. For this guide, I’m picking Elenda, Saint of Dusk
Interaction – Destroy Effects
The first thing I look for to start my decklist is interaction, and in white and black that starts with the card text “destroy.” Here are the white cards I added:
Cathar Commando
Split Up
Looking at the black cards with “destroy” in the text, here’s what I chose to add:
Cut Down
Gix’s Command
Interaction – Exile
I also like to search for the word “exile” since some removal spells and other interaction effects exile cards that your opponent controls. Here are the ones I’ve added to the deck:
Sheltered by Ghosts
Deep-Cavern Bat
Mana Ramp
If you’re playing green in your deck, use the words “library” and either “land” or “Forest” to search for cards that will help you develop your mana ahead of curve. If you’re not playing green, you’ll want to rely on artifacts that provide mana, so you can search for “add” to reveal those. The options in Standard for nongreen decks are a bit limited, but there are some good ones:
Arcane Signet
Other Ways To Gain Life
Next I searched for “lifelink” for other creatures with lifelink that can help keep my life total high enough that Elenda’s full text box can be utilized.
Healer’s Hawk
Enduring Innocence
Next I went looking for other cards that can gain life, putting “gain life” into the search bar. There weren’t too many options, but these are the two I picked:
Authority of the Consuls
Lifegain Payoffs
The commander Elenda gives you payoffs for life gain, but why stop there?
Exemplar of Light
Drawing Cards
Drawing cards is one thing you should look to add to your Brawl decks whenever you can, since the more cards you see, the more options you have. Some of the cards I’ve added so far have card draw effects attached, but I went looking for some more, typing “draw card” into the search bar:
Many of the best black card draw spells make you lose life, like Gix, Yawgmoth Praetor
Picking Lands for Your Brawl Deck
When you have two or more colors, fixing your colors is incredibly important. Some of the land choices are better than others, but even if most of what you have are the uncommon or common choices, I’d play them to increase the chances of you having the right colors you need to cast your spells. I ended up with seven lands that produce my two colors of mana, seven Swamps and seven Plains, and three lands that offer some utility. Don’t forget to use the “Suggest Lands” feature once you’ve picked your nonbasic lands to let the computer figure out the right mix of basic lands!
Once you’re finished, don’t forget to adjust the deck’s cosmetics if you’d like. Click on Deck Details, and then you can select the Avatar, Card Sleeve, and Companion you want to have when you play the deck. For this one I picked Liliana Vess as the Avatar, for the sleeve a vampire woman who I imagine might be a fan of Elenda if they knew each other, and the companion is the Halloween Cerebus with pumpkin heads to round out the spooky theme.
Here’s a picture of how the deck ended up looking:
And here’s the decklist:
Standard Brawl_Elenda
Commander (1)
Creature (16)
- 1 Brightblade Stoat
- 1 Cathar Commando
- 1 Deep-Cavern Bat
- 1 Enduring Innocence
- 1 Enduring Tenacity
- 1 Exemplar of Light
- 1 Gix, Yawgmoth Praetor
- 1 Gumdrop Poisoner
- 1 Healer’s Hawk
- 1 Loran of the Third Path
- 1 Nullpriest of Oblivion
- 1 Phyrexian Fleshgorger
- 1 Phyrexian Missionary
- 1 Ruin-Lurker Bat
- 1 Sheoldred
- 1 Solemn Simulacrum
Instant (5)
Sorcery (5)
Enchantment (4)
Planeswalker (2)
Artifact (3)
Are there any other cards you’d run in an Elenda, Saint of Dusk
Want more info on getting started in Arena? Then check out our Beginner’s Guide to Playing on Magic Arena.