Hello and welcome back to Arena Adventures, the series where I climb up the Arena ladder and take you along with me. In the last edition of this series, I climbed back up to Platinum 4 after the monthly rank reset and talked about maybe choosing a new deck. I put out a poll asking you all if I should choose a new deck to work with, and you said yes! So today I’ll be making a new deck, talking about my rationale for the cards within it, and hopefully climbing even higher on the Arena ranked ladder.
A Brand New Hairdo
I’ve played a lot of Magic over the course of this series, and there’s one deck that’s recently popped onto my radar. Released just a few weeks ago in Foundations, Hare Apparent is one heck of a common. It’s a 2/2 for two mana, and it makes small 1/1 Rabbit tokens if we control other Hare Apparents when it enters the battlefield. And, most importantly, we can have any number of this card in our deck (ignoring the normal four-of restriction). This card seems unassuming, but with just a few copies of it in our opening hand, we can flood the board with little guys.
But Standard is a format with a lot of powerful cards. Simply putting a few small creatures on the board won’t be enough to win games. Let’s talk about the cards that will support our army of Rabbits…
LIFEGAIN:
This creature, a one mana 1/2, is also from Foundations. It gains us a point of life whenever another creature enters the battlefield, which can add up quickly over the course of a multi-turn slugfest. Plus, because it only costs one mana, it can hit the board the turn before our first copy of Hare Apparent and start gaining life as early as turn two.
This does the same thing as Hinterland Sanctifier, except it costs one more mana and has flying. This card is worse than its aforementioned one mana sibling, but redundancy for this sort of effect is particularly powerful because we’re making so many creature tokens.
INTERACTION:
1x Planar Disruption, 1xSheltered by Ghosts, and 2x Stroke of Midnight
These cards do largely the same thing: stop one of our opponent’s bothersome permanents from bothering us. They do so in different ways, though. Planar Disruption keeps the bothersome thing on the board while removing its effectiveness, Sheltered by Ghosts removes it from the board entirely but puts a target on the back of one of our creatures, and Stroke of Midnight removes the problem permanently at the cost of giving our opponent a 1/1 creature. I think having a diverse suite of removal is a good thing, so they’re all here for now!
This Bird is an interesting one. It’s kind of a counterspell? It’s also kind of a hate bear (a small creature that changes the resource economy of the game)? It’s a weird one, but it slots well into our mana curve. It can be cast on turn three, when we’d otherwise only be able to cast one copy of Hare Apparent and waste our one additional mana. We’re working with a new deck, so we’ll try out this interesting option for a while.
ODDS AND ENDS:
Every creature in this deck works well with Delney. It can make our life total skyrocket when combined with Hinterland Sanctifier and make tons of tokens with our 20 copies of Hare Apparent. And, as a bonus, it makes all of our creatures much harder to block.
Just a neat little catch-all. It’s graveyard recursion, token creation, and removal all in one. Five mana is a lot, admittedly, but I think the sheer flexibility this card offers is worth the cost.
1x Dollmaker’s Shop // Porcelain Gallery
This is a great card, both as an early-game setup piece and as a late-game finishing blow. And, if we’re lucky enough to have it stick on the board, it can act as both! Making an additional 1/1 each turn starting on turn two or making a wide board full of creatures massive are both great options to have. This seems like it’ll quickly become one of my favorite pieces in this list.
2x Dewdrop Cure
This is a neat little piece of recursion. Because Hare Apparent (and most of the other key pieces in this deck) cost two mana or fewer, this card will bring back two (and sometimes even three) of our best creatures from the graveyard. It helps us recover from board wipes and spot removal quite well, so I’m a big fan of it here.
With that long-winded explanation, here’s the full decklist…
Hop to It
Now that I’ve got a solid decklist, it’s time to get some games under my belt. I’m starting out in Platinum 4, the highest I was able to climb with my Dimir Faeries list from the last bunch of articles.
First off, let’s talk about when the deck is at its best. When I can land a Hinterland Sanctifier on turn one, an Hare Apparent on turn two, a Delney, Streetwise Lookout on turn three, and several more Hare Apparents throughout the rest of the game, I develop a board state that’s near insurmountable. This is a potent combination that results in a board full of unblockable creatures and my life total being astronomically high. This combination is strong without Delney, too, and leaves a good window for me to interact with my opponent on turn three.
Sometimes, with a few copies of Lifecreed Duo and Hinterland Sanctifier on the board, I can afford to play the long game. I’ll build up a large life total and a board full of 20+ creatures before attacking my opponent just once for the win. Once, I was even able to get my life total up to triple digits, with 30 creatures on board, before crashing through for a win in combat.
I know it seems silly to say that this is a legitimate strategy, but it is. Hare Apparent and the tokens it makes are quite fragile, meaning that they usually won’t survive attacking. So, by bolstering my life total and slowly building up for one strong attack, I ensure a safe win (unless my opponent wipes the board, but I’m choosing to be optimistic here).
I worked my way through the lowest sub-rank of Platinum, and saw a good diversity of decks along the way. There were a lot of Bloomburrow-focused Frog kindred decks, a lot of mono-black life-gain/life-drain decks, and the occasional spellslinger deck.
I still struggled against the mono-black decks, unfortunately. They ran a lot of removal to kill my early setup creatures, and cards like Unstoppable Slasher, Sheoldred, the Apocalypse, and Virtue of Persistence are often too much for my meager removal spells to handle.
Nevertheless, I persisted, and climbed up to Platinum 3! It took a while, but I’ve become a big fan of this deck. I really enjoy the cushion that having a higher life total provides, and I think that with some focused upgrades I’ll be able to push even higher on the Arena ranked ladder.
Tale’s End
So, I’ve clawed my way up into Platinum 3! It’s not a huge improvement from last time, but any improvement is certainly welcome.
This deck feels like it has a lot of room to grow. It needs card advantage, it needs better removal, and it certainly needs better supporting pieces than the ones we have now.
When I get more wildcards, and when I write the next part in this series, I’ll better the deck in all of those ways. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next time!
Want more Arena Standard? Check out this deck tech for Azorius Oculus. New to Arena? We’ve got a complete beginner’s guide right here.
