Gift Bag Standard – Midweek Magic Event Guide

Hey everyone! I hope you’re all in the mood for gifts this week, and not because every store has already decided it’s Christmas. No, it’s because this week’s Midweek Magic is Gift Bag Standard!

I’ll spare you the rant about how we’re apparently skipping right over Halloween (which is clearly the superior holiday) and focus on Magic instead. That’s definitely what’s going to happen, and I absolutely won’t get sidetracked while writing this at 3:00 AM. I’m a professional, after all.

I’m sure you’re wondering what exactly a Gift Bag event is, and I’m here to give you my best educated guess based on previous events. Surely it can’t be a worse gift than last week, when the event was advertised as Brawl Builder Challenge before launching as an Alchemy Week variation instead, rendering my entire article completely useless. Once again, I’m sorry about that whole mess. Apparently, the real Brawl Builder Challenge was the disappointment we made along the way.

Anyway, back to Gift Bag Standard!

In previous Gift Bag events, players received an emblem that allowed them to choose between creating a Treasure, Clue, or Food token during their upkeep. You could only choose each option once per game. Naturally, the correct order is Treasure, Clue, Food in approximately 99% of games. The other 1% is reserved for people who enjoy making questionable decisions.

As for the Standard part, I’m assuming you’ve already figured out that you’ll need to bring a Standard deck to the event. The emblem isn’t impactful enough to justify building an entire deck around it, so we’re going to be playing some pretty standard Standard decks.

Yes, that’s the quality of humor you’re getting today. At this point, I’m genuinely not sure whether I need to go to sleep or drink ALL of the coffee.

I’m leaning toward the coffee. Let’s see how that works out for everyone.

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Bring a standard deck and you get an emblem that says “At the beginning of your upkeep, choose one that hasn’t been chosen: – Create a treasure token, – Create a clue token, – Create a food token”

Find out more details about this and upcoming Midweek Magic events HERE.

• Duration: October 20th, 2026 @ 2:00 PM PST to October 22nd, 2026 @ 2:00 PM PST
• Format: Gift Bag Standard
• Entry Fee: Free
• Ends After: You can play as much as you like for the duration of the event.
• Match Structure: Best-of-one matches (BO1)

Event Rewards

Wins	Reward
1 Win	Rare Individual Card Reward (ICR)
2 Wins	Rare Individual Card Reward (ICR)
3 Wins	One Random Cosmetic Item

Mono Red

Good ol’ Mono Red. Nothing beats Mono Red! Well, when it comes to getting this event over with as quickly as possible, it’s certainly hard to argue with it.

The game plan is the same as always: turn creatures sideways, throw some burn spells at your opponent’s face, and try to finish things before they get any funny ideas about actually playing Magic.

I borrowed this particular build from The MTG Hero’s article, which you can check out here.

Auras

As the kids like to say, this deck has aura. In fact, it has a whole bunch of them. The game plan is simple: play a cheap creature, pump up the jams, and start bashing face.

Of course, putting all your eggs in one basket is a great way to get blown out by a single removal spell. Fortunately, Shardmage's Rescue and Restoration Magic are here to make sure your opponent doesn’t ruin your day quite so easily. After all, it’s not really fair if they’re allowed to interact with your giant monster.

Kona

Do you enjoy interacting with your opponent? Having meaningful back-and-forth games of Magic? Allowing both players to participate in the experience?

Then this probably isn’t the deck for you.

On the other hand, if you enjoy playing Solitaire while your opponent stares helplessly at their screen, you’ve come to the right place. The goal is to get Omniscience onto the battlefield and do all sorts of completely reasonable things that the designers definitely intended.

Realistically, your opponent will probably concede the moment Omniscience hits the battlefield, but it’s nice to pretend that both players were going to have fun.

I don’t know what is up with Marang River Regent causing importing issues. The solution is to copy the deck list into word and edit it to say only Marang River Regent. You could also delete it entirely and just manually add them in once the list is in the client.

Dimir

This deck can’t quite decide whether it wants to be a reanimator deck or a control deck, so naturally it decided to do a little bit of both.

While it’s not a full-fledged reanimator strategy, Superior Spider-Man gives you some nasty options by copying threats like Uldaros Theorix, or Deceit. Depending on the matchup, you can lean into that game plan or take the slower, more controlling route.

Either way, you get to play powerful threats while making your opponent’s life miserable. Which, now that I think about it, is pretty much the entire philosophy behind playing Dimir.

Budget Hare

Believe it or not, some people have absolutely no interest in investing their precious wildcards into Standard decks. Fortunately, there are always some hares around to handle that situation.

Getting a bunny onto the battlefield on turn one is actually a pretty big deal, letting you build momentum early and start multiplying your threats like, well, rabbits. Before you know it, you’ve got an adorable little army ready to bash your opponent’s face in.

Just cross your fingers that your opponent doesn’t have a board sweeper. Nothing ruins a perfectly good bunny party quite like someone deciding to clean up the entire battlefield.

That’s all I’ve got for this week’s Midweek Magic! Hopefully, Gift Bag Standard turns out to be exactly what we’re expecting and I don’t have to apologize for another event pulling the rug out from under us. I’m starting to develop trust issues with these event descriptions.

As always, thanks for reading! I’ll be back next week with another Midweek Magic and this weekend with another Limited Weekend Update. Until then, stay classy, people!