MTG Arena Budget Historic Brawl Decks and Guide for Beginners
A beginner's guide to Historic Brawl: Managing your collection, and the best budget deck recommendations for Historic Brawl. We make use of the free cards, minimal rares and mythics, and a majority of cards consisting of commons and uncommons!
Historic Brawl is quickly becoming a beloved format on Magic: The Gathering Arena. Today we are going to look at the cost to get into the format, how to manage your collection and why it is so incredibly free-to-play (F2P) friendly in the long run. With 19 budget decks to pick from, there is something for everyone, even if you only have four common and one uncommon Wildcards left!
How to get cards in the first place
In a previous article we discussed what Historic Brawl actually is, and today we are talking about how to get into the format without having to spend tons of wildcards to do so.
The most important thing you have to remember is that in order to play Historic Brawl decks you only need one copy of each card (Singleton). This makes the format very cheap to maintain in the long run compared to other formats, at least if you are a player that switches decks often and likes to experiment. There are a couple of ways to gain a decent quantity of first copies, let’s go through all of them:
Color Challenges & New Player Starter Decks
After completing the tutorial you get access to five mono-color decks and after doing a couple of quests you also get the ten newcomer decks, one for each two color combination. These decks rotate each year and grant you a bunch of rares and mythics. This guide is written with that in mind and also strongly considers the Arena Base Set for card choices. If you want to learn more about the Starter Decks you can read about them here:
Drafting is hands down the best way to expand your collection and this is especially true for Historic Brawl. If you have a strong win rate and draft on a regular basis you don’t really have to do anything different but the average drafter will likely play three drafts per set with a 50% win rate and call it a day.
If the latter is the case, I highly recommend picking desirable rares a bit higher if you don’t own a copy yet to grow your collection. You should also definitely watch out for older draft formats as these will be your bottleneck. Sealed is also a decent alternative but gives you less control.
Packs
Opening random packs is generally not a great strategy if you want to get into most other formats in MTG Arena but it is pretty optimal if you want to get into Historic Brawl. Remember: we only want the first copy of any given card so you will run into diminishing returns if you focus on one set too much. If you go to Profile -> Set Collection you can see how many unique cards you are missing from any given set and can make your decisions based on those numbers.
Jump In! is a great and cheap way to earn tons of cards for very cheap. To get the most out of Jump In for Historic Brawl you should stop once you have picked every pack once. I highly recommend doing this if your collection is not very large as the value you gain is absolutely massive. You can also check out our complete event guide here:
This is not a guide to crafting staples for Historic Brawl (that is for a separate guide) but you generally want to spend Wildcards on cards you will unlikely to open in packs. This means you will prioritize sets like JumpStart, Anthologies and everything that has rotated out of Standard as you are unlikely to open packs from these sets.
If you Intend on opening packs for any given set I would also recommend waiting to craft cards from that specific set as any card you open a second copy of is wasted. A very important principle to remember is to stick to one, maybe two colors at the start, craft a lot of good cards in those colors and then expand your collection color by color. This ensures that you have consistently strong decks instead of a lot of medium power decks.
Deckbuilding Philosophy for Budget Decks
As previously mentioned, these decks all require you to spend no more than ten rare/mythic Wildcards each, with some of them technically requiring zero. A lot of decks also try to only include rares and mythics you will also likely use in other lists. Not counting towards the rare and mythic count are the free cards you get from the base set and the 2023 starter decks.
A bottleneck for newer players are also common and uncommon wildcards, the provided lists also try to minimize the amount of different commons and uncommons you have to craft, especially for the mana base. The goal was to offer a list for every playstyle, every guild and color, as well as a 5 color list.
Every single one also comes with a few crafting recommendations and which deck you can try to build next in this article to be more efficient with your Wildcards.
Honorable Mentions
There are two decks in the format that are famous for being very budget friendly: Angrath, Captain of Chaos + Rat Colony and The First Sliver + Tibalt's Trickery Both decks are also infamous for requiring very few decisions during piloting, but I can definitely recommend the rat deck as it will cost you a total of 4 commons and 1 uncommon to build.
The deck tries to put a ton of Auras on the Commander and protect her with cheap instants. You technically only require the Commander, although I highly recommend spending the Mythic wildcard on Mox Amber.
This list tries to assemble Paradox Engine and the commander on the battlefield at the same time to loop artifacts from the graveyard, draw the deck and win with Explosive Apparatus.
Play a ton of cheap creatures to sacrifice to the commander and draw tons of cards to win with cards like Blood Artist. You only need the commander, but you will notice having additional interaction and win conditions if you spend the Wildcards.
Magda tries to get 5 treasures on the field to fetch Paradox Engine. From there you can fetch Ancestral Statue into Aetherflux Reservoir to go for a combo kill or take an entirely different route all together and go for an aggro win.
Ramp with your elves and search up Craterhoof Behemoth for the win. Notably there are lots of great elves you should definitely craft if you enjoy this deck.
Try to ultimate the commander as fast as possible and draw your deck for the win. Green/white is the only color combination with two decks because both tokens and enchantress are very popular playstyles.
Gain tons of life with the commander and buff your creatures or spend it all for black card advantage.Heliod, the Sun Crowned, who is included in this decklist, is also a great budget commander on his own.
Balmor can kill the opponent quite consistently on turn 4 by pumping the board and trampling through everything. Most wildcards are used on the mana base, the deck has a hard time getting the right colors otherwise.
Put tons of lands into play and sacrifice them all with your commander in play. The crafts for this deck are universally useful for any lands commander.
Feather is a unique deck that pumps creatures repeatedly and gets tons of card advantage through the command zone. Similar to Balmor Prowess you are going to spend most of your wildcards on lands to get the right colors.
Ramp until you are at a point where you take virtually infinite turns by returning Time Warp over and over to your hand. All crafts are quite important for this deck.
Although it can seem quite daunting, getting into Historic Brawl is easier than it looks. If you craft the right budget lists you will have all staples in no time and experience the vastness of the format in all its glory. If you have any additional questions you can ask them on my Discord!
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Hannes Kaiser, also known as ImNotFine, was first exposed to Magic the Gathering back in Mirrodin at the age of 7 and fell in love with the game ever since. When Wizards of the Coast announced the public queues for Historic Brawl he had already played thousands of games of the format for almost two years and pioneered some of the most popular decks. If you want to stay up to date with the latest meta you can also join his Discord, Historic Brawl Stronghold.
