Gift Bag Historic – Wilds of Eldraine Festival Event Guide and Best Decklists
This guide will contain everything you need to know about the Wilds of Eldraine Festival - Gift Bag Historic event, including the details, banned card list, rewards, and our exclusive sample decklists.
Hey everyone! We have finished going through a Season of Growth during our latest ride of the festival. The train is pulling up to the next station and this time it is Gift Bag Historic. I’m sure most of you are wondering what a gift bag emblem does.
It is “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” You only get each of them one time and then the gift bag is empty.
For those of you without much Historic experience, it is a very fast format where games can end in the blink of an eye. This is especially true when you’re playing the Bo1 version like this event. You might be asking yourself, “Why is Josh discussing format speed in Festival event?”. Quite simply that you might not get much off of the stipulation other than getting an extra mana off of the treasure.
Of course, there are some options such as Gleeful Demolition that will always have a target now. Red decks probably didn’t need that food anyway, but they sure could use three little beaters.
Keeping that in mind, we’ll mostly be playing decks that wouldn’t mind an extra mana early. I’ll be providing a budget deck for those who don’t want to invest into a top tier historic deck just for a festival.
Since the effect is pretty minimal on game play, you will be fine playing almost anything off of our recently updated Bo1 Historic Meta Tier List. I’ll be highlighting the ones that I think you should be considering in this article.
I expect some version of this to be the most played deck in the festival. Very easy to pick up and play with most of the rares tied up in the mana base. Sometimes it just kills the opponent before they have a chance to get off of the ground and it has just enough interaction to keep them honest.
This probably gains the most off of the emblem because it cares about raw number of artifacts and can turn those free artifacts into 4/4s off of Yotia Declares War.
One of the problems this deck has always run into is all of the tapped lands leaving you one mana short from going off before dying. Getting that extra treasure can be a huge swing and even getting a food to gain three life can be the difference in living to go off the next turn and packing it in.
The biggest benefit this is getting from the emblem is being able to cast your two-card combo of Founding the Third Path and Glimpse the Unthinkable on turn one to get the party started. Being able to sneak that in underneath a Thoughtseize can be a really big deal.
I’m not expecting to see much graveyard hate in this event so that is another big plus for this one.
Another deck that the extra treasure can be huge in getting to go off a turn earlier with. This deck lets you basically ignore your opponent’s creature removal while you are focused on doing some pretty crazy stuff and/or things.
Just a bunch of cheap red cards to try to race to zero. Knowing that you get some free artifacts lets you take advantage of both Gleeful Demolition and Shrapnel Blast. I also threw in Experimental Synthesizer so you’d have some other artifacts to sac once your gift bag runs dry.
Josh is a member of the elite limited team The Draft Lab as well as the host of The Draft Lab Podcast. He was qualifying for Pro Tours, Nationals, and Worlds literally before some of you were born. After a Magic hiatus to play poker and go to medical school, he has been dominating Arena with over an 80% win percentage in Bo3 as well as making #1 rank in Mythic.
