Festival of the Gods: Thassa's Briny Bounty Event Guide • MTG Arena Zone

Table of Contents

Event Details
Event Rewards
Hidden Depths Decklist
How to Play the Deck – Tips and Strategies
Wrapping Up

In the final week of MTG Arena’s Festival of the Gods event, we’re battling each other using an oversized mono blue Historic Singleton deck to win the final bunch of Theros Beyond Death showcase card styles. We don’t need to do any custom deck building this time, but read on to find out the event details, rewards, and some strategies on how to play the Hidden Depths deck!

Event Details

The ocean is calling! Set sail in search of hidden secrets and ancient knowledge in this week’s Festival of the Gods event. Both you and your opponent will embark with the same oversized Singleton deck. As the sea shanty impores, “May Thassa, the deep-dwelling God of the Sea, guide the cold currents and bring you to victory!

Thassa’s influences include the ocean, aquatic creatures, ancient knowledge, and the passage of time to name a few. She works slow, eventual, unfolding change to the status quo: resculpting the land, changing coastlines and upending institutons.

Duration: March 21 2020 at 8:00 AM – March 23 at 8:00 AM
Format: Mono-Blue Singleton Preconstructed Deck
Entry Fee: 2500 Gold or 500 Gems
Ends After: You can keep playing, but rewards do not go past three wins.
Match Structure: Best-of-one matches (BO1)

Event Rewards

To clarify, you do not have to re-enter the event and you only have to pay the entry fee once. There’s no limit on the number of losses (or victories). Play as much as you want for the duration of the event.

thb-260-callaphe-beloved-of-the-sea — 1 Win

1 Win: Threnody Singercard style
2 Wins: Callaphe, Beloved of the Sea Showcase card style
3 Wins: Thassa, Deep-Dwelling Showcase card style

Hidden Depths Decklist

We only have one choice of deck for this week’s event, called Hidden Depths. It is a 160 card Historic singleton deck consisting of a wide range of Blue cards and Artifacts – card draw, counterspells, creatures, bounce spells and more. The full decklist is below.

[sd_deck deck=”4PITVrJvb”]

How to Play the Deck – Tips and Strategies

If you’re familiar with Brawl, you may already be familiar with the inconsistent nature of singleton decks. You don’t always draw what you want, and individual power of cards matters a lot more than specific synergies. With a 160 card deck, it becomes even more random and the card pool is much more diverse in nature. We have low impact creatures like Sailor of Means at the three mana slot to Tempest Djinn one of the most efficient creatures in the deck. There’s not much we can do to control our draws so we’d better make our plays count!

Hidden Depths is primarily a creature based tempo deck that has many cheap evasive threats and spells to get through damage by bouncing your opponent’s things, and devotes a lot of resources in protecting its creatures.
As a example, cards like Unsummon or Run Aground are good for slowing down your opponent in the early game where you are trying to push through for damage and apply pressure, but as the game goes on their impact will be much less. Using them optimally can blow out your opponent and will mean difference between victory and defeat. Some examples of good use are in bouncing expensive creatures that don’t have valuable enter the battlefield abilities, like Faerie Formation or Atemsis, to gain a huge tempo advantage. You can also disrupt a double block by bouncing one of the blocking creatures, or reset your own creatures against Waterknot or Ichthyomorphosis.
Ideally, you want to look at dropping creatures early and continue chipping away with them throughout the game while leaving up mana for instants and flash spells during your opponent’s turn if possible. This is much easier to do when you’re ahead, so consider mulliganing slow hands, especially on the draw. Outside of River's Rebuke, it will be very difficult to reset the board if you fall behind.
Of course, play around counterspells or lure them out – but keep in mind there are only five of them (which many people will be happy with!). Sinister Sabotage is the only unconditional one; the rest are more specific in nature. Identify when it’s okay to tap out so you don’t face something that you cannot deal with the next turn.
As the game progresses, card advantage and card draw become much more important as you search for your game-ending threats. Cards like Midnight Clock, Precognitive Perception and Gadwick, the Wizened stand out where they can refill your hand. There aren’t that many of them so think twice before discarding them to cards like Chart a Course or Thirst for Meaning
Be wary of attacking into creatures with flash such as Thryx, the Sudden Storm and Dream Eater.

That’s probably a bit more detail than what you need for the event, since the stakes are so low and players can freely concede – it may even be over before you know it. Most importantly, have fun!

Wrapping Up

That’s it for Festival of the Gods as we start to say goodbye to Theros Beyond Death and await the Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths shakeup. In the meantime, we have a lot of things on the agenda over the next few weeks to help get us through everything going on in the world, from special events (Arena Sealed Cube, anyone?), daily tournaments via MagicFest Online, to the start of the preview season for the next set.

Also remember, you can always engage in our growing MTG Arena Zone community: