Historic Brawl Fest Event Guide and Decklists

Table of Contents

Event Details
Event Rewards
What is Historic Brawl?
Decklists

The Historic Brawl event is a weeklong event that gives players an unlimited matchmaking queue for Historic Brawl. This is your chance to go wild, have fun and take a break from the competitive Standard and Historic queues. There are a bunch of card styles to be earned and some new cards to be slung, including the Mystical Archives which have really enhanced the power of some decks! View our Historic Brawl decklists updated for Strixhaven, come up with your own, and share them with us!

Event Details

Duration: May 8 2021 at 8:00 AM PST – May 14 at 8:00 AM PST
Format: Historic Brawl
Entry Fee: 2500 gold or 500 gems
Ends After: You can keep playing, but rewards do not go past five wins.
Match Structure: Best-of-one matches (BO1)

Event Rewards

1 Win: Gods Willing Japanese Mystical Archive Card Style
2 Wins: Brainstorm Japanese Mystical Archive Card Style
3 Wins: Doom Blade Japanese Mystical Archive Card Style
4 Wins: Faithless Looting Japanese Mystical Archive Card Style
5 Wins: Regrowth Japanese Mystical Archive Card Style

What is Historic Brawl?

As the name suggests, Historic Brawl is an extension of the regular Brawl format, which is dictated by Standard legal sets and rotation. We choose our Commander, a Legendary creature or a Planeswalker that we can cast as if they were in our hand (similar to Companions, which we can still use together), and create a singleton 60-card deck that ideally fits into your theme using any of the cards in MTG Arena!

The known banlist for Historic Brawl is as follows:

As for the logistics, Historic Brawl is not quite an “official” format yet as we can only play it in occasional events and direct challenges, coordinated through unofficial methods such as a Discord server. Wizards will gauge interest in both Standard and Historic Brawl formats to see if it can “support a healthy play environment simultaneously”, so players don’t “suffer from long queue times and repeated mirror matches because we’ve split the player base in twain”.

The Historic format is undoubtedly more diverse and arguably more fun, as new sets and especially the Remastered sets are added retroactively will increase the card pool significantly. This should increase diversity, rather than seeing the same Commanders like we do in Standard Brawl. Ideally if both queues become available, we can even see regular Brawl not be played anymore especially with no rewards on the line, and it could even be merged with Historic Brawl to create one format.

Decklists

Check out our new Strixhaven-themed Commanders! We’ve also left up some lists that were built/updated in Kaldheim, which shouldn’t take very much updating at all to regain their full strength.

Please note that unfortunately the Learn/Lesson mechanic is essentially banned in Brawl, since you can’t have a sideboard. The Mystical Archives that aren’t banned have given the format a bit of a power spike though!

As always, feel free to change some cards around if you don’t have every single one: each card matters less in Brawl, since you’re less likely to draw any individual one! While some of them are pretty important to certain archetypes, such as synergy pieces and tutor targets, Historic’s card pool is so big that you’ll almost always be able to find something else that does the job, though perhaps not quite as well.

We’ll be adding and updating more throughout the week, so check back later! If you have any that you wish to share, leave a comment below or follow us on Twitter and show us your best brews.