Standard Artisan – Festival of the Fae Event Guide and Decklists

Festival of the Fae is here for the next three weeks! This is a set of three special events where you can win some beautiful Showcase Card Styles from Throne of Eldraine. The event kicks off with the first chapter – the Artisan Market, where you are only allowed to use common and uncommon cards in your deck. Check out the full event schedule and details here. Read on to find out the best strategies and decklists for this event!

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Event Information

• Duration: November 3 2019 at 1:00 AM PST – November 6 at 8:00 AM*
• Format: Standard Artisan
• 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)

*The end time is yet to be confirmed by Wizards.

Event Rewards

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

• 1 Win: Merchant of the Vale Showcase Card Style
• 2 Wins: Beanstalk Giant Showcase Card Style
• 3 Wins: Order of Midnight Showcase Card Style
• 4 Wins: Giant Killer Showcase Card Style
• 5 Wins: Brazen Borrower Showcase Card Style

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What is Standard Artisan?

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Hidden deep in the Wilds, the Festival of the Fae kicks off with a welcome fete of magical wares. A bustling plaza stretches as far as the eye can see. What’s for sale? Mostly junk, of course. But sprinkled among the clutter real treasures await…if you’re willing to look.

Standard Artisan is a new MTG Arena format that allows you to only use common and uncommon cards in your deck. This serves as an alternative to Pauper, which we have not seen since War of the Spark Chronicles. In anticipation of some deck archetypes dominating and promoting interesting strategies, the following cards are banned from this event:

• Persistent Petitioners
• Cauldron Familiar
• Cavalcade of Calamity
• Gates Ablaze

Building Your Artisan Deck

The pattern of Magic: The Gathering sets has been that each color combination has its own theme and/or mechanic for drafting synergy. The multicolored uncommons in each set – the signpost cards of their limited archetype, will be the best cards to build around. Here are some examples we like:

Grumgully the Generous is a decent sized body for 3 mana and helps buff all your (non-Human) creatures, similar to the Gruul Riot mechanic. Combined with cards like Zhur-Taa Goblin, the Gruul deck will be a strong and consistent archetype.

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The two “lords” will opens up Artisan to some powerful aggressive strategies, within their tribe.

Izzet is a very strong color combination in Artisan, offering a host of great spells such as Ral's Outburst, Improbable Alliance and Beacon Bolt We’ve even done a deck guide for this archetype here!

Dimir will be a great control color combination, that offers both excellent disruption, card draw and finishers. Nightveil Predator will be very difficult to deal with due to the lack of boardwipes in Artisan, and Surveil cards will provide plenty of synergy to work around with. Having said that, take a look at our example decklists below as a starting point, or use them as is for your five wins!

Our Top Artisan Decklists

Here are some decks tailor made for this event, which we think will perform quite well. Here are also some other resources that you may find helpful within the site:

• MTG Arena Budget Standard Decks: Our full list of all the budget decks we have on the site, complete with a tier list and upgrade guide for each deck. Great for new players!
• Budget Izzet Control Artisan Deck Guide: A dedicated guide to one of the decks below, with a more detailed explanation on how the deck works and how you can upgrade it outside of this event.

Check out our video on the Azorius Flyers deck as well!

https://youtu.be/mOn3Tha8NpA

For this event, we were able to take the quick five wins with our Boros Knights deck. We plan to do a deck guide on it soon, so keep an eye out for it!

Wrapping Up

Join us next week for Oko’s Madness, which is a twist on Momir! We also have decklists and metagame coming up for MagicFest Lyon and Nagoya, which are both Standard. We can’t wait to see if somebody has come up with any decks to combat Oko and Nissa – we’ll post the top decks as soon as it comes up! In the meantime, you can watch the coverage of the events here.

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

• Discuss everything and ask quests about MTG Arena in our Discord server
• Follow our Twitter for the latest decks and guides
• Subscribe to our new YouTube channel
• Leave a comment below if you have any feedback or just want to let us know how the decks went!