Historic Is The Best Format In Magic

Posted on December 9, 2022

Historic is the best format in Magic.

There, I said it. Someone had to, because it's been true for some time now.

Modern, Magic's previous golden child, has become an excessively expensive rotating format thanks to Modern Horizons sets, while also feeling the weight of the power level outliers in those sets. Modern isn't necessarily a bad format right now, but there are much stricter rules of engagement than ever before (mostly just play as many Modern Horizons cards as possible), which both put a lot of pressure on the format as well as stifle innovation.

Pioneer has made moves in recent times, but it's still a relatively small format that somehow lacks both the flair as well as the interaction to be exciting. Again, it's not a bad format, but it's also not a format that excites the mind with endless possibilities. There are a good number of different decks, but on the whole, it feels fairly explored and sterile.

However, Historic right now is basically the wild, wild west of Magic: the Gathering, and today I'm going to go over the reasons why it's Magic's best format right now.

A Brewers Paradise

In a lot of ways, Historic in 2022 resembles Modern in the mid 2010s, perhaps the peak of the format (and of paper Magic events with the SCG Tour having huge events every other weekend and huge viewership on Twitch). The card pool was huge, and it didn't feel like it would take much for a new deck to just come out of nowhere. You could build all sorts of homebrew decks, and while they might not end up tier one, it wouldn't feel out of place to see one make a run on day two of a big event.

That's a good descriptor of Historic right now, except there are even less big events to help define the format. There's no better "anything goes" format in Magic right now, as the possibilities of what you can do feel limitless.

There are tons of great fair and midrange options like in most of the other formats, but there are also an endless amount of awesome build arounds and paths you can take. Do you want to build an awesome Elves deck? Mill your opponent out? Win the game with Maze's End?

In Historic, if you can dream it, you can build it! Why?

Carefully Cultivated Variety

There are just so many cards in the Historic format!

This has been used to make fun of the format in the past, but I assure you it's a feature not a bug!

Historic is of course every card ever released on MTG Arena for all the normal sets like Ixalan, Ravnica Allegiance, Throne of Eldraine, and more, but there are also a bunch of other supplemental products that have the benefit of being specifically curated by Wizards of the Coast to inject all sorts of fun stuff into the format.

There are the Historic and Explorer Anthologies, which are small sets of cards specifically chosen to be added to Historic, and are often a great mix of classic cards and build arounds. There are the Remastered sets like Kaladesh and Amonkhet, which add both cards from those sets as well as a themed anthology set of extras reimagined in the set's plane. There are Jumpstart releases which add a whole host of fun build around cards. There are the Mystical Archive and Retro Artifact subsets of Strixhaven and The Brothers' War, which are just reprints in paper but bring new cards to the format in Historic. And there are the Alchemy releases with their digital only cards.

Put it all together and you've got a melting pot that becomes a deck-builder's paradise.

History In A New Light

The first half of the fun of Historic is getting to see the classic cards from the Anthologies and Mystical Archive reprint sheets in a brand new light.

How do cards like Knight of the Reliquary and Tarmogoyf play without access to the Fetchlands? How does Death's Shadow do without Street Wraith? These are the questions Historic deck-builders must ask themselves, which flips the script on cards that may have been around for over a decade. It's also a possible home for some of these cards that may have been power crept out of Legacy or Modern and now no longer see any more play, like Phyrexian Obliterator or Dragonstorm.

Context is everything in Magic, which makes seeing cards we have established notions about in different settings very fun.

Frankly, it's also just refreshing to play an Eternal format not completely run by ubiquitous elements like Fetchlands or Lightning Bolt - Historic is the format where other cards have room to breathe.

But Historic is not just old cards.

Digital Only Delights

Okay, take a second and go scream out the window about how Alchemy is the worst format ever and Wizards is killing Magic and blah blah Hearthstone blah blah. You back now?

Alchemy may be a failed format, but a large part of the digital-only designs on MTG Arena are very fun!

Sure, there are some misses like the specialize cards and a few others, but delayed triggers, interesting play/draw stuff, conjure, seek, and perpetual are all wildly awesome designs that do very interesting things to a game of Magic. They would look weird in paper-adjacent formats, but the beauty of Historic is that it isn't beholden to such things. Historic gets to be this wild, oddball format where anything goes, and the digital only designs fit perfectly into that and make the deck-building equation even more interesting and complex.

Honestly, how can you read a card like Juggernaut Peddler and not smile?

Now, I will say that I have mixed feelings on the rebalanced cards.

On the one hand, rebalanced cards are much more awkward and jarring than I would have liked. I played a MTG Arena Pro Tour earlier this year where the formats were Historic and Standard, and it wasn't uncommon to see two different Luminarch Aspirants that did different things in across the two formats. This is mostly an issue of the rebalances being targeted at the Alchemy format.

However, seeing a card like Dragon's Rage Channeler or Teferi, Time Raveler toned down to a more appropriate power level, or seeing cards like Symmetry Sage or Plate Armor toned up to a playable level is pretty fun.

The issue is that it is inconsistent (in theory you could buff just about any card to be good enough to see play, so where do you draw the line?), but the upside is this is the kind of thing that can be changed as often as necessary until they get it right.

Who Can Afford It?

However, now we come to the one true issue of the format.

MTG Arena is expensive, and Historic is by far the most expensive game mode on MTG Arena. The best part of Historic is trying out crazy brews and diving deep into the expansive card pool, but that is a killer drain on your wildcards.

However, this is an issue with the platform, not Historic as a format. I am fortunate to be a full time Magic content creator who has been playing MTG Arena since the very beginning, and also in the position to write off my MTG Arena purchases as a business expense, so I am certainly speaking from an ivory tower here, but this feels like the biggest reason why Historic hasn't caught on more.

This one I can't speak to unfortunately, other than I hope Wizards of the Coast makes this wonderful format more accessible.

A Totally Unique Experience

When you put it all together, you've got a format like no other.

The deck-building possibilities are vast and endless - if you dream it, you can build it and have a fighting chance. There are so many unique and fun new and old cards, as well as build arounds, that you never run out of things to do.

It's a format I hope everyone can experience and enjoy, and one I strongly suggest Wizards of the Coast do more "All Access" events for, as well as try to think of ways to make acquiring the cards more reasonable, because it does have a bit of a tough on-ramp.

To close things out, here are some of my favorite brews from Historic over the last year or so. The first three I've all done serious damage with on the ladder, while the last one is bit more of an extreme but fun combo deck.