Foundations is, as Wizards of the Coast describes it, a set distilling the very nature of Magic: the Gathering – what you would get if you simply made a set called, “Magic: the Gathering,” and it doesn't disappoint. Fortunately, one of Magic's features that survives the distillation process is janky build-arounds that create fun moments at the table when huge power plays crop up in improbable ways. Foundations has a number of build-arounds that might not see competitive play but deserve to be attempted. I've selected seven such cards that I'll be attempting with the primary focus being on Standard. Keep in mind that this set will be legal for at least five years in the format, though, so the cards surrounding this set will fully rotate multiple times before any of these cards leave. Meta shifts will mean different builds and synergy points will be available through the years. Stay tuned for articles about those as we go! Everybody's favorite self-absorbed intellectual is back with a new incarnation, Niv-Mizzet, Visionary. When WotC spoiled this card, they specifically pointed out that it goes infinite in older formats with Niv-Mizzet, Parun, which is a fun interaction, but we don't have any source like that in Standard at the moment. We do, however, have a lot of sources that can deal direct damage to opponents when casting spells such as Coruscation Mage. Combine those with Urabrask and you can build a machine gun that's constantly reloading.

Today, Wizards put out an article detailing the current state of MTG Arena formats and play rates across them. They did a similar post last year and there were many details that weren't exactly surprising. Standard remains the most popular format by a wide margin with Best-of-1 being preferred over Best-of-3 by a large number of players. Timeless is the newest addition to the list and, as one might expect, has the lowest adoption rate of the official formats. One detail stood out, however, as a significant change over last year's data, and that is the play rate associated with Brawl. What is Brawl? If you’re not familiar, Brawl is a format that is similar to Commander, but it includes only the cards available on Arena. You select a commander to helm your deck which can be any legendary creature or (unlike the Commander format) a planeswalker. You have access to your commander at all times as a sort-of eighth card in your hand and if it is killed or exiled, you can return it to its starting location, the “command zone,” and recast it with an additional two mana “commander tax” added to its casting cost.

At MagicCon Vegas over the past weekend, Wizards of the Coast unveiled a number of new products they’ll be releasing over the next year to a variety of fan reactions. Many of these sets and supplemental items will be paper-exclusive, but a fair number of them will be coming to Arena, so I wanted to break them down and discuss what we can expect from these sets. Magic Foundations

Today's deck is nothing short of a disaster, but a beautiful disaster that has brought me a lot more joy than other decks I've been playing recently. The deck is all-in on doing gigantic silly things with exorbitant mana costs that would generally be more unattainable than a poorly named plot contrivance in Avatar; but we can get there due to a deceptively powerful Leyline that, as of this writing, is still legal in Best-of-One… and will continue to be because I'm talking about Leyline of Mutation. The Cornerstone Leyline of Mutation, like any Leyline, can start the game on the battlefield if it's in your opening hand but it would cost four otherwise. Generally, this mana disparity means they're useless if they aren't in your opening hand because the effect can't be game-breaking if it's on the battlefield at the start of the game, but four mana is a significant cost.

Insidious Roots is a combo deck that's near and dear to my heart, and a number of Dusourn cards slot into it in powerful and interesting ways that allow us to upgrade the build to possibly generate more consistent gameplay. The Core Combo If you didn't read my last article talking about the previous version of Insidious Roots combo, here's a quick rundown. This is a combo deck designed to get a one-hit kill that the opponent will likely not see coming after comboing off with the following three cards.

Mill is an often misunderstood and maligned archetype that gets people hot and bothered in multiple ways. As a reanimator player, I love watching my deck flip into my graveyard, but for the rest of the player base, it’s often a frustrating sensation as a world of possibilities unravels before their eyes. Well, there are a ton of cards from Duskmourn that support a mill package, and I want to focus on one today: Doomsday Excruciator. Doomsday Excruciator is a throwback reference to the card Doomsday, which strips your library down to only five cards that you hand select. The potential of this card is bananas and is the backbone of combo decks in Vintage and Legacy. Unfortunately, Doomsday Excruciator is nowhere near as good with twice the mana investment, and it doesn't allow you to select the cards you're left with, which means it just doesn't do the same thing. What the Build Around Does Well

Brewing decks is more than just finding a card that inspires you and picking what cards to put around it. You also have to take into account the context the deck finds itself in. If your brew is soft to the most popular deck in the format, it’s just not going to be successful no matter how consistent it is when put against different matchups. Power creep exacerbates this as the speed of the game increases, requiring your deck to either pop off faster or answer a variety of threats within even the first two turns in order to be successful. Today, I want to look at the most popular archetypes in Standard and look at play patterns we can focus on to give our janky brews a fighting chance. Red-Based Aggro

Every set, Wizards of the Coast prints rares and mythics that look super niche and, generally, are considered missed opportunities by the larger community. Brewers like me, though, look at these cards and it feels like WotC is saying, “I dare you to build around this thing.” And today, we're building around one such I-dare-you build around: Funeral Room // Awakening Hall. The Build Around Maybe I've oversold how niche this card is. A Bastion of Remembrance type effect for three mana is not bad on its face for aristocrat strategies and Commander players will likely lean on this card a fair amount, but in current Standard, no good aristocrat shells exist, so I doubt it will see much play. For our purposes today, though, it presents some interesting synergies.