M21 Flavor Wins!

Core Sets are an interesting part of Magic: The Gathering. They provide a great entry point for new players to learn the fundamentals of the game, but they are often detached from the ongoing story. This year’s release gave us a mix of new and returning planeswalkers, but told us very little about where they came from or how they arrived in their current respective situations.

With this pause in the Magic story line, this felt like a great time to experiment with a new type of video and explore the history of the mono-colored planeswalkers featured in Core Set 2021 with a series we call “Flavor Win.”

The full season is now on the Magic Arcanum YouTube channel, but I thought it would be fun to offer a little more insight into the decks I created for those videos, and share what I learned while working on the Flavor Win series.

Basri Ket:

4 Stonecoil Serpent
4 Anointed Chorister
2 Speaker of the Heavens
4 Maned Serval
2 Splendor Mare
1 Basri’s Acolyte
4 Basri’s Lieutenant
1 Mangara, the Diplomat
2 Cavalier of Dawn
4 Basri Ket
1 Mace of the Valiant
1 Sentinel’s Eyes
2 Omen of the Sun
1 Light of Hope
1 Unbreakable Formation
2 Basri’s Solidarity
3 Castle Ardenvale
1 Field of Ruin
20 Plains

Basri Ket is a brand new character in the Magic story and was the inspiration for the Flavor Win series. Not surprisingly, his video received the most views, as I suspect people were most curious about him.

For his deck, I really wanted to maximize the advantage of his planeswalker’s +1 ability, which put a +1/+1 counter on a creature and made it indestructible for a turn.

To me, the best way to do that was to find creatures that had vigilance (and thus, got to use the extra counter on defense after attacking without fear) and/or creatures that had lifelink (gaining large amounts of life thanks to the increased power on their attack.)

Fortunately, both strategies were well supported with the cards currently available in standard (and in white specifically, because at this point I was planning to keep each deck mono-colored to match its planeswalker.)

With Basri’s Flavor Win, I learned that explaining interactions is important – things like Basri’s Lieutenant working well with Stonecoil Serpent, for example. I also didn’t commit enough resources to the deck itself! The Anointed Choristers should have been two more copies of Speaker of the Heavens, but I didn’t have the wildcards available to craft them, so I did the best I could with what was in my collection.

Overall, the Basri deck performed very well, and the Flavor Win did better than expected. This encouraged me to keep going, which brought me to…

Teferi:

4 Jolrael, Mwonvuli Recluse
3 Barrin, Tolarian Archmage
3 Elite Instructor
4 Llanowar Visionary
1 Teferi’s Protege
1 Solemn Simulacrum
1 Tolarian Kraken
4 Teferi, Master of Time
4 Ominous Seas
1 Teferi’s Tutelage
2 Capture Sphere
1 Teferi’s Ageless Insight
4 Opt
1 Rewind
1 Discontinuity
1 Contentious Plan
9 Forest
15 Island

Encouraged by the success of Basri’s video, I put more resources into my Arena account in order to afford enough wildcards to create a deck for Teferi. Fortunately, I was able to ride that investment through the rest of the season, thanks to Chandra being a Brawl deck and not needing a playset of her showcase cards, but more on that later.

Teferi’s deck was the most challenging to create, as I didn’t want to do a mono-blue control deck because (to me) those are often boring to watch play out. Instead, I challenged myself to take a different approach, and wound up with a very fun and flavorful “Jamuraa Draw” deck that included Teferi’s longtime friend Jolrael.

Teferi had the longest history out of the featured planeswalkers, and so his video drew the most criticism for “skipping out on a lot of stuff.” These videos were only meant to be introductions to a character and not the traditional “deep dive” fans of Arcanum have come to expect.

The lesson I learned here was that the bigger a character is, the more people expect you to spend time on their lengthy history. This will definitely influence future Flavor Wins, but I decided to stick with my formula for the rest of this first season and kept the split at about 1:3 in terms of story vs gameplay.

Even though people seemed to accept the two-color deck for this character, I knew my next one had to be mono-black, because she was the game’s most iconic necromancer…

Liliana Vess:

2 Foulmire Knight
4 Liliana’s Steward
2 Eternal Taskmaster
4 Lazotep Reaver
4 Liliana’s Devotee
3 Liliana’s Standard Bearer
4 Murderous Rider
4 Liliana, Waker of the Dead
3 Eliminate
3 Heartless Act
3 Liliana’s Triumph
4 Radiant Fountain
20 Swamp

I expected this video to be popular, and indeed, it came in second place overall. Liliana is a complex character, and her storyline reached a very interesting point during the conclusion of the War of the Spark novels. Unfortunately, none of that is reflected in her M21 card, which still treats her more like the power-hungry necromancer we’ve known for years, rather than the reformed Ana Iora she has started to become.

Regardless, her deck was fun to assemble and a blast to play, making great use of the zombies currently available in standard. The video also received my favorite comment:

“I gotta say, the Devotees really weren’t selling me, until those 5/2s just kinda grew out of removing an opponent’s body — who woulda thought there’s a reasonably real lords & board mono black deck hiding in Core 21?”

This made me really happy because it means the deck was not only flavorful but also opened some eyes to the competitive angle, which is great praise considering it was only my fourth gameplay video on the channel! It’s the third in this series but I also did gameplay for the 4th of July holiday.

After three standard decks in a row, I felt it was finally time to try a different format. Fortunately, the next planeswalker had everything I needed to make that happen…

Chandra Nalaar:

1 Chandra, Heart of Fire
1 Burning Prophet
1 Chandra’s Embercat
1 Chandra’s Magmutt
1 Chandra’s Pyreling
1 Heartfire Immolator
1 Incendiary Oracle
1 Chandra’s Spitfire
1 Phoenix of Ash
1 Spellgorger Weird
1 Everquill Phoenix
1 Cavalier of Flame
1 Chandra’s Incinerator
1 Lava Serpent
1 Chandra, Acolyte of Flame
1 Chandra, Fire Artisan
1 Chandra, Novice Pyromancer
1 Jaya, Venerated Firemage
1 Chandra, Awakened Inferno
1 Chandra, Flame’s Fury
1 Chandra’s Regulator
1 Leyline of Combustion
1 Chandra’s Pyrohelix
1 Chandra’s Triumph
1 Fire Prophecy
1 Jaya’s Greeting
1 Thrill of Possibility
1 Flame Spill
1 Flame Sweep
1 Slaying Fire
1 Soul Sear
1 Chandra’s Outrage
1 Inescapable Blaze
1 Doublecast
1 Lava Coil
1 Reduce to Ashes
1 Interplanar Beacon
23 Mountain

Thanks to her abundant support in last year’s M20, Chandra had a very deep pool of flavorful cards to pick from – enough to fill a Brawl deck, Arena’s singleton format.

We received multiple requests to try Brawl and overwhelming responses on a community poll indicating more people would be willing to watch a Brawl episode, so I decided to give the format a whirl.

The games wound up being some of the more interesting ones, but thanks to some misplays on my part it ended up more fun than serious. The deck managed to fit in a ton of Chandra related cards but “attack and burn stuff” strategies can only get so exciting. This deck was easy to assemble and I had plenty of wildcards left in my account to use on the final video in the season…

Garruk Wildspeaker:

4 Stonecoil Serpent
4 Gilded Goose
3 Curious Pair
4 Garruk’s Harbinger
4 Savvy Hunter
2 Wicked Wolf
2 Elder Gargaroth
4 Garruk, Unleashed
2 Garruk, Cursed Huntsman
2 Ram Through
2 Unexpected Fangs
1 Bake into a Pie
1 Primal Might
16 Forest
9 Swamp

However you pronounce his name, Garruk is another character currently sitting at an interesting crossroads in the Magic story. He was featured in a set most recently out of the M21 planeswalkers, appearing in Throne of Eldraine, which gives us the most clues as to what he’s doing next, but at the same time we know the least about where he’s actually from.

I was excited to tackle this video. The deck itself was the biggest departure from the established formula. Rather than force myself to use at least one copy of each of the showcase cards for Garruk, I made use of his other planeswalker card from Throne of Eldraine, and wound up with a green and black build full of hunters and beasts.

This was the second-most popular deck list and I think my gameplay was finally on point. I had definitely been learning and improving as the series went on, but like all things, it was time to bring it to an end.

Overall, Flavor Win: Season One was a success. I learned some important lessons about the type of decks that people like to see, the amount of story they expect, and the skill level they expect to see while demonstrating the deck itself.

Flavor Win is a fun way to explore some of the stories behind characters who might not otherwise get much attention, and the videos are extremely fun to create, which means we’ll probably see Flavor Win return again before the end of this year. What changes would you like to see for season two of Flavor Win? Let me know in the comments, and keep your eyes on Magic Arcanum as we approach the wild landscapes of Zendikar Rising…

—Ryan