Goldfish Gladiators: Boros Visitation (Standard, Magic Arena)

Welcome to Goldfish Gladiators! Last week, we played a Selesnya Visitation deck during one of our streams, and at the very end of the stream, we played a couple of games with a Boros build of Divine Visitation that seemed pretty sweet. So today, we're going to give Boros Visitation the full video treatment and see if the deck was as good as it looked during our short time on stream. The deck is basically Boros Tokens but with a unique top-end in Divine Visitation that suddenly lets us turn all of our tiny 1/1 tokens into massive 4/4 flying Serra Angel tokens. Is going tokens (with Divine Visitation) the right way to build Boros in Standard? Let's get to the video and find out; then, we'll talk more about the deck!

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Goldfish Gladiators: Boros Visitation

Discussion

• Boros Visitation was way better than I imagined heading into the video. We played a competitive constructed event and ended up going 5-1, maxing out on wins. While the matchups were fairly repetitive (we played Golgari and Boros a lot), we did play almost exclusively top-tier decks, and Boros Visitation was good enough to beat them all!
• One of the biggest upsides of Boros Visitation is that we can win with or without Divine Visitation itself. One of the risks of building around a card like Divine Visitation is that it's easy to run into the Heartless Summoning problem, where our deck is great when we have the namesake card but doesn't do anything without that card. Thankfully, Boros Visitation manages to dodge this problem altogether, being able to win pretty easily as a Boros Tokens deck without ever drawing Divine Visitation.
• This being said, our most explosive and exciting games involved Divine Visitation. The important thing to remember here is that, apart from being a 4/4 with vigilance and flying, the tokens we upgrade with Divine Visitation come with some additional upsides. For example, the token we make with Legion Warboss still gains haste until end of turn, while Heroic Reinforcements becomes even more devastating, giving us two 5/5 haste attackers on the turn we cast it!
• One of the strangest aspects of the deck is Tilonalli's Summoner. The upside of the two-drop in immense, giving us a two-card combo kill with Divine Visitation on Turn 6. If we can cast a Divine Visitation on Turn 5, attack, and spend all of our mana activating Tilonalli's Summoner on Turn 6, the end result is five 4/4 flying tokens attacking—exactly 20 damage in the air! On the other hand, Tilonalli's Summoner is only a 1/1 that makes 1/1s without Divine Visitation, making it the one card in our deck that isn't very good on its own.
• It took me a while to figure out the sideboard plan, but I think the idea is to sideboard into a more traditional Boros deck against Goblin Chainwhirler strategies. Goblin Chainwhirler is really good against our main deck, since one damage kills a lot of our creatures, so being able to take out things like Tilonalli's Summoner and Adanto Vanguard for bigger threats like Tajic, Legion's Edge and Aurelia, Exemplar of Justice helps us avoid this potential blowout. That said, the sideboard plan is the one aspect of the deck I'm not really solid on. We have a lot of slots dedicated to improving our own creatures, and in most matchups, this left us with few sideboard options. Playing more traditional sideboard cards (like removal and other disruption) might be worthwhile, although it's hard to complain too much, since we just went 5-1 with the deck.
• As far as building the deck on Arena, it's worth mentioning that a lot of the cost of the deck comes from the sideboard, which means it gets significantly cheaper if you want to play it in "Arena mode" (aka best-of-one matches). While the deck still has a reasonable number of rares and mythics, if you discount the sideboard, the deck drops from 10 mythics and 33 rares to six mythics and 22 rares. The bad news is that apart from playing without a sideboard or cutting back on rare lands (which usually isn't recommended, especially for aggressive decks, which need their lands to come into play untapped), there isn't really a good way to get the cost much lower.
• All in all, Boros Visitation was great. It was not only more competitive than I thought it would be but a ton of fun to play as well! If you like going wide with aggressive tokens and sometimes randomly janking opponents out with massive Serra Angel tokens, give it a shot! It's more than good enough to grind out a collection on Magic Arena, and considering we played mostly tier decks in our league, it should perform well in paper or on Magic Online as well.

Conclusion

Anyway, that's all for today. Don't forget to vote for next week's deck! As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.