Brawling with Jadzi (Historic Brawl)
Over the past few days on Magic Arena, Wizards has been running an event called Historic Brawl Fest. While Brawl isn't a format we play all that often, the event is offering some really sweet rewards: Japanese Mystic Archive card styles (which you currently can't get in any other way), including Historic all-stars Brainstorm and Faithless Looting. Since I really want the card styles, I decided to throw together a deck and play the event. And since I was going to play it anyway, I figured I may as well record it for all of you!
So, what Historic Brawl deck are we playing today? Jadzi, Oracle of Arcavios! I've been wanting to see Jadzi in action for a while, and although we did try it a little bit on stream a couple of weeks ago in Standard, it didn't really work out the way we had hoped. Historic Brawl, on the other hand, seems like a great home for Jadzi, Oracle of Arcavios since we get access to all of the most powerful spells on the client and a bunch of ramp that isn't legal in Standard to get Jadzi on the battlefield; plus, we can play Jadzi, Oracle of Arcavios as our commander, so we'll be guaranteed to draw it every game!
The rest of the deck is basically a Simic spellslinger deck. Apart from (hopefully) chaining together a bunch of spells from the top of our deck once we get Jadzi, Oracle of Arcavios going, we have a ton of cards like Shark Typhoon (which we are planning to cast, not cycle), Metallurgic Summonings, Talrand, Sky Summoner, and Murmuring Mystic to make tokens as we cast our spells; plenty of card draw to keep our hand full; ramp like Cultivate and Hour of Promise to get Jadzi on the battlefield as quickly as possible; and a couple of extra-turn spells in Time Warp and Alrund's Epiphany to help us close out the game once we make a huge board of tokens.
The plan actually worked super well—we cruised to five wins without a loss, although we were aided by some opponents scooping somewhat early. (Events like Historic Brawl Fest are weird since they reward you for wins but don't punish you at all for losses, so some players concede as soon as they fall even a little bit behind to get to the next game and potential win faster.) Even though it would have been nice for some of the games to go another few turns so we could see Jadzi, Oracle of Arcavios go off more often, in general, the Simic spellslinger plan was a huge success.
As for Jadzi herself, we had two games where we won before Jadzi even hit the battlefield, another where we resolved Jadzi but our opponent drew a removal spell to kill it before we could trigger it a single time, and one where our opponent scooped to our first Jadzi trigger. Thankfully, we finally got to go off with Jadzi in our last match, and it was spectacular, giving us three turns in a row along with a massive board of Sharks, Constructs, and Drakes from our various spellslinger payoffs.
More importantly, the format was actually fun. While Brawl itself isn't all that interesting to me because the card pool is based on Standard and really small, Historic Brawl has enough cards that it actually felt a bit like Commander. In my perfect world, Brawl would just become a Historic-based format, with its legality being tied to the Historic card pool rather than the Standard card pool. It's not especially popular in paper anyway, so embracing Historic and turning Brawl into Arena's version of Commander doesn't really seem to have a whole lot of downside.
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today! Did you play in the Historic Brawl Fest event? What did you run? Do you prefer Standard Brawl or Historic Brawl? Let me know in the comments! As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions. And if you're looking for something fun to play in the next Historic Brawl event and like drawing cards and slinging spells, keep Jadzi, Oracle of Arcavios in mind—it's a blast to play! Oh yeah, you can also reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
