Much Abrew: Historic Brawl with Go-Shintai of Life's Origin Shrines
Hello, everyone! Welcome to another episode of Much Abrew About Nothing. This week, we're doing something fun and different: checking out Historic Brawl on Magic Arena! It's been a long time since we've done some brawling, but one of my favorite legends of the year—Go-Shintai of Life's Origin was just released on Arena. So, let's play all the Shrines and see what happens! What's Historic Brawl about? How good are Shrines in the format? Let's get to the video and find out on today's Much Abrew About Nothing!
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Much Abrew: Go-Shintai of Life's Origin Shrines
Discussion
- In all honesty, I'm not sure how to write about a Historic Brawl deck. Obviously, the theme of Go-Shintai of Life's Origin is pretty obvious: it wants you to play as many Shrines as possible, and we have them all except the blue creature-mill Shrine, which is pretty lackluster. The goal is basically to stack up as many Shrines as possible with the help of Go-Shintai of Life's Origin's token Shrines; then, the value will quickly become overwhelming since all of our Shrines power each other up.
- We mostly have various enchantment synergies backing up the Shrines, along with removal and sweepers. Enchantresses like Sythis, Harvest's Hand and Enchantress's Presence keep us drawing through our decks and finding Shrines, tutors like Moon-Blessed Cleric and Idyllic Tutor snag our best Shrine for any given situation, and Heroic Intervention and Sterling Grove help protect our Shrines.
- Outside of the immense Shrine value, my favorite part of the deck is a new lock that just came to Arena in the latest Anthologies: Night of Souls' Betrayal and Overwhelming Splendor. If we can get both on the battlefield, we turn all of our opponent's creatures into 1/1s with Overwhelming Splendor and then give all creatures –1/–1 with Night of Souls' Betrayal, which essentially hard locks our opponent out of playing creatures until they deal with one of our lock pieces. Is Overwhelming Splendor an acceptable card to play in Historic Brawl? I really have no idea—it would probably be frowned on in Commander. But Historic Brawl is a 1v1 format, so maybe it's different. Either way, it's a pretty hilarious and miserable way to win a game.
- As far as Historic Brawl itself, I've found that I actually really enjoy the format. It's a weird mix of 1v1 Commander and Historic. While it is a little weird to see some of the digital-only cards like Key to the Archive be staples in the format, we built a very competitive and fun deck that is all "real" (in the sense that they exist in paper Magic) cards and didn't really feel disadvantaged by not playing Alchemy stuff. So it's not like you have to take the plunge on digital-only cards if you don't want to. Let me know what you think about Historic Brawl content. While it certainly wouldn't be like Modern, Pioneer, or Standard, where we make videos on it weekly, could it be a good once-in-a-while addition? Give us your feedback in the comments!
- So, should you play Go-Shintai Shrines in Historic Brawl? I think the answer is clearly yes if it's a play style you enjoy. Much like Commander in paper, the beauty of Historic Brawl is that, rather than being a super-competitive format where you feel the pressure to play something competitive to rank up on the ladder, Historic Brawl is essentially a casual format where you should play whatever you find fun. I think Shrines are a blast, and I love that the deck is five colors so you can include whatever pet cards you like (see: our epic win with Eerie Ultimatum), but I'm not going to try to tell you how you should have fun. I will say that I avoided Historic Brawl for a long time, but I've found it to be a really enjoyable experience ever since I started playing it a month or so ago. So if you haven't given it a try, I'd say it's worth checking out, whether you play Shrines or something else!
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. 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.
