Teaching Arena Zoomers about Iona (Historic)
Hello everyone! One of my current favorite parts of Magic is Arena Anthologies, where old, nostalgic cards are added to Arena, and we get to try them in a brand-new context. Recently, we got Arena Anthologies 3 and 4, and while there were a bunch of cool cards in the sets, today, we're focused on one in particular: Iona, Shield of Emeria. While Iona might not be the best reanimation target of all time, it is certainly one of the most brutal, stopping our opponents from playing cards of a color of our choice. This means if our opponent is a mono-color deck, they just can't play Magic anymore. And even many multicolor decks struggle to do much against Iona, Shield of Emeria, assuming we pick the right color. As such, we're heading to Historic today to try to get Iona on the battlefield as quickly as possible and teach some Arena Zoomers about the joys of not being able to cast any spells at all!
Teaching Arena Zoomers about Iona
Wrap-Up
I'm not going to bother doing a big write-up about the deck. I think it's pretty self-explanatory: get Iona, Shield of Emeria in the graveyard as fast as possible and then reanimate it with Life // Death or Unburial Rites, which will (hopefully) lock our opponent out of playing Magic at all! As we saw in our matches, Iona is an absolutely brutal card. We played against multiple mono-colored decks that scooped pretty much as soon as it hit the battlefield because they simply couldn't play any of the cards in their deck, which is a great feeling from across the table but perhaps not nearly as fun in our opponent's seat.
In the somewhat distant past, Iona, Shield of Emeria was a legit reanimation target all the way back to Legacy, but cards like Archon of Cruelty and Atraxa, Grand Unifier have sort of pushed it to the side. After playing with it a bunch, I think that Iona is still a very good reanimation target. The biggest problem with Iona is that it doesn't gain us any life, which leads to some scary games thanks to Life // Death where we end up super low on life. But this typically didn't matter in practice thanks to how powerful it is to lock the opponent out of playing an entire color of cards, and the big 7/7 flying body would be enough to take home the win before our opponent could get our life total to zero.
Iona also feels especially well-suited for Historic because I'm not sure Historic players believe in playing graveyard hate. Across eight matches with the deck (going 5-3 overall), we ran into a single copy of Tormod's Crypt. And if our opponent can't disrupt our graveyard, our deck is really good at putting Iona or a backup like Serra's Emissary (which is pretty brutal in its own right, by giving us protection from a card type) or our one-of Atraxa, Grand Unifier into play super early in the game.
Oh yeah, and more so than any deck I've played in a long time, this deck really likes to Thoughtseize itself. We had several games through our matches where it was actually correct to cast Thoughtseize targeting ourselves as a way to get Iona, Shield of Emeria in the graveyard, which got even funnier when our opponents started hitting us with the "oops" emote, apparently thinking we misclicked and did it by accident, only to very quickly un-oops the next turn when they were staring down an Iona telling them they could no longer play Magic!
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. If you, like me, love nothing more than making your opponents not play Magic, keep Iona, Shield of Emeria in mind. As far as creatures go, it's an all-timer in terms of how miserable it is to play against. 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.
