Goldfish Gladiators: UB Artifacts (Arena Singleton)
Welcome to Goldfish Gladiators, a new series with a twist: rather than taking place on Magic Online, Goldfish Gladiator is focused on Magic Arena. You probably remember that a while ago, we played Five-Color Superfriends in Arena Singleton and had a blast. Unfortunately, Singleton left the client shortly after we played our event, but now it's back! As such, we're heading back to Singleton today to play a sweet artifact-based deck overflowing with Karn, Tezzerets, and basically every powerful artifact synergy available in the format. While the deck will certainly be fun, will it be competitive enough to win us a free run or two and some new cards? Let's get to the video and find out; then, we'll talk more about the deck!
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Goldfish Gladiators: UB Artifacts
Discussion
Singleton is a weird format to deck tech, especially for a deck like UB Artifacts, which is basically a pile of sweet cards united by artifact synergies and without any specific combo. So rather than spend too much time talking about the deck, I wanted to take a second to talk about Singleton itself. Personally, I think the format is one of the best aspects of Magic Arena. If you play a regular Standard event, you'll run into Red Aggro, The Scarab God, and Teferi, Hero of Dominaria roughly 75% of the time. In Singleton, the metagame is much less developed and more diverse. While the "play every counter possible" strategy is probably the most competitive, for me, Singleton is basically the Brawl or Commander of Magic Arena. While you don't have a commander, it's a place where you can pile together a bunch of fun cards that you enjoy, even if they aren't the spikiest cards in the format, and have a reasonable amount of success. It's a great place to try out new things, and since you need 35-ish unique non-land cards, you have plenty of opportunities to play cards that aren't quite good enough for Standard (like Chaos Wand, which seems really good in the format). Plus, you don't need playsets of rare dual lands to build a functional mana base, which lowers the barrier of entry.
Basically, Singleton is a really fun format, but rather than playing the best deck, I think the right way to play the format is to treat it like Commander or Brawl and play a deck you enjoy. If UB Artifacts looks like fun, give it a shot, but you should feel free to add in whatever sweet artifact cards you enjoy playing but don't get a chance to in Standard proper and make it your own!
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. We'll be back next week with some budget Standard on Goldfish Gladiator! 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.
