I was happily playing my Historic Elves this month when out of nowhere a similar deck to what I am about to show you surprised me. It beat me turn 3-4 and I was powerless against it. It was irritated that such jank should beat my carefully crafted Elves deck that I had to go look at my tracker to see what I just got beat by. I only saw a few cards, but quickly formed my own list that seems to work pretty well for me.

Here's what I came up with:
​

It's fairly simple. Slam down harmless 0/x creatures, then drop Assault Formation and attack all-in for the surprise win.

You absolutely must hard mulligan for Assault Formation in your opening hand. There will be games where you won't get it so just concede and start another game. This is a pretty forgiving deck. I've mulliganed down to Assault Formation and 2 lands several times now and still pulled off a fast win.

Lets go over what each card is best used for:
​

​Ornithopter is an excellent free drop, especially on turn 1. It's also our only other flyer to add some evasion in to the deck.

Shorecomber Crab and Aegis Turtle are both big beefy creatures that seem so innocent on the first turn or two. Once Assault Formation is played, they are serious threats that are hard to remove and can steam roll over most of your opponent's early creatures.
​

Assault Formation is the main card of this deck. Without it, your creatures are absolutely useless.
You must have Assault Formation in your opening hand. Mulligan until you do. If you have too few cards, just concede and start the next game. It's rare you don't get it by at least the 2nd or 3rd mulligan. Just make sure you leave yourself with at least 2 lands of different colors and you can still play Assault Formation, then just whatever creatures you draw. I've won several games with a 3 card starting hand. The deck is pretty forgiving to get you going.
The downside to this deck is that if Assault Formation is destroyed or removed somehow, you may as well concede, as the rest of the game will be spent waiting to draw another, and your opponent will have recovered by then. Players don't typically run much Enchantment removal, so you're usually safe from this. It does happen once in a while though.

Tower Defense can be used in 3 different ways.
The first is the obvious one-shot kill. If your opponent doesn't bother blocking because you don't have enough for lethal, then Tower Defense will almost always be a fast lethal strike.

Secondly, you can use it as a defensive move, both blocking and attacking. If the opponent has creatures much larger than you that you are having a hard time playing around, you can use this to beef up your big creatures to kill their big creatures. The same goes for blocking, let them attack in with their big creatures, and then play this.

Third, you can use this to avoid a non-destructive board wipe. Quite a few board wipes just do mass damage. This can boost your creatures above the minimum toughness needed to beat most of these board wipes.

Stern Dismissal can be used in multiple ways as well. Remove something in your way of attacking or an opponents enchantment, or use it to save your own Assault Formation enchantment from being destroyed, or one of your creatures.

​

Because this deck moves very fast, we want to make sure we have fast mana. 20 mana seems to be plenty for this deck to work quickly. Keep in mind 70% of your cards are 1 mana. One playset of cards is 0 mana, and then your most important card is only 2 mana. You don't need a lot.

Because you are trying to hit hard and fast and end the game by turn 4 or so, you want to make sure you always have mana available in the way of not using any tap lands.
​

So far after playing this deck daily for 9 days straight each morning, I have a decent 65% win rate in the BO1 Play queue.

What surprises most people is the odd assortment of cards. I am playing both mono-green ramp cards and mono-blue mill cards, along with some random useless blockers. Most opponents don't think twice about it and just think it's either one of the two variants, when it's really neither one. Instead Assault Formation gets dropped and all of those useless creatures are suddenly a massive threat. 

This morning I went 4-0 in just 8:34 mins. Yesterday I went 4-2 in 15 minutes. The deck is fast. Here's some examples of what to expect with good opening hands.

Game 1 - Against Shrines
Turn 1 - Island, Ruin Crab
Turn 2 - Forest, Aboreal Grazer--> Breeding Pool, Aegis Turtle
Turn 3 - Shorecomber Crab, Assault Formation, attack all in.
Opponent didn't even get going yet with their shrines and instantly conceded.

Game 2 - Against Zombies?
Turn 1 - Island, Aegis Turtle, Ornithopter
Turn 2 - Hinterland Harbor, Shorecomber Crab, Arboreal Grazer-->Breeding Pool
Turn 3 - Hinterland Harbor, Assault Formation, attack all in.
Opponent conceded with a few creatures and a saga out on the field.

Game 3 - Against Mono White Angels/Lifegain
Turn 1 - Breeding Pool, Arboreal Grazer-->Breeding Pool
Turn 2 - Hinterland Harbor, Aegis Turtle, Merfolk Secret Keeper
Turn 3 - Ornithopter, Assault Formation, attack all in, opponent didn't block
Turn 4 - Attacked all in, Opponent didn't block since I did not have lethal and he was just getting his lifegain going. I then activated the Assault Formation ability to +1 all my creatures and killed him.

Game 4 - Against Toski shennagins of some kind
Turn 1 - Forest, Gilded Goose-->Food Token
Turn 2 - Hinterland Harbor, Ruin Crab, Shorecomber Crab
Turn 3 - Forest, Merfolk Secretkeeper, Assault Formation, Attack all in with no blocks.
Turn 4 - Forest, Arboreal Grazer, attack all in. Opponent had critical mono green stuff out that he didn't want to die, and I did not have lethal showing. He did not block, so I activated Assault Formation's ability to +1 everything, and killed him.

Now the next 2 games I lost. The first loss was because the opponent destroyed my Assault Formation. I waited 2 more turns and conceded. The second loss was because I got greedy and was just loading the board with all my creatures. I was going to drop Assault Formation on the next turn for a glorious attack, except the opponent looked at my hand and discarded my Assault Formation.  Word to the wise, don't be greedy, get that thing down ASAP.

The game above was a quick turn 3 win against the hard to beat mono white lifegain angels deck.

I mulliganed down to 5 cards to get an Assault Formation and 2 lands in my hand.
Turn 1 - Breeding Pool, Aegis Turtle, Ornithopter
Turn 2 - Breeding Pool, Assault Formation, Attack.
Turn 3 - drew a Tower Defense, I figured the opponent wasn't going to let his two key pieces die, so he didn't block. I played Tower Defense for lethal.

Yes, that's a turn 3 win against that lifegain angels deck, with only 2 lands, and a 5 card starting hand. It's very forgiving!

It does not play well against full on deathtouch decks unless you have enough flyers out to outlast the opponent. If not, just concede.

It does not play well against Golgari decks that seem to find all the things to kill your stuff with, and then can also destroy your Assault Formation. Cards like Thought Seize and Assassin's Trophy is an immediate concede.

Any control that takes your Assault Formation, such as Skyclave Apparition, or other white/blue enchantments that can steal your stuff.  Just concede and start the next game.

Obviously if you don't have a great opening hand and slam out a bunch of creatures and get overwhelmed by the opponent, then you may as well concede unless you can somehow kill all their stuff (Assault Formation ability or Tower Defense).

I hit all of these examples the very next day and only got a 50% win rate. The day before I didn't see as much of these examples and ended the day with a 65% win rate.

These are just examples of perfect opening hands. Even a bad opening hand can be mulliganed a couple times to become a good one and still be perfectly playable.

I tried this deck out in the BO1 Historic Ladder, but only made it to mid silver before getting stuck with the more powerful meta decks, and that included a ton of losses. My win rate was not good in ladder play.

This deck is more of fast deck to get your daily 4 or so wins in and move on.

Anyway, I hope you found this deck tech fun, exciting and useful. Please let me know if you have any questions, comments or tweaks you can think of.

​I really enjoy off-meta decks that do well.
​

Here is the latest gallery all caught up from last summer.

Kaldheim releases tomorrow! Hooray!

Zendikar was the set that made me quit playing Standard. I was so bored of the same decks every day, and I refuse to play tier1 control or any of those other controlish long game 3+ color decks. Thanks Triomes, thanks a lot. I don't find these decks fun to play against. I also don't see the fun in just denying my opponent from playing the majority of the game while I do nothing but wait until I have enough lands to play my one big thing. It's just boring gameplay to me. I was also bored of mono red, as I played two complete set releases with mono-red. I wanted something new with more action, so I started playing Historic.

Welcome to Historic! The land of opportunity and limitless fun.

Or so I thought...

Historic, I realized quickly, was also the same 4 decks over and over again. But, they're different decks! It was new and fun for a while, then turned into the same thing I hated standard for. Most days it's either U/W control, Rakdos Sacrifice or some combo of 3 color deck that all does the same thing, which is counter all your spells and board wipe you on turn 4 every game. They're pretty easy to play around because they're all exactly the same. It just comes down to luck of the draw and if you get to go first or not. I quickly started conceding after a turn or two after I saw what was up.

I love playing magic, but if I don't get to actually play the game on my end, then it's no fun, so I concede and find the next opponent, hoping they don't have one of these specific decks, or that my hand is better this time, or the opponent misses a land drop or card draw or something to give me the edge.

Despite all of that, I had more fun. I think it's because I was able to play a deck architype that was competitive that I enjoyed playing. I went with Historic Elves. It's all creatures except for a set of Collected Company, which a large majority of the time is really just equal to two more creatures. So basically a 100% creature deck.

I love the synergy of the elves. They either give themselves mana or buff themselves. Some duplicate themselves to make more elves or more buffs. My finisher for a while was Craterhoof Behemoth, until later on I switched over to Ghalta, Primal Hunger. Ghalta was just easier to cast early on, especially since the last month of gameplay has been a large majority of just U/W control, so I was never able to get Craterhoof out anymore. Ghalta can be dropped as early as turn 3-4, hoping to miss the big board wipe or a counterspell early on.

So with all that said, I started with Zendikar standard on the Arena release day, playing Mono White Lifegain then changed to Mono White Enchantments for a week. By early October I switched to Historic with my old Historic Merfolk deck and finally by mid October I had crafted the Historic Elves deck and have been tweaking it ever since.

I really, really enjoy the Elves deck. So much so, I built a commander deck out of it for my weekly gaming group. I'm also considering buying the new elves commander precon for Kaldheim.
​

We can see here I played Historic Elves for the majority of the duration of the Zendikar Rising set. Since my weekly play group started playing in-person again over the late summer, we stopped playing direct play games online, so that's why that one has zero games.
Historic Elves did pretty well IMO, with a 58% win rate, and I even enjoyed many of the losses or quickly conceded and moved to the next game, so really not much time loss there for that kind of rate.
​

The only other stats I didn't show here was my ranked play rank. My best Standard rank was  silver 4. My best Limited rank was bronze 1. I'm not much into the grindy nature of ranked play, so I stick to the casual queues and play out my daily 4 wins each day.

I wish I could say I had fun with Zendikar Rising, but as soon as I switched to Historic, I rarely saw a ZNR card. We'll see what this new set brings. I am looking forward to more new Elves and a Viking theme. That new Kaldheim showcase art is stunning!

​TL:DR version

• Kaya Pack Bundle - Yes, if you're one to spend at least $50 on virtual booster packs.
• Niko Play Bundle - Maybe. The value is there, but if you draft a lot, you probably already have a ton of gems to get all of this for free anyway.
• Both Bundles Combined - Maybe. It depends if you need the Play bundle or not based on your drafting experience and gems banked.

Last week started preview season for the new Magic: The Gathering set Kaldheim.

As with past sets, WotC has released pre-release bundles on Arena prior to the new set launching. Are they a good deal or not?

Just like with the previous bundles, they are offering a bundle purchase of both bundles and throwing in another pet. I will go into depth on each bundle separately, and then discuss both bundles combined at the end.

Pricing and value information is all found on my main Arena site. All values shown are as of 1/12/21.

I really didn't change much in this article at all. It appears the pack and play bundles have stabilized in their offerings and have been the same going on 3 sets in a row now.

I was kind of excited for Zendikar Rising, but barely a month into Standard, I realized I couldn't stand the format any longer. I love Magic, but seeing the same few decks over and over again, I needed a change. So, I moved to Historic.

Now in Historic, I thought this may be different, but I quickly found that I see the same few Historic decks over and over again... but it's somehow different. I think the difference is that I am able to build what I want, and not be confined to a format of cards that don't care how I want to play. I don't play control, I don't care about killing all your things, I just want to be as aggro as possible and play a bunch of creatures. It's what I like. So, I gravitated towards one of my favorite tribal groups, Elves!

With the move to Historic, I kind of lost the interest of collecting the new set, knowing that I already have a powerful enough deck, one of which didn't even use any cards from the new set. I used my premium draft token from the Mastery Pass, and I did about a dozen quick drafts total. This was down significantly from the 20 or so I have been doing for the past year's worth of sets.

I was taking it kind of slow this set. Since I don't draft to win but instead draft to collect, I didn't always have a very good pool of cards to build a limited deck from. I played what I could, or just conceded the draft after picking out all my cards if I had nothing to really build a deck out of. Either way, I gained a lot of gems from some of my wins and a few extra prize booster packs in the process too.

Zendikar rotated out of quick draft, and by the time it came back, I had completely lost interest in getting any more cards via Draft. I had enough gems for the next two set's worth of Mastery Passes, and I had enough wild cards to not care about not having all the new cards anymore.

Flash forward to when I finally hit the last booster pack from the Mastery Pass, it was time to open all those packs I had been saving. I decided to just open them all when I had all the free ones that I was going to get to make it easier to keep track of. I didn't need anything from the packs, so I just let them sit.

After drafting and opening packs, I cleaned up and added some new calculations to the spreadsheet. I am working towards automating as much of it as I can. My goal is only to plug in the draft and booster card counts and my daily play info, and the spreadsheet will calculate the rest across the various sheets into a nice neat easy to read dashboard of interesting stats. As crApple likes to say with product revisions, "This is the best one yet!"

I manually track everything and double check my data using MTGAHelper.

Gameplay Stats will be my Arena Post ZNR Gameplay Stats article that will be written shortly before the next set release.

*There may be some discrepancies or calculation errors, I found a few cells while moving everything over to Kaldheim this week that were off. It's close enough. Fixing the screenshots as I go.

So, after 12 ZNR drafts and after opening 82 free ZNR booster packs, here is what I ended up with. Keep in mind all of this was free, I only spent gems for the mastery pass (which I obtained from previous draft winnings) and gold was spent on drafts, cosmetic items and the gold/gem daily deals. I did not buy any packs with gold.

​ZNR Booster Packs

All booster packs were free, earned through set mastery, mastery pass, codes and draft rewards. I did not purchase any packs this set.

These packs were tracked independently from the draft, so all numbers reflect what can be expected if you only opened 74 booster packs for the current set and nothing else.

ZNR Draft Stats

I completed 1 Premium draft with a token from the Mastery Pass, and 11 quick drafts using gold.
​

Total Stats

I did not include the ICR count or ICR vault progress in these stats, realizing that I need to add that data into another dashboard from my daily play sheet. But the majority of those cards are not from the current set anyway, so the increase would be quite small.

Wild card data also includes the additional 20 non-ZNR packs obtained via the Mastery Pass.

What's Next?

I didn't get around to messing with the Cards Kept vs Dupes data points since I didn't do much drafting this time. We'll see how I feel when Kaldheim comes out. There's quite a few cards in there that I would like to use for Historic.

I will also be adding some more daily gameplay dashboards to use with my Post Gameplay articles. This will help display more interesting data points of how much goes into playing this game.

As of now, I am just maintaining the sleeve gallery and adding up my stats. I'm not going to say I'm bored of Arena, I enjoy waking up and getting my morning games in, but I am not as excited as I once was. We'll see where the year takes me.

I am excited for Kaldheim. There's a lot of elf cards that I will be adding to my new elf tribal commander deck, as well as other elf decks for modern, historic, etc. 

... that viking etched showcase art! Can't wait!

This is the first set that I finally started playing all of the draft games on. While my methods for collection drafting haven't changed, I actually spent time to play if what I had was able to build a somewhat playable 2 color deck. A few games I didn't bother with, but most of them I played out.

I was able to do 1 premium draft and 19 quick drafts. I waited until the set was over since there were a lot of extra free packs to gain, and I wanted to show fully what F2P gets you. I ended the set by opening 74 M21 packs, followed by 15 packs from ELD, THB and IKO.
The other 3 sets are only mentioned in that they will reflect in total wild cards earned after all of this. Card stats themselves will only reflect M21.

Since there wasn't much else I wanted to get past 20 drafts, I cut my spending short and saved my gold for the rumors of more full art lands being released, which they did with the Unstable lands that I purchased. I got far more enjoyment out of those than the 3 quick drafts worth of vaulted cards I would have received.

I ended up using several cards from M21 for the Mono White Lifegain deck: Selfless Savior, Speaker of Heavens, Swift Response and Basri Ket. I also used the new rotation proof Arena only card Hallowed Priest.

I do purchase the mastery pass each set, for free from past gem earnings, and this set was no different.

I used MTGAHelper as my tracker to help figure out what I did and did not have while drafting so as to avoid duplicates as best as I could.

I wanted to change things up a little this time because it might help better show what total amounts of cards you can obtain from the free-2-play path. I typically show my collection stat articles right after I finish drafting, but this time I waited until the set mastery was completed since there were more free M21 packs rewarded this time, and those do add up over time.

I want people to see just how much of a collection you can obtain, even if you have to wait a while to get all of the free packs. Free is free, don't ever overlook that. If time is your enemy, then money is your solution, so waiting out the set mastery is probably not for you. Patience will be rewarded in the end.

I did of course buy the mastery pass, but I bought it with gems earned from previous set drafts that were all free. The point of that statement is that once you get the gems rolling in, you can play for free indefinitely and afford some free upgrades. Packs and stats included in the mastery pass I will be including in these stats as well because they were all free for me.

I also did a Jumpstart even as well, but didn't record any of my cards since it wasn't for M21 nor did I get any wild cards for doing so. The extra 15 other booster packs from the mastery pass will be mentioned solely for reasons of showing total wild cards when all is said and done, but the cards themselves won't be part of these numbers since they are not specifically for M21's collection data.

I am going to leave out most of the gameplay related stats, which you can find in my M21 Post Gameplay Stats  article. These stats will focus on collection stats and wild cards only.

M21 Booster Pack Stats

All booster packs were free, earned through set mastery, mastery pass, codes and draft rewards. I did not purchase any packs this set.

These packs were tracked independently from the draft, so all numbers reflect what can be expected if you only opened 74 booster packs for the current set and nothing else.

M21 Draft Stats

For M21, I completed 19 quick drafts, and 1 player drafts that I got for free with a mastery pass token.

Total Stats

These stats also include 18 M21 ICRs obtained through daily gameplay and other free event rewards as well as the above 74 M21 booster packs and 20 drafts. Wild card data includes the additional 15 other packs opened via mastery pass rewards.

New Data Projects... incomplete.

Here is a little preview of some data points I am working on to help figure out when to quit drafting. This is going to show the point of when your common/uncommon duplicates are each crossing the line of dupes vs what you got to keep. Since I focus on drafting for my collection and not really caring about the wins, I want to make sure I get the most for my gold.

I don't know how accurate it is at this point, as I stopped working on it to focus on other things, but this is the gist of it.

The red/yellow lines reflect the drafted uncommon cards. You can see that about 18-19 drafts is when you start vaulting more uncommons than you keep.

The two blue lines represent the drafted common cards. I am not sure why both are goign up, this is where I stopped playing with this chart and went on to other things rather than complete fixing this chart. I'll probably work on this more during Zendikar Rising.

So, to look at the uncommon lines crossing, this is the point when I would say stop drafting and open all your packs purely for the rares. If you still have gold left over to spend on this particular set, then buying packs would be a better value for the rares only, especially with the duplicate protection.

Since this chart updates with each new draft completed, it will continually show you when you're getting close to that point and when to stop.

Drafting will still reward you with more overall value with gems and extra booster packs though, but if all you are after is rares then this is where you would stop drafting and start opening packs.

In Conclusion...

I am going to try to get these stats related articles down to a minimum so they are easier to maintain and give all of the relevant facts without having to ramble on about them. I am continually tweaking my spreadsheets with each set release, and even during the set when I find something that is off, or a new stat to track, or even just a better way to show the data.

I hope you enjoyed what you saw. Your takeaway is that this is what you can expect from a daily F2P player with 4 wins a day, every day, and a mastery pass.

I almost didn't make it to the end of M21. I was so burned out the last couple of weeks of play and hated the stale meta. I was about to quit for a week and then realized a few days ago that I had calculated my spreadsheet end date using the wrong date. I used the release date of Zendikar Rising for paper, and forgot to subtract a week for Arena. So at that point I had only a couple of days left, so I powered through. I then realized since I was expecting to have one more week, I didn't have any of my spreadsheets finalized, or my new fresh one cleaned and ready for Zendikar Rising, or any of my collection stat spreadsheets ready to go for the new set. I got it all going and am ready to close out the old stats for M21 finally.

I started M21 with Azorius flyers until quick draft started, played about 19 drafts, plus 1 premier draft that I had a free token for, and then switched over to mono white lifegain. I tried mono green stompy a little but it just wasn't going fast enough for me.

For the first time since I started playing, I decided to actually play my draft games out in order to earn the gems so I could save a few dollars on the mastery passes going forward. Even though I was only rare drafting for my collection, I still managed to win enough games to pay for the next two mastery passes.  It's unbelievable how many wins I got just by pure luck of the opponent having worse luck than I was.

All of the FNM @ Home events helped add a lot of value to this set release as well, I made sure to participate in every one of those.

Core Set 2021 makes the fifth full set I've been tracking via spreadsheet, with the help of MTGAHelper to verify my statistics. My spreadsheet didn't change too much since the Ikoria set, though I made a few tiny tweaks here and there, added a couple extra columns to track additional data as well as continued tweaks in the large draft and pack opening spreadsheets.

All stats started on 6/25/20 and ran through 9/17/20, when Zendikar Rising was released. I was able to get one extra daily grind in for M21on release day, just before the big update.

While I strive to have accurate stats, due to decimal places, and sometimes missing a cell or two in my spreadsheet, totals may not fully add up, so don't try mathing them. If you are interested in all the raw data, please let me know and I can share the spreadsheet with you.

Total Gameplay Stats

These stats are from all types of gameplay, including daily gold farming in the play queue, ranked draft, events, ranked BO1, and just play testing decks for fun in the play queue.

The larger loss ratio was due to the oppressive decks circulating in the meta. I quickly recognized if I was going to have a chance in the first few turns and conceded early on if not. Most of these decks play way too long for daily grinding, so I was not going to wast my time only to lose to them.

• Total Games Played: 852 (12.0 games per day)
• Win-Loss: 375-477, 44% win rate
• Total mulligans: 170 (2.0 per day)
• Play-Draw: 404-448, 47% I went first
• I conceded: 453
• Opponent conceded: 318
• Total time played= 55:20:00 hrs
• Time played per day = 46:46 minutes
• Average time per game = 3:54 minutes

Daily Gold Farming and Individual Daily Deck Stats

My daily routine was to win a minimum of 4 games per day in the play queue, and complete a daily quest if able. I played more on occasion, but usually 30-60 mins a day was enough for me if I already met my daily minimums.

These stats are only for games played in the play queue during my daily farming routine, or events that allowed either deck. These are the main two I used during this set release and does not reflect other decks I played throughout.

Mono White Lifegain

• Deck played: 7/21/20 - 9/17/20
• Total games: 453
• Time played: 29:05:46 hrs
• Win-Loss: 205-248, 45% win ratio
• Play-Draw: 218-235, 48% I went first
• Me-Opponent conceded: 242-193
• Mulligans: 84

Azorius Flyers (various versions)

• Deck played: 6/25/20 - 7/21/20
• Total games: 174
• Time played: 8:42:29 hrs
• Win-Loss: 88-86, 51% win ratio
• Play-Draw: 89-85, 51% I went first
• Me-Opponent conceded: 83-63
• Mulligans: 43

Gold

• Total gold earned: 103,275 (1,454.6 per day)
• Daily rewards: 47,025 (662.3 per day)
• Daily quests: 49,750 (700.7 per day)
• Other gold rewards (events, etc): 6,500
• Gold spent on drafts: 95,000
• Gold spent in store: 26,700
  • Unstable land bundle
  • several fold for gems daily deals
  • few sleeve daily deals
  • 1 Jumpstart event
  • 1 avatar daily deal
• Total gold spent: 121,700

Gems

• Gems spent: 3400 (mastery pass)
• Gems earned: 6360 (mastery pass, duplicated rares, quick draft)

ICRs

• Free daily ICRs: 19
• Mastery pass ICRs: 8
• Total ICRs: 41
• ICRs Kept-Vaulted: 31-10

Ranked Draft

I only do ranked draft for the cards, gems and booster packs. For the first time since I started playing, I actually played all of my draft games if I had something I could actually build a deck out of. For Arena, I do what I call collection drafting. You can more about that my article for Arena Collection Drafting.

• Drafts completed: 20 (1 of these were from free tokens I received)
• Cards opened: 869
• Cards Kept-Vaulted: 766-103

Booster Packs

• Free packs: 69 (codes, set mastery rewards, ranked draft rewards)
  
• Mastery pass packs: 20
  
• Pack cards opened: 702
  
• Pack cards Kept-Vaulted: 186-516

Cards

• Total cards earned from all sources: 1,612
• Total cards Kept-Vaulted: 962-650
• Total vault progress: 105.1

Wild Cards

• Wild Cards: Total / Pack / Wheel / Used
• Common: 23 / 23 / 0 / 4
• Uncommon: 35 / 20 / 15 / 2
• Rare:  16 / 4 / 12 / -4
• Mythic: 6 / 3 / 3 / -5
• Total: 80 / 50 / 30 / -3

The -x are most likely refunds when cards were banned.

In Conclusion
I only made a few small tweaks to the spreadsheet this time around and it seems to be working even better. It's much more accurate and finely tuned for every little bit of data that I want to track.

I hope everyone enjoyed their journey through Core Set 2021. Until the next set...

This week starts preview season for the new Magic: The Gathering set Zendikar Rising.

As with past sets, WotC have released pre-release bundles on Arena prior to the new set launching. Are they a good deal or not?

Just like with the previous bundles, they are offering a bundle purchase of both bundles and throwing in another pet. I will go into depth on each bundle separately, and then discuss both bundles combined at the end.

Pricing and value information is all found on my main Arena site. All values shown are as of 8/31/20.

What's in it?

The Jace Pack Bundle is the same as past pack bundles, with a slight discount on bulk packs plus some fun extras thrown in for "free".

• 50x Zendikar Rising booster packs - $54.24
• 1 x Jace, Mirror Mage card - $debatable, still working on values for individual cards
• Jace, Mirror Mage card style - $2.19
• Mind Mage sleeve - $4.30

From this we can see there is $60.72 worth of value here. If  you don't care about the cosmetics, you still get a small discount on booster packs as well as the single inclusion of the Jace, Mirror Mage card, still totaling at least $54.24 in value.

Is this a good buy?

Yes, if you're one who buys at least 50 virtual booster packs for real world money.

What's in it?

The Nahiri Play Bundle appears to be keeping it's increased value that was raised in the M21 Play bundle by adding more draft tokens. This is a good trend to see.

• Mastery Pass - $19.86
• 3x Player Draft tokens - $28.17
• 1x Sealed token - $11.68
• 1x Nahiri, Heir of the Ancients card - $debatable, still working on values for individual cards
• Nahiri, Heir of the Ancients card style - $2.19
• Stoneblade sleeve - $4.30

From this we can see there is $66.20 worth of value here. If  you don't care about the cosmetics, you're still coming out ahead with $59.71 in value if you were going to be purchasing these items anyway.

Who is this bundle for?

I see this bundle targeted to those who don't have a lot of gems or are just starting out in the world of drafting.

I would think that if you draft a lot, and you're one to purchase the draft tokens with gems, then you are typically able to keep the gem rewards going, even on a bad run of luck. That said, you are probably someone who has enough gems saved up to get the Mastery pass and draft for free from your previous set's gem winnings. If this is you, then this is probably not a bundle you need.

Is this a good buy?

Yes, if you're one who buys the mastery pass and draft tokens each set release.
No, if you already have enough gems banked from the previous set release.

Are both bundles worth it?

If you are planning to buy the pack bundle already, and want the play bundle too, then this is an excellent buy.

If you only want the booster packs and dont need the draft tokens or mastery pass, or you can get those for free with your gems, then don't bother with the play bundle.

In Conclusion...
I hope you found this helpful and informative and it helps with your purchasing decisions.

It's been a while since I last updated this series. I had become upset with the game after one too many crashes causing me to lose all of my stuff I spent many hours gathering in-game.

With the latest Wastelanders update that came out a few months back, I started playing daily again and falling back in love with the game.

Ikoria came and went quickly. Even though it was a shorter set, clocking in at only 71 days, with all of the Covid stuff going on, game stores closed and delay for the paper product, it seems like it just went by without a thought. As we're going into week two (as of the time of this writing) with Core Set 2021, I am hardly seeing any of the signs of Ikoria anymore, mainly all of the mutate decks.

Speaking of residual Ikoria, the only thing I ended up really using from it on a daily basis was Skycat Sovereign in my daily Azorius Flyers deck. I played around with some of the other cards, but nothing that I played for my daily grind. I had a really exciting and fun to play Slitherwisp flash deck that got nasty if the engine could get going and also built the awful cycling deck that I refused to play before of absolutely boring gameplay. I had one mutate deck, but it was missing a few rares that I didn't want to craft since I wasn't going to be playing that daily.

I generally stick to fast aggro so I can either win quickly, or concede quickly and move on to the next game. The fun decks are saved for playing with friend in direct play.

I was pretty excited for this set. I loved the art and style of the showcase cards, though since they were only on the mutate creatures, I didn't end up getting any of the card styles since I didn't play with any of them much. I did get quite a few in my paper collection and they look really slick in the card binder.

Ikoria makes the fourth full set I've been tracking via spreadsheet, with the help of MTGAHelper to verify my statistics. My spreadsheet didn't change too much since the Theros set, though I made a few tiny tweaks here and there, added a couple extra columns to track additional data as well as changed and fixed a few things in the large draft and pack opening spreadsheets.

All stats started on 4/16/20 and ran through 6/25/20, when Core Set 2021 was released. I was able to get one extra daily grind in for Ikoria on release day, just before the big update.

The accuracy has greatly improved as I build in a few check cells to make sure I tallied up certain fields correctly.

Total Gameplay Stats

These stats are from all types of gameplay, including daily gold farming in the play queue, ranked draft, events, ranked BO1, and just play testing decks for fun in the play queue.

• Total Games Played: 777 (10.9 games per day)
• Win-Loss: 401-376, 52% win rate
• Total mulligans: 211 (2.9 per day)
• Play-Draw: 389-388, 50% I went first
• I conceded: 323
• Opponent conceded: 269
• Total time played= 58:10:31 hrs
• Time played per day = 49:10 minutes
• Average time per game = 4:30 minutes

Daily Gold Farming and Individual Daily Deck Stats

My daily routine was to win a minimum of 4 games per day in the play queue, and complete a daily quest if able. I played more on occasion, but usually 30-60 mins a day was enough for me if I already met my daily minimums.

These stats are only for games played in the play queue during my daily farming routine.

RDW (THB)

• Deck played: RDW (THB) (4/16/20 - 5/1/20)
• Total games: 165
• Time played: 10:18:42 hrs
• Win-Loss: 84-81, 51% win ratio
• Play-Draw: 82-83, 50% I went first
• Me-Opponent conceded: 71-62
• Mulligans: 48

Azorius Flyers (various versions)

• Deck played: RDW (THB) (5/9/20 - 6/25/20)
• Total games: 326
• Time played: 19:10:11 hrs
• Win-Loss: 173-153, 53% win ratio
• Play-Draw: 173-153, 53% I went first
• Me-Opponent conceded: 142-128
• Mulligans: 105

Gold

• Total gold earned: 92,350 (1300.7 per day)
  
• Daily rewards: 41,350 (582.4 per day)
  
• Daily quests: 40,000 (563.4 per day)
  
• Other gold rewards (events, etc): 6,500
  
• Gold spent on drafts: 95,000
  
• Gold spent in store: 4,950
  • Couple cheap cosmetics, packs on sale and gold/gems for gold on daily deals
    
• Total gold spent: 99,950
  

Gems

• Gems spent: 3400 (mastery pass)
  
• Gems earned: 660 (mastery pass, duplicated rares, ranked draft)
  

ICRs

• Free daily ICRs: 40
  
• Mastery pass ICRs: 18
  
• Total ICRs: 84
  
• ICRs Kept-Vaulted: 55-29
  

Ranked Draft

I only do ranked draft for the cards, gems and booster packs. I really don't enjoy the format on Arena, and really only have fun drafting with a group of friends. For Arena, I do what I call collection drafting. You can more about that my article for Arena Collection Drafting.

• Drafts completed: 22 (3 of these were from free tokens I received)
  
• Cards opened: 968
  
• Cards Kept-Vaulted: 803-165
  

Booster Packs

• Free packs: 39 (codes, set mastery rewards, ranked draft rewards)
  
• Mastery pass packs: 16
  
• Pack cards opened: 644
  
• Pack cards Kept-Vaulted: 165-479
  

Cards

• Total cards earned from all sources: 1,696
  
• Total cards Kept-Vaulted: 1023-673
  
• Total vault progress: 115.3
  

Wild Cards

• Wild Cards: Total / Pack / Wheel / Used
• Common: 25 / 25 / 0 / -1
  
• Uncommon: 43 / 29 / 14 / 0
  
• Rare:  22 / 10 / 12 / -3
  
• Mythic: 9 / 6 / 3 / 0
  
• Total: 99 / 70 / 29 / -4
  

In Conclusion
I only made a few small tweaks to the spreadsheet this time around and it seems to be working well now. It's much more accurate and finely tuned for every little bit of data that I want to track.

I hope everyone enjoyed their journey through the lands of Ikora and meeting all the great beasts and other fun mechanics. Until the next set...