Easy to Build Ravnica Alllegiance Standard Budget Decks on MTG Arena
Good morning/afternoon/evening everyone! I have (unsurprisingly) been playing a simply absurd amount of MTGArena. While exploring the game, it struck me just how powerful the budget options in Magic’s Standard format currently are. There are several tier 1 and tier 2 strategies that have 12 or fewer rares/mythics in them, which makes them mostly trivial to build on Arena. I’ve taken a sample of four decks that may be obvious to existing Standard players, but are terrific starting points for those getting into the format.
I will be highlighting Mono Blue, Mono White, and Mono Red, all of which are in unironic contention for best deck in the format. After looking at these aggressive strategies, I’ll show off my build of Four-Color Gates, which will be less potent for ranking up but has some of the most powerful interactions in Standard. These lists will be optimized for Best-of-One play, as it is a better starting point than the more intricate Best-of-Three (Traditional) play.
Mono Blue
This deck produces the most potent “nut-draw” in Standard, not close. It rewards players who know how to take it slow and use their cards to their absolute best potential. What looks like a pile of draft leavings has shown itself to be one of the premier archetypes (and is extremely cheap in paper and on Arena as a bonus).
This build of Mono-Blue looks to really leverage the power of Chart a Course. The deck’s best possible draw involves 1-drop into Curious Obsession + Dive Down or Spell Pierce as a 1-2 tempo punch. This sets up an extremely powerful card draw engine, a respectable clock, and ideally blanks your opponent’s entire second turn. With all the midrange and control decks in standard, being able to play 3 spells in the first 2 turns of the game can be completely backbreaking when they’re still playing their lands tapped and setting up their strategy.
The reason I would recommend this version with more Chart a Course than average is because it allows for more extremely powerful early games. The deck would likely play 7 or 8 Curious Obsessions if it were allowed to and the 3 Chart a Courses are the second-best option to keep your wheels turning. A constant stream of new cards is necessary for this deck full of objectively weak cards to compete going into the mid- and late-game.
I would recommend this deck to players who love Gitaxian Probe and Serum Visions. The ability to correctly time cantrips and leverage your play-skill to eak every ounce of value out of your low-impact effects translates very well to this deck. I would not recommend this deck to brand-new players to Magic, but if you’re familiar with the game but not Standard specifically, it’s a really terrific option.
Mono-Red
Mono-Red is the deck you will get by far the most “free wins” with. You can indeed leverage play skill to correctly time each burn spell and win games others couldn’t, but you also get a huge amount of games just by casting whatever spell you can each turn and soon your opponent drops to 0 life.
This version of this archetype tries to slightly abuse the mulligan program in BO1. On Arena, when playing Best-of-One, the program generates 2 opening hands and gives you the one with the better mix of lands and spells. This is how you can get away with running only 18 lands, as the deck really only needs 3 lands for the whole game and the program makes it much more likely for you to have 2 lands right off the bat. The Flame of Keld, Risk Factor, and Light Up the Stage will help keep the cards flowing and the burn spells flying even well into the late-game.
The synergy between The Flame of Keld and Electrostatic Field is extraordinarily powerful. For those who don’t find it obvious, the third chapter of the Sage makes it so each time you cast an Instant or Sorcery, your Wall will deal 3 damage to your opponent. This allows you to pull out a win through a shocking amount of life-gain from your opponent’s side. The reason we’re only running 3 Flames is because they are so terrible in multiples.
I would recommend this deck for those coming to Magic from another game, particularly Hearthstone. A lot of the concepts this deck utilizes that are more complicated (when to trade vs when to go face) are ones shared by most other card games. I would not recommend this deck for people looking for long games. While the decisions in this deck are far from easy, you run through each game rather quickly, with a winner being determined during the first 5-8 turns of the game in most cases.
Mono-White
This is the most expensive deck I’m including, but still relatively cheap. There are upgrades you can make to this deck if you have more resources, such as adding Tithe Takers or a second color (usually Blue, sometimes Red), but the version I present is one I feel will help you get a great handle on how to play aggro in Standard.
First of all, if you are looking to budget this deck further, I would advise you don’t. The Histories, Marshals, Loxodons, and Landings are all extremely core to the deck and it will run much worse if you cut the numbers on any of those core cards. However, I also would recommend this deck the most for people trying to get a handle on this Standard format. This deck generates interactive gameplay and showcases the variety of creatures available in Standard, as you’ll have to muscle through whatever your opponent’s defensive plan is. While Mono-Red can start hucking burn at their life total and Mono-Blue can mostly ignore your opponent’s board as long as they’re not presenting lethal, this deck requires you to do much more math regarding the upcoming turns.
If you value your ability to correctly predict what your opponent wants to do next and evaluate board states, I would recommend this deck. This deck might also appeal to you if you’re a fan of go-wide creature strategies, where you attempt to overwhelm your opponent by snowballing a minor advantage on board into a massive one by pressuring them into bad blocks. This is also a great Standard deck for control players. Believe it or not, playing this strategy requires a lot of the same predictive and threat-assessment skills that make good control pilots, as you really need to decide when to deploy your light selection of interaction.
Four-Color Gates
This deck is likely the one that will catch most peoples’ eye. Building a four-color deck on a budget is usually impossible, but the payoffs for playing Gates are so potent that they justify all your lands entering the battlefield tapped. This deck goes way over the top of a lot of what the rest of the format is doing and invalidates any other deck’s late-game if it’s able to set up its engine.
This is the quintessential ‘ramp’ deck, but with the twist that all your lands draw cards. The power level of the deck changes so drastically when Guild Summit is in play, it’s pretty ridiculous. The ability for each land drop you make to provide more and more fuel is really the backbone of why this deck is so good. The Summit is even powerful later in the game when you use it to draw a ton of cards. While the deck is slow, it can hold its own against aggro decks because Gates Ablaze is such a potent board-wipe and Plaza of Harmony, Archway Angel, and Hydroid Krasis all provide significant life-gain.
I would recommend this deck to people who like Tron. If you play Modern and play any of the linear strategies that turn every game into a race to see who hits their late-game combo first, I’d recommend this deck. While all the aggro decks presented earlier need to mix intricate interactions with managing their and their opponent’s battlefield, this deck looks to totally invalidate whatever their opponent is doing. If you are new to magic, this is a great deck for you, as your strategy usually has absolutely nothing to do with what your opponent is doing and you get to do extremely cool and powerful things when your engine is running.
Conclusion
This is the first Standard format I’ve played where “budget” doesn’t mean “bad”. All of the decks presented in this article are not only going to serve you well on Arena, but are not unlikely to top 8 a large tournament, such as the upcoming Mythic Championship. If you are looking to get into Standard from another format, looking to explore the new hotness that is Arena, or just looking to expand your play style into a new archetype, these decks will serve you well regardless of how much money you intend to put into the game.
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