Are you a sucker for limited run promotional cards? I know I am. When the schematic alternate art versions were revealed for the retro artifact sheet in Brothers’ War, I knew I would want to acquire them on Magic Arena if they became available.
I have to admit, amid the hustle and bustle of Thanksgiving I missed the original announcement of this week’s The Brothers’ Brawl event. Also, I was definitely surprised to see the price tag set at 1,000 gems for each event, essentially a cost of 100 gems per card style.
While that might seem steep, that’s only half the cost of a common-rarity card style when purchased from the collection browser directly. The event includes a handful of rare and mythic rare cards, making the event a very good value if you happen to be a fan of these kinds of unique card styles and the Historic format.
The event is two events, and you’ll need to win five matches (best-of-one) in each event to get all the promos. Thankfully this is my favorite kind of event, the kind with pre-constructed decks. The Mishra event features decks with all three versions of Mishra plus Gix and Ashnod. The Urza event has decks with all three versions of Urza plus Kayla and Tawnos.
So if you (a) have the gems or coins to burn and (b) like unique card styles for Historic decks and (c) enjoy the flavor of the Urza vs. Mishra conflict, this event is definitely for you (and it was definitely for me).
Moving on in other Brothers’ War related news is this weekend’s qualifier events. This weekend is Best-of-3 Brothers’ War sealed deck. You’ll have a chance to earn an invite, if you don’t already have one, in Friday’s qualifier play-in event (4-0 required). On Saturday if you win seven rounds of sealed deck you can play on Sunday. Draft a deck on Sunday and pick up another seven wins to qualify for the Arena championship and the Pro Tour. Good luck!
Explorer Anthology 2 will go on sale next week. So if you need to save gems for that maybe don’t get the Urza and Mishra event promos. Eldrazi Displacer, Courser of Kruphix, and Mutavault, among others, will make their way into both Explorer and Historic. Personally I’ve been jamming Goblin Charbelcher in Historic lately and will happily continue doing so until Wizards stops me.
Quick note! The Unfinity lands will disappear from the store next week! If you’ve been holding out on these and you really want them, this is basically your last chance. I’m old-school so I’m sticking with my Unhinged lands until I die, but I can’t deny how sweet those space lands are.
Lastly, Wizards has decided to shadowban the old card sleeves that are country flags. Unsurprisingly seeing some flags makes some players upset. I can speculate on a few. Wizards will be giving players 300 gems for each of these sleeves they have in their collection. Going forwards you can still use them but your opponent won’t see them. And Wizards is probably never going to release them again.
That’s all for this week in Magic Arena! Best of luck getting your promos, your explorer cards, or crushing this weekend’s qualifier event!
Rich Stein (he/him) has been playing Magic since 1995 when he and his brother opened their first packs of Ice Age and thought Jester’s Cap was the coolest thing ever. Since then his greatest accomplishments in Magic have been the one time he beat Darwin Kastle at a Time Spiral sealed Grand Prix and the time Jon Finkel blocked him on Twitter.