Every week, Magic: The Gathering Arena features a fun and unique game mode for its Midweek Magic event. One of these event types is Historic Artisan, which combines two formats and gives players a wide range of cards to explore while enforcing a unique deck building restriction.
Check out our guide to the Historic Artisan format!
By competing in this free event, players can earn prizes in the form of two rare Individual Card Reward (ICR) and one random Mystery Cosmetic. The random cosmetic can be anything from sleeves to special card styles, avatars, and pets. More often than not, the Mystery Cosmetic will be a card style—but there is always a chance to earn a rarer cosmetic.
MTG Arena Historic Artisan Rewards
Midweek Magic events occur on every Tuesday at 8 a.m. PT and run for 48 hours, ending on Thursday at 8 a.m. PT. Two days is plenty of time for players to experiment with different decks until they reach their three wins.
Unlike other game modes on Magic: The Gathering Arena, players are not locked in to a single deck for the entire event. Instead, players can experiment with multiple decks, either by modifying their deck between games or even swapping to a different deck entirely, and try again in another game.
Historic Artisan Rules
MTG Arena Historic Artisan Screenshot
Historic Artisan allows players to build a deck from a very broad card pool consisting of every card available in Magic: The Gathering Arena in the Historic format—so long as it is at the common and uncommon rarity. Basic lands from any set in Arena are also allowed. Decks must include a minimum of 60 cards in addition to the other restrictions placed on players.
There are plenty of ways to experiment and explore with this format and, since the decks are restricted to only common and uncommon cards, most decks are easy to craft. For this reason, Historic Artisan is a great format for new players or those who have not had time to build up a large collection of cards yet. It is also an efficient way to easily complete any quests that are lying around or if you need a push to complete the Weekly Win Rewards.
While players can only earn three rewards for playing, they can continue to play games in the event for as long as it is available.
Banned Cards in Historic Artisan
As with most formats, there are a number of banned cards in Historic Artisan that are just a little too powerful to let players play with. These format-warping cards cannot be included in any tournament-legal deck to help keep the format healthy and to help increase the variety of viable decks for players to choose from. The banned cards are:
- Abiding Grace
- Cauldron Familiar
- Gates Ablaze
- Persistent Petitioners
- Veil of Summer
- Wilderness Reclamation
- Zenith Flare
Even with these banned cards there are plenty of deck archetypes to pick from that will all help players win. With the relatively low stakes of Midweek Magic events, players are free to explore all sorts of decks and gameplay styles.
Example Historic Artisan Deck List
Looking for some Historic Artisan decks to take into MTG Arena? Check our our guide to the Historic Artisan format or try out something like this Rakdos Sacrifice deck.
Historic Artisan Rakdos Sacrifice
| Creature (8) 4 Shambling Ghast 4 Bloodtithe Harvester Artifacts (11) 1 Blood Fountain 4 Experimental Synthesizer 2 Dragonspark Reactor 4 Oni-Cult Anvil Instant (16) 4 Fatal Push 4 Voltage Surge 2 Abrade 4 Deadly Dispute 2 Reckoner’s Bargain Sorcery (2) 2 Feed the Swarm Planeswalker (2) 2 Saheeli, Sublime Artificer Land (21) 4 Bloodfell Caves 1 Cryptic Caves 4 Tramway Station 6 Mountain 6 Swamp | Sideboard (15) 2 Cut Down 4 Duress 2 Abrade 2 Embereth Shieldbreaker 1 Feed the Swarm 2 Cry of the Carnarium 2 Davriel, Rogue Shadowmage |
Ryan Hay (he/him) has been writing about Magic: The Gathering and video games for years, and loves absolutely terrible games. Send him your bad game takes over on Twitter where he won’t stop talking about Lord of the Rings.