Historic 101: Dimir Specters (Historic, Magic Arena)
Hey everyone! Your friendly neighborhood AsianAvenger here with some historic content for you all! With the launch of Historic on Arena, I wanted to play Hypnotic Specter and Phyrexian Arena. I had to pace back and forth but then it dawned upon me that we can make a Dimir Specter deck! It's not exactly the most competitive deck but it is a lot of fun.
Gameplan
Since our threats are a bunch of small 2/2 fliers, we need to make sure we clear the way for these little friends...
These two cards can really do some crazy things and run away with games if protected. The best way to do this is with a bunch of disruption like Duress and Thought Erasure. If we can pick apart key removal spells or answers, the fun is sorta endless as Hypnotic Specter could potentially throw away key cards for the opponent and Thief of Sanity...well, we know what happens if Thief connects a ton of times.
Drown in the Loch is our other form of "disruption" as it can counter our opponent's spells thanks to our Thief of Sanity throwing away a ton of cards. Not only is it a way to counter and protect a thief, it could potentially be a way for us to remove a bunch of problematic creatures as we don't run many board wipes. Speaking of board wipes...
With how aggressive the best of one format is, it's mandatory that a slow deck like ours have a board reset when we fall behind even if it's at the cost of our own creatures. On the bright side, we have Lazav, the Multifarious and Cavalier of Night to potentially give us more use out of our specters! Also, there's a sweet interaction between Cavalier bringing back Lazav after it dies. This allows you to turn your Lazav into Cavalier for the body or a specter right after that.
Though this card easily gets bounced by a Teferi, Time Ravaler, this card will make it so we're just drowning in card advantage. Our other way to keep us in the game is through drawing off of our Castle Locthwain.
Matchups
I won't lie to you, this deck suffers against a ton of decks but it only needs to work a few times for the fun to be worth it. It will have a bunch of issues against decks loaded with Shock and cards like that as those opponents are trading a 1 mana spell for our 3 mana spell which feels bad but hopefully, our disruption can deal with all of that. Control however, might be a little bit better for us as they're significantly slower and allow us the time to set up.
Conclusion
The deck surprised me as we got extremely lucky and went 4-1. It might've helped that we didn't run into a ton of Kethis, the Hidden Hand and mono red aggro decks. Although this deck is very fragile in best of one, maybe if we added a sideboard, we can be a little more resilient. Here's what I would start with if I were trying to make this best of three...
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-Your Friendly Neighborhood AsianAvenger
Twitter: @TheAsianAvenger || Twitch: twitch.tv/TheAsianAvenger || Email: theasianavenger@mtggoldfish.com
