It’s been a while since anyone had to care about Historic. The last Set Championship was half Historic a year ago, but the format has changed beyond recognition since then. A year of regular sets, Anthologies parachuting cards from across the years into Arena, Alchemy rebalances, and Alchemy releases have effectively created a brand-new format. Players have dabbled in Historic on the ladder, but there was no incentive to take it seriously. 

Competitors at the Arena Championship had the biggest incentive you could ask for – tens of thousands of dollars on the line and seats at the World Championship. Their deck choices for the Historic portion are a glimpse into how some of the best deckbuilders in the game approach a fresh format.

Mardu Reanimator

Upon its release, Atraxa, Grand Unifier immediately became the default creature to cheat out in every format. From Standard through Vintage, Atraxa was the missing piece of the puzzle that breathed new life into some cards or decks and gave rise to entirely new ones. 

It’s no surprise that Atraxa took her talents to Historic as well. The basic Reanimator recipe has three ingredients: discard outlets or direct replacements like Unmarked Grave, reanimation spells, and something worth reanimating. The quirks of the Historic card pool mean that it excelled in some of these areas and lacked in others – this is one of the few formats where you can still cast Faithless Looting, but that’s fine because you can’t do that much with it. 

The Team Handshake list taken to the Top 8 by Matti Kuisma even forgoes Looting in favor of proven midrange cards that happen to be discard outlets, making a clear statement that this is not an all-in combo deck. Bloodtithe Harvester into Fable of the Mirror-Breaker is a familiar curve from both Standard and Pioneer in decks that don’t care about the graveyard; Seasoned Pyromancer is a Modern all-star in a wide range of red decks and repeats that role in Historic. 

The Crucias Factor

If you haven’t checked in on Alchemy or Historic lately, feast your eyes on Crucias, Titan of the Waves for a moment. In formats where it exists, Crucias is just as ubiquitous as Fable in these grindy Rakdos decks, and it’s easy to see why once you map out its play patterns.

Start at the extremes. You can always turn a land into a spell as flood insurance. You can always turn any one-drop into a land for next turn. Any one-drop can become a more expensive spell, especially useful in the midrange Rakdos decks where your one-drops are conditional interaction like Thoughtseize / Inquisition of Kozilek and Fatal Push / Strangle.

As you go higher, you can sculpt your curve to ensure the same hit every time. Jan-Moritz Merkel’s Rakdos deck can always turn any of its many three-drops, such as a redundant Crucias, into a Sheoldred as the only card that costs four or more. Crucias can expand your access to high-impact sideboard cards this way. Against Azorius Artifacts, Merkel can swap out his Sheoldreds for a Shatterstorm.

Crucias in Reanimator

In Reanimator, Crucias is a discard outlet and engine in one. Say you cast Crucias and discard Unburial Rites to it at end of turn, choosing ambitious and automatically hitting Atraxa. You now have Rites where in the graveyard (flashback discount and all) and Atraxa in hand to feed to Crucias next turn – or, thanks to the Treasure it created, you can discard Atraxa to a Blood token or Thoughtseize and flashback Rites on it all on Turn 4. A steady stream of Treasure tokens makes it possible to hard-cast Atraxa too if necessary. 

With tools like these, Reanimator can beat the midrange decks at their own game and sidestep hate while threatening a fast and lethal combo.

Rites Place, Rites Time

A recent addition to Historic that never found a home until now, Priest of Fell Rites finally makes a Reanimator deck possible. Unburial Rites is a little clunky as a backup option but makes up for that with its resilience. Between its flashback and Priest’s unearth, you are sure to rebuild your combo from your graveyard given enough time, and you can happily toss both your creature and your reanimation spell to a Fable or Seasoned Pyromancer if you aren’t ready for it yet. 

And then there’s Atraxa itself. The rest of this Mardu Reanimator shell existed for a few months (not that there were any tournaments to play it in) but lacked a payoff to make it worth it. Serra’s Emissary is the most terrifying threat of all in some matchups (and is waiting in the sideboard here for those times), but you want your main payoff creature to be impressive no matter what. Atraxa fills that void left by the lack of other big hitters like Griselbrand or Archon of Cruelty.

This deck also enjoys a recent Alchemy addition in Phyrexian Scrapyard. Grafting another cheap discard outlet into your manabase is very convenient, but Scrapyard also comes with a self-contained plan against graveyard hate that also avoids discard and counters.

Kethis Combo

Kethis Combo took Core Set 2020 Standard by storm and has been a curious oddity in larger formats ever since. Kethis was cut down in the Pioneer combo purge before it could make a mark there, but in Historic it has been a constant source of temptation that never lived up to the hype until now. Ondrej Strasky, one of the deck’s original trailblazers in Standard, revived this old favourite in Historic for yet another strong finish at the Arena Championship.

If you weren’t around for Kethis’s day in the sun, it’s hard to parse the combo at a glance. With enough legends in your deck and a repeated source of self-mill (previously Diligent Excavator or Emry, Lurker of the Loch on a loop), you can keep recasting Mox Amber (with each new copy banishing the old one via the legend rule) to generate mana as you mill your deck, putting enough fuel in the graveyard to let Kethis keep activating to restart this sequence, eventually ending with a win condition like Jace, Wielder of Mysteries.