What are the best MTG Arena decks? Grinding up Magic: The Gathering Arena’s Standard ladder is tough – so there’s no shame in looking up a tournament-winning deck. This guide tracks the best MTGA decks every month, based on the latest tournament results, with full decklists and info on how to play each one.
On MTG Arena, the meta is constantly moving. With the busy MTG release schedule constantly adding stacks of fresh cards that unlock new winning strategies, the best MTG Standard decks can rise and fall very quickly.
Each month, we review which decks are performing best, crunch down exactly how they work, and explain the top decklists below. You can also find crucial info in our FAQ section to help you understand how these decks win games. Remember, the biggest changes come when a new set drops – most recently that was Tarkir Dragonstorm. you can find the full timeline in our guide to all MTG sets.
The best MTG Arena decks in Standard right now are:
Gruul Aggro
As with any aggro strategy, this deck sees you playing cheap creatures and turning them sideways, but it also relies heavily on the Prowess keyword. That means you need to be playing spells to land big hits, and Gruul Aggro opts for buffs and damage instants that allow it to win any combat and force terrifying hits through. Monstrous Rage in particular, is such a good combat trick that it’s on the MTG banlist for Alchemy
Bloomburrow really kicked this deck into high gear, with a swarm of mice like Emberheart Challenger, a natural fit for the deck with their Valiant keyword. A Duskmourn card, Screaming Nemesis, is a hasty attacker that’s very hard to get rid of, and can nullify lifegain for an entire match.
After seeming glued to the top of Standard since the start of last year, the story of the past month is that Gruul Aggro is finally starting to be surpassed, by two decks that seem superficially similar. Still, this tried and tested deck can certainly deliver the goods, with explosive turns, and reasonable staying power thanks to green cards like Pawpatch Recruit.
Izzet Prowess
The new hot deck from Tarkir Dragonstorm, Izzet Prowess is heavily reliant on the artifact card Cori-Steel Cutter. This thing pops out monk tokens like crazy, which can then be buffed up by your spells. Thanks to this card, the deck can still pull off a win through a boardwipe, and doesn’t need to play many creatures at all.
Izzet Prowess has some similarities to Gruul, with lots of the same Prowess bodies and combat tricks. However, the addition of blue turns the deck into a tempo strategy. Though very aggressive, it wants to play a lightly controlling game, just clearing enough of a path to swing through with the team.
It’s not as consistent as the next deck on our list, but Izzet Prowess has come out of the gates hot. We’ll see how it performs in a month’s time, once the meta has had a chance to adjust, but this is definitely one to watch!
Jeskai Oculus
Jeskai Oculus is an interesting iteration on what was once a pure blue-white deck, which relied on pulling Abhorrent Oculus out of the graveyard with Helping Hand.
It can still do exactly that, but the newest version of this midrange deck, isn’t so tied to that line of play. Instead it gains value from drawing and discarding a bunch of cards, with creatures that buff themselves like Marauding Mako, and the enchantment Proft’s Eidetic Memory, which can turn any creature into a massive beater.
Oculus is still a dangerous threat that your opponent must answer, but this Jeskai deck now has loads of new options that can help it finish games very fast. Fear of Missing Out is a good example, giving one of your buffed-up creatures a free attack.
Mono Red Aggro
The Gruul Aggro deck never ran much green, and now Mono Red Aggro has formed which drops the color altogether. Apart from this, it’s pretty similar to the Gruul deck, and again contains many of the same key cards.
Mono red drops some of the options Gruul has for building bigger creatures in favor of more burn spells. With a less restrictive mana base, the land card Soulstone Sanctuary comes in clutch – often striking the killing blow after a boardwipe.
With fewer sideboard options than Gruul, the red deck seems strongest in BO1, while the two-color deck often fairs best in a BO3 matchup. What really makes it shine is its consistency.
Esper Self-bounce
An innovative deck that took off at the very end of 2024 without any new cards coming along to help it, Esper Pixie or Esper Self-bounce is a strategy that’s all about bouncing your own permanents and replaying them, to get the absolute most value you can from ETB effects.
This is particularly useful with disruptive enchantments like Nowhere to Run and Hopeless Nightmare. Esper Pixie decks make opponents’ lives a misery by continuously recycling these, while accruing value with the likes of Optimistic Scavenger. Flying creatures like Fear of Isolation and Nurturing Pixie then let you get in for the win.
This tempo deck has seen some honing to find the most efficient version. For example, Entity Tracker, an incredible card draw engine with all those enchantments, has been dropped, as it’s too slow, a lightning rod for removal, and you can already play your own cards multiple times without drawing loads of new ones.
The planeswalker Kaito is in – currently – able to gain lots of value while also providing another source of self-bounce.
Jeskai Control
The best control deck in the format right now, is Jeskai Control, proving that Jeskai is definitely the best Tarkir clan. And the key to the deck is Shiko, Paragon of the Way, a creature that lets you pick and replay whatever spell you need from your graveyard, from card draw to board wipe.
Beza helps you survive an onslaught, Marang River Regent and Chandra, Hope’s Beacon are nice late-game cards, but then the rest of your list is just smashing non-creature spells that Shiko can replay for you.
Domain Overlords
Another deck that’s been kicking around at the top-end of Standard for literal years, Domain took a brand new shape in late 2024 thanks to Duskmourn.
The Domain deck looks to win the long game, and now uses multiple Duskmourn overlords to achieve that, keeping the board clear with removal until you build up steam for a devastating attack.
Over time the game plan has evolved to be more and more focused around these creepy creature enchantments, and the list above shows this with cards like Zur to animate them, and Scrollshift to blink them into play.
While it now tends to leave out red cards, aside from the Overlords, this deck still does a lot of what it’s known for: ramping, using Leyline Binding as absurdly cheap removal, and gaining loads of value from Up the Beanstalk. If you want to play a deck with a ton of mana colors, this one’s for you.
Golgari Midrange
Once S-tier decks, both the classic midrange ‘good stuff’ builds in Dimir and Golgari have wasted away a little, but can still win games. This deck pairs aggressively statted creatures that can beat down, with ways to generate value over a longer game, whether that’s casting spells from the graveyard, or drawing cards.
This particular iteration of the deck has a strong focus on demons, thanks to the excellent Room card Ritual Chamber. Capable of making a huge flying beater and drawing/draining an opponent out, it tends to define any game you get to play it.
A few cheap removal spells round out the decklist, and you also get the benefit of Restless Cottage, probably the best ‘man land’ in Standard right now.
Dimir Midrange
Dimir Midrange has been a powerhouse in Standard for many months, and though its no longer on the podium, it remains one of the best MTG Arena decks in the meta.
As usual with this color combination, evasive creatures and removal spells abound. What is fairly new, however is the appearance of an MTG planeswalker: Kaito, Bane of Nightmares. Kaito is a really solid source of card advantage, and also works great against other midrange decks, being very difficult to remove.
As for the rest of the deck, it’s probably got the best card draw of anything on this list, allowing it to properly leverage Sheoldred the Apocalypse, which, as ever, remains one of the greatest four-drops in Standard.
Azorius Omniscience
Though it sounds like a meme deck, Azorius Omniscience has shown it can win games. This Control strategy looks a bit like Azorius Oculus used to – with lots of self-mill and reanimation. However, in this deck, what you’re pulling from the grave is not a giant floating eyeball, but the most busted card that can hit the field in Standard.
Omniscience makes all your other spells free. So if you can use removal and counterspells to hang on until it’s up, the game is usually a sure victory. With the combo of Roiling Dragonstorm and two Marang River Regents (repeatedly bouncing each other) you can draw through your entire deck to find your win con, a single copy of Founding the Third Path.
Now you can play and repeatedly bounce this aura with your dragons to mill your opponent out.
Before Tarkir Dragonstorm, the much more complicated win condition was to play and bounce Invasion of Arcavios to repeatedly bring in spells from your sideboard.
What seems to have tipped the balance in favor of a slow, controlling blue-white deck like this is the MTG Aetherdrift card Stock Up. This card is sort of like a cheaper Memory Deluge. It’s an excellent card selection spell that is strong enough to see play in Vintage, let alone Standard!
Best MTG Arena decks FAQ
If you’re relatively new to Magic: The Gathering and are here for a helping hand to grab some wins, some of the terminology here may seem like daunting jargon (and it is) so let’s explain some of it.
What do MTG Arena deck names mean?
MTG Standard deck names are generally made up of two components:
- Colors – The first part tells you which MTG colors are in the deck (for example Mono Red or Blue/White).
- Archetype, mechanic, or theme – The second part either describes the strategy ‘archetype’ it uses to win games (e.g. Aggro); the main in-game mechanic it uses (e.g. Burn or Life Gain) or a distinctive theme to its cards (e.g. Rabbits or Vampires). If the deck is driven by a single powerful card, that card name might be used here instead.
Both halves of the deck names can get complicated, though. Players often refer to decks with more than one color by their in-universe lore labels, like Gruul or Azorius, rather than the straightforward colors. We explain every single one of these in our guide to MTG color combinations.
And when it comes to labelling decks’ strategies and themes, there’s very often more than one commonly used term to indicate a specific deck’s distinctive playstyle or win conditions – so you might see the same deck referred to by slightly different names by different players or websites.
It’s easy to identify these doppelgängers, though – just look at the cards in the decklists. They may vary slightly – every deck has variants – but the core deck concept remains the same and builds on the same cards.
What are the main MTG Arena deck archetypes?
Magic: The Gathering has a huge range of strategic interactions and options in it – but generally, your deck needs to follow a single, coherent strategy to win games. Fans have grouped these winning strategies into six main ‘archetypes’, based not on which cards they include, but on how they set out to win games.
You can find full details in our guide to MTG deck archetypes – but here’s a short summary of the six types and how they play:
- Aggro – Win fast with aggressive damage, mostly using creatures.
- Control – slow down the opponent while you spin up powerful cards.
- Midrange – Use the best available mid-cost cards to outmaneuver both aggro and control.
- Combo – Set up and then play a specific, game winning card combo.
- Combo-Control – Play control and then win with a combo.
- Aggro-Control / Tempo – Disrupt the opponent with quick control cards, while chipping away life with cheap aggro.
How do I build the best MTG Arena decks?
To build a Magic: The Gathering Arena deck, you’ll need to collect all the cards necessary for the deck list (click on the images above each deck in our guide to see the cards you need), then navigate to the ‘Decks’ area in the game client, create a deck, and add all those cards to it.
How do you get the cards you need? Well, you’ll either need to collect the cards from Arena booster packs for the sets they came in, or else directly ‘craft’ the specific cards you need using MTG Arena Wildcards – effectively tokens you can exchange for the exact Common, Uncommon, Rare, or Mythic Rare card you want, depending on the type of Wildcard.
Unless you’re lucky enough to find exactly the cards you need in boosters, you’ll need to earn a stack of Wildcards to craft the best decks. You get Wildcards by opening boosters, competing in events, and winning games to beat your daily and weekly challenges – so if you’re short on Wildcards for the shiny new Arena deck you want to build, the best thing to do is get playing with the decks you already have!
And that’s our guide to the strongest MTG Arena decks right now! If you’re lacking the cards to craft one of these decks above, you might be able to gain a few free wildcards with our list of all the MTG Arena codes that still function. Alternatively, behold the priciest rare Magic cards on earth in our guide to the most expensive MTG cards.
Source: Wargamer
