Phyrexian Arena
1BB
Enchantment
During your upkeep, lose one life and draw a card.

The hype surrounding this card is rising to a fever pitch. With the possible exception of Spiritmonger, no Apocalypse card has sparked so many new deck ideas. Heralded as the new Necropotence, it's now time to test the viability of this card.

When people looked at the set and saw a black enchantment that allowed them to trade life for cards, the instant comparison to the Skull is obvious. What isn't so obvious are the major differences between the Arena and the Skull. The original Necropotence decks used the powerful black enchantment to provide enough card advantage to overwhelm the control heavy environment. It wasn't so much the power of the Skull as the power of the Skull vs. the rest of the field. Anyone will tell you Necro just doesn't work as well against Sligh or a similar quick beatdown deck. The reason: The early damage restricts the amount of cards the Skull can feed you. The less life you have, the fewer cards you can draw. This is where the first major deviance between the two cards occurs; while Necro was used to refill a depleted hand or search for combo components, the Arena simply provides what in is, in essence, and extra draw step.

Lately, a lot of people have been talking about how to define a broken card. One of the most popular definitions is that a broken card allows you to break one of the games fundamental rules. The set of"one of"s are the most commonly broken rules - one land a turn, one card a turn, one attack a turn, and one use of your lands a turn. While most of the cards that break these rules are merely solid cards at best, the cards that allow you to break the"one card a turn" rule have historically been very powerful.

After having established the card is powerful — and believe me, it is — we have to decide whether its power comes at too steep a cost. While a single life point doesn't add up to a whole lot most of the time, in some games one life is all that separates the winner from the loser. To compensate for this fact, the Arena will have to provide a player with enough good cards to win. Every card in a deck should help your chances of winning; the cards in a deck that includes the Arena must be that much more powerful to make up for the Arena's life loss.

So it really comes down to not whether there are enough cards to support the Arena. Most builds of the Arena deck have at least eight painlands. Of course, most builds are trying to splash green for Pernicious Deed and Spiritmonger — this is a mistake. The Arena is already sapping your life. Why would you want to lose even more playing cards that are suboptimal in the deck? Yes that's right — the Deed and Spiritmonger are SUBOPTIMAL in a deck that includes Arena. The most consistent builds of the Arena decks, and therefore the best, are only two colors: white and black. Deeds and Spiritmongers are intended to provide creature kill and a kill mechanism. White and black all ready have sufficient creature kill cards, and a few of them can double as the kill mechanism.

Early Necro decks coupled it with hand disruption to provide immense card advantage. Arena decks today still use the"Necro + disruption = card advantage and therefore a win" theory. While Necro had Hypnotic Specters and Hymn to Tourach, we have Duress and Gerrard's Verdict — cards that are less powerful but more versatile. A nifty trick I picked up during playtesting was that the Verdict reads"target player." Late in the game, it doesn't matter what most opponents are holding, so a six-point life boost for two mana and two lands is a pretty good deal when you consider that Arena will eventually turn that into six extra cards.

The early Necro decks also coupled strong weenies with the Skull to provide a seemingly endless stream of attackers. We no longer have the cheap weenies to rely on this strategy, so we must now concentrate on playing threats that are very resilient. Our opponents not only pose a threat to our creatures; the Arena deck's indiscriminate creature kill in the form of Wrath of God has a habit of rendering most of our choices useless. The only threats available to the deck that survive a Wrath are Nether Spirit and Chimeric Idol. The Spirits help the deck versus beatdown, a thorn in classic Necro's side, and the Idols help the deck against control.

Every good deck has some form of creature control. The previously mentioned Wraths and Spirits provide the bulk of the deck's creature control; Death Grasp is a card that just screams to be included in the deck. It is the final piece of the puzzle to make the Arena live up to its potential. A single well-placed Death Grasp can turn a losing battle into a rout. Another card that deserves a spot in the deck is Vindicate. True, it's a three-mana sorcery. True, it provides no card advantage. But it's also true that it has unmatched versatility. Black historically has had a problem dealing with enchantments; Vindicate solves this problem, and also provides artifact destruction vs. Burning Bridge and Orbosition decks and extra creature control vs. beatdown.

With the deck basically straightened out, the only thing left is the mana. I've already stated more than four painlands in this type of deck is BAD. That being said, I had to find alternate ways of providing mana consistency. Dromar's Cavern provides the appropriate colors of mana, and as long as you don't use too many the drawback is minimal. I am also including a single copy of Rath's Edge in the deck. I don't understand why more people don't play this card.

Following these maxims, here is the first version of the Arena — which I'm lovingly duping the Alley, after the Nashville's arena:

4 Phyrexian Arena
4 Dark Ritual
4 Duress
4 Gerrard's Verdict
4 Vindicate
4 Wrath of God
4 Death Grasp
3 Chimeric Idol
3 Nether Spirit
1 Rath's Edge
2 Dromar's Cavern
4 Caves of Koilos
12 Swamps
6 Plains

With the metagame currently in a state of flux, I think it wisest to hold off on creating a sideboard, though I do think it will hold a place for extra discard and a few Disenchants. Make no mistake about it: The Arena is viable, and a powerful card at that. It's left up to time to tell whether or not the Arena has the cards to support it.

-Josh James, Somedude127@hotmail.com