So the curiosity for brawl has been satisfied. I thought I’d be writing this over the Easter hols. But I managed to get 3 games in yesterday. So here are my initial impressions of the new format.

I was going to build a dinosaur tribal deck over the weekend. But then I had the bright idea of using my dinosaur tribal commander deck as the basis for the brawl deck. As it turned out after I removed all the non-standard legal cards from the deck I was left with 59 cards, I added a single extra basic land, and that became my dinosaur tribal deck for brawl. My second deck was a mono green deck (deck list in another post) that was going to try and abuse etb effects and energy counters.

One of my students knocked together a menfolk deck from the cards he had with him. So lending my dino tribal deck to another student we played some games of brawl.

We played 3 games in about an hour forty. So brawl games are a little quicker then Commander games. Or can be. Playing it the games are basically commander. So if you like Commander then you will like playing brawl I think. The deck building side is challenging not having the Commander staples to call upon. But that’s an interesting twist and constraint to the deck building. Sometimes there isn’t an alternative and you have to work around it. For instance my mono green deck may have to evolve to a different commander so that I can splash in a second colour and get access to some board wipes of some description. I felt that was an element that the deck was missing when I played it.

The games were fun. The speed of the games did surprise me. The games we played I enjoyed, despite not winning. Although today as I write this I did get to play my dino tribal deck and stomped my way to glory. It’s not nice being on the other end of this dino deck. I can testify to that from yesterday. I’m almost coming to the conclusion that Zacama is too powerful. Once that hits the battlefield mid game, with lots of land to use to pay for it’s abilities, it’s almost game over. Well that’s how it appears in the local meta at the moment.

For me I think brawl will be for when I want that Commander experience but don’t have the time to play Commander, like during a lunch break for instance.