Regardless of what game we're talking about, if there is anything on the line, sooner or later a meta will form. People will figure out what the best strategies are, how best to counter what the opponents are trying to accomplish, as well as how to do all of that in the shortest time possible. MTG Arena is no different in this regard.

However, fighting against the same decks over and over again does tend to get tedious after a while. As such, you might be interested to hear that the newly launched Historic Shakeup event has banned many of the popular cards, thus creating an entirely new and unexplored meta to mess around with!

The list of banned cards includes staples like Collected Company, Embercleave, Cauldron Familiar, and even the dreaded Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath. You can find the full list over at the official website, but long story short, most of the powerful decks have lost at least one or two key pieces.

As a consequence of this, the Historic Shakeup event is a remarkably good time... as long as you can find opponents that are willing to experiment. The reason I say this is because the bans have unfortunately not hit all of the popular decks, so you still have things like the Seagate Stormcaller + Neoform combo running around without a care in the world. So as long as you don't get too many of those, the Historic Shakeup should be a pretty fun environment to mess around in.

When it comes to the rewards, there is only one - a single, random cosmetic that can be anything from a card sleeve to a pet. While getting more stuff would certainly be welcome, in a way the small reward is actually to the event's benefit. Instead of people farming it 24/7 with the best decks in order to get the rewards as quickly as possible, Historic Shakeup is likely to end up a more pleasant place within a day or two once everyone that doesn't care has received their free cosmetics and gone elsewhere.

Have fun, and if you're looking for cool ideas, I'd give the oldschool Blue/Red Arclight Phoenix deck a try. It might not be all that powerful these days, but reanimating an endless army of phoenixes is always a good time!