5 Reasons Why Arena Tutor is the Best MTG Arena Deck Builder

Last updated on July 12, 2024

The Deck of Many Things | Illustration by Volkan Baga

MTG Arena is my favorite way to play Magic, and it brought me back to the game in a big way. I’m a casual free-to-play player, so my card and deck-building options are limited. I always look online for new decks, and if there’s anything on the market that can help me build new and competitive Standard or Explorer decks or update my old decks that are not winning that much, it's Draftsim’s Arena Tutor.

Today I show you five reasons why you should use Arena Tutor’s deck builder to build decks on MTG Arena. Stay with me and we’ll go through a little tutorial together to make the most of this awesome resource!

Why Arena Tutor Is the Best Free MTGA Deck Builder

Reason #1: Gives You Hundreds of Ideas

You’ve just realized that you have 20 rare wildcards and 10 mythic rare wildcards, so it’s time to build a new deck. In the Arena Tutor Metagame section, you can see Arena's formats and top decks within them. Or, you can search by the least amount of wildcards you’ll need to spend. If you’re a mono-red player, you can see which mono-red builds are doing better just by looking for mono-red decks.

Reason #2: Metagame Is Updated Twice a Week

I’m a terrible deck builder, so I usually look on the web to see the new tech. Do control decks play new win conditions now? Is there a deck that’s the new hotness? If you don't want to join in, you can still see the key cards to disrupt. Arena Tutor updates the metagame automatically, so your main concern is to play MTG with a nice deck. Of course, you still need the cards on Arena to build them.

Reason #3: Free Win Percentage Data

Arena Tutor is just handing you the win percentage of decks on a plate natively on the platform. You can simply consult Arena Tutor to see what decks are performing better in which formats.

Reason #4: Easy to Use

How often have we gazed upon a nice and shiny new deck, only to discover that we can’t build it on Arena? Or that it sucks? Netdecking is so easy with Arena Tutor. You can look up decks by color, color pair, formats, and win percentage. It’s actually integrated into your MTG Arena account, so Arena Tutor already tells you what deck you could play based on your current collection.

Reason #5: It’s Free

Look, I know there’s a premium version of Arena Tutor and you should definitely try it because it adds a bunch of nice features, but not in the deck builder. All the resources I show you in the deck builder feature are 100% free.

Building Decks Using Arena Tutor

Enough talk! I’ll show you Arena Tutor for real running on my PC using data from my MTG Arena collection. First, let’s open Arena Tutor. Here’s the initial screen, and today I’ll show you how to use the Metagame tab, which allow you to see the top decks you’ll want to build. So, let’s click on it.

Let’s say I’m hooked to the Explorer format, and I want to build new Explorer decks. In the right-most part of the screen, you can see the top Explorer decks by win rate in Arena. The Mono Blue Spirits deck looks pretty good.

When I click on the menu, I can search the Explorer metagame by Win Rate, Popularity, Completion, and Name.

• Win Rate shows you the decks with a bigger win percentage.
• Popularity shows you decks that are a bigger part of meta.
• Completion shows you the decks that you’ll need the least wildcards to build on MTG Arena based on your collection.
• Name gives you decks in alphabetical order.

Since I’m a Free to Play MTG Arena player and I don’t have that big of a collection, I’ll search by completion because I want to find a deck I can build. Let’s select completion. Since Arena Tutor also tracks my collection, I can see exactly how many and which wildcards I need to complete a given deck.

As you can see, there are a couple of decks I could build by spending precious few wildcards. Grixis Karn has a win rate of 50.9% at the moment and requires four wildcards, while Mono Black Devotion has a win rate of 49.1% and requires three rare wildcards and an uncommon wildcard. Finally, there’s Phoenix which requires only one rare, and a few uncommons and commons that I have. Let’s start with Phoenix.

Izzet Phoenix Explorer Deck

Arena Tutor just told me that I need Den of the Bugbear as my rare, plus 4 copies of Fiery Impulse and 4 copies of Lightning Axe. I’ll take this deck to my Arena account, but I’ll replace that rare land for a Fiery Impulse to be able to play it. For that, I click on the Export Deck and import it on Arena.

Now I open my MTG Arena account, and I import the deck. Note how effortless this is: Arena Tutor told me what deck I’d spend the least wildcards on and still get a good fighting chance in Explorer and allowed me to export the deck. The only thing I need to do on MTG Arena is to build and save the deck.

And voilà, there’s the deck. I’ll craft the cards I need and I’m ready to battle.

As easy as that, I’ve got a new Explorer deck.

Grixis Karn Explorer Deck

Let's follow the same procedure, I open the Grixis Karn deck on Arena Tutor. I can see what I lack to build it on Arena.

I just realized that the 4 rare wildcards I need to build this deck are rare dual lands, so if I really want to play the deck, I’ll replace the lands with dual lands that I already have in my collection and play it.

Another deck is ready to rumble.

Mono-Blue Spirits Explorer Deck

I returned to the metagame section of Arena Tutor and sorted it to show the decks by win rate. The best deck is Mono Blue Spirits, and it shows that I need 14 rare wildcards to build it on Arena. That’s a lot. It would be a lot easier to build Abzan Greasefang or Burn, and there’s no way I’m playing humans anytime soon.

As you can see, Arena Tutor shows that I lack 14 rare creatures, and those are hard to replace with cards that are already in my collection. I’ll import it to MTG Arena to show you.

On MTG Arena, I uploaded the deck, and I do not have the missing the 14 creatures. I’ll scrap this one and move on.

Does MTG Arena Have an Auto Deck Builder?

There's no automatic deck builder on MTG Arena. MTG Arena does have a deck builder and a feature to import the decklists you see online (netdecking), provided that the websites have the “Import deck to MTG Arena” feature, but that’s it. When you add Arena Tutor, you’re playing with power. You’ll get the updated metagame for the format you want to play (be it Standard, Explorer, Historic or Timeless). You’ll be able to see how many wildcards you need to build the deck, and make sure you never see Arena's “Invalid Deck” error!

Wrap Up

Wizard Mentor (Jumpstart 2022)| Illustration by Ernanda Souza

That’s all from me on Arena Tutor and how effortless it is to use it to “netdeck” competitive Constructed decks.

I'm mainly an MTG Arena player, and I can’t recommend Arena Tutor enough. The deck builder is awesome, and the other features are also a must. I can track my collection to see the sets I have the most and the least cards, Arena Tutor helps me draft better and build better decks, and it tells me which of my decks have the best win rate. It’s free and very easy to use, so be sure to give it a spin!

Do you already use Arena Tutor? Please tell me your favorite features in the comments below, or in the official Draftsim Discord.

Thanks for reading, and stay safe!