Core Set 2020 spoilers have been live all week, and we’ve had some surprisingly powerful cards. Today, we got to see a new Planeswalker card coming to MTG Arena: Vivien, Arkbow Ranger! She’s here to join Chandra in shaking up the MTG Arena meta.
Vivien, Arkbow Ranger
Vivien Reid is a newer Planeswalker character first introduced last year. While Nissa, our other main green Planeswalker, focuses on lands, Viven focuses on creatures. Her prior card let you put a creature into your hand, for example. This time, she buffs creatures with counters and uses creatures to fight! She also does something we’ve only seen a few times before: she Wishes for a creature from outside the game.
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What’s a Wish?
In Magic: The Gathering, there are some older cards like Living Wish and Burning Wish that let you grab a card you owned from outside the game and put it in your hand. In competitive settings, “outside the game” means your sideboard. We’ve seen this Wish effect before on the recently printed Karn, The Great Creator. Karn has proven to be quite powerful, so Vivien being similar is interesting.
While Vivien, Arkbow Ranger isn’t quite at Karn’s power level, she does allow for creature decks to run a Wish Board. A Wish Board is whenever a player dedicates part or all of their sideboard to cards that can be Wished for and that are good in specific situations. For example, a common line in Modern right now is using Karn, The Great creator to Wish for Mycosynth Lattice to lock up a game.
Similarly, we may see people on MTG Arena running a few Vivien, Arkbow Rangers in their deck with a single Carnage Tyrant in their sideboard so that she can grab it Game 1 against a control deck!
Stay Tuned!
MTG Arena is about to be completely shaken up by Core Set 2020, so be sure to keep an eye on our MTG news page for all the new spoilers! For our most recent full day rundown, check out our Day 4 recap.
