I spent the last week or so wracking my brain about the Jund/Abzan conundrum. Reid played straight Green/Black with Lingering Souls at Pro Tour "Goyf Sucks" and Top 8'd. The deck looked phenomenal, and made me really rethink how I envision these decks.
At their core, these are Black/Green decks with a splash, and if you don't splash a certain color, it becomes necessary to make up for it with other cards within your colors. If you lack white for Lingering Souls, you might need to make up for it with Bitterblossom. If you lack Red for Bolt and Kolaghan's Command, you'll have to play Abrupt Decay and Maelstrom Pulse to help your removal suite. The on-color replacements aren't objectively worse, but they are lacking just enough and the splash of one color is usually so cheap that it's worth it. We've seen in the past where splashing both White and Red is perfectly fine. After watching this Pro Tour, I don't think I was about to start playing Abzan, but it was certainly on my radar, and I didn't consider it to be a worse choice overall anymore.
Some things have changed in the last couple of hours here on planet midrange.
Let's just talk about Bloodbraid and hash some stuff out.
- Bloodbraid loves catchall answers. Liliana, Maelstrom Pulse, Kolaghan's Command, Dreadbore all look great.
- Bloodbraid doesn't love conditional stuff, so Fatal Push gets a lot worse, since on lots of boards it doesn't hit anything. The same is sorta true with Abrupt Decay, but it's still a fine card. Lightning Bolt gets a little better because Errbody Got Faces.
- Bloodbraid hates X spells. Engineered Explosives, Profane Command, Bonfire of the Damned, all that stuff isn't going to be a thing anymore.
- In general, Bloodbraid likes lots of three drops in your deck. They are just more powerful to hit than twos and ones.
- Bloodbraid would rather have up front value than cascading into something that gives incremental value. Lingering Souls vs Bitterblossom, basically. We'll talk about this more later.
- Bloodbraid costs 4, and you're gonna want 4 in your deck, so watch out with those Bobbys.
- Bloodbraid loves to get cast early and often. You want to hit land drops, so you play at least 24.
- Bloodbraid does not love mana ramp. Noble Hierarch, Utopia Sprawl, Birds of Paradise, No thanks. We tried Nest Invader in Standard, it, uh, didn't work.
- Bloodbraid likes getting cast, not getting reanimated, kinda like Battlecry in Hearthstone. Eternal Witness, Kolaghan's Command, and Liliana the Last Hope are its friends, Unburial Rites is not.
- Bloodbraid likes being aggressive. A 3/2 with haste doesn't do a lot outside of a somewhat dedicated aggro strategy.
- Bloodbraid LOVES Blightning.
About Lingering Souls vs Bitterblossom: Bloodbraid likes Dark Confidant, even though the number of 4 drops goes way up in your deck. Bob is great if you can keep the board clear, which Bloodbraid is pretty good at doing, and Bloodbraid and Bob on the same board complement each other's weak but aggressive power and toughness. The aggro plan is a lot better when your utility creatures are more significant clocks. Because you want Bob, that makes Bitterblossom look a lot worse, since you can only tax your life total so much. One of the reasons I liked Bitterblossom was the mirror, and at this point, the mirror looks to be a lot less about getting incremental advantage and more about drawing and hitting of your Bloodbraids the most.
A while ago I said that I liked my current Jund build so much that if they actually did unban Bloodbraid, I might not even play it. I even told a friend that I thought that, in a vacuum, Huntmaster of the Fells is a better card. I spent a lot of hours testing and playing and rethinking and theorizing a gatherer-scouring to get the Jund deck where it was at until 10:59 am today. Bloodbraid has so many requirements to utilize it fully that you can't just jam 4 in the current list and call it a day. However, now that it's actually happened, I'm pretty sure I'll be cascading from now on. Mostly because of the second part of the unbanning this morning:
Haste and immediacy is going to be important, at least for the next few weeks. You're going to want your cards to match up well against Jace, but also against Supreme Verdict, which Bloodbraid into just creatures often does not. Kolaghan's Command is a must, Liliana the Last Hope looks great, Eternal Witness is an interesting one, Kitchen Finks looks great as well. Setting your deck up to beat the control decks, the big mana decks, Humans, Affinity, Burn, AND the mirror will be interesting. I'm interested to see if the white splash is what people will gravitate towards.
I can't say that I'm not going to miss my Huntmasters and Grim Flayers and Tireless Trackers. But I'm also really excited for the format. Mostly, I love playing against control decks, and finally we get to have the great Bloodbraid vs Jace battle that we've all been waiting for. It's gonna be fun. Good luck on your cascades!
