This mockup comes from the good folks at MythicSpoiler. Pretty obvious card, but kinda a lot to unpack here.
First: Hoses Tron. Better than Blood Moon against Tron because it comes down a turn earlier and doesn't screw up your own lands. Better than Fulminator because it can come down a turn earlier, beating them on the draw, and they can't just beat it with redundant Tron pieces. It's not strictly better, since it is vulnerable to artifact hate, but Jund runs discard spells so we're at least a little protected there.
I like the design of this card a lot for how it attacks Tron. Similarly to Blood Sun, it beats half of the big mana deck problems, but doesn't do anything to the other half, since Valakut is fine under this. It also hoses Amulet, which is nice.
Second: Hoses Storm. I don't think it's worth bringing this in for anything other than Storm just for the second half of the text box. However, Storm really takes a hit from this, since not only do they kinda sorta have to respect your fair game of creature removal, discard, and good threats, but now there is a lock piece they have to worry about that they just cannot win through. It adds another element to what they have to do to win, find a Wipe Away or Echoing Truth, then bounce this thing and have enough gas to go off the next turn before dying to your Goyfs.
Damping Sphere is pretty surgical in its design to hit just those two decks. I can't imagine that bringing this in to fight Snapcaster Mage or something is worthwhile, similarly to Grafdigger's Cage just to Ambush Viperize their Thiagos. And it's cool that it's just an artifact, which pretty much any deck can deal with if they're ready.
What this does, though, is completely redesign how we are going to build our sideboards. For instance, here's the sideboard of my current Jund deck:
2 Crumble to Dust
2 Ancient Grudge
2 Blightning
2 Shadow Guildmage
1 Anger of the Gods
1 Duress
1 Jund Charm
1 Kitchen Finks
1 Huntmaster of the Fells
1 Thragtusk
1 Obstinate Baloth
So a little off the beaten path, sure, but it covers a whole swath of Modern decks pretty well. Now, since we have Damping Sphere, we not only get to upgrade Crumble to Dust, we get to use it against Storm, and maybe the Storm cards get reallocated elsewhere, and of course when we do that, we can shake up some more things to improve more matchups overall.
Start by taking out 1 Duress and 2 Crumble to Dust for 3 Damping Sphere. Storm and Tron matchups are starting to look real good, maybe we don't need this Jund Charm or one of these Ancient Grudges anymore, let's cut those and add 2 Back to Nature because Bogles pisses me off. Now all of a sudden, not only did our Tron and Storm matchups get an upgrade, but so did our Bogles matchups.
This is the power of overlapping sideboard cards. If Grafdigger's Cage beats Dredge 80% of the time and Collected Company 60% of the time, it's probably better to play 2 Grafdigger's cage than 1 Leyline of the Void and one, uh, I dunno, Perish or something. You increase the odds of drawing your bomb sideboard cards, and you also increase the number of decks you are packing heat for.
Of course, you also have to worry about what cards are in your maindeck that you want to take out. You might need to board out a lot of cards in matchups that make your removal dead, like Control decks, Bogles, or Tron. These broad range cards help make up for that, too, which is why I like something like Blightning. It looks pretty out of place, but its versatility lends itself to a lot of matchups, even if it isn't a knockout blow like some of the other cards here. But, I bet if I really take a hard look at my 60 and the format as a whole, I can come up with something even better.
Anyways, thanks for reading, just wanted to get the ol' Damping Sphere on everyone's radar. I might write a whole post at some point explaining my Jund sideboard theories. Keep an eye out for that, in the meantime, here's what I would have for a sideboard starting as soon as Dominaria is released:
3 Damping Sphere
2 Fracturing Gust
1 Shadow Guildmage
1 Grim Lavamancer
2 Obstinate Baloth
1 Huntmaster of the Fells
2 Blightning
1 Thoughtseize
1 Ancient Grudge
1 Bontu's Last Reckoning
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