Every once in a while, Magic's pundits like to say things like "Tarmogoyf isn't good in the format right now," or "If you're registering Tarmogoyf in Modern, you're doing it wrong." I see it all the time on the big websites. What they mean by this is not that Tarmogoyf is a bad card. They mean that they dislike the metagame positioning of Black/Green/X midrange decks. This is a reasonable position, but don't be fooled. The Lhurgoyf is not the problem.
Tarmogoyf is an amazing card, and today I'm going to talk about why it's so good. I think it's a necessary lesson that we have to relearn once in a while.
As far as this blog is concerned, why is Tarmogoyf a good card for Jund specifically? Jund is a resource denial deck at its core. Why does Tarmogoyf fit? All it does is attack and block. Let's dig in.
I'm sure you've all heard of Tarmogoyf's beginning story. Set reviewers hated it and thought it might possibly be a consideration in a Golgari Grave Troll midrange deck in Standard. Its price after the prerelease was something like $3. Once people started to play with it and slot it into their green aggro decks, its value skyrocketed. Seemingly overnight, it became a $20 card, but it didn't stop there. No, it turns out that the best control deck in Extended was mono-blue splashing green for Tarmogoyf, the best midrange deck was Black/Green with Tarmogoyf, and the best aggro deck was Kird Apes, Isamaru, and Tarmogoyf. Even TRON had a sideboard plan of bringing in 4 Tarmogoyfs. Tarmogoyf became a $50 card while Standard legal, then later a $100 card, then $200 card.
Tarmogoyf's beginnings taught us a lot of lessons about card evalutation, but most importantly, it taught us that no card exists in a vacuum, and that not even your own deck exists in a vacuum. We also learned how important a cheap oversized creature is, and how attacking and blocking are both extremely useful abilities, something that almost any deck can utilize. Tarmogoyf's strength, as simple as it is, is that it plays and often wins at every stage of the game at every facet of the game.
Tempo
A two mana creature is almost as cheap as a creature can get. Depending on the format, this is either very cheap, very expensive, or somewhere in between. However, even in something like Vintage, two-mana creatures are playable, so there's lots of places to play Tarmogoyf and lots of time to cast it.
One of the things that makes Tarmogoyf such a potent tempo threat is that its power and toughness increases over time. I think this one thing that we forgot about during its evaluation process back in '07. While you are likely casting it as a 1/2, 2/3, or 3/4, it can get +3/+3 or more from the time it resolves to the time you are first attacking with it, pretty easily. On turn one you play a land and say go, on turn two you play a land and a Tarmogoyf, it resolves as a 0/1. Not exciting. On turn three, you play fetchland, Thoughtseize an opposing artifact, cast a creature that gets Mana Leaked, then you attack for 5. Your two mana investment turned into a four turn clock that starts ticking this turn. Not a lot of other cards have that kind of power simply by themselves. The more efficient the rest of your deck
and your opponents' decks, the better Tarmogoyf becomes.
This effect doesn't stop happening. Throughout the game, more and more cards will enter the graveyard, and your two mana investment will always be getting bigger and bigger. It's like another one of my favorite cards, and one that epitomizes value-plus-tempo, Bitterblossom. It seemed slow to begin with, but its advantage doesn't stop growing, and when you're being attacked by six 1/1 flyers, you try and piece together why this got so out of control. The reason is that your opponent deployed this threat on turn two, and then spent turns three through whatever dealing with your creatures, countering or making you discard your spells, and generally stopping you from gaining a foothold on the game. It creates a huge tempo advantage just by being a growing threat that you don't have to spend mana on to grow. It's hard to catch up against, because if you plan on drawing the game out longer, it will grow bigger and be even harder to catch up against. A catch-up 22. Sorry.
It's important to note, for Tarmogoyf, that not many spells can deal with a Tarmogoyf at a tempo advantage, which makes it an incredibly sound mana investment. Few one mana cards can kill a Goyf. In Modern, a lucky opponent can snag one with a Lightning Bolt or hit it with a Spell Snare. More realistically nowadays is Fatal Push, a card that to me is far too good for the little amount of play it sees. Path to Exile, importantly, gives
you a tempo advantage, at least when your deck is designed with utilization of extra mana in mind, so I wouldn't really count it as such.
This is one reason that Tarmogoyf is great in a midrange deck. Jund or Abzan can find itself as the beatdown or as the control deck depending on the matchup. If you are being attacked early, Tarmogoyf blocks incredibly well and lets you get to the next turn to start playing your more powerful stuff and eventually turn the corner. If the aggro player wants to deal with it, they have to spend an equal amount of mana on killing it when they would have rather spent that time and mana playing more threats. When you are beating down, your opponent needs to spend their mana killing your Tarmogoyf, which makes your more powerful and more expensive threats available to resolve and put on more pressure. They would have rather spent that time holding up counterspells, but instead the threat of a two mana 6/7 or whatever is too great lots of times.
Card Advantage
You have a 3/4 Tarmogoyf untapped. Your opponent has two Wild Nacatls. They don't attack. This is card advantage.
You have a 3/4 Tarmogoyf untapped. Your opponent has two Wild Nacatls. They attack. You cast Lightning Bolt on one of them and block the other. This is card advantage.
You attack an opponent with a 4/5 Tarmogoyf. They are at 4 life. They block with a Birds of Paradise. This is card advantage.
You attack an opponent with a 4/5 Tarmogoyf. They cast a Lightning Bolt on it, then another, killing it. This is card advantage.
Value is the name of the game in midrange, but I don't think we realize how important creature stats are. Yes, a Mana Leak counters a Squire just as easily as it counters an 8/9 Tarmogoyf, but lots of the best removal out there is based on the creature's size, and, importantly, most creatures are smaller than Tarmogoyf. You create value for yourself every single combat step when you have it in play.
Reach
I'll touch on this real quick, but Tarmogoyf can deal burst damage that your opponent didn't expect. Tick up a Liliana of the Veil to discard an enchantment or planeswalker, all of a sudden you're attacking for more damage than you had available on the board at the beginning of your turn. Same is true if you Abrupt Decay an artifact, or Dreadbore a planeswalker, or Thoughtseize an All is Dust (Tribal!!!!), it induces mistakes when an opponent can't plan on how much damage you are capable of dealing. The fact that there is a subtle hidden information element to Tarmogoyf gives it more play than most vanilla creatures have.
Resource Denial
Like I mentioned earlier, Tarmogoyf used to be the focal point of the best aggro, control, and midrange decks in Extended back in the day. Today, in Modern, Zoo is mostly out of the picture and control decks play garbage like Jace, the Mind Sculptor and Teferi, Hero of Dominaria as finishers. Tarmogoyf has been relegated to midrange almost exclusively, except for one interesting inclusion: Temur Delver in Legacy. What does Jund and Temur Delver have in common?
Jund and Temur Delver try and reduce opposing resources. They are resource denial decks at their core. Jund does it by card quality and quantity, Delver does it mostly by mana availability and life total pressure. Tarmogoyf slots in well here in both instances, because when the amount of resources you have available to both players is reduced, the most powerful things you can realistically do is also reduced. Given that each player starts with seven cards in hand, the most powerful cards you can cast differ from when each player starts the game with effectively four cards in hand, since you either Thoughtseized and Liliana'd your opponent's hand, or you Wastelanded and Stifled all their land.
Earlier I talked about how few cards can deal with Tarmogoyf at a tempo advantage for the opponent, but what is so interesting about that, in the right deck, it means that they can't deal with a Tarmogoyf
at all. If you land a Goyf and then Wasteland and Stifle your opponent down to one land, then they can't kill your Goyf and it rules the table. Similarly, if you tick up Liliana and make your opponent discard all their land, or Thoughtseize a Serum Vision they were depending on to hit land drops, then your opponent doesn't have the mana to deal with your Goyf, even if you only have the two mana to cast it. And Path? Sheesh, two or one yourself if you must, but you're making yourself look bad.
And that's just for answers to the Goyf. What if you are trying to be aggressive and play a threat that's bigger than it to go over the top? This is really what's great about Tarmogoyf - it's not only the most powerful threat for its mana cost, it's pretty much also the most powerful threat
for three mana as well. Knight of the Reliquary comes to mind as a creature who can block a Goyf the turn it comes down and then turn the corner against it, others are few and far between outside of specialized stuff like Mirran Crusader. You're not often going to be outmuscled by opposing creatures when resources are slim and Goyf is on your side.
It's also important to note that Temur Delver and Jund both have the ability to answer specific cards from its opponents, which make Tarmogoyf a more powerful threat. An opponent with a Mana Leak and a Lightning Bolt might see their Mana Leak Thoughtseized away to clear the way for the Goyf, leaving the Lightning Bolt helpless while the Goyf just simply kills them. Temur similarly can just Daze the Mana Leak or Force of Will it and let the Goyf kill them as well. You can neutralize opposing cards by snagging them with Thoughtseize or Counterspells, but you can also neutralize them by making them not doing anything, which Tarmogoyf does extremely well.
Here's one more thing Tarmogoyf does well in Jund to create advantage - Midrange decks try to play all the angles. Reducing an opponent's life total reduces their decision making power. When an opponent is facing down an imminent threat, they have less ability to spend their time and cards on creating an advantage for themselves. It forces them to play defense, which requires mana and cards. They might have to chump block, they might have to use a planeswalker's defensive ability instead of something that creates an advantage for themselves, they might spend their time casting a removal spell instead of a card drawing spell. These are all wins for us, because in general, we are always trying to force our opponent to not do the things they want to do.
Graveyard Synergy
Like just about everything in Magic, having synergy with the graveyard is a double edged sword. You can really go nuts and make some gigantic terrifying Tarmogoyfs by building with Tarmogoyf in mind, but you also risk being susceptible to graveyard hate when you go down that path.
Tarmogoyf's strength lies in its ability to be awesome while not doing a lot of work to make it so. While that's true, there is a lot of room for improvement and you can turn your Goyf into a 1G 8/9 relatively easily if you try. It's a little bit counter to what Jund usually wants to be doing, but in the right metagame, something like a Life from the Loam midrange deck can be good in the format and Tarmogoyf excels there for all the same reasons as it does in normal Jund decks.
However, Rest in Peace, Relic of Progenitus, Scavenging Ooze, Nihil Spellbomb, and countless other cards exist in the format. When you go down the graveyard-synergy path, you open yourself up to be vulnerable to those cards. Now, Jund in particular is set up well to play against those things, what with its discard spells to stop them, but an even better strategy against graveyard hate is to leave the card in their hand after you Thoughtseize them and neutralizing it by making it irrelevant. Jund is at its best when it has few holes to poke in it.
This, to me, is what makes Tarmogoyf a better threat than some of the other cards we can play that are more powerful and abuse the graveyard more. Specifically, I'm talking about Tasigur and Gurmag Angler, but to a lesser extent Bedlam Reveler and some others. Tarmogoyf puts the opponent in an awkward situation while sideboarding - is it worth it to board in Rest in Peace if Tarmogoyf is the only card it hits? Sometimes they will board it in and you won't draw the Tarmogoyf. Sometimes you will draw it, so you take it with discard spells and move on with your life.
Against graveyard hate, Tasigur, Gurmag Angler, and Bedlam Reveler all do at least something, while Goyf is a 0/1, and sometimes that can make a big difference. However, Goyf needs no Faithless Looting, no Street Wraiths, no Thought Scours to get going - those cards don't need to be present in order to run Tarmogoyf in your deck. That means that, while Tarmogoyf is hit hard by a Rest in Peace, the rest of your deck is usually just fine, which makes it less likely (or good) for your opponent to bring in their graveyard hate. Not only does Gurmag Angler suffer from a Rest in Peace, the
entire deck needed to maximize Gurmag Angler will suffer from that same Rest in Peace. And again, if it looks like it'll be good against you, you still have the safety valve of discard spells. This is in addition to the fact that it's easy to just be unable to cast a Gurmag Angler because you didn't draw its enablers or they were Thoughtseized or countered, which doesn't really happen with Tarmogoyf, since its enabler is Magic the Gathering.
Conclusion
You may be wondering, "why is this guy talking about the most ubiquitous card in Jund?" Well, there are two reasons. One is that, from its surface, Tarmogoyf actually looks a little out of place in Jund. It's a creature that just attacks and blocks. It's an automatic four-of, but there are no other cards like it in the deck. No Wild Nacatls, no Loxodon Smiters, no Watchwolf. Its inclusion isn't beyond question, because as deck tuners, no cards' inclusion should be without question, that's what leads to innovation. So, this is a rundown of the card for newer players who are maybe (rightfully) curious about its status in the deck and in the format. It's important to examine that.
Additionally, I plan on really covering everything Jund in this blog over time. Sometimes it's more relevant to the moment stuff, sometimes it's just my tournament results so that I (and maybe you) can hopefully learn from them, sometimes it's big theory stuff like this. My goal is to make us all better, you and me, and one of the ways to do that is really examine Jund and Magic as a whole from the ground up. Look for more of these in the future. If you like this, harass me on Twitter at
@griffinzoth and post idiotic comments on my videos at
here.
Thanks for reading! Wish me and my squad good luck this weekend in Worcester.
