Rainbow Spirals Round and Round

 Kaladesh Remastered

There are two things to discuss when planning out the near future for the Historic Jund deck. Well, I guess three, one of them being "Is the deck where we like it right now?" I think for that, the answer is yes, but there are plenty of little changes you could make to ratchet up your ability to win certain matchups. Right now, it seems to work really well against aggro decks but is lacking against control decks. That's fixable, but tough to accomplish without teetering the seesaw and then you'll lose to Gruul and Red and whatnot. Anyways, what we want to figure out today is 1. What will the format look like going forward, and 2. What do we want to add to the deck?

If you remember from when Kaladesh was in Standard, it was a very powerful couple of sets. There was a definite aggressive slant with cheap creatures like Bomat Courier, Toolcraft Exemplar, and Scrapheap Scrounger. These aggro strategies kept in check the Energy decks, one of the main mechanics of the set, and there were a few ways to build Energy, either aggro, midrange, or combo.

I think that all of these things are good enough to see play in Historic. Toolcraft Exemplar enters the format as the closest thing to Wild Nacatl we've got, so if that deck becomes popular, our low-to-the-ground Chevill plus removal plan will continue to be good. Rogue Refiner and Longtusk Cub and Harnessed Lightning are good synergy cards that also have high ceilings and are looking to grind. The cards are consistent and powerful, they work great together, and you can imagine that Uro might find its way into a Blue and Green midrange deck as well. Fighting these decks will look a lot like the way we fight today's Sultai midrange decks, with discard, value plays, and trying to keep Uro off the table.

Some unknowns from Kaladesh Remastered are whether or not WotC wants to put cards that were formerly banned in Standard into Historic. Smuggler's Copter ate a ban early on in its Standard tenure, Aetherworks Marvel was banned shortly after, Felidar Guardian was banned and deemed to be a mistake, and eventually Attune with Aether and Rogue Refiner met similar fates. Copter and Walking Ballista are also banned in Pioneer, for what it's worth. It's unclear if these banned cards will be put into Kaladesh Remastered, and also whether some new goodies will be put in, like Thoughtseize and Collected Company et al were thrown into Amonkhet.

I'm most interested in finding out about Felidar Guardian. For a hot second, Felidar Guardian and Saheeli Rai in Jeskai control decks looked a lot like Splinter Twin. Outside of that, Kaladesh's best stuff was not necessarily pure control cards, but the Felidar Guardian package added a lot to existing control strategies. If Felidar Guardian is legal, I'm interested in trying to give ourselves more instant speed interaction. This could mean Bedevil to deal with Saheeli Rai, Heartless Act or Cast Down to hit Felidar Guardian, or whatever works. The idea previously was to make sure your anti-creature spells could hit your opponent's planeswalkers, now we want to bust up their combo as well.

So what does that mean we're playing, moving forward?

Blooming Marsh is an upgrade to our mana base for sure, but we run into the same problem we ran into when Cragcrown Pathway was spoiled. Can we afford to bust up our Shockland/Checkland combo? I think the answer is yes, since Blooming Marsh is so good, and if every once in a while our Castle Locthwain comes into play tapped, then that's okay.

How about Fatal Push? Well, this card gets much, much worse when you don't play fetchlands, and I don't think we want Fabled Passage. It also runs into the problem of being a dead card against a lot of decks, which Bloodchief's Thirst does not. For now I think that Bloodchief's Thirst is just a little bit safer.

I've been really into Chandra Pyromaster out of the sideboard lately, but Torch of Defiance does all of that and more. She's perfectly maindeckable, since she's a removal spell and a value engine in one. She's flexible, has a big effect right out of the gates, and threatens to run away with the game, even ultimating and winning the game by herself. What's nice is that we're aggressive enough to take advantage of the +1 ability dealing 2 damage when we don't want the card. To really maximize Chandra, ideally we have a way to utilize the two red mana on turn 4 and turn her into a 2 mana planeswalker. Magmatic Channeler is perfect for this, but red removal spells also get a little bit better when Chandra is in your deck as well. Bonecrusher Giant and Cut/Ribbons start to look a little better when they cost 0 mana. Extra mana on turns you untap with her make Shatterskull Smashing look much better as well.

Do we want to move towards the Winding Constrictor Golgari Energy package? My gut feeling is that Constrictor itself is too bad of a card when not working in synergy with your other stuff to be exactly my personal style of deck, and that Glint-Sleeve Siphoner's stats are a little too low impact for the format. Constrictor works really well with Scavenging Ooze, however, so maybe there's something there. If you decide to go this route, I can't imagine that you'd want to run a midrange Energy deck without Rogue Refiner. Maybe 4 color Energy is viable? It's worth a look. Aether Hub and Attune with Aether make lots of crazy things possible.

Here's a way too early look at Jund:

I like this MTG Goldfish Visual View thing. We've got some cool stuff to do with RR added to our pool, including Cut/Ribbons. The mana is going to be a work in progress for sure, but I like the ratios as they are now. All of this is up in the air, of course, since we don't know what will and won't be exactly in the Kaladesh Remastered set list, but I'm happy and excited with this list. Thanks for reading, and check out the twitch stream if you're interested. See ya!