Every Damn Thing But The Jailhouse Keys - Two Drop Creatures

 Let's dive in.

Chevill is beyond bonkers. I think it's a testament to how absurd the power level of printings have been in the last two years that Chevill isn't a staple of at least Pioneer, nevermind Historic and Standard. A card like this in the past that was a card advantage engine stapled onto a mana-cost worthy body would normally lose you life. Think Dark Confidant, Glint-Sleeve Siphoner, or Midnight Reaper. Instead, Chevill draws you cards and plays defense. That is the recipe that we want in our best cards, the ability to be proactive and protect you at the same time. Some of the best creatures in Magic's history fit this description: Tarmogoyf, Stoneforge Mystic, Scavenging Ooze, Thing in the Ice, Kitchen Finks, Courser of Kruphix.

Chevill doesn't really force you to to do anything special to accomodate him, but he certainly makes your removal spells better. We aren't playing Bloodchief's Thirst and Maelstrom Pulse and Chandra because of Chevill, we play them to kill our opponent's stuff, but Chevill turns your necessities into an advantage. He's perfect for this kind of deck.

Chevill also neatly dodges the legend rule. Opponents are often willing to trade a creature in combat just to get him off the table, which frees up the second copy in your hand. If your worst case scenario is just Doom Blade, then I like where we're at. Also, at first glance, Chevill looks like a liability against control decks, but in practice it's a huge plus to be able to recoup some of the inherent card disadvantage that comes with casting removal spells on planeswalkers. I play three Chevill normally, but in aggro-heavy metagames, don't be afraid to go to four if you anticipate needing to trade him off early.

Ooze is quite a bit different than Chevill, but accomplishes a lot of the same thing. It adds value to your removal spells, since you can eat their creatures for life and counters. Ooze also can act as your late game nail in the coffin card against aggro strategies, since with more mana at your disposal it turns into Pelakka Wurm pretty quickly.

Ooze also does this thing that's really special in Magic: it's a main-deckable hate card. Lots of decks have Uro or Cauldron Familiar, sure, and Ooze has some incidental value there, but Ooze makes your deck better by being a pretty dedicated hate card against graveyard decks while being in your starting 60. It's probably not as good as Leyline of the Void (although even that's up for debate, I've never attacked for nine with a Leyline of the Void), but it also doesn't take up space in your sideboard. It's also there for game one, so you have more chances to steal games by drawing your hate cards.

Ooze's only drawback in my mind is that I find myself boarding it out against decks without creatures. But again, Ooze's floor is really high, a grizzly bear that can pump itself every once in a while off your own dead creatures or can help keep Search for Azcanta or Torrential Gearhulk in check. I like playing four, and would not go below four as long as Uro is in the format.

Channeler is first up in a pretty long list of cheap creatures that I've been trying out (well, Knight of the Ebon Legion is kind of in this category, too). It has a lot of the things we look for in a threat for this deck: it's good early, it's good late, and it can help stop your opponent's game plan. It even has the ability to smooth out your draws if you're mana screwed or get rid of excess lands to find removal.

Channeler lives in this weird space where it's kind of a build-around card, but also the payoff is that you just get a 4/4 creature when you finally get there. Increasing your instant and sorcery count helps, but isn't super necessary, this deck doesn't care that much about getting the 4/4 turned on quickly, so long as it happens. But, Channeler does necessitate that we play more cards that are versatile and going to be useful as one of the two cards we hit off its ability. Kazandu Mammoth comes to mind as a card that's great here, but so is Maelstrom Pulse. The problem with this, though, is that if we're playing a bunch of versatile, slower cards to facilitate Channeler, then we have less desire to dig through our deck because the cards in our hand get the job done fine.

However, you can't say that Channeler is not good. I have had a lot of games where a Channeler came down early, perhaps did some blocking or chip damage, helped hit a critical removal spell or land drop, then turned the corner and hit for four a turn until they were dead. Not a lot of cards can compete with the likes of Chevill and Scavenging Ooze at checking all the boxes of proactive, defensive, and cheap, but Channeler does a great job.

To put this into perspective, I want this deck to have 10 to 13 cheap creatures, cheap being one or two mana. Channeler, in my mind, is at the top of the list behind Scavenging Ooze and Chevill. That said, if you're planning on playing this deck or a similar list, test for yourself and see what you like. I'll run through the rest of the contenders here and talk about their pros and cons, but really it might all come down to the metagame you predict and the way you like to play the deck.

Gifted Aetherborn is definitely a what-you-see-is-what-you-get kind of card. That said, whether it belongs in the deck is longer discussion. A few months ago, Historic was a much more aggressive format, with Gruul being the de facto top deck in the format and things like mono-red and others not far behind. In that moment, Aetherborn was excellent. The ability to gain a few incidental life points, trade with big creatures, and be a cheap and somewhat resilient threat goes a long way against the blunt-object decks of the format.

The format has shifted, however, and that's a big part of why Aetherborn isn't in the deck anymore. Even the current most popular aggro deck, Goblins, has a much easier time dealing with Aetherborn than Gruul, since it can just cast Muxus and attack for 40 or whatever. But the other part of the equation is that Aetherborn's mana cost is more prohibitive if we want to include things like Shatterskull Smashing and Kazandu Mammoth.

Merfolk Branchwalker was a mainstay of the deck for a long time, but some stronger stuff got printed and I haven't been back for a while. Still, this card does a lot of the things we want, and isn't as bad a late game card as you might expect, since there's a good enough chance that it draws you a free card. Nowadays, there's a good chance that free card will actually be a spell, like Kazandu Mammoth or Shatterskull Smashing. (Edit: This is wrong. Kazandu Mammoth et al don't count as lands for the Explore trigger.)

One thing that Merfolk Branchwalker does well is that it can often have good stats right out of the gate. It's not our plan, per se, to cast two mana 3/2s on turn two. If it was, I'd play Voltaic Brawler. However, a Branchwalker that doesn't flip over a land can put a lot more pressure on a control opponent than most other two drops, and that's the card at its worst. In order to get the most out of Branchwalker, you need any option that it gives you to be good, and I think our deck does that well. We're into drawing an extra card, and we're into attacking. We are into trading with a big creature and we're into drawing an extra card and trading with a small creature. All good stuff, but less raw power than most of the other two drops available.

Siphoner might be the best proactive card available for us, but it's also the worst defensive card. Not only do you lose life when you draw the card, but you have to attack in order to get it, and Siphoner doesn't block especially well.

You could say that the way to maximize Siphoner is to play with energy producers, which is true, but the other way to maximize Siphoner is to play with lots of cheap removal. I think the best shell of Siphoner adds in extra Fatal Push and possibly Harnessed Lightning, not only for its energy production but for being a good, cheap removal spell. That's because Siphoner is going to give you a raw volume of cards, so you can afford to have one of them be a dud in a matchup where removal isn't at a premium. Additionally, in order to have Siphoner work against creature decks, you need those creatures to be off the battlefield.

Siphoner runs into the same problem that Thoughtseize has, which is that while it's strong most of the time, there will be matchups where it's extremely bad and needs to be boarded out. With Thoughtseize in the deck, this means you're going to want to have eight cards to bring in against a dedicated burn deck, if you're playing four Siphoners.

To sum up this section, my rankings for best cheap threats are:

1. Scavenging Ooze

Also number 1. Chevill

3. Magmatic Channeler

4. Knight of the Ebon Legion

5. Glint-Sleeve Siphoner

6. Merfolk Branchwalker

7. Gifted Aetherborn

Take rankings like these with a grain of salt. Each of these cards is going to be better based on the build of your deck, the way that you play the deck, and the opponents you expect to face. I think they all have their merits and I wouldn't consider you wrong for playing any of them.

Kroxa, however, is a card that I don't like very much in this deck. I've touched on this before, but in order to maximize Kroxa, we need to really re-work a lot about the strategy of the deck, or have a very specific metagame that we expect to face.

Kroxa opens us up to graveyard hate that I don't want to get involved with. Uro is the number one card in the format right now, so people are prepared for this effect. If we're going to run the risk of being nailed by opposing Scavenging Oozes and Klothys, then we should make sure that we're getting the most out of Kroxa as we can. Run down this logic line long enough and you end up just building Rakdos Arcanist.

Additionally, Kroxa is slow. It doesn't effect the board at all, it gets rid of your opponent's worst card, if they even have any, and it's honestly kind of hard to cast from your hand, let alone when you escape it. Add to that how bad it is with Kazandu Mammoth in the deck, and I'm just kind of over it. It's splashy and wins big when it wins you the game, but I haven't missed it since I stopped playing it.

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That's it for two-drop creatures for Jund Midrange in Historic. There are plenty more that I think are pretty good cards, but don't quite cut the mustard for slots in this deck. Let me know in the comments if there's any that you think I may have missed or to voice your opinion. Thanks for reading!

Every Damn Thing But the Jailhouse Keys

When I was a kid I read the article My Fires by Zvi Mowshowitz. Actually it wasn't an article, it was an article series, all about one deck. What made it special was how in-depth Zvi went on every single card in his Fires deck, and also on cards that he didn't end up playing as well. Fires, like all Standard decks (or Type II as it was called back then), is a snapshot in time. Metagames ebb and flow, cards are printed and rotate out, but themes and strategies stay the same.

It's been just about a year since I really dug into playing Historic Jund. It's been a lot of grinding, bashing my head against the wall, but also analysis of cards and decks and trying to think deep about what I want to be doing and what space I want to be occupying. To wrap up 2020, I want to run through just about every card that's been in or out of the deck. I'll start with the one drops.

We got quite a gift with the Amonkhet Remastered set. Thoughtseize wasn't in either Amonkhet or Hour of Devastation, but it somehow got injected into Historic. Just wish we got the original art for it.

Anyways, Thoughtseize is so good that sometimes I think about the time before it became legal and have a hard time understanding how it all even worked. Thoughtseize is definitely a 4 of in any deck like this if they let you play it. That being said, in Modern we usually play 4 Inquisition of Kozilek and then some number between 1 and 4 of Thoughtseize. So if we ever get gifted Inquisition, we'll have to revisit.

Thoughtseize also makes our sideboard construction a little different. There are going to be decks we run into where it's important that we board out Thoughtseize, and so you need to have at least four cards in your board ready to go for that situation, and on top of that some more stuff for your maindeck cards that aren't optimal. Not a problem, just a something to think about. Anyways, yeah. Thoughtseize is great.

Also, if you only ever read one article about Magic in your life, it should be this one.

Sure, this is the quintessential sideboard card, but there honestly are some metagames where maindeck Duress can be good. When the second most popular deck in the format is 36 Goblins and 24 lands, then no, Duress isn't really maindeckable. But in metagames of the past I've had Duress in the main and didn't hate it.

As far as its sideboard utility, before Thoughtseize was legal I just liked jamming four copies in the board, but usually I've been down to just two. You can definitely draw too many copies of Duress effects, plus it's only as good as the threats that you're able get to stick with it. Lately I've been on two copies of Duress and three copies of good Planeswalker-ish threats to sneak in, like Phyrexian Arena and Angrath.

I'm currently not playing Fatal Push, but that has more to do with the power of Uro than it does the weakness of Fatal Push. We don't have a lot of ways to turn on Revolt in the Historic format at the moment, and surprisingly we have a newly printed card that does a really good Fatal Push impression while being more versatile in the late game. That said, it's Fatal Push, it's an exceptionally efficient removal spell and I think we can expect some future where Fatal Push becomes a mainstay in this deck.

One thing that would make Push much better is more ways to turn on revolt. In Modern and Legacy that means fetchlands, but in Pioneer people get by with Fabled Passage. I'm not huge on Fabled Passage, however, as we'll get to later. Historic is a wacky format though, and we never really know what might get put in. Prismatic Vista comes to mind as a card that would make Fatal Push look a lot better that could get injected into Historic via some Anthology or Remaster set.

I've had Fatal Push in the sideboard as well, and I have to say, I think something a little more focused like Shivan Fire or Disfigure might be a bit better there. It's hard to be too wrong by playing a card this good, though.

The other reason that I'm off of Fatal Push for the time being is that we have a second divinely-efficient removal spell that's just a little more versatile. Bloodchief's Thirst certainly comes with some drawbacks that Fatal Push doesn't have, but it's almost tailor-made for this deck and format. We don't have to warp our deck at all to accommodate it, and it's almost never going to be a dead card.

I've been on four Bloodchief's Thirst since almost day one. Fatal Push was a game-changer in Modern, and Bloodchief's Thirst comes with none of the downside and almost all of the efficiency. It's kind of amazing.

Knight's good. For a card with this much versatility it's kind of strangely variable in how good it is. Sometimes it's Norwood Ranger, and other times it can win the game by itself. It's also strangely bad in this deck because it's often the only pressure you have, despite that kind of being what it's good at. It's hard to maximize its +1/+1 counter ability, but it's also hard to maximize its pump ability with certain draws. You often have to choose between pumping Knight and casting spells, or between pumping Knight and activating Castle Locthwain, or you might not have enough mana to pump it anyways.

I don't really have a final verdict on whether this card should be in the deck or not. I've had it be amazing and I've had it be abysmal, but what makes it interesting is that it doesn't synergize with the rest of our deck at all. It doesn't trigger Chevill, it doesn't disrupt the opponent, it doesn't generate card advantage. It just kind of does its thing, which is okay if it's working. Currently I'm playing zero, which is definitely subject to change, but any number 0-4 works if you like it. 

I think that there are also builds of this deck in which Knight is excellent. Maybe you run more shocklands, maybe you run a more aggressive angle. It's certainly powerful and it's probably the most powerful creature that's just there to attack and block that we can play, and if attacking is something you're very interested in, then go nuts.

I actually love this card. It does a lot of things that this deck wants, which is killing creatures very cheaply and killing creatures that are big. If you can save yourself from your opponent's fastest draws with the same card you're using to kill their biggest threats, then it's a great deal. It's basically an instant-speed, creature only version of Bloodchief's Thirst, which is great. Few of the aggressive decks in Historic are 100% small creatures, so the ability to knock out their bigger creatures in the late game is phenomenal.

Since the printing of Bloodchief's Thirst, I've been more interested in Abrade as a sideboard card. It kills stuff like Mayhem Devil for cheaper, and hits Witch's Oven and some other stuff when necessary. That said, I really do love Shivan Fire and if the format starts to shift towards small creatures again, it's fantastic. If they ever give us Burst Lightning, it's game time.

Attune with Aether is probably the best card in Historic that sees almost zero play. I keep thinking that Temur Energy is going to start taking over the format, but it's yet to happen. As for Jund, the problem with the Energy package is that most of the payoffs are blue, be it Rogue Refiner, Whirler Virtuoso, or Confiscation Coup. As for us, the only card that is good enough to play without a ton of energy support is Glint-Sleeve Siphoner. Siphoner is great, but really what makes it great is how little extra support it needs. It's great after a turn one Attune, sure, but isn't it just better after a turn one Thoughtseize?

The other problem with Attune is what it does to your mana base. Not only do you have to add in a lot of basic lands, but you have to reduce your total land count of your deck. You also need to skew your deck towards having lots of green sources to make it work. Plus Aether Hub is kinda lame too. Add to this it's making our Rootbound Crags and Castle Locthwains worse and we're into a situation where the enablers are hampering us more than they are pushing the cards they are enabling, since we would have to make cuts to some really good cards we're currently playing.

Llanowar Elves is extremely powerful, but like Attune, it needs a lot of things in order to be at its best. One is for extra green mana to be useful, and it's just not in this deck, so Llanowar's kind of a non-starter. But for a thought experiment, how good would a one mana green mana dork have to be to have a spot in this deck?

For what it's worth, I don't think I would play Birds of Paradise if it were legal. I could definitely be wrong about that one, though. However, Llanowar Elves is nice in that it has a point of power, which means it can pressure planeswalkers and can do something sort of useful when you aren't using it for mana. If you gave me a Llanowar Elves that was just a one mana 1/1 that could tap for Red or Black, I'd take it. That sounds like a crazy card, but it's almost certainly worse than Noble Hierarch.

The problem with a card like this is that while you want to set your deck up to utilize the extra mana, you also need to be able to function without it, either because you didn't draw it or because the opponent killed it. You also have to be able to function with drawing two of them, since they are pretty weak cards on their own, which is hard. I think that I would want to play a Planeswalker-heavy build, possibly with Vraska Golgari Queen, Liliana to ditch excess Elves, and Chandra. Glorybringer might be good in this deck, too, since it's aggressive. C'mon WotC, give me my Jund Noble Hierarch.

Here's another card that has overperformed for me. The thing about this deck is that we're looking for all of these effects. I think that Inscription of Ruin has pretty much replaced this kind of effect, but when the format was more Llanowar Elves centric, I enjoyed having a two-for-one card that pressured the opponent's life total and could be used to keep pace with early creatures if that's what the game was about.

Cling to Dust is strong, but it's in a weird spot of being a little too narrow to be a main deck card and also not quite strong enough at what it does to be a sideboard slot. I have played Cling in the past and it's been okay, and I really do enjoy having some incidental graveyard hate in the main deck.

Cling really exemplifies the difference between a card that draws you a card and a card that gives you some selection. I would play the crap out of Opt if it were in Jund colors. Instead, Cling to Dust gives you whatever is on top of your library, so when it's in your opener you can't really assume it will offer much help. The other problem is that, even though it costs one mana, you can't just cast it on turn one, unlike Opt.

The thing about Cling, though, is that having outs to Uro is so critical in this format, that it might be worth playing anyways. And it's got some late game power built into it, but its Escape ability isn't really better than Castle Locthwain anyways. If it wasn't for Locthwain, I might be more bullish on this card, but as is I'm not the hugest fan.

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I'll keep this series going in the near future, which will give us something to think about going into Kaldheim spoilers. Thanks for reading.

All I Said Was Come On In

It's early for Kaldheim spoilers but they've shown us a few cards to get spoiler season kicked off. One of them is this thing:

It's a long read, but the gist is that it grows when something your opponents control dies, and then later can be used to do a mini Planar Cleansing.

It's good. I wonder if it's fast enough for this format. I think it's going to be a doozy against things like Goblins, Sacrifice, and Auras. Note that it hits nonland permanents, so things like Witch's Oven get eaten, as do creature enchantments. It gets triggered by anything Jund Sacrifice does at all. 

Sarulf's problem, of course, is that it dies to Doom Blade (well not actually Doom Blade but you know). Can we afford to play a three mana creature that kinda just sits there for a turn before it's turned on? This is going to be an ongoing question we have to ask ourselves, because the answer might fluctuate from time to time based on both the metagame and the payoff of the card itself. If we can expect Sarulf to live until our turn against a large portion of decks, and that doing so is going to lead to wins, then it looks really good. But if it's getting hit by removal spells that cost less than it does, or if it's just not as good on the battlefield as we thought, then it's bad.

I'm bullish on Sarulf for a few reasons. One is that it slots well into our deck. We already have the Chevill plus removal engine, we already have the Scavenging Ooze plus removal engine, whatever other cards we have all either draw us into removal or are removal. I'm currently on Magmatic Channeler again at the moment, which is good when you are casting removal spells on your opponents' creatures. So if there is a theme to the current Jund Midrange deck, then it's that we like killing their stuff, and Sarulf likes that too.

Two, Sarulf is just one of a pretty good amount of creatures that our opponents really don't want us to have. It's hard to beat a Chevill that stays on the table, the same is true with Scavenging Ooze, and all the other cards we have in here. They kind of have to deal with your two drop or else lose to it, so that clears the way for Sarulf to survive the turn. This works well because Sarulf might not be at its best when you have a bunch of two drop creatures hanging out anyways, since the threat of its upkeep ability is weakened.

Third, we play with Thoughtseize. You just steal their Fatal Push.

Fourth, and maybe this isn't why Sarulf is good but why other cards are bad, is that Sultai is such a hard deck to attack that anything that can meaningfully interact with Uro while still being a maindeckable card has a lot of value. I love my Oozes mostly because they fit into this category, but so does Klothys, and even Chevill kinda does because it lets you keep pace on cards when you kill an Uro. Sarulf's upkeep trigger exiles Uro, and for just three counters, and Sarulf gains a counter when your opponent casts their Uro the first time. And of course, if it's good against Uro it's usually good against Kroxa, which is another problem card that we like to have outs to.

I'm pretty sold on Sarulf. It's way too early to sketch out what a starting point list would look like, but I would imagine that two Sarulf is the right way to go. There's a lot more to see with this set though, and they seem to be on a cheap efficient removal spell printing spree these days, so I'm cautiously optimistic. I'm interested to see what the Black, Green and Red gods are, if there are any, because I think Halvar, God of Battle looks really cool. And who knows? Maybe they'll just go reprint Lightning Bolt to go with the Thor theme.

Thanks for reading.

Faced With Mysteries Dark and Vast

No real updates in Jund land at the moment. I've been pretty busy with work but I don't have a ton of changes I would make to the deck. I really like where it's at, and honestly feel like I'm a favorite in every matchup I play.  Link.

Chevill continues to be incredible. I can't really imagine playing a deck without him. Don't know what else to say about him really. He wins games that you have no business winning. It's like if Shadowmage Infiltrator gained you three life a turn and cost 2 mana.

Chandra has been excellent, but I think that what I really found out by playing Chandra is that a four-mana Planeswalker works really well in this deck, as long as it has an ability that can kill a creature. Chandra is the best at that, but having one copy each of Vraska and Liliana lets us have a little bit of diversity, and lets us get around the legend rule. Casting a Chandra on turn four and then a Liliana on the next turn is a sequence you can't do when you have only Chandras in your deck.

I think we utilize Castle Locthwain really well, which is important. I think this kind of deck needs a little extra oomph from its lands, kind of like playing Raging Ravine or Treetop Village in Modern. We're set up to maximize Castle for a few reasons. One is that our cards are cheap and we can empty our hand pretty quickly so that we don't lose life, but that also helps our ability to actually cast those cards. It's essentially four mana to use it, so your mana is a little tied up. Secondly, it is an uncounterable and un-Thoughtseizable value engine in the matchups where your life total isn't as critical. We're not as good at raw card draw as Uro and Teferi decks might be, but we can leverage our tempo, point and click discard their important stuff, and then keep pace on cards later on with Castle. We are good at getting both decks into topdeck mode, and when that happens, Castle is one of the best topdecks you can have. Castle wins a lot of games and I think it's worth shoehorning a few into your mana base.

Inscription has been excellent. This kind of versatility usually comes at a steep mana cost, but all of these effects are solid enough for three mana, especially when you consider how good returning a Scavenging Ooze to the battlefield is against a lot of decks. It's not the flashiest thing ever, but it gets the job done.

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That's about it for today. I think this list right now is as tuned as it's ever been and I don't want to make any changes to the 75. I think my next move soon here is to work on Pioneer on Magic Online, but we'll see. Thanks for reading.