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.