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.