If You Plant Ice You're Gonna Harvest Wind

First things first, Strixhaven doesn't come out for about three weeks, so what are we doing until then? For now, I like the list as I posted last week, with a little change. Jund Food has completely surpassed the typical Jund Sacrifice decks, as noted in the metagame breakdowns for the Pro Tour. The problem with that is that Grafdigger's Cage is much less reliable in that matchup. It still stops Cat/Oven, and stops them from getting back Woe Strider, but that's about it, whereas the non-food versions have Collected Company that get shut down by Cage. Because of this, and that I haven't even really liked bringing in Cage against Goblins these days, I've switched to two Sarulf and one Klothys in the sideboard and cut the Cages. Sarulf is also excellent in most of the matchups that have Collected Company, like Angels and Gruul, but we didn't want to bring in Cage to just shut off Company. It's also great against Auras as well. I like where it's at in the sideboard, where we can bring it in for all the matchups where we basically would want extra copies of Chevill, but also would love a sweeper. As for the Klothys, I just like it. It has a lot of applications.

The trick will be to get back into Mythic before Strixhaven drops next month.

Strixhaven Reprints

So after only two days of spoilers, plus the Commands that were spoiled a while ago, I think we have enough stuff to talk about already.

First, I want to put in writing that I think this card will be extremely good, so good that it will pretty likely be banned some time soon. Just a prediction, and I'd love to be proven wrong and get to play with it forever. I would have claimed that it would be the best card in Historic, but since it was spoiled, two more cards that are likely better were spoiled as well. I'm also really excited about it for Modern and Pioneer.

It's been a while since there was a deck that played it, but I was always so jealous of decks that could play Flower/Flourish. It almost felt like cheating, this card that not only produced mana for them, but fixed their mana, and as a bonus wasn't a dead draw on turn six. I'm honestly kind of surprised that it doesn't see more play in Historic but I guess Collected Company really restricts your deck building choices.

Abundant Harvest plays a similar role to Flower/Flourish and Attune with Aether, but doesn't need any sort of synergy to make it effective. It just gets you want you want all the time. It lets us play a 23 land deck and get mana screwed at only the rate of a 27 land deck. There are other effects that do similar things in magic, but they usually aren't green, and they don't hit every single time. You'll never resolve this and miss on land when you want one. You'll also never try to hit a spell and miss.

I think that to start out, we want to play a low land count deck, something like 23 or 22. We also want to have enough green sources to play the Harvest on turn 1 as often as possible, so Blooming Marsh and Overgrown Tomb look good, possibly Stomping Ground or Pathways do as well. Green definitely becomes the most important color, so Kazandu Mammoth isn't out of the question. I also don't hate the Thriving lands here, but we have to remember that Harvest is essentially a tapped land itself, so playing a tapped land to fetch up a tapped land slows us down pretty considerably.

As for the rest of the deck, I think Jegantha might not be of much use anymore. Jegantha is great because it's action when you don't have any, but all of a sudden we will have a lot more action to play with. However, we're going to be keeping a lot of hands that are like, Harvest plus Blooming Marsh and hoping we hit a red source, so having the deck be Jegantha-ready will help our color situation.

I'll talk about it more in a second, but playing Harvest with Thoughtseize effects might not work the best. There will be times when you cast a Harvest naming non-land and hit a Thoughtseize when they have an empty hand, and that's not a great feel, especially if you're in a situation where an extra land would have turned on your Locthwain or Slumbermound. Oh and by the way, that's another great thing about Harvest, is that sometimes you just want more land to turn on your utility lands and you can just get it every time. That makes Harvest really good against discard spells, too.

This is in the format now, but it's an interesting thing. I mean, we definitely play it, but how many, and what is the mix between this and Thoughtseize? My initial thought is something like three Thoughtseize and two Inquisitions. Even in Modern, we usually play six or seven discard spells, not the full eight, because it makes the top of your deck soft. There are plenty of games where you stabilize the board but then draw two Thoughtseizes while your opponent draws two big creatures or whatever and you lose, so we don't want to increase the odds of that happening.

In Modern, we also run four Inquisitions and then shave or add Thoughtseizes to go along with it. Thoughtseize might be the one that gets all the attention, but really it's Inquisition that sees more play. However, in Historic there's a huge gap in power level between the best cards and the rest, and Thoughtseize hits way more of the important stuff. Collected Company, Muxus, Teferi, Nissa, Emergent Ultimatum, Yorion, Korvold, Shark Typhoon. Thoughtseize is in the deck to prevent those cards from resolving, so the fact that we'd have to reduce our count of Thoughtseize to make room for Inquisition might not be great for us overall. 

I think we'll have to see what happens with the rest of the decks in the format before deciding exactly how many and which discards spells to play. Maybe the rest of the Strixhaven special cards will make the format much faster and the top end cards that Inquisition misses won't see as much play. Or, maybe everyone will be playing 22 land Brainstorm and Faithless Looting decks and we need all 8 discard spells, since their decks will be so redundant.

This is Brainstorm. It will be legal in Historic. 

The thought with putting this in the format is that there aren't enough Fetchlands to make it work. I'm going to put in writing right now that this is wrong. Fabled Passage is already halfway there, and Abundant Harvest, Field of Ruin, Search for Azcanta, Castle Vantress, and lots of other cards will interact with Brainstorm very well. It also is just a good one mana card that reduces your land count and helps turn on stuff, like Arclight Phoenix, Dreadhorde Arcanist, Search for Azcanta again, Young Pyromancer, and Narset.

I also want to stress that Brainstorm with no fetching is a solid enough card, and that Brainstorm with a fetchland is just off-the-wall out-of-bounds beyond bonkers, but we're just used to it because it's been happening in Legacy every game for 15 years. Like, this card, in reality, is powerful enough to be banned in Legacy, in spite of the fact that it isn't. You don't need to do any work to maximize it, all these cards are things blue players are going to be doing with their decks anyways.

There's not really much to do about Brainstorm being in the format, but all the blue decks just got a lot better. I would have said before this came out that Abundant Harvest will make it hard to justify not playing green, but that didn't last long.

Looting is actually more problematic, because instead of just being a card that makes the decks it's in more consistent and good, this will actually enable a lot of dangerous stuff. Again, it's great with lots of the same stuff as Brainstorm, like Phoenix, Arcanist, and Pyromancer, but also sets up stuff like Kroxa and Claim to Fame. What's incredible about Looting is that it's a graveyard enabler, pretty much the best one, but also helps dig through your deck to find your answers for your opponent's graveyard hate, or helps to find your graveyard payoffs. Looting into an Abrade or Feed the Swarm to knock out their sideboard card is an incredible tool to have.

At the height of its power in Modern, Looting was the lynchpin of the two decks in the format that were far and away the best, Izzet Phoenix and Dredge. During that time, folks called it Modern's version of Brainstorm. The thing is, while you can claim that the enablers for Brainstorm don't exist in Historic, plenty of enablers for Looting exist already. Get ready for the graveyard decks of the format to become extremely powerful and consistent.

Of all these new cards, I think that Looting is probably the best, then Brainstorm then Harvest. I would not be shocked if we only got about a month or so with any of them in the format. Rakdos Arcanist and Izzet Phoenix are the low hanging fruit, but maybe the best thing to do is just splash blue in Arcanist for Brainstorms and Opts and jam some Phoenixes in. Not to mention that stuff like Neoform get much better since you can find your pieces so much more effectively and for cheap.

I wanted to talk about this a little because I think it would have been pretty solid in a format without Abundant Harvest. Harvest has me wanting to cut cycling lands and lower my land count, which will make the first mode of Command miss much more often. I think that this card gets a lot better if you can depend on the first mode working, which doesn't take that much work to do but might either be not worth it or too bad in the times it doesn't work out. Having said that, in the long game against UW, one of these can destroy a Baffling End and get back a land, often times something like Locthwain, Slumbermound, or a Canyon Slough. Against an aggro deck we can pop off an Elf or Soul Warden or Bomat Courier and either gain some life or secure our next land drop. And of course, it answers both Trail of Crumbs and Witch's Oven. It's not super splashy, but it might be worth including because of its flexibility and how cheap it is. Oh, it also can clear the top of your library after a Brainstorm and helps mill over Faithless Lootings, yay.

I'm excited about this card in Modern, where we have more ability to ensure we get a land, and there are cheaper and smaller targets for its removal abilities. I'm not sure if it's powerful enough, but two mana for a meaningful two-for-one is something worth trying out.

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It's funny, we haven't really seen anything worth talking about from Strixhaven itself, but with these new additions, all of a sudden the power level needed for a card to get included in a Historic deck just went way up, so it's entirely likely that this set, outside of Command, has just about nothing that we're going to want. When we get closer to a full spoiler I'll write out a way-too-early decklist, but that won't be until closer to the release. For now, I guess we can just argue online about how good Brainstorm will be. Check out my twitch channel, I'll be doing some streaming over the next couple weeks. Thanks for reading.