Keep Your Day Job Til Your Night Job Pays

Wanted to check in on the deck and where I'm at.

This list right now really pushes the cards that are okay early and bombs late. Three Valki and four Inscriptions means the top of your deck is super live in the late game. Quite frankly, we shouldn't be able to get away with this kind of flexibility, because our top end can go toe to toe with most of our opponents' top end, but theirs can't get cast for cheap when the game is still in its early stages.

I've moved away from Sarulf, which is not a choice that's easy to make. Sarulf has the ability to destroy some opponents pretty much by itself, but it's also very matchup dependent. There are two big problems with Sarulf, one being that it's still a creature than can get hit by Skyclave Apparition and Claim the Firstborn. A large portion of the time, if you manage to draw it against the matchups that it's there for, you can still lose if they have the answer, and usually it's a mana advantage for the opponent. Secondly, there are a huge number of matchups where Sarulf gets boarded out, like UW Control or any Yorion deck. There are things that it can do in those matchups, but it's too hard to get it going.

Of course, none of this is to say that Sarulf is a bad card. It's phenomenal when it works, but I've been finding it's not working that much in the current state of Historic. When that changes, then by all means bring it back in.

I've also cut Vraska. Vraska is likely just a worse and more expensive card than Inscription of Ruin against most of the format. All the creature decks have the ability to attack it when it's at 1 loyalty, and there are a lot fewer ways to get value out of it immediately against control decks. Again, this is subject to change if things like Narset and Search for Azcanta become more prevalanet, but even there I think I'm just as happy with Esika's Chariot and Inscription a lot of the time.

Speaking of, Chariot has been performing well against the influx of over-the-top midrange and control decks. It's a great thing to slam post-wrath, and also pretty great to bait out a wrath and have value left over. It forces opponents to deal with it at a card advantage loss, which is great by itself but the impact of that gets amplified when we're running this many Mind Rots, plus Davriels out of the board. Like I've mentioned before, don't let the Legend rule scare you with Chariot, chaining Chariots is usually just fine.

I added an additional Castle Locthwain, just to help out our long game a little bit. It doesn't really matter which of the utility lands you draw, but drawing one will help you win a lot of games, and Locthwain is the one that hurts our mana the least, even if it's maybe a little less powerful. We're now at one utility land in every 12 cards in the deck, which means that in a late game scenario, you'll be reasonably likely to have one in play when the dust settles.

I'm still happy with Jegantha. It fits so well because you are free to sideboard out threats all you want, you still have a win condition whenever you get around to it. Also, because our cards are cheap, you'll have three mana sitting around pretty often to grab Jegs, but with Inscription and Valki, we're also in the market for a little mana boost from time to time.

In the sideboard I've got Fatal Push over where we'd usually have Shivan Fire, mostly as a concession to Bishop of Wings and Youthful Valkyrie. Outside of that, it's mostly the same as it's been.

Davriel gets even better the more discard you have, which is part of why we're at four Inscriptions. When you land a Davriel and then follow it up with an Inscription, there's a fair chance they're going to be totally empty handed, at which point Davriel can sit there and deal them damage. This means that Davriel is good in multiples as well, so don't be afraid to have two in your opener. Also, Eldest Reborn is just about the most powerful thing we can be doing against any deck going long, and also some that aren't going that long. It's an answer, a threat, and a card advantage engine rolled into one. I nailed a Carnage Tyrant with one the other day, pog city.

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That's about it for now. I plan on doing more streaming and video making and blogging of course, plus we've got some Strixhaven spoilers coming soon. Also, I should mention that the r/MTGHistoric opens on MTGMelee are really great. They're free to enter, and there's some pretty stiff competition and lots of diversity, plus some good prizes. Thanks for reading.