Clank Your Chains and Count Your Change

Gonna talk about Modern Horizons 2 in this post, but let's talk about Historic a little first.

Here's a list for my first foray into Kolaghan's Command land. I'd recently been on a Dragonsguard Elite and Young Pyromancer kick, but maybe Knight of the Ebon Legion is just the way to go. It's less splashy, but it's only one mana and it's never awful. Also, I already was down on Esika's Chariot after lots of decks started playing Prismari Command, and now with Kolaghan's Command it looks even worse.

Kolaghan's Command itself has been a solid addition, but I wouldn't say it's solving any problems we have already. What's great about it is that making the opponent discard a card is excellent in this deck, whereas it might be worse in other builds, since we have so much discard already. Also getting back a creature has some great value, since they could be Ooze or Ebon Legion, hence the power of Inscription of Ruin. But popping off their cheap creatures and gaining some value is already something that Bonecrusher Giant does really well, and gaining some card advantage with some flexibility added in is something that Inscription does really well. I like it, but I don't think it makes the deck broken or anything.

With that out of the way...

It's been a while since I played or wrote about Modern, so let's get into it. This thing looks awesome.

I'm not the hugest fan of mana dorks. It's kind of not really the game I like to be playing. But opponents who play Noble Hierarch end up having such a huge advantage that it changed my mind in Modern. In spite of my efforts to always reduce the average mana costs in the spells in my decks, I still lose games with cards in my hand I didn't have time to cast. Everything in the format is better when it gets into play faster, and being able to keep pace is huge.

As for whether or not this is going to see play in Modern Jund, I think it kind of has to. It's too good. If Deathrite Shaman taught us anything, it's that even if you're not in the market for mana acceleration, when it's really good you should just play it anyways. You'll get a boost when you draw it and you'll be fine when you don't.

Speaking of that, what, if any, changes need to be made to accomodate this? We're going to be playing a deck that is capable of acceleration, but won't draw it every game, and also won't be expecting it to survive that often when we do draw it. This means we can't go hog wild and play all four drops or whatever. But when we do in fact draw it, we need to make sure the cost of the cards in our hand is worth the boost in mana. Hierarch does basically nothing in a hand full of all one drop spells. Jund loves cards that are versatile, but what we are looking for now are cards that are versatile in their mana cost, or get much better if they land earlier.

Liliana is already a huge one, of course. A second turn Liliana is backbreaking against a lot of decks. Also, Liliana is a card that rewards us for emptying our hand quickly, since her +1 doesn't affect you if your hand is empty. So yeah, play Liliana in Jund, got it. Liliana the Last Hope also looks solid, since you're a turn earlier getting to ultimate, and more likely to pick off an opposing X/1. Note that there will be more X/1s in the format after MH2, including opposing Hierarchs. Bloodbraid also likes to hit the board early, but Hierarch isn't going to be the greatest cascade, so that's a maybe. Hexdrinker and Scavenging Ooze are cards that you can pump excess mana into, and also are threatening enough to win the game on their own, which makes a less threat-dense deck still able to compete. Dark Confidant and Kolaghan's Command are excellent at giving you card advantage, recovering from the low-impactness of the Hierarch, and Ignoble Hierarch is excellent at making sure you can cast your new found cards.

I don't know if you want to play Abundant Harvest in a deck with Hierarch. Harvest is good at giving you action when you want it and mana when you want it, and Hierarch throws a wrench in that plan. Hierarch does, however, let you use your Harvest for spells more often, and/or helps alleviate the fact that the spell you find essentially costs and additional green mana. I could be convinced either way.

Thoughtseize and Inquisition of Kozilek specifically are not excellent with Hierarch. The point discard spells are good because they are cheap, and they pare the game down so you can grind the opponent out. Hierarch gives you extra mana, which means it doesn't matter as much that they're cheap, and is low impact by itself, making it hard to grind the opponent out. One thing that Hierarch does, though, is make your life total less of a problem, since you're less likely to get run over by fast opposing starts, or you can afford to play shocklands tapped more often. That makes Thoughtseize look a little better than Inquisition. Plus, Thoughtseize is a better answer to Wraths and Cryptic Commands and stuff, which is the best way for the opponent to get back in the game after a quick Hierarch start. I expect to see fewer discard spells overall and leaning more towards Thoughtseize with Hierarch in the deck.

Castle Locthwain is a card that strikes me as working nicely with Ignoble Hierarch. You can empty your hand faster, you don't have to worry about your life total as much, and you'll be in the market for drawing more action to make up for the Hierarch itself. Creature lands like Treetop Village and Raging Ravine accomplish this as well, and work nicely with the Exalted trigger, but enter the battlefield tapped, which kind of dampens the benefit of the Hierarch anyways.

I'll touch on Grief for a bit, but I don't think it's actually that great. What Grief has going for it in future versions of Jund is that it's solid in hands that have Ignoble Hierarch and in hands that don't. 3/2 Thoughtseize guy for four mana looks much better when you cast it on turn three and it actually attacks for four, and using Unmask starts to look better when you're trying to keep up on tempo because you didn't draw your Hierarch. My initial evaluation is that Grief isn't what we want to be doing in Jund, but I could certainly be wrong about that, given its flexibility.

Tourach, on the other hand, I really like. Similarly to a card like Valki, the unkicked version of the card isn't something you'd play by itself, but can do some work and make life annoying for the opponent. Protection from White is kind of a big deal, and it grows with a lot of the cards in the deck, including Liliana and Kolaghan's Command, but also extra copies of itself. It gets around the legend rule because your opponent discarding two cards and putting two +1/+1 counters on your creature is a fine thing to be doing. Plus, if you can get it to trade off early, you might be able to finagle a way to get it back in your hand with Liliana the Last Hope or Kolaghan's Command and nail 'em later on.

The kicked version of this card is a monster. Random discard is extremely powerful. Lots of times this will be nabbing the last two cards in their hand, so it doesn't matter, but when you hit their Scapeshift or whatever out of a full hand, it's incredible. Add to that Tourach himself will just kill them super fast and you've got a card that's just incredible. It does everything we want in a deck with Ignoble Hierarch, since it's better the earlier it comes down, it's a fast clock, it recoups the card advantage lost from Hierarch, and it's got a safety valve for when you don't have the Hierarch and just need to get something on the board quickly. A truly incredible card.

So I've seen a lot of folks talking about Ragavan on the ol' World Wide Web. Some have called it the best red one drop ever, and possibly even the best one drop creature in Legacy. But it seems like most of the hoard of Jund fanatics out there are silent on Ragavan. If Ragavan is as good as they're saying it is, I think it's great in Jund, and here's why. Consider Ohran Viper.

Why does Jund not play this card? Well, because it's situational in that it has to attack to do anything, it doesn't have a ton of toughness, it's not that great on defense, drawing an extra card doesn't help that much, it doesn't actually close the game. That's all true, but the real reason we don't play Ohran Viper is because it costs too much mana. If it cost one mana, we'd play it. Ragavan is good because it's way cheaper than it should be. It gives you a bunch of options and a random assortment of value that you can do whatever you want with, for just one mana. If the best one drop creature is in your colors and the only condition it has to make it effective is that your opponent has a life total, then you should play it.

I like that Ragavan can act as a pseudo Ignoble Hierarch for when you don't draw one in your newly Hierarch-tuned deck. Also, Ragavan looks like it's exceptional with Hierarch, in that it likes to attack for three on the second turn, right into any one power creatures they might have, and that you want to have extra mana with which to cast the cards you steal with Ragavan.

Thoughtseize and Inquisition are nice with Ragavan, since they clear out opposing removal for it, and the bevy of removal we play also helps clear the way for Ragavan to get in. I'm not a hundred percent sold on Ragavan being an automatic four of, since it's legendary, but jeez. It gets around the legend rule by just winning the game if they don't kill it. What a card.

Here is an early sketch of what the deck might look like. Please disregard the dollar amounts next to the cards, it will only make you sad.

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Those four cards are the main ones I'm interested thus far from this set, but there's a lot to like here. I'm sure more cards will trickle in for Jund, and there's plenty of cool stuff to talk about outside of Jund colors. I've been interested in getting the ol' Magic Online account up and running again to play some Modern, but we'll see. I can play Jund in Historic free to play, and Jund in Modern is, ah, not. I'd love to make some Modern Jund content again like I did a while ago, including in the early stages of this blog and my Youtube channel. That about does it for today, thanks for reading.

The Sun Went Down in Honey, The Moon Came Up in Wine

 Made Mythic with this.

I'm actually not sold on whether or not I like Young Pyromancer or Dragonsguard Elite, but a friend wondered if maybe with Abundant Harvest we had enough action to use Dragonsguard Elite. I was always looking for something to better fit in the Valki slot, and the Elite worked pretty well. I then tried Pyromancer and while it's also pretty good, I can't really decide which one I like better. I think it comes down to Pyromancer being better if you expect black removal and Dragonsguard being better if you expect red removal. I ended up actually crossing the finish line to make Mythic with Pyromancer in the list, but whichever one you like better is fine. Both work great. It's not a huge focus of the deck to maximize them, but it is a focus of the deck to get some little bits of value out of our cheap creatures, so they work here.

Cling has taken the spot of Grafdigger's Cage in the sideboard. I don't like bringing in Cage if there's just a graveyard subtheme, like if your deck can win without using the graveyard. So Cling works much better against Torrential Gearhulk decks, still has plenty of usage against Phoenix and Dreadhorde Arcanist, and also works just fine against normal old control decks as a late game draw engine, since we only can afford to run two Castle Locthwain with the tighter mana base.

Thragtusk in the board has been okay, but I find myself wanting something that has a similar effect and is cheaper. Five mana is a lot, especially when we only run 22 lands and are expecting to be grabbing nonland cards with Abundant Harvest. Grakmaw and Chariot are the two things that come to mind, so maybe that will work in the sideboard, but I'm looking for other ideas. They all block and trade off with attackers for value, and they all play well against removal, so they're good at either winning a value fight or turning a game into a value fight. I'll keep trying some more stuff, but if you're in the market for a five drop at the moment, I do think that Thragtusk is the one.

Tainted Pact is the new hotness. It's kind of funny, most combo decks that turn out to be great go from dedicated combo to be more like midrangey interaction-based with a combo element. What made Splinter Twin such a good deck wasn't Splinter Twin, it was Snapcaster Mage and Lightning Bolt. Tainted Pact seems to be going the other way. I originally envisioned this deck as being a midrange deck with the combo added in, since you can only play so many copies, but instead people are playing things like Solve the Equation and Mastermind's Acquisition. There's a little bit of interaction in the deck, but a good recipe of a quick clock and disruption will be awesome against Pact and similar decks. You strip away their combo pieces, and then don't give them the time to find new ones. I've found the matchup to be a little tough because we don't have that quick of a clock from most of our creatures, like Chevill and Ooze, but you can mess with the numbers if Pact becomes what the format is entirely about.

I see a lot of people on the internet asking for a Tainted Pact or Thassa's Oracle ban. I guess I'm just kind of tired of banning the best deck all the time. The next best deck in the format at large is probably the Gearhulk Magma Opus deck, so are we just going to ban that too? Don't get me wrong, the deck is great, but I think that part of the challenge of Magic is trying to either become a master with a deck you like, or trying to come up with creative ways to attack a metagame. I like rewarding people who get good at playing the best decks, and I like rewarding people who can identify the best deck's weaknesses and exploit them. It sucks to work really hard to be good at Tainted Pact mirror matches and then have the deck banned, and it also sucks to finally figure out how to beat the boogeyman and then they just ban it anyways.

Let's talk Historic Anthology 5. Unlike the last Historic Anthology, pretty much every card in the set is a hit. As for us, I think Kolaghan's Command is the only really good one.

I am going to start with a 2-of Kolagahn's Command, though off the top of my head I'm not sure what to replace for it. The easy thing would be to say Inscription of Ruin, since it does lots of similar things, but right now I'd play six Inscriptions if they let me. Kolaghan's Command is a discard spell that works well with other discard spells, since it's an instant and can get the card they draw when their hand is empty. The all Mind Rot deck will often leave their hand empty, so this will come up often. Plus, with Pact as the frontrunner of the format, more discard spells are better.

My initial thought is to cut one Maelstrom Pulse and one Esika's Chariot. I also don't want to go down on creature count, since, you know, you want creatures in your graveyard to rebuy. It's honestly not a great format for Kolaghan's Command, since the creatures are big and there aren't that many artifacts, but this kind of flexibility is perfect for our deck.

Out of all the cards in the set, I think that the biggest deal is Into the North. This will be the first time that we have a pure Rampant Growth effect in the format. If you're a fan of straight green-black decks, maybe try this one out for a spin. You ramp, you fix your mana, and if you want to you can fetch Faceless Haven. All extremely good stuff. Plus, a hand of two lands and Into the North will get you to at least three mana every time, unlike two lands and Explore. I tried Explore as the Farseek substitute in a more RTR/INN Jund deck for Historic, but Explore just isn't what that kind of deck is looking for.

Outside of Into the North, I think Ojutai's Command is very good and will be losing to it a lot, and Atarka's Command is very good and an easy slot-in for Gruul decks. I also wouldn't be surprised to see Grisly Salvage do some good work. You don't ever want to be the the second or third best graveyard deck in the format, but Grisly Salvage sets you up to just cast your stuff if your graveyard shenanigans are offline.

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That's about it for me today, I plan on firing up the stream a little bit this week and testing out some Kolaghan's Command. Thanks for reading.

Back To Back Chicken Shack

 On a nice little run with this list, let's talk about it.

A question I get on stream from time to time is what card from Jund in older formats would I like to see put into Historic. There's no real perfect answer to that question because the format is changing at a rapid pace and the tools that you would want change quickly. Lots of cards would be good in certain situations, others wouldn't really be as useful because of the decks you're likely to run up against. One card I always kind of wish we had though was Sprouting Thrinax.

Having said that, there were a couple of big reasons to not play Grakmaw up until now. One is the amount of Claim the Firstborn in the format. Between Rakdos Arcanist and Jund Sacrifice, which were at times two of the top three most popular decks in the format, getting this hit by Claim was such a high risk that it didn't seem worth it. It's honestly still a little sketchy. However, the amount of Claim the Firstborn in the format has fallen off drastically.

The second reason to not play Grakmaw was that if the first 3/3 didn't kill an Uro, the second 3/3 wasn't going to either. Before Strixhaven, Historic was a format of haymakers. Even beyond Uro, there was Nissa, Emergent Ultimatum, etc. As the format as a whole gets more lower-to-the-ground and decks are more interested in using one for one removal, Grakmaw starts to create some real problems. It's great against decks trying to remove it with Lightning Helix and it's great against decks trying to attack into it with Gruul Spellbreaker.

This, like all cards but more than usual, is subject to change if certain metagame shifts happen. Specifically, if Claim the Firstborn starts to creep into the equation more than it is, then Grakmaw will have to hit the sideline again. But I like how it's playing for now.

I'm still a huge fan of this card, but there's a few reasons why I'm playing Chariot over it for now. One, I wanted to go down to two four drops and when you do that, the cost that Professor has on your sideboard becomes a lot tougher. All of a sudden you're drastically debilitating yourself in post-board games for a much smaller payoff, since you're only 2/3 as likely to draw a Professor. 

Secondly, I'm finding that either the card you get off it doesn't need to be cast to win the game, or you lose with it in hand. Like I mentioned before, the format is getting much lower to the ground and while two for ones are great, drawing a card that you don't have time to cast isn't really a two for one.

Third, I moved back to Maelstrom Pulse from Murderous Rider, so the utility of getting a Naturalize effect wasn't as necessary. A little thing, but worth noting that it's nice to not be cold to Experimental Frenzy and hardcast Shark Typhoons if you don't have to be.

For what it's worth, I tried out Rekindling Phoenix in this slot, looking for a good threat that was hard to deal with one for one but could close a game quickly if it wasn't dealt with. That was nice, but it took about one time not being able to cast it for lack of red mana to change my tune. So Chariot's back.

Play 4. It's too good.

In our new low-to-the-ground format, things like Mono-Red and Gruul are great decks. They are consistent, low-to-the-ground themselves, and punish people who are messing around with Brainstorms and Abundant Harvests. Since that's the case, Thragtusk looks awesome if you can get it to resolve in those matchups. Fewer decks are trying to get fancy with Righteous Valkyrie and stuff, but instead they are going straight for your face. Add to that how great Thragtusk is against Teferi decks and mirror matches, and we've got a really solid card for the format right now. If their plan is to either attack into it or remove it, then Thragtusk is a slam dunk.

Since we always have to make this comparison, I like Thragtusk a lot more than Gargaroth at the moment. Thragtusk is almost always lights out against red decks and Gruul decks. Gargaroth is as well, but Tusk is better against the grindy matchups than Gargaroth by quite a bit.

Another thing is that as of right now, we're Jegantha ready. A month ago I'd have insisted on Jegantha being in the board, but the world has changed quite a bit since then. There are two reasons for this. One, the graveyard decks are a lot better than they used to be because of Faithless Looting, which stretches your sideboard in an extra direction and requires lots of slots. Go Blank of course has been awesome there, but you still need as much action as you can get. In addition, other decks like Rogues and combo decks are really sleek and strong, and you need to tune your 60 with cheap interaction after sideboard to have a shot. What I'm getting at is that sideboard real estate is at a premium right now, so if there was ever a time that Jegantha wouldn't be worth the sideboard slot, it's now.

Second, you're just not very likely to need to fetch it and cast it. Trying to spend eight mana on Jegs in a 22 land deck is just a completely different world than in a 27 land deck. It isn't that the deck wouldn't like to have it, it's more that we simply cannot access it very often. Games are over or essentially over quicker, and you'll be operating on less than five lands quite often.

Having said all of this, I'm still not sold that it shouldn't be included. We've already made all of the deck construction costs, so the only thing we have to do is make one sideboard cut in order to have it. If Jegantha wins one game out of every 30, is that more or less useful than one extra sideboard card? It's tough to run the numbers, but if the Companion mechanic has taught us anything, it's that it's more worth it than you'd think.

To touch on this quickly, I tried a Dreadhorde Arcanist build of this deck for a little while but ended up moving away from it. First, you're running into the graveyard trap. Grafdigger's Cage is usually a blank and Rest in Peace is pretty limited against us, but with the Arcanist build you're running headlong into it, at a time when graveyard hate is a huge necessity in everyone's sideboards. Second, the deck had trouble closing games. I'd have times where I literally cast five free spells off an Arcanist and lost because I didn't have enough ways to actually kill the opponent. Arcanist decks usually do this with Kroxa, but unless you want to go in on Stitcher's Supplier and Faithless Looting, then it's harder. Third, you really do have to warp your deck around Arcanist to make it consistent. I was going way up on discard spells and even main deck Cling to Dust in order to have enough Arcanist food and it still often wasn't enough. Don't get me wrong, I usually love cutting mana costs, but this was a little too much. Hence why I didn't have space in the deck for cards to close the game with.

I think that this list looks very good, but it's a little different from what I want to be doing. Note that if the graveyard decks are going to have easier access to cards to get rid of opposing graveyard hate, you need to really max out on that effect, and that Go Blank specifically is great because it can't get Assassin's Trophy'd or Abraded.

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I played in and streamed JafferMTG's big tournament championship thing this weekend and had a great time. I had no idea what I was doing in Standard, but if I was to do it again, I think I would play this deck by a player named Mertcan. I got beaten badly by it and it looked well tuned. I'm hoping to have a little time this week to fire up the stream again and run some Historic Jund on the ladder. Thanks for reading.