Didn't Have One Good Word To Say

Brainstorm got banned. Suspended I guess, but whatever.

For pretty much every banning in the last couple years, my gut is to say "I don't think this should have been banned, but I just think it shouldn't have been printed." That sounds dumb and shortsighted, but like, is it as dumb and shortsighted as printing Oko? I just can't get my head around injecting a card into the format, that's been thoroughly tested for 25 years, that is obviously head and shoulders above everything else in the format. It's not like we didn't know how it was going to play out. The same can be said, to a certain degree, to lots of the stuff in the last couple years. Omnath? What was the goal?

The Time Warp banning was frustrating. Not only do you have to identify that the Jeskai Turns deck was an actionable problem, but then you have to identify that Time Warp was the problem. I think that both of those things are false. The best deck after the Time Warp banning was clearly just going to be the next best Brainstorm deck. But the other part of the equation is that we just aren't letting people find answers to the best decks anymore. Part of the fun of Magic is learning and figuring out how to beat your opponents instead of just waiting until the card you can't beat gets banned. I also feel that the narrative of the Magic Hivemind solving formats is far overplayed and cards and decks exist to beat the top stuff most of the time. Except with Oko.

I think what it boils down to is that printing a bunch of super powerful stuff and then banning it gets a lot of packs sold, and paying out wild cards for the banning reimbursement doesn't amount to very much. It's a stark departure from the past, when bans only happened once a decade in something like Standard and rarely in other places as well.

Anyways, what does the Brainstorm ban mean for Jund? Well, first is that Inquisition of Kozilek starts to look quite a bit better. An opponent responding to your Thoughtseize with Brainstorm was annoying, but an opponent responding to your Inquisition with a Brainstorm was huge. Inquisition was particularly bad here, but all discard spells get a little bit better now.

I'm not sure what it will do to the metagame at large, but stuff like Izzet Phoenix is likely still pretty good. Brainstorm was just there for support and it's more of a Faithless Looting deck. Brainstorm Teferi decks might take a hit, but they'll still be around. My biggest question is whether Arasta is still necessary, or if we should go back to Jegantha. Arasta is so super beyond lights out against Phoenix, but the Jegantha versions of the deck feel the best to me outside of that matchup.

Even with the creature lands from DnD, Jegantha is still a welcome addition. And as far as those are concerned, I've found Lair of the Hydra to fit this deck the best. It can pick off planeswalkers, threaten lethal, and is the best mana maker. Den of the Bugbear is the most powerful, but the red mana isn't that useful. Interestingly, fitting Lair of the Hydra into a deck without Jegantha is hard, because the mana requirements are steeper.

As for a current decklist, here's a snapshot of where I'm at. It's hard to say exactly what to do next after the banning and where the format will end up after things shake out here, but a good place to start when the format is shaken up is just to play nuts and bolts anti-aggro Magic. Chevill has been great as of late, and the fourth copy in the board to just go in deep is real nice. I like Shivan Fire out of the board too.

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That's it for now. I gotta admit, I just got a Nintendo Switch today and I might just go real deep on Pokemon Unite because it's fun as hell. But also, I want to do some Modern stuff this week as well. Thanks for reading.

I Made A Patreon

I made a Patreon. I don't do content full time or anything so I've set the contribution amount to just $1. Maybe I'll bump that up some day if I keep doing more stuff and turn this into a side gig or whatever. In the meantime, that means that for this blog, I'll keep doing most of my normal posts, but maybe put some stuff behind the $1 paywall. Between videos, streaming, and blog posts, I figure that some amount of the blog posts would be enough to make it worthwhile to become a patron, but still have almost all of the stuff for free.

I'm doing this mostly because Twitch's economy system is a pretty unfavorable for the artists. I still might stream on Twitch from time to time, but I'd recommend becoming a Patron instead of subbing on Twitch if you're interested in doing that sort of thing. It's cheaper for you and I get to keep more of the money.

I also set up a Discord server but have yet to do anything with it at all. Apparently Discord servers are useful for Patreon users but I haven't gotten that far yet. Check it out and say hi if you want, I'll try to get some stuff up and running there soon.

As for the more near future, I have a video that I'm going to try and finish up editing and then export and upload to Youtube tomorrow for Modern, then I'll get started in on Dungeons and Dragons in Historic. After a handful of matches on the ladder today, I can say that I'm pretty excited and that there's a lot of cool stuff going on. Ebondeath looks like the real deal, and the utility lands are proving worthwhile as well.

Thanks for reading, see you soon.

Just Like Mary Shelly, Just Like Frankenstein

I'm a little late to comment on the new D and D set, mostly because I didn't realize it was a real set. It's going to be in Standard and everything.

The cards in this set are a little underwhelming so far, at least the ones that I'm interested in, but the whole set hasn't been spoiled yet. Let's take a look.

Four is a lot of mana, and it's not particularly good on defense. But, Ebondeath looks phenomenal against any type of control strategy. We usually don't get a flash creature like this that has the potential to just end the game immediately like this, plus it's got some recursivity. Given you have time, I would imagine this is also pretty solid in a mirror match, if such a thing exists.

Ebondeath lives in a weird spot, where it's so geared towards one specific type of opponent and just okay against others, that it seems like more of a sideboard card. But, in a format with a wide variety of opponents, you want sideboard cards that can do work against multiple opponents as well, like Duress effects and Wrath effects. Ebondeath reminds me a little of Klothys, where it's a good one-of in the main deck, and the way that you make it work against decks that it isn't specifically made for is to make the rest of your deck more effective in that matchup. If Ebondeath is the stones against half the format and just okay against the other half, just tune your deck to be better against that other half.

Probably too slow, and also probably just not as good as the other five drops available. I think that this card would have been good a year or so ago, when Historic first came out. I would have loved to have Ob Nixilis Reignited or a similar effect, but at this point we're pretty far past that. I am having trouble imagining when I'd rather have this over something like Angrath or Eldest Reborn.

Probably a little less narrow than Cast Down these days, this might be the go-to Doom Blade effect for the format. That's not always something that's going to be useful, especially because the decks that have few creatures are likely to use stuff like Angels or Dragons as creatures. I still like Flunk more, but this might be a more maindeckable card, if that's something you're interested in.

This card excites me a lot. It reminds me of Finale of Eternity but I think it's more flexible and also has a more impressive ceiling. 1RRR to kill anything isn't that bad when you consider you have the ability to just go ham when you get to five or six mana. The problem, of course, is the triple red. Having said that, Shatterskull Smashing gets you part of the way, and another card that's in this set can help as well. If it can be set up to be reliably castable, then I like this as a 2-of in Historic Jund. That's a big ask for a 2-of, but we'll see.

I like graveyard hate, and I like creatures that gain life, but five mana is too much.

Great card. It costs a lot to activate it, but having a creature land with very little restriction like this is really nice. Whether or not it's going to work in a deck with Castle Locthwain remains to be seen, but if we are going for the Meteor Swarm deck, Locthwain might not be what we want anymore.

This card is definitely less powerful than Den of the Bugbear, but it might be better for two reasons. One, it can cast a Thoughtseize on turn one, something not even Castle Locthwain can do. Second, get a little graveyard hate thrown into your mana base for pretty much free, since black Treetop Village is something we're in the market for anyways. Add to that the extra point of toughness, which can be important in a format with Prismari Command, Kolaghan's Command, and Bonecrusher Giant.

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Anyways, just threw this one together because I realized that this set was going to be legal and not some kind of weird supplemental product. Also, I made a video last weekend and have been having trouble with Youtube getting the quality settings to work the way I want it to. I'll keep working on it, but take a look if you're interested. Thanks for reading.