Got A Letter This Morning Baby And All It Read

We've got a few days until Midnight Hunt comes out so I asked folks to ship some questions for a Q and A post. If there's anything I like more than playing Magic, it's talking about Magic.

What's your favorite Mind Rot?

Great question. My friend Steve asked me to do a Top 10 Mind Rots post. I can tell you that my favorite Mind Rot is Blightning, but I don't think it's the best. I'm going to define Mind Rot as a sorcery that makes the opponent discard two cards.

10. Unburden - The best thing to do with a Mind Rot when you don't need a Mind Rot is to cycle it, but you'll probably just draw a different Mind Rot.

9. Carnival/Carnage - Carnage is not as good as Blightning because the new damage templating doesn't let you hit planeswalkers. However, I really liked this in Standard a couple years ago, when Llanowar Elves and cheap red, white, and blue one-drops were all over the place. You have no idea how many Teferis I picked off after they used their -3.

8. Heartless Pillage - Build your own Gerard's Verdict? Honestly does some good work as a sideboard card in decks where you have lots of two drop creatures. Two drop on two, attack and Pillage on three, then five mana Planeswalker on four is a nice plan when you're in an aggressive role.

7. Stupor - Pretty good.

6. Go Blank - One of the worst parts of Mind Rots is when they discard stuff but also have graveyard abilities to recover. Sure I'll just go discard this Arclight Phoenix or Kroxa or Unburial Rites or whatever, great card advantage spell. With Go Blank, no shenanigans allowed. Plus, it's a graveyard hate spell for Dredge or whatever, so it's a nice sideboard slot.

5. Inscription of Ruin - The best part here is that it's Mind Rot that can do other things. There are lots of times where Mind Rot is a good enough card to cast in a constructed game, but the times when it isn't, it really isn't, and so doing something else with the Inscription is a huge deal. Also, Mind Rot is obviously bad when your opponent has no cards and you've drawn it on turn twelve, but Inscription is great in that scenario.

4. Wrench Mind - The problem here is that if they happen to have an artifact, it's so bad. But two mana vs three is a huge deal.

3. Blightning - The crucial part here isn't that it domes the opponent for three, it's that it can do that if you want but also you can blow up an opposing planeswalker. Folks like to say that Bloodbraid Elf was the reason Jace the Mind Sculptor was kept in check in Standard, but Blightning was a big part of it.

2. Gerard's Verdict - If this cost 3 it would still be pretty high on this list, but at two mana it's so good. You either want to be gaining life or gaining card advantage in most matchups, and this card does it all. I think this is the one card that if it got ported to Modern would make me want to play either Abzan or a white splash.

1. Hymn to Tourach

Honorable Mention to Davriel, Rogue Shadowmage, who usually is a three mana discard two, but when you hit all three cards with him, it's awesome. Done a lot of work with Davriel in my day, I have.

No Way Out from the new Midnight Hunt seems interesting, but it's in the same Standard as Inscription and Go Blank. I could be wrong, maybe it's gas.

What's your favorite weird card you've played and why?

See, I don't think I play weird cards. All the cards I play are pretty basic. My idea of a weird card is something like The Ozolith or Hollow One, things that require you to do weird things. My weird cards are just weird because few people play them, not because they are strange.

Looking at that list of stuff, there's lots to choose from. There's a few reasons for that. One is that I've been playing for a long time, so I have a backlog of cards I remember for when a metagame calls for certain effects. Another is that players don't often know how to play against stuff if it's not the same things they always play against. And of course, I just like certain cards and have fun playing them.

I guess another thing is that I just don't really care what the status quo cards are. When I build every deck in Historic with Shivan Fire and Flunk in the sideboard while playing zero Heartless Acts and Fatal Pushes, I'm sure it looks strange, but I play them because it works. As long as you can be honest with yourself and not just play weird stuff for the sake of being different, then you should feel absolutely free to play what you want. It is entirely possible that you're right and everyone else is wrong.

A few that come to mind are Bitterblossom, Chevill, Wolfir Avenger, and Sprouting Thrinax. I think maybe my favorite though is Shadow Guildmage. It's not the case anymore, but a turn one Guildmage was close to unbeatable for a lot of decks in Modern around five years ago. Affinity, Infect, Humans, any of the Collected Company decks, all of them just fold to this thing. I beat a medium-fame SCG Grinder with it once and saw later they tweeted "Just got taught a lesson by Shadow Guildmage." But again, the trick with these cards is to only play them when they work. None of the decks Shadow Guildmage preys on see play these days, so my Guildmages are back on the shelf. But some day, when it's time again, get ready.

How do we feel about punishing Memory Lapse and Expressive Iteration? Is it possible that maindecking Cindervines is correct?

Lots going on here. First, I don't think that it's that outlandish to play maindeck Cindervines when both the metagame calls for it and it works in the deck you're playing. I'm not sure that right now meets the first criteria (I could be convinced otherwise) and as far as Jund Midrange goes, it certainly doesn't meet the second.

As far as a midrange card, Cindervines doesn't really do it for me. We don't put on enough life total pressure, or at least can't rely on putting on enough life total pressure, for the damage to matter that much. A lot of what makes Cindervines good is when your aggressive game plan forces your opponent to take damage when they don't want to because they don't have any other choice. Sometimes we get that draw, and you can tune your deck to get it more consistently if you want to, but lots of times we don't, letting the opponent dictate how much they want to let Cindervines affect the game. You can cast a Cindervines on turn two and have your opponent cast literally 19 spells and still lose that game.

I've put Cindervines in my sideboard before to fight Nexus of Fate decks, but that's just one particular metagame call. The most twisted I ever got in deck construction in Historic I think was when I jammed four main deck Massacre Wurms to fight against Field of the Dead. Field of the Dead decks were the most common and best decks in the format, and drawing a Massacre Wurm turned the matchup from legitimately unwinnable to legitimately unloseable, not to mention being the checkmark against Goblins and other creature decks. Desperate times call for desperate measures, but I'm not sure we're there.

These Jeskai decks are good, but they're plenty beatable, as are the Phoenix decks and the control decks. The three best decks in the format all being blue decks isn't actually that rare a phenomenon, if you go back in Magic's history far enough.

What got you so into Jund?

I've kind of wondered this myself for a while. I think that there's two things.

One is that I grew up and still live in Vermont. Well before Arena and even before Magic Online, Magic metagames and philosophies were very regional-based. Sure, we all had StarCityGames and other strategy sites, but nothing really teaches you Magic like learning from the player sitting next to you. In Vermont, our big defining player was Jamie Wakefield.

Wakefield is best known for playing green decks, but he also liked black midrange decks. He was kind of an innovator and definitely came up with his own philosophies and theories. I don't really remember it fully, but I think he came up with the concept of a creature that can attack being a source of card advantage, theoretically. Like, given enough turns, a Wild Nacatl is worth seven Lava Spikes. I still base a lot of my deckbuilding on that, I like creatures and threats that can win the game by themselves, hence the Cindervines stuff previously. Wakefield was actually on the cutting edge there, the only real creatures people played for like the first decade of Magic were Morphling and Jackal Pups, so casting a bunch of mid-sized creatures and winning the game was a big deal. He wasn't Patrick Chapin or Mike Flores or anything, but he was a big deal. Lots of the local players from the time when I started playing were disciples of Wakefield and I think it shaped a lot of how the more tenured players play. I don't think I ever played against or really interacted with Jamie, but he influenced a lot of the people who influenced me, like Aaron McCaslin and Jeremy Muir, and looking back you can tell that a lot of the Vermont Magic scene was shaped by him. And it really was a stark contrast from outside of the state. I have a lot of memories of grisly looking dudes in plaid and snow boots from the woods showing up to Boston and Montreal, playing in PTQs against pro level players, playing slow green creature decks and just completely kicking ass. It's less significant now, but you can still see the impression Wakefield made on the state if you know what you're looking for.

The second thing is that I was looking for deck inspiration about ten or twelve years ago for some upcoming event and started looking at winning decklists on the internet and found decklists by the Duke brothers. Usually at least one of them Top 8'd every PTQ in the Northeast US. I knew them a little bit from chatting to them at PTQs and their lists looked good, so I just started playing whatever they were playing. The first time I did that, I think I lost a win-and-in for Top 8 of a PTQ with a list from Ian, then a few weekends later I qualified for Nationals with a list from Reid. Reid usually played Mythic, the Bant colored ramp/midrange creature deck, and Ian usually played Bloodbraid Jund. So in a way, it wasn't Reid but actually Ian that got me into Jund the first time.

Fast forward a few years later and Reid won the Magic Online championships with the first iteration of Modern Jund, and I was hooked.

That's the actual storyline, but I guess what keeps me interested in Jund is the challenge of trying to apply a lifetime of experience and what is kind of an outdated strategy to a current game. People call it grinding, but in reality "grinding" is just what it looks like when black decks try to accrue card advantage. In reality, Jund is playing Total Football, trying to fight the game on as many axes as possible, in the hopes that it's better than the opponent at at least one of them. You have to be good at pretty much everything in Magic to play Jund well. I certainly don't feel like I've mastered it yet, even after all this time. I like that I get to use my experience and I also like that I get to actually tangle with what my opponents are doing, which teaches you for later.

Why is Jegantha only a 5/5? It's clearly a gigantic thing.

Yeah, I don't know. It's a big deer. I'd love if they replaced the mana ability with just making it a 6/5 or whatever. Jegantha has been an interesting puzzle to solve. Lurrus and Yorion are pretty easy to build around and evaluate, but how much value does straight up no-text Colossapede have on a game? As it turns out, it's a huge deal, especially when you're playing a deck like Historic Jund.

What are some of the best cards for Historic Jund in Midnight Hunt?

I've been talking about this a lot in the last two posts, but so far I like Bloodthirsty Adversary and Briarbridge Tracker. Equally or possibly more importantly, the "slowlands" also are pretty promising. I love good new lands. As far as cards I haven't mentioned yet and have been spoiled, Florian looks like it has some potential in the same way Tovolar does, and Primal Adversary looks a little better than Tainted Adversary, but I'm still not super impressed. You've gotta be a real good card to earn a slot when you have the same mana cost as Bonecrusher Giant.

I haven't played Magic in years, why is Jund the right deck for me, and how much better has Goyf gotten since I've been gone?

For what it's worth, the guy who asked this question is a good friend of mine, and Jund is the right deck for him because he already owns a lot of the cards and has played that kind of strategy his whole life. But, for the rest of you, I should say that I don't usually try to convince people that they should play Jund all the time. I kind of know that what I'm doing is weird and probably not the best path to tournament success.

Having said that, I think that the lifelong project of mastering and tuning a single deck is really fun and could be worth doing for you. I don't think that Jund is the only deck you can do that with, but it is one of them. Also, Jund could be right for you if you haven't played in a while because it's basically the same deck as when you did play, even if the last time you played Magic was Standard in 2009.

Tarmogoyf is a super interesting card because it just kind of can't be that bad. When formats speed up and decks gain more velocity, Tarmogoyf just keeps growing. Whereas you could rely on attacking on turn three with a 3/4 Goyf, nowadays that will usually be a 5/6 due to all the broken stuff going on around it. Mishra's Bauble, Urza's Saga, Dragon's Rage Channeler, all this stuff makes Tarmogoyf better and you don't need to do anything to make it happen. Tarmogoyf was good, is still good, and will always be good.

What's the best place to eat at the DCU Center (in Worcester, MA)?

Mezcal Cantina lunch special!!!!

Why play Jund over doing busted Jeskai stuff?

I think that this is actually a pretty deep question, but as far as this weekend's Mythic Qualifier or whatever the hell it is, the various Jeskai decks do look pretty good. As I have it built right now, Jund isn't really that well positioned against Jeskai control or Creativity. Not that badly either though, they're just a blue deck you can Thoughtseize and attack and stuff. But I would change the deck significantly if I was going to try and gun for this specific metagame.

But forgetting about the Jeskai part of the question, why are we playing Jund over busted stuff, in general? First, fair decks are often harder to disrupt than unfair decks. We don't fold to Rest in Peace, we don't fold to Kor Firewalker, we don't fold to Thalia, we don't fold to Damping Sphere. There's nothing to disrupt! Midrange decks are hard to sideboard against because there are few cards that are easy knockout blows against us.

Second, Magic is a game of high variance and midrange decks don't really need to have that good of a draw to play the game. For the same reason that we don't fold to hate because there's nothing to hate, we can't not draw our key cards because there are no key cards.

As far as a snapshot of this very moment's metagame is concerned, paying your ten thousand gems or whatever and registering Griffin's latest Jund deck might not be the best thing to do (honestly maybe it is though, I've been doing just fine on the ladder). But in the grand scheme of things, I'm looking to reduce variance and to increase interaction.

Who is Kenji?

I would imagine that by now most people hear the name Kenji and think of Numot on Twitch, but Kenji Tsumura was a legend of the game from about 2004 to 2008. A handful of the game's absolute best ever were coming up during that time, including PV, LSV, Masashi Oiso, Shuhei Nakamura, and a bunch of others. I became a huge Magic coverage fanatic as soon as I got to college in 05 and had good enough internet to download and watch Top 8 Pro Tour coverage, and Kenji was my favorite. The dude was amazing, just truly one of the all time greats, and it's kind of a shame that more people don't know him. I would imagine that the consensus top five players of all time are Finkel, Kai, PV, LSV, and Nassif in some order, but a hill I will die on is that number six and seven are solidly Kenji Tsumura and Masashi Oiso. The numbers that those two players put up in such a short amount of time will probably never happen again, even if we go back to the old PT system some day.

He's also just so easy to root for. He's like 5'4" and is either extremely dialed in to a game or giggling and bubbly. He was friends with everyone on the Pro Tour even though he could barely even communicate with most people. Patrick Sullivan told a story on a recent episode of the Resleeveables where Kenji and Patrick's mom have a long conversation in a New Jersey convention center and PSulli is just watching, thinking it's the greatest thing ever. Pretty sure he Top 8'd that GP, too, because he always did.

To explain Pro Player cards I would also have to explain Tournament Packs, so I won't, but basically Wizards made some promotional cards with Pro Tour players on them like baseball cards and put them into sealed product, kind of like they do now with token/ad cards and stuff. For no real reason, I bought like 50 Kenji Tsumura cards and used them for all my tokens forever when I play paper magic. It's weird, but it's served me well. Instead of having to figure out what kinds of tokens my deck makes and find the right ones through all my junk, I just make sure to bring my Kenjis with me to every tournament. Kenji has spent a lot of time as a 2/2 Wolf and as a 1/1 Faerie Rogue, and even some time as a 2/2 Zombie next to a Grave Titan.

I got to play against Kenji Tsumura on the ladder a few months ago. He was playing Black/White Auras and I just nuked him with Chevill both games. But he made some pretty savvy plays, if I remember right. It seems like he's still got it.

Is Urza's Saga good in Jund? How about Ragavan?

I think the answer to Urza's Saga is probably yes, but I haven't tried it. I've been more focused on Historic for the last little bit here.

I think that a good rule for deck building in midrange decks, and this is just my own philosophy that others will probably disagree with, is that I don't mind cutting good cards in order to facilitate powerful payoffs, but I'm not a fan of playing bad cards to facilitate powerful payoffs. The Urza's Saga bullet package in the Modern Jund Delirium deck looks loose to me, but you have to do that if you want to play Saga. It's probably worth it, but I'm less into that type of thing than most. Cutting Liliana and Bloodbraid et al for Lurrus is less of a problem for me though, because it's not like you're going to replace them with bad stuff. Lurrus doesn't ask you to play with bad cards, it just asks you to play with different good cards. Maybe Urza's Saga is worth it, or maybe the shell is so good that people are Stone Raining themselves for no reason and winning anyways.

I don't have any real expertise on the matter, but I wouldn't be surprised if Urza's Saga was kind of a trap in this exact deck, but a Lurrus and Dragon's Rage Channeler version of Jund might be still be the best thing to do. Every draw step is still gas, the curve is lower but you still have lots of power, and you don't fold to graveyard hate. Classic non-Lurrus Jund still might be plenty viable, but Lurrus is a huge deal.

Ragavan is busted.

Does Jund have room for Blue?

I've tried Jund with White and I've tried Jund with Blue in Modern. I think that there are some legitimate reasons for splashing White, but splashing Blue doesn't really do it for me.

In the past I've played Wild Nacatl and Lingering Souls in Jund and been kind of impressed. It takes a certain kind of metagame for that to be the right thing to do, where you expect mirror matches and want Lingering Souls, but also want Wild Nacatl against combo decks to apply fast pressure. If those are what you expect to face, it's honestly pretty good, or else it was good when I tried it in the pre-Modern Horizons times.

I've also tried splashing Snapcaster Mage and some other blue stuff in Jund in Modern and liked it a lot less. You win the mirror, but you aren't really speeding the deck up at all, and you're not bringing a lot of new angles to the deck. If that's what you want to do, win the mirror, White might just be the better splash then anyways.

Both of these plans come with significant costs to your life total, your decks' overall consistency, and your ability to deploy your spells and keep up tempo. It greatly reduces your ability to play stuff like Raging Ravine and other utility lands and also good dual lands like Blackcleave Cliffs because you need to play more lands you'll want to fetch and you'll need to draw more fetchlands to make it happen. It's not even clear to me that Lingering Souls and Snapcaster Mage are such value all stars that they make cutting Raging Ravine worth it.

I think that Modern might be the only format where going four colors like this makes sense. You have the fetchlands and dual lands that newer formats don't have, but you don't have Wastelands and Stifles to ruin your manabase.

I know that this is completely biased, but I would imagine that there's evidence that would hold it up; I think that Jund is the best color combination for a Green and Black midrange deck most of the time. Green and Black cards complement each other nicely. You deal with the opposing big creatures with black removal, you deal with the opposing small creatures by playing big green creatures. You can use a discard spell to take away removal and counters for your threats, and your bigger threats create a bigger advantage for you. The red cards help make sure that you don't fall too far behind on the board and make sure the opponent isn't too comfortable with their life total. This is all completely theoretical and fairly likely bullshit, but every Sultai, Abzan, Golgari, or four color midrange deck just feels like it's built wrong to me. Of course there are things like Siege Rhino and Uro that get printed and are worth bending for from time to time, but this has been my experience.

Is Goblin Dark Dwellers better than Ox?

?

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Big thanks to everyone who got in with a question. This was really fun, and I hope you enjoyed. When Midnight Hunt comes out in a little bit here, I'll fire up the stream and maybe even the Youtube channel. In the meantime, thanks for reading.

It Might Be Twelve O'clock And It Might Be Three

 New spoilers, let's go.

I think that this is going to do less than Radha for us almost all of the time. Radha fights better, is easier to cast in Jund, and doesn't require any weird deck construction to get her going. Augur of Autumn is clearly at its best when you're likely to have creatures on top, and you're likely to have multiple creatures in play at once. That doesn't seem to be what we're doing these days, but there is some power there. I just don't like our chances if this is going to be a little worse than Radha most of the time and also we're not even playing Radha much.

Three drop creature that trades with Questing Beast sized creatures, deals a lot of damage, and is good against removal because they two for one themselves by using a removal spell on it. They can't really just let you beat them up with a 4/3, so they have to let you net a card at some point. It doesn't look like much, but might hit that sweet spot like Bonecrusher Giant, where there's just enough rate to threaten them effectively and also enough defensive size to hold off attackers. Trading off with a creature and getting a Clue token out of the deal is excellent when that's what you want to be doing, and forcing them to have removal and then gaining card advantage for it later is also excellent. An excellent card, my biggest concern is the plethora of other three drop cards available to us we could be playing instead. But I like it. Like I was talking about with Wrenn and Seven and new Arlinn, putting a bunch of numbers on the battlefield without doing anything disruptive isn't always going to be what we want to do, but the difference between that strategy at three mana versus four or five is huge. For what it's worth, this card seems awesome in Standard and I'm excited to try it with Esika's Chariot.

I was getting myself a little bit interested in this card until I saw the next card I'm going to show, but this one has its merits as well. 1B for 2/3 Deathtouch is already doing work for us, since it dodges a lot of the cheap removal and can't be easily attacked into. Moving past that, this gets pretty powerful in the later stages of the game, but is making decayed tokens something we're interested in doing? I like blocking, and I like forcing opponents to have removal for my creatures instead of just absorbing some damage and calling it a day. The unkicked body is relevant, for sure, and the kicker is a bonus, but none of the deals here are particularly exciting, and the tokens aren't particularly useful.

It's important to note that this is a 2 drop creature with an ability when it enters play. That is so, so much better than Kicker, since you can cast it with three mana open and in the event it gets destroyed or countered, use three mana on something else if you'd like. The same is true with the next card.

This card is incredible. I don't know when I've seen a card with this much flexibility and rate rolled into the same card. I just barely got done talking about how the problem with Goblin Dark Dwellers is that it's a five mana card in an increasingly tempo-dependent format. Bloodthirsty Adversary has the best way to play a five drop and get around this drawback, by not costing five mana.

First, two mana 2/2 Haste is a card that has its applications. Michael Majors was on The Resleeveables and said that haste is an underrated enters the battlefield ability and no one seems to realize it. The ability to go after Planeswalkers and deal some burst damage the opponent wasn't planning on is a big deal. The ability to threaten a Narset or Teferi is nice. Plus, sometimes you just have no other play on turn two and want something on the board. Additionally, this is a nice safety valve to get around graveyard hate. You can Thoughtseize them and let them keep their Rest in Peace or whatever, just start bashing.

In addition to the 2/2 Haste for 2 plan, I think there's a real argument that 3/3 Haste is as good or sometimes better than 4/4 Menace, and if that's the case, we're cruising with this card. Dark Dwellers has already been awesome for this deck, and that card comes with much less flexibility than the Adversary (even though it's a very flexible card). Even if not, there's just so much going on here.

The combination of this card and Inscription of Ruin is bonkers. First, you've got your simple Mind Rot and 3/3 haste combo, which is great. Then, you've got the removal spell plus 3/3 haste creature that completely flips a race situation. Then there's make my Adversary a 3/3 haste, use Inscription to bring back another Adversary in my graveyard and now I've got five power with haste attacking you or your planeswalkers, or get back an Ooze and eat your Kroxa or Phoenix, or get back Chevill and let him fuck people up. That's awesome, but you'll also run into situations where you're at six mana with an Inscription in your hand and rebuy your Adversary and flash back that same Inscription, basically getting the value of a full kicked Inscription but for only six mana. It's of course still awesome with Eliminate, Maelstrom Pulse, and Kolaghan's Command.

Eight mana isn't likely to happen that often, but when it does, it becomes very hard to lose. Now we're getting into Hydroid Krasis territory, where you can get tons of card advantage and a race swinging battlefield presence in one topdeck. Even a 4/4 haste that casts a removal spell and an Abundant Harvest is going to win a huge amount of games.

One more thing, cards like this become much better after sideboard when you can board in knockout blow cards and then cast them again. Go Blank is clearly a good one, but there are sure to be other things in the format as new stuff comes out. Witch's Vengeance and Necromentia come to mind, given the right metagames. Also of note, this card, for no reason, gets around Grafdigger's Cage. It also is Jegantha-ready, unlike Dark Dwellers.

I'd be shocked if Adversary wasn't the best card in the set, for us anyways. Like I said, it's got flexibility on top of flexibility, it's got rate, it's doing all the stuff we want to be doing at whatever point of the game we happen to be at. I'm pumped.

~

That's likely going to be it for spoilers for this set, I can't imagine too many cards making as much of a splash as the red Adversary and Briarbridge Tracker, but we still don't have the green Adversary so who knows. If anything really exciting pops up, then I might post about it here, but either way, I'll catch you on Twitch or on Youtube soon. Also, for no good reason other than I think it would be fun and make for some good material, hit me up on Twitter for mailbag questions. That could be a fun post. Thanks for reading.

Crazy Rooster Crowing Midnight

Spoiler season is over so that means it's spoiler time again.

A quick update on the Historic deck, here's my latest build. I've found Goblin Dark Dwellers to be great, but most of the other Jumpstart Historic cards to be only okay. Dark Dwellers requires a little bit of deckbuilding concessions, mainly maximizing your three drop removal spells to try and make sure that you have something worthwhile in your yard to cast with the Goblin. That's kind of fine, because Inscription, Maelstrom Pulse, and Kolaghan's Command are all things we wanted to be doing anyways. Some other cards from Jumpstart were okay, like Davriel and Seasoned Pyromancer, but didn't fit in the deck that's trying to maximize Dark Dwellers. Dark Dwellers just fits nicely in what this deck is trying to do and for what is going on in the format.

This card is exceptionally powerful, but doesn't really do anything for me in Historic. Too much mana, doesn't meaningfully disrupt the opponent. You're too likely to make your token and then lose. As far as purely putting numbers onto the battlefield, which is important to do, this card is excellent, even for five mana. But, that seems to be less and less what Historic is about. The reason that I'm so into Goblin Dark Dwellers right now is that it does a lot of the same stuff that W7 does, puts a big body on the table and gives you card advantage, but it does it in a way where it disrupts your opponent. I'm pretty excited for it in Standard though. Curving Esika's Chariot into this is going to be awesome, and Chariot is already one of the better cards in the format anyways. Standard 22 has looked pretty fun from what I've seen so maybe I'll give this a shot.

Speaking of Esika's Chariot, I'm not sure that Arlinn really does anything for us that Chariot doesn't. Similarly to Wrenn and Seven, she doesn't kill any opposing creatures to do anything to any of their stuff. And since we can already get that from Chariot, is Arlinn going to be able to do that better? It's possible, especially since Prismari Command seems to be everywhere right now. As far as I have the deck built at the moment, I don't think there's really room for either of these cards, but the build of the deck is very likely to change at some point, like always, so maybe we'll want to jam some cats or wolves again.

Not long ago, if you were to tell me there was a three mana 3/3 Ophidian with some significant upside, I'd have loved it. Now, I'm not so sure. The problem is that there just aren't that many opponents out there where you can expect to cast a three mana 3/3, untap with it, and attack with it the next turn. I got fooled by Nighthawk Scavenger, so I don't want to get fooled by Tovolar. But, the power is definitely there. It's certainly worth a shot.

Here's another three drop with potential. It reminds me a little of Deathgorge Scavenger, but I think it's probably more powerful. I don't disregard any graveyard hate cards, so this will always have a chance. The Ward ability is a pretty big deal against decks where you're grinding, and the back side has enough power to threaten an opponent. It doesn't really tangle on the ground with anything in the format, but there's some potential here.

It's funny, losing 2 life is a pretty significant cost to a removal spell. In theory, you want to use your cheap removal spells to keep your life total high, not empty your hand out fast. But, Historic seems to be very much about keeping pace on the battlefield instead of worrying about your life total. Right now, I'm more interested in catering my deck around Goblin Dark Dwellers, and losing 2 life twice isn't what we want to be doing, but this could be an interesting option in the right metagame.

It's been a while since I kicked a Shivan Fire, so this card is certainly an option out of the sideboard. Is it good enough to main deck? I think we'd main deck Lightning Bolt if give the chance, potentially even something like Chain Lightning, so it's not out of the question. Three is a lot more than two, though, no matter what else we tack on.

The translated version of this is 1R, Sacrifice a Vampire and discard a card: Draw two cards, activate only if an opponent lost life this turn. Similarly to my explanation on Ragavan in Modern, nothing is off the table if it's versatile and cheap and powerful enough. It gets on the board early, trades with most other cheap stuff, pressures planeswalkers, and can help you dig for value in a pinch. I don't think it can fit in the Dark Dwellers top end plan that I've got going now, but I like to keep an eye out for cheap stuff like this. Over time, the power level of eternal formats necessitate mana curves going down.

I like these a lot. One thing that's apparent with the list I posted earlier is that the mana is stretched quite a bit to hit all of our requirements, Thoughtseize on turn 1, Abundant Harvest on turn 1, and double red for Goblin Dark Dwellers. These don't help you cast your early stuff, but they do increase the count for your red sources, and without needing land types like Rootbound Crag does. By cutting those lands, we can also cut the Shocklands from the deck and have a functional mana base. I'm interested in trying to get Stomping Ground out of the deck entirely, which is tough to do if you're using Rootbound Crags. These lands also work nicely with Darkbore Pathway, since a Pathway plus either one of these lands will get you all your colors, plus the Pathway will be able to cast your one mana spell, be it Thoughtseize or Harvest. And, like most of these other lands, at the very worst they are tapped lands that add two colors, so your awkward mana draws will still be able to cast stuff, if possibly a little slower than we'd like. My best guess right now is that somewhere between three and five of these lands should be in the deck, but it will take quite a bit of testing to get the knobs turned just right.

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There's still plenty left of this set to see, and if there's another card or two that look viable then I'll post something quick here. Also, I'd love to get another Youtube video out about Goblin Dark Dwellers in Historic, if I have time. If you want to check it out, you can see my past broadcasts on Twitch. Thanks for reading.