The Grass Ain't Greener, The Wine Ain't Sweeter

Degen Tournament

Yesterday I played in a Standard tournament run by Degenerate Gaming. I went 4-2 with this, but took my losses early and missed on breakers. I played against two mono-green decks and against four various blue deck brews, and beat all the blue decks and lost to the green decks.

Tracker is just excellent in this format. It trades early with big aggro deck creatures, or it pressures life totals, all while generating card advantage. The blue decks all had a hard time with any hand that had Tracker in it, especially when backed up by either more pressure from Chariot or by Inscription generating more card advantage. Grakmaw was also good in the three drop slot, pressuring opponents, being a combo with Chariot, and leaving material behind when the opponent tried to remove it.

My Jund deck played Bloodthirsty Adversary, and while Adversary was clearly great whenever I drew it, it left me playing more reactive spells than I feel like I should have. My Green opponents had lots of Old Growth Trolls and Snakeskin Veils to make spot removal not work very well, plus Chariot is pretty good against spot removal too. I think that what I've found in this format is that spot removal for a few turns and then turning the corner doesn't cut it, or at least isn't as good here as it would be in other formats. I think a better plan is to try and build an equally powerful board presence as your aggro opponents, then win with bigger trumps. I've loved Tovolar's Huntmaster so far. Tainted Adversary has proven to be good in this format, since it trades off with anything out of the green deck, but also applies pressure to the blue decks. It's not busted with Inscription like Bloodthirsty is, but it's been good in conjunction there.

I don't think that the red splash is that problematic for the deck, but I did lose a game to getting hit by multiple Field of Ruins. If you're not on the Bloodthirsty Adversary plan, then it's a little bit less necessary. Moving forward, I think I would play something more along the lines of this. The mana is a little less awkward, but most of the power is still there. There's less spot removal and more cards to create board presence, notably Gnarled Professor, which is another card advantage generating big-stats-guy.

Degenerate Gaming is a cool program that you should check out. It was a fun and well run tournament, big thanks to the TOs and casters.

Bans

After having played this tournament, I can't really understand anymore why people think that Alrund's Epiphany is even close to ban worthy. Standard is great, it's the best it's been in years, and there are lots of tools to beat whatever you're going to face. I had a great experience brewing for, testing for, and playing in a Standard Tournament this weekend, and I even learned a lot and have new ideas to fix the problems I faced. If that isn't the experience you want to have as a Magic player, then Magic just might not be for you.

Bans are really, really bad. They price people out of the game. You get wildcards back in Arena, but on MTGO and in paper, you're just out the amount you put in. Sometimes your whole deck gets blown up in the process of banning a single card, and now the deck is unplayable and not worth anything in trade. Clamoring for bans is an extremely privileged thing to do, especially in Standard, which is supposed to be the most accessible format, and especially for something as innocuous and borderline as Alrund's Epiphany.

As far as Historic goes, I guess I don't really care that much about Memory Lapse being banned. Jeskai and Azorius control decks are still fine. Memory Lapse is a great card, but it's certainly not the reason that Jund specifically was losing to control, and honestly whatever the decks look like going forward could be even worse for Jund. I think banning it will end up having a net negative effect on the format, since it's opened the door for Five Color Niv Mizzet to become prevalent, but whatever.

Historic

I'm trying to find the card to bring in against Five Color Niv to beat it, but I'm not sure one exists. When there's a deck like this that's such a bizarre strategy, often there will be a single card that can take it out in one blow. For Field of the Dead it was Massacre Wurm, for Forsaken Monument it was By Force. So far the best thing I can think of is Cleansing Wildfire, but that's just a speedbump. It's a really good speedbump, but still not what we're looking for exactly. Maybe with Bloodthirsty, it's enough of a one-two punch to really knock that deck out. Now that the Standard event is done with, I'll get back to testing.

I think it's also worth remembering that Niv Mizzet, even if it is a popular deck and a successful and hard to beat one, is still just one deck. If you play four creature decks and one Niv Mizzet deck and go 4-1, that's a great record to have, and it might not be worth messing around with the deck too much to fix that one loss. If the next day you re-tune the deck, play those same matchups and go 3-2 but beat the Niv Mizzet deck, you've gone backwards. If Niv continues to get more popular, then maybe it's worth some drastic changes, but for now I think it's okay to just take your medicine, so long as you're confident elsewhere. Also, what's nice about Cleansing Wildfire is that it's actually a little useful in some other matchups and doesn't require a whole rebuild of the deck to include.

Crimson Vow

Cleave looks great. It's basically Kicker with extra steps, but I still like it. As for this card, I think it's too slow for Historic but it's not that far off. Fixing your mana for the rest of the game for just one mana is a great deal. Note that building around this card is way different than something like Attune with Aether or even Fabled Passage, because if you've tutored up all your basics, you can just use the Cleave ability instead. One Swamp, Forest, and Mountain aren't a huge sacrifice to make, especially if opponents are going to start playing more Field of Ruin and Cleansing Wildfire effects. The other part of why this might be okay in Historic is the sideboard space it saves you, and the volatile nature of the decks in the format. All of a sudden your one Witch's Vengeance turns into five, your one Klothys turns into five, your one Grafdigger's Cage, your one Tergrid God of Fright, etc. As more knockout blow silver bullets get printed and more combo decks get printed, this can gain a little bit of utility. Again, I think it's too slow for the format ultimately, but it's doing some good things.

This one has potential, but I think it'll see more play in Modern than in Historic. In Modern it looks great to me. It hits most of the stuff that Inquisition hits, including Snapcaster Mage, Counterspell, and every card out of a Lurrus deck. The added bonus is that it hits Primeval Titan and Karn and stuff like that when you need it to. Is three mana a lot to pay to get rid of a Titan? Sure, but it's better than taking 36 damage. Lots of games against Valakut decks turn out to all boil down to whether you had Thoughtseize or you had Inquisition, so Dread Fugue can do both. In Historic, I don't really like it as much, since 4 Thoughtseize and 0 Inquisition seems to be the thing to do anyways. I find myself pretty rarely taking something with Thoughtseize that costs 2 or less in Historic, but hey, more ways to snag a Niv Mizzet or Teferi might be worth it, depending on how the metagame shakes out.

Cool card, but I think it's too bad. 2/3 Flying Lifelink would be awesome in a format where the default aggro decks are red decks, but instead they are Green decks and the green decks just crush this thing. Maybe worth playing in the Golgari Standard deck I posted earlier, but the Professor is pretty nice too.

Call me crazy, but this is kind of okay. It's a 0/4 wall for B that has 2B: Transform, but you can only flip it as a sorcery. Then the other side is a 3/4 Menace that Vendilion Cliques them. It's got big toughness, attacks on turn three for three damage, disrupts the opponent a little bit, and can stop early attackers. All kinds of variable mana costs on this thing, since you can pay one mana early and three mana later or four mana all at once. I'm not sure what deck it goes into, but it's a solid card. I like it. I think it's worth trying.

Of course, I'm waiting for something like 

1BG Sorcery - Cleave 1B, Destroy target creature [or planeswalker, or artifact, or enchantment]. 

Or how about

1G Sorcery - Cleave 2RG, Create a 3/2 red Wolf creature token [with "when this creature enters the battlefield it deals damage equal to its power to any target.].

There's a lot of design space here, so we'll see what they do with it.

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That's about it for me. If more cool stuff comes from the new set I'll talk about it here. The tournament vods should be up on my Twitch channel for a little bit if you're interested. I had some wild games near the back end of the tournament but was ultimately out of contention anyways. Also, I played some Pokemon Blue and leveled up my Sandslash a bunch between rounds. Thanks for reading.

Summertime Done Come And Gone, My Oh My

I've been away for work for a little while, but still had some time to hit Mythic last month. This month, I've been working on Standard as much as I have Historic.

Here's a link if you're interested. It's pretty simple and seems to have game against most things. The sideboard is a little bit warped to fight the Alrund's Epiphany decks but that's not the worst thing in the world. It's possible that Duress is a main deck cards these days, but I try to do that as little as possible.

This deck certainly plays out more like a Bloodbraid 2009 style Jund deck than a Modern Jund list or even a Huntmaster 2012 Jund list. The threats are hard to deal with but are capable of winning the game by themselves if left unchecked, so they have to be dealth with. You don't kill every single creature the opponent plays, but you kill enough of them to let your top end get online. We also get lots of good value lands, which is nice because it lets us play a high land count.

It seems like the power in this format lies either in playing Esika's Chariot or Alrund's Epiphany, so we play Chariot and do a little bit of work to maximize it, but not a lot. Wrenn and Seven and Briarbridge Tracker are just good cards no matter what, and I like the rest of our threat suite even though more synergistic stuff is available, like Tainted Adversary or Reckless Stormseeker. Our way to win the Chariot mirrors isn't to have better Chariot synergy, it's killing their Chariot.

The mana works out pretty well. We get to utilize as many slowlands as we want and don't have to play any Snarls. That said, I'm not 100% sure that the red spells are worth it. Bloodthirsty Adversary is great, but doesn't seem to excel in this format as much as it does in Historic.

For what it's worth, and this could be it's own separate post, but having played Standard with this deck has not made me feel like anything should be banned in the format. Esika's Chariot and Alrund's Epiphany are clearly very good, but if those are the boogeymen of the format, then I think we're in a good place. This is the type of deck that intrinsically should be getting creamed by Izzet Turns and I haven't found the matchup to be that bad.

In Historic, this is my latest list. I wouldn't say that Adversary has been a revelation, but it's very good. It does all the things I liked about Goblin Dark Dwellers but with none of its downsides and most of its upsides. Plus, there's lots of neat tricks, in large part in concert with Inscription of Ruin. It isn't the most off the wall powerful card in the world, but if you give a card enough little abilities and tricks you can do with it, eventually one of them will be a route to win a game. The amount of things you can flash back, the timing that you cast it, the haste, all of it is a nightmare for the opponent to play around. Adversary is a card that rewards practice.

Not trying to subtweet (or sub-discord-chat or whatever) but I still think that I like Abundant Harvest. It's a card that doesn't see a lot of play, but at the same time there aren't that many decks that meet all its requirements. You're green, you don't have any spells that add mana, and you don't have Blue to use Opt or Consider instead (which you could argue are worse, but okay). Few decks meet all those requirements.

At the moment I'm not interested in cutting it from the deck. If you're running into Thalia and Esper Sentinel in a third of your matches or something, then maybe that's different, but that hasn't been my experience yet. I also think that it's totally fine to sideboard Harvest out in that matchup when you have a 24 land deck, which I do as of now. We'd ostensibly be bringing in cheap removal, so the overall mana cost of the deck goes down and 24 land seems more suitable.

Harvest is the kind of card that you might not realize is winning you games. It turns mulligans into keeps and turns sketchy hands into smooth draws. It also essentially reduces the number of cards in your deck which will help you find your good stuff after sideboard. It's the kind of card that I'm envious of my blue opponents for getting to play. I think it's totally reasonable to try and cut it if you don't like it, as is the case with any card, but it will be hard to gauge whether you're winning more or less without it. I do recognize its downsides, but I know I've been happy so far.

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I did some streaming on Twitch this weekend and might do some more soon. I like the weekend morning stream time, it's a nice relaxing way to start the day. Thanks for reading.