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.