For the last two winters, my wife and I have taken on this little project. We make donuts in our kitchen on Sunday nights, then early on Monday morning, we hand them out to folks driving to work. I live in a very small town in Vermont, so we set up shop on the busiest road in town. The whole ordeal takes all of Sunday and some of Saturday to actually do, so it's hard to really get anything else done during those times. During the week I've been doing a lot of work on the road away from home. Hence, not a lot of streams or blog posts recently.
Additionally, it's been hard to really nail down what I want to be doing. I've dipped my toes into Historic here and there since the Alchemy release, but I still kind of hate it. Part of that is the Alchemy cards, but another part is that I'm more interested in formats that match up with paper so I can practice IRL formats again, anticipating maybe playing in them in the near future.
Modern is okay but there are two problems, one is the Lurrus ban, which is lame, and two is that Ragavan and Urza's Saga cost a lot. I have Cardhoarder rental, which is awesome, but it's not enough to cover all of that. And I think you do want to be playing those cards if you're going to be playing Jund in Modern. I really like what Sanitoeter on twitch has been doing lately in Modern. He writes (and maybe runs?) a website called Greatnessatanycost.com, which is dope.
Anyways, the donuts project is done for the winter now, and I'm looking for something outside of Historic to stream and do. I decided a neat project for me would be to make a goal of winning a challenge on Magic Online at some point this year on stream. Then I put out a poll on Twitter to ask what format people wanted to see me do this in, and the most voted answer was Pioneer. That's cool, I like Pioneer.
This is what I've been toying with lately.
I can't in honesty claim that this build is tuned perfectly, but the engine that's going on here works well in Pioneer. It's a Golgari deck, which means it's going to be a little bit slower and less aggressive than a Jund deck. Instead of cheap removal and putting emphasis on life total pressure, we have versatile removal and put an emphasis on resource pressure. I mean, there's still cheap removal and aggressive creatures, but it's going to be less so.
There's a couple reasons that I've liked this better than a Jund build in this format. The mana in the Jund deck was okay, but there were certain cards that you really couldn't get away with playing. Courser of Kruphix has been worth it by itself, but stuff like Murderous Rider and Liliana the Last Hope are also great in the format. Also, going with only two colors opens up the ability to play more utility lands, like Field of Ruin and Boseiju and Takenuma. Because of that, and because of a couple of 'value' Fabled Passage that I'm playing, Witherbloom Command gets maximized here.
Witherbloom Command has been excellent in most of the formats I've been dabbling in as of late. When the best things going are cheap creature decks and Witch's Oven/Trail of Crumbs/Oni Cult Anvil, and folks are playing stuff like Portable Hole and stuff like that, Command starts to get really, really good. As long as you can depend on getting a land back, you get to play a two mana spell that turns itself into either a card advantage spell, or a race-winning spell with the Lightning Helix effect. I mean seriously, those are the two ways you win at Magic, through tempo or through card advantage, and Witherbloom Command lets you do whichever one you want. When you can reasonably expect to be able to use one of the destructive effects on this card, and the land base of the deck is tuned a little to support it, it's an incredible card. Believe it or not, it's been the stones in Vintage, if that's any indication of how powerful it can be.
There's a little bit of graveyard synergy here to round it all out, with the Command and Grim Flayer kind of combo'ing together, and they both work with Courser as well. It's just where I like my decks, enough graveyard interaction to keep up with some of the card advantage blue decks have, but not enough to get totally wrecked when they have Rest in Peace.
The sideboard is very rough right now, but what I can definitely say is that Sarulf and Culling Ritual do a lot of work. That might seem like a lot of that type of effect, but decks that flood the board with cheap garbage are all over the place in the format. The rest of the board is up in the air, but I would either keep as is or increase the number of Sarulfs and Rituals if you were to take this deck for a spin.
Like I said, the "Win a Pioneer Challenge" goal is probably going to be a year long process, so I should mention this thing. We don't get to play with it for a month, but when it comes out, I'll certainly give it a try. I can't tell you right now whether I'll add red permanently to the deck though. There's a few reasons I'm excited for what this does for us, but I'm trying to be cautious about it. All the things that I said about why I like the straight Golgari build still are true, and this will make the mana better, of course, but a splash is never free.
First, this is a card that has utility alongside Witherbloom Command. However, it's not a ton of utility. You can't really expect to be cycling for three mana very often, but in a late game situation it's bound to come up. Second, it's a Swamp, which means that it might be viable to fit some Castle Locthwains back in the deck. If we're playing four enters-tapped lands, then I like Hissing Quagmire a little less.
Red opens us up to some cards that I miss playing, like Dreadbore, Bonecrusher Giant, and Kolaghan's Command. If Witherbloom Command is great against Oni Cult Anvil etc, so is Kolagahn's Command, so that's a nice one to have. Bonecrusher is a one-card wrecking crew in itself as well. But the cards we'd be replacing, Murderous Rider and Bloodchief's Thirst most likely, aren't exactly bad. That's the other thing about this whole quandry: not only do you have to get the mana to work, but you have to be sure that the red cards you want to play are better than the alternatives you have access to. Like, for instance, I've been impressed with Abrupt Decay in the format for a lot of the same reasons Witherbloom Command has been good. It's a clean answer to Graveyard Trespasser and is great against Greasefang. Cutting it for a red card is a tough sell at the moment.
I think that the deal breaker for me, right at this moment, is Courser of Kruphix. If we can depend on having 1GG on turn four (which is the best time to cast Courser), then it could still work. Or, alternatively, if the format moves to a place where Courser isn't as good as it once was, then we won't need double green anymore. I don't know what that would look like, because Courser is so good. I just can't stop playing that card.
Fable of the Mirror Breaker is a card that went a little bit under my own radar for the Neon Whatever previews, but from what I've seen and played, it's solid. The problem with it is that it's pretty slow, but it's a ton of cardboard, lots of ways to play it, and helps turn your bad draws into good ones. It also happens to have synergy with a lot of what we have going on already. It's an enchantment to help give us delirium, and it loots to help fuel delirium. It lets you pitch lands to help set up a Witherbloom Command. A Courser in play helps you determine whether and what you want to discard. Plus, in a little bit of an Esika's Chariot kind of way, it just has synergy with our plan.
I've talked a little bit about this before, but it's often not enough for a card like this to just provide card advantage, I want to to be actually interacting with the opponent or finding you the cards you need to interact. Compare this to something like Esika's Chariot or Wrenn and Seven. Those cards are more powerful in a vacuum, sure, but when what you actually want to be doing is not just putting a bunch of stuff into play and instead want to be finding your Damping Sphere or Culling Ritual or Go Blank, then those types of cards just aren't enough. Pioneer specifically is a format where you're very interested in drawing your sideboard haymakers, so the digging here is excellent. Dig into the card I need, beat you up with two 2/2s. Don't get me wrong, I love a Chariot, but in Pioneer at the moment, cards like this are more what we're looking for. All the threats in this deck can either dig for sideboard bullets, like Courser, Grim Flayer, and Lolth, or they do some amount of disruption of our opponent on their own, like Scavenging Ooze and Liliana.
Between this and the cycling ability on ZPG, I'm interested in playing a high land count in this deck. Another thing that Witherbloom Command really likes is a high land count, so you can hit blind flips with it more often. That means that our red splash will be easier, since you'll have more sources of each color just because you'll have more total lands. Fable helps you deal with your mana flooding by letting you pitch excess lands and draw new cards. I could definitely see 26 being the right thing to do for a red splash.
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The red splash is all speculation for another time. I'm sure that New Capenna will have a bunch of cool cards to go over, so I'll definitely be doing some work on that during spoiler time. Like, when you think about it, Siege Rhino could just be Jund colored card and still work thematically.
Anyways, I'm going to be trying to stream at least one Pioneer challenge a weekend until I win one. So check me out coming weekend, they start at 5pm Eastern USA time on Saturday and 9am Sunday. Thanks for reading.
