So it's Bloomburrow spoiler season and there's already a card I want to talk about, a lot. But, I think that it's time to go over some of the overarching themes of this blog. Because it's all tied together, and this one card, while simple, is subject to all the guiding principles that I use when playing Magic, in a big way.
These are what I'm going to call the Guidelines of this blog. They are the themes, maybe beliefs, that I try to apply when I'm building decks, playing games, theorizing, writing, everything. And these aren't hard and fast rules, and they are changing constantly and being tweaked a little bit to fit around formats and metagames and life. But ultimately, these are the fundamental drivers that dictate Magic for me, and I hope that even a piece of it works for you as well. Here we go.
1. We play one deck.
I break this guideline all the time, of course, but I think there's real value to playing one deck as much as you can. It's that you become an expert at that deck, over time, and it leads to advantages in experience that you'll have every time you sit down to play. No matter who I'm facing, I know that I know my deck better than they know theirs, and that in all likelihood I know the specific matchup better than they do too.
Also, that doesn't mean that you never change the cards in your deck, in fact the opposite. You'll have the experience to know that one specific card you're playing is not working and change that for something else, or maybe you want to shift the focus of the deck a little bit. For me, Jund is an evolving project, and there are sub-projects and offshoots of it, but the idea is to be constantly getting closer to the right recipe. More on that in #4.
2. Midrange.
I think it was Gerry Thompson who recently said that Jund is a good deck for making you feel like you have agency, which I definitely agree with because you're making a lot of decisions, but you actually make lots of decisions with all decks and some people just don't realize it. But what midrange decks truly do for you, the player who has given themselves this extra bonus experience, is the tools to beat whatever you're facing, and the ability to play different kinds of games based on what you feel you need to do. This is both in-game and and in deckbuilding. You can have high or low levels of synergy, aggression, control, card advantage, and can utilize them how you want in each game. Your deck is an extension of yourself, and your goal is to win the game, by whatever way looks like the best to you. Reid wrote an article a long time ago about choosing a deck to play in Legacy, and he basically said, play one deck all the time so you master it, and play a deck with Brainstorm. We basically do the same, except instead of Brainstorm we play Thoughtseize, the black Brainstorm.
Midrange also just lets you play whatever cards you think are the best. Ideally they fit alongside what you're doing, but that's not that hard because what you're doing isn't that focused. If a specific creature removal spell lines up great, then play it. If no one has answers to some creature, jam it. No rules. You're in charge.
3. It's okay to lose to decks, it's not okay to lose to cards.
This is basically an extension of "the graveyard trap" that I've talked about a lot, where some of the most powerful things you can do in Jund colors is gain card advantage using graveyard interactions, and if you pack your deck full of them, you'll end up losing to graveyard hate out of the opposing sideboard. You could be playing against a deck where you built your deck to beat it, you have a huge experience advantage, you're outplaying your opponent, and then you just lose to Rest in Peace. When you fold yourself into one dimension, you end up losing games you should be winning. When you play against a deck that is a tough matchup, like Enigmatic has been a tough one for me the last few years, then you'll often lose but the opponent just has an intrinsic advantage against you. They had to put in the work, i.e. play that deck specifically, in order to win that game. The same thing is true with other avenues you could take your midrange build. If a single card is going to stop your entire deck, then diversify your cards, because it's not hard to put Rest in Peace, or Shaper's Sanctuary, or whatever, into your sideboard.
4. Package System
Lately I've been building Jund decks with slightly different focuses, maybe not exactly micro-synergies but not macro-synergies either, and trying to line them up with the right metagames. Because we're a midrange deck, any specific card in our colors is a viable card to play, but even further than that, we want to be in the right place on what Zvi Mowshowitz calls the Metagame Clock. That's a complex topic in its own right, but the idea is that you want your cards and deck to be somewhere in a range of quick and cheap to slow and powerful. So, not only do you want to play the right cards, you want the mana curve, the mana access, all of it to be tuned with what decks you expect to face in mind.
So Package System is just having experience with a bunch of variations of what is basically the same deck, that are accomplishing different things, and knowing which one to use at a given time. Of course, you never actually know which one, but that's the point of testing them out. For instance, I had been playing around with a list in Explorer recently that topped out with a handful of Hostile Investigator, and I found myself boarding them out fairly often because they were too slow. So, I loaded up my version of the deck with no four drops and four copies of Cenote Scout and two Evolved Sleeper, which dramatically shifts the focus of the deck, or what I like to call the "gear" of the deck, and I fared much better.
5. We don't play bad cards, but it's okay to play different good cards.
There are times when there’s a card you want to play, but it needs the right cards around it to facilitate it. Okay, sure, so you add your maindeck Haywire Mite and your Pithing Needle to your deck to make your Urza’s Sagas work. Then you start looking at hands that have mediocre situational one mana artifacts in them, and wonder if it was worth it. If you can make the decision that all of those semi-dead draws are worth the payoff of playing Saga, then by all means, but I know I don’t have the stomach for that.
A different situation, though, is when you find cards that have synergy with specific things you already are okay with playing. For instance, you want to play Chevill. That’s great, because you’re already playing a bunch of removal spells. A smart idea might be to play creatures that can trigger a Chevill as well, like Bloodtithe Harvester and Bonecrusher Giant might be better choices than other potential choices for those slots. Similarly, you won’t want to play Vraska’s Contempt or Eat to Extinction over Bedevil, since the creature needs to hit the graveyard. The difference between Chevill and Urza’s Saga in these scenarios is that the cards you’re using to facilitate Chevill are cards you’re fine with drawing, even if you don’t draw Chevill himself. You’ll never say “my hand sucks, I drew Bloodtithe Harvester and Bonecrusher Giant” but you may find yourself saying “my hand sucks, I drew Pithing Needle and Shadowspear.” Again, this is a guideline that gets broken all the time, and often it’s well worth it, but I think it takes a lot more for me to be okay with that in a deck where you’re just playing normal Magic.
6. Versatility and Optionality
Abrupt Decay is a versatile card. It can hit creatures, enchantments, artifact, planeswalkers, battles, tokens, ward creatures you name it. That’s great, because there are a lot of different cards out there that people play, and you’re going to need to get rid of them.
Optionality is something different, where a card not only can do different things, it can be different things. A card with Kicker or a similar ability (lots of abilities are basically Kicker) can occupy multiple points in your mana curve. The reason that’s important is that you can’t usually dictate what the top of your deck is going to deliver. Sometimes you want a cheap card, sometimes you need a more powerful expensive card. Sometimes you are tight on mana, sometimes you have extra mana going to waste. We like Optionality because it allows you to circumvent some of the inherent randomness in the rules of the game. Cards that scale up in power when you add more mana let you avoid having the wrong half of your deck. It’s critical in this kind of a deck because we don’t have a nut draw that we are hoping to see anyways. One of the ways you can win with a less focused and linearly powerful deck is to be more consistent than the opponent.
That’s a lot of it, but not the whole thing. Okay, so let’s talk about Fireglass Mentor.
So here we have a card that makes you jump through some hoops, but essentially boils down to a 2/1 Ophidian for two mana. Cheap threats that apply pressure and generate real card advantage are some of the best things in Magic. Let’s go over how we can apply our guidelines to making this work.
For Guideline 1, I am pretty much going to be working under the assumption that it’s going to take many iterations before exactly figuring out the recipe to make this work within the rest of the deck. There’s a lot going on here, even though it’s a simple card, but since there’s only one deck to be concerned about, we’ve got plenty of time to bang our head against the wall figuring it out.
Guideline 2 dictates that we are playing a midrange deck, and Fireglass Mentor is an aggressively minded card, on its face. But really what I see from Fireglass Mentor is a tempo card. We use Thoughtseize to strip away removal spells for it, then use removal spells to clear the way. At that point, you are working with an Ophidian that is connecting until the opponent can figure out a way to stop it. Once they have, it’s often too late.
I don’t mind having an aggressive slant to a midrange deck, and I also think that I like this plan for Fireglass more than I’d like simply casting it with a bunch of aggressive creatures and burn spells, then hoping to hit more aggressive creatures and burn spells off its trigger. Instead, we get to choose from a variety of potential hits off its trigger, because we play a variety of different cards. Similarly, we are allowed to play the cards that complement Fireglass well, because there’s no real type of card that would be out of place.
Guideline 3 tells us that we can’t just play a deck that focuses solely on the Fireglass plan. There’s a ton of power packed into the disruption/Fireglass/clear blockers plan, but it’s still just a two mana creature, and so it’s as solid as you’d expect a two mana creature to be. The opponent could have, say, a protection from Black creature that puts a damper on us, or extra Portable Holes and Fatal Pushes, or some sort of 1/1 token generator. It wouldn’t be hard to do that in an opposing deck, so we might not want to plan on just crossing our fingers and hoping that the opponent doesn’t draw an answer. Instead, we want to have a variety of threats that work well in conjunction with the Fireglass plan but also when the Fireglass engine isn’t running. Bloodtithe and Bonecrusher are easy answers to this, but so might Chevill, Evolved Sleeper, etc.
Guideline 4 just suggests that Fireglass is one of many ways to build the deck, and that’s worth remembering. Fireglass will clearly be at its best when we are the aggressor, and we can choose to play that way more often, but really we want to be able to get under the opponent more than the other way around. Fireglass isn’t going to be that good on defense. So in meta games where we might be on defense more often, there’s a little bit you can work with to make it so you are the lower-to-the-ground deck in more matchups, but you can also just shelve the Fireglass package and play something more naturally suited to what you’re facing. But, I will say that it can also be a mistake to too quickly assume you need to try a different package, just the same as it’s easy to assume you need to try a new entire deck. I’m confident we can make Fireglass work.
Guideline 5 wants us to figure out if we can maximize Fireglass while also keeping the quality of cards in the deck high. So first we want to know what we need to maximize it, and for Fireglass, it’s a actually a complex puzzle.
First we use Thoughtseize to clear their answers. Do we want Duress as well? Maybe, but Duress is a little weaker by itself, so I’m not sold yet. Then we want the Fireglasses, but of course we can only play four copies. Do we want something similar as a backup? Chevill is honestly kind of close, but not a lot of two drops so the same thing as Fireglass. Chevill is a maybe. Then we need removal to make sure that we can get in and get our triggers. I like Bonecrusher, since it can go upstairs and get the trigger in a board stall. Fatal Push obviously. Bloodchief’s Thirst and Strangle start to look good because, if all goes according to plan, we’ll be casting them in our first main phase anyways. If we can put in ways to incidentally case Fireglass to trigger, then we can still be getting our card advantage when in a board stall. Invasion of Azgol makes the opponent take 1, Mosswood Dreadknight has trample, Stomp can go the to dome, stuff like that is worth extra consideration. Then, we need to be able to play the cards we get off the trigger. That means they need to be cheap, so you can cast them, and be relevant on more board states. Bonecrusher and Mosswood are great since they are two mana cards when you need them to be but are big spells when you have the mana for them. Evolved Sleeper comes to mind as something you can hit for cheap and then pump mana into later when you have extra. There are like three new cards in Bloomburrow that are worth talking about for this effect as well, and I’ll talk about them later. Also, you can always just play a land, so we are going to want to set up the deck to not play a land precombat, and since that’s the case, we aren’t going to be slamming our biggest stuff and then clearing the way to attack. Cards like Vraska Golgari Queen and Chandra Torch of Defiance might not be what we are looking for.
All that said, there are certain good cards that we are going to want to skip on, but different good cards that will play in their place. None of this stuff is going to look bad in our opening hand or during a game where the Fireglass engine never is a factor, they’re all just solid cards you can use to win a game.
For Guideline 6, in a similar vein, cards that are more consistently applicable and cards with varying mana costs are going to be our best bets for hits off of Fireglass. If versatility and optionality are important for us, we’ll want a lot of it alongside Fireglass. Partly because they will let us hit usable cards more often when Fireglass triggers, and partly because Fireglass doesn’t itself lend very much in that regard.
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I’m very excited for Fireglass Mentor, not only because of how powerful it seems to be, but because it’s going to be a fun deck tuning puzzle to try and solve. Bloomburrow looks like a ton of fun so far, which is not something I’ve felt about a new set in a long time. I’ll try and get something into writing about the rest of the cards that are interesting to me before the set comes out. Thanks for reading.
