Entering the Arena

One of the first games I ever got really deep into was Diablo 2. It was so addictive, but in a really good way. What I really liked was how there was always multiple goals, one to win the fight you were in, but also to upgrade your character. Creativity was rewarded when you figured out a new build for your skills, grinding was rewarded when you got new sweet items and your character got more powerful, and straight up being good at the game was rewarded, because the fights were actually pretty hard. I spent countless hours playing that game, looking for items and fighting monsters. The social aspect was awesome, too, because the end goal was to be able to PvP your buddies with your decked out Amazons and Barbarians.

When I spent more of my time in Magic, starting out was a lot of the same, except real life. I went to battle at FNM every Friday night to try and practice, test out my creativity (aka badness), and hopefully win some battles and acquire new loot. I started out playing some less than stellar decks, but eventually made friends with some players who kinda sorta knew what they were doing and hooked me up with some cards and practiced with me until I could start consistently doing well at FNM. That beginning couple years of playing Magic was some of the most fun I've ever had with the game, even though I was quite a doofus and never won anything of consequence.

Over the past few years, new online games have popped up that recreate the Magic experience. Deep one-on-one decision driven battles, but rewarding players for grinding and collecting and becoming better. Solforge was really fun. I loved it, and I dove in deep in that game. I backed the Kickstarter, and even though I haven't played for a long time because the servers were taken offline or whatever, it's still my most played Steam game by a long, long time. I also started playing Hearthstone quite a bit. I started out small, but went pretty much free to play to having a sizeable collection and playing some cool decks.

Magic is still just the best game, though, and MTG Arena is super awesome. I love that I'm going in on the ground floor again and starting from nothing. Opening an uncommon that's potentially usable is really exciting again. The decks that you get to start with are pretty much garbage, so transforming one into something playable is a long road, and to go from that into something that is actually good is a journey. It's so much fun.

To make it even better, new Standard seems great. The rares I crafted for my new deck were Overgrown Tomb, and I haven't looked back. Vraska, Relic Seeker has been awesome in the format for me, District Guide has been great, The Eldest Reborn and Ravenous Chupacabra are great for turning the corner. I think that with some more good uncommon curve fillers I can get somewhere I'm happy with. Oh, and Underrealm Lich has been absurd. Untapping with that is game over a huge amount of the time, and it's super easy to untap with it since it protects itself. It's very Scarab God-esque in that way.

What's really cool is that when the next set comes out, I'm going to be pretty well set up to transition right into Jund. If you were playing Standard back in the days of Return to Ravnica and Innistrad, you'll remember that the mana for format was awesome. The Woodland Cemetery lands meshed so well with the Shocklands and every three color combination was playable and good. I obviously gravitated to Thragtusk and Huntmaster of the Fells, but you could pretty much do whatever you wanted. That's where we're going to be at going forward when this set comes out. Currently, I could play Rootbound Crag and Dragonskull Summit and try and get there with Mountains, but it's pretty tough. Eight more dual lands would help a lot. And who knows what awesome multicolor red/black or green/red cards will come out, or maybe some busted black/white card will be printed and we play Abzan instead.

Straight Golgari has been solid, but maybe a little underwhelming. I'm running into the 'wrong half of the deck' problem that arises when you play Doom Blades in a format with a good control deck. Teferi is definitely enemy number one, but enemy number two is Steel Leaf Champion, which is also brutal and requires a completely different set of answers. One of my next moves on the account is going to be trying to craft a playset of Knight of Malice as a card that can slip under countermagic but also plays well against the Boros and Red decks. Duress is a blank so often, and Llanowar Elves is a terrible late game draw, but I've got both of them in there at the moment because I don't have access to anything much better. Luckily, the good two and three drops in the format for this color combo are uncommons instead of rares and mythics.

My end goal is for the deck to look something like this:

4 branchwalker
4 jadelight
3 knight of malice
4 district guide
4 doggo
2 vraska
2 Underrealm Lich

3 eldest reborn
2 walk plank
2 moment of craving
2 vraska's contempt
2 cast down
1 AT

3 Memorial to Folly
4 OGT
4 Woodland Cemetery
7 forest
4 swamp
1 golgari guildgate

I decided that I'm going to stream all of my MTG Arena playing, going from the ground up. It won't supplant my MTGO playing or videos, but it's pretty easy to just flip the stream on and battle some people, so I'm definitely into that. Also, Twitch saves all your videos, so you can watch me work from my humble beginnings to something more meaningful (hopefully). Check it out here and check out my YouTube channel here. I'm going to try to keep a schedule of one video per week, and not Jund every time, just most times. Especially when I'm super psyched about Narnam Renegading people.

Thanks for reading!

Current Events

Hey folks, here's a rundown of what decks I've been tinkering on for the last little bit, plus some spoiler season goodies.

Pauper MBC

This deck has been doing well so far. Pauper is a weird place where every card is bad and this deck is just a 2-for-1 machine. It's so hard to get punished for playing things like Chittering Rats and Phyrexian Ragers because it's so much harder to get tempo'd out of the game than in other formats. I don't think Sign in Blood has ever been usable in constructed, but here it's gas, because the life loss and the two mana spent aren't making or breaking the game.

My list differentiates from other lists I've seen online quite a bit. Specifically, the Duresses and the Innocent Bloods, along with all four copies of Chainer's Edicts are a departure from most lists. Y'all youngin's might not remember MBC of the old days, when you'd Cabal Coffers your Nantuko Shade for 18 after you Mind Sludged all your opponent's cards away. These cheap and easy one-for-one trades are really what set up the deck to turn the corner and I've been liking them a lot. Another difference here is that I'm playing 5 more cycling lands and a value Rakdos Carnarium, so the first couple of turns often will involve using a mana or two to cycle lands or playing lands that enter the battlefield tapped, so one-mana spells are especially good for getting out of the early game.

Cuombajj Witches are usually an automatic 4-of  in these lists, but they kind of cut down on the cards you can play with them. I really like Liliana's Specter. It's like a Chittering Rats that's really good against Delver of Secrets, but you can't play it and Cuombajj Witches on the same battlefield. That said, I have a couple of Witches in the board that will come in against decks with one-toughness creatures, and in those instances, the Specters aren't that good anyways. The absence of Witches also makes our Innocent Bloods not as damaging.

I almost wish I could play three more Duresses in the sideboard, but I'm happy here with most of it, just a smattering of discard spells and value stuff along with one of the format's only sweepers. Nihil Spellbomb comes up from time to time, but it's solid enough against the Mnemonic Wall decks to warrant an inclusion.

I'm tempted to splash a color. Red would give us Faithless Looting, Blue would give us Mulldrifter, White would give us Thraben Inspector (don't laugh). However, we would lose out on the value of all the cycling lands, which really is one of the reasons I think this deck is so good honestly. You run out of gas so infrequently that none of the additions to bolster your late game actually would do so.

Modern Jund

Narnam Renegade has been pretty good. It seems like in every matchup you would either like a quick creature to put pressure on with or a one-mana Deathtouch blocker. Death's Shadow, Champion of the Parish, Hollow One, Tarmogoyf, Gurmag Angler, they all die to this thing, and it clocks pretty well if you cast it on turn one. Similar to Wild Nacatl and Kird Ape and every other one mana creature, it gets a lot worse as a late game topdeck, this time especially so because you'd like to have a Revolt trigger that you probably don't have anymore. Theoretically, those matchups are ones where Deathtouch matters a lot, but sometimes against a control deck you'd like something with a bit more oomph as the game goes late. However, I love what it does to the mana curve, just look at that beauty. Decks like this aren't supposed to be this fast. To really maximize it, I think I'm going to try an 11th fetchland. Tireless Tracker likes that idea, too.

Phyrexian Arena has been crushing it in the midrange mirrors. Since your deck is so much faster with extra Fatal Pushes and Renegades, you aren't often on the back foot as far as your life total is concerned. Blightning continues to be great, as does Damping Sphere. Something I wish I had more room for is Ancient Grudge to fight all of the Ironworks and Hardened Scales decks going around right now, but all of the sideboard slots get heavy rotation, so I wouldn't know what to cut for it. Third copies of Nihil Spellbomb and Damping Sphere would help certain matchups, too. If you could play 20 card sideboards instead of 15, Jund would be unbeatable.

Modern Burn

Here's the thing about this deck: there have been times in the past when control decks were just not present in the format. A year ago, Jace had not been unbanned, Teferi had not been printed yet, and people were just running Thalias and Thought Knot Seers into Karns and Death's Shadows and everyone was happy. That was a different time. And it's not to say that Burn is necesssarily a bad deck against the Blue/White control deck that's popular now, actually, I think it's pretty good. This list, however, is not designed to beat that deck and so I'm not comfortable running it right now. The reason I put this deck together in the first place was to attack a format with a lot of combo decks in it and not a lot of creature removal, but when your Wild Nacatls are getting Bolted or Path'd or whatever, we start to have a lot of problems.

That being said, this deck is like a Humans deck that's good against Humans. It plays way under anyone else, it has plenty of creature removal to play a tempo game, and importantly, it has a lot of disruption for unfair decks. Granted, with this list, that comes in the form of Eidolon of the Great Revel, but also the sideboard cards in this set of colors are just knockouts, if that's what you're looking for. Molten Rain, Rest in Peace, Stony Silence, Searing Blaze and Blood, it's all super good if that's what the format is about, and you don't give them any time to find an answer to your busted silver bullets.

Now is not the time for this deck, but ideally, that's kind of the point, for me, anyways. I built this one as a backup for times when Jund didn't seem like a good metagame call, and those are the times when Karn and Stinkweed Imp and Monstrous Carabid are popular. This deck smokes all that stuff, and so I might be unpacking this one again if my opponents could just please stop playing Snapcaster Mage.

Assassin's Trophy

It's been about six days since this one was spoiled, so I've had some time to think it over. The answer to the Question of Life, the Universe and Assassin's Trophy is either 0, 1, 2, 3, or 4. Right now, I think the answer is 0. That is, I am going to put 0 into my Jund deck.

Couple things. One, this card is card disadvantage, let's not forget that. Giving an opponent a land is a significant disadvantage when so much of your own deck consists of discard spells. If your opponent has more mana to cast their stuff, you can't catch as much with discard spells, so when you two for one yourself to resolve this, you also might be deading an Inquisition or Thoughtseize or neutralizing a Liliana activation.

Second, outside of Tron, how often does this target something that Dreadbore can't? It being an instant is better of course, but depending on our own deck, that doesn't come into play very often. Abrupt Decay also has a lot of targets and we don't play many, if any, of those these days. Reminder: Dreadbore ramps our opponents by 0 extra mana. While this card is probably (not definitely) better than those options against Azorius control with their Jaces and Search for Azcantas, against Mantis Rider or Tarmogoyf you'd rather just be casting your normal removal spell and not giving them any more mana.

Third, how often is it good against Tron? There are a lot of factors there, including how much Tron will get played in a format with Assassin's Trophy, whether you play Damping Sphere in the sideboard, how often they actually hit Tron through your discard spells instead of just hitting six land drops and casting Wurmcoil Engine. Remember that if they don't already have Tron online, you really don't want to be ramping them into Karn and Ugin. By the way, Assassin's Trophy targeting Ugin will not help you, since they just wiped your board and now have nine mana.

I think that, to start, Assassin's Trophy isn't going to be in my deck. I could be convinced that I'm wrong about that, but for now, I'm not dropping any of my already pretty good two-drop versatile removal spells. Maybe the right mix is 1 Dreadbore, 1 Abrupt Decay, 1 Terminate, 1 Assassin's Trophy, and we all stop talking about it.

Some quick hits spoiled so far:

If this put the land into your hand, I think it would be a four-of in Modern Jund. Alas.

If you play Tasigur and expect tons of Humans and Spirits but no Hollow One, this actually looks pretty good. It has to be really good to be better than Damnation because it hits almost all of your own stuff and misses some of the things you'd want Damnation for in the first place. Wipes up everything out of Affinity unless people start playing Myr Enforcer again, then we're screwed.

:/

That's actually about it for spoilers thus far. Even though there are two of our guilds represented in the next set, Golgari is kind of our best bet for good Jund cards, since graveyard shenanigans and removal spells seem to be the best way to print stuff that's good enough for Eternal formats but don't mess up Standard. That being said, Kolaghan's Command was a pretty nice one in Rakdos colors, so who knows. And you never know when they'll print another artifact hate card like Damping Sphere or Null Rod that looks out of place but is a great sideboard card in Modern. Actually, Null Rod would be amazing.

Ari Lax tweeted recently that Scavenging Ooze wasn't good enough for the format, and for the most part, I agree. It's super good in certain matchups, but the matchups where it's not good, it's very not good, and half of the time that it is a good matchup, it's too slow anyways. Against Dredge, you still might just lose unless you have some good help or they have a slow draw, same for Vengevine garbage, Storm, Hollow One, Living End, etc. The only matchup where it really shines is the mirror, and even then it's got all of Dark Confidant's weaknesses with only a fraction of its upside. They are awful in multiples, and Reflector Mage just annihilates it. Until I think of something better, or they print something better, I'm not satisfied with spoiler season yet. Assassin's Trophy has not quenched my thirst to tinker Jund forever.

I love Jund.

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Success! Kinda... not really.

Junded out in a PPTQ yesterday. There were 33 players, which is the exact cutoff for 6 rounds of Magic.

I made the changes that I had talked about, swapping the Dark Confidant/Bitterblossom counts, cut a Kolaghan's Command for another land, an extra Shadow Guildmage in the board.

In the first round, I faced a Blue/White Aethermage's Touch deck with lots of scrying and Emrakuls. The plan was to Aethermage's Touch on end step into Emrakul, then Restoration Angel or Flickerwisp it on their own turn after attacking to really get em. It did not seem good, but it did seem awesome, and while I would have loved to see this dude Emrakul someone else, I used a bunch of discard to make sure he didn't Emrakul me, specifically.

In round two I squared off against a friend, Adam Perkins, playing Storm. I think I should have won all three games had I played a little differently, but I took unnecessarily risky lines in games two and three and got punished. For what it's worth, I think it's a super good matchup, not intrinsically but with my build the way that I've got it now. I've got lots of graveyard hate, lots of discard, removal for their Electromancers and Barals, good threats, and even Damping Spheres. In the very next round, I was paired against Storm again and this time took it down pretty convincingly.

I played against Grixis Death's Shadow in round 4. My opponent mulliganned a bunch in game one, but I still had to get lucky to rip Liliana to kill a turn 2 Zombie Fish, then take over with said Planeswalker. In game two it was more of the same. I feel like the way the deck is set up now, if I hit my land drops, I'm a pretty significant favorite here, especially post-board. Their stuff is so much cheaper, though, so if you stumble a little bit it could be too late The inevitability is definitely on our side, as long as you keep Zombie Fishes and one mana 6/6s in mind when figuring out your removal suite.

Round 5 was pretty much a win-and-in, and I faced off against a really cool Green/Black aggro Death's Shadow brew. My opponent's deck was full of stuff like Experiment One, Putrid Leech, Narnam Renegade, Greenwheel Liberator, Strangleroot Geist (swoon!), Death's Shadow, and Avatar of the Resolute, to go along with some removal and Street Wraiths. Game one was a long protracted ordeal but I hid behind Goyfs and Bitterblossom until my Liliana could ultimate and kill a bunch of his dudes so that I could turn the corner. In the second, I had a Bitterblossom again and used it, Liliana, removal spells, and Hissing Quagmire to block and kill stuff and eventually win.

I drew into the top 8 and had time to go obliterate a burrito from Bueno y Sano.

In the first round of the Top 8, I faced off against Blue-Red stuff. Like, when people call decks "Abzan Cards" and "Sultai Cards I Own" this was the Blue-Red version of that. Snapcasters, Young Pyromancers, Remands, Cryptics, Bolts, Serum Visions, Opts, Jaces. In the first game we got to a pretty good stalemate with Liliana taking all our cards away until I topdecked a Huntmaster and took over. I lost the second game, in which I kept four lands and two Tarmogoyfs, kept an Inquisition on top, then never drew a spell. In the third, I was kinda sorta on the back foot for a while due to Vendilion Cliques and my own Dark Confidant, but I made sure to have answers to both Jaces that he played and eventually won a close one after some clutch Scavenging Ooze lifegain.

In the semifinals, I played against Burn and got extremely lucky in game one. At 6 life, I had a Huntmaster in hand but would need to take 2 damage from an Overgrown Tomb to cast it on turn four. I got shot down to three, then had to fade any burn spells for three turns, which I did and snuck away with one. In the second, we both mulliganned (which definitely favors the Jund player) and I made him discard a bunch of stuff, then attacked him to death with dorky creatures.

I faced off against Humans in the finals, and it was not to be. I had a good start in the first game with removal into Bob, but I still couldn't really deploy all my stuff in time and died to a Mantis Rider. In the second I made the punt of a lifetime by totally forgetting about Noble Hierarch's exalted when blocking, but I don't think I was going to win that one anyways. I ended the game with three lands in play and two Huntmasters in hand, which would have been great but never worked out. My opponent had fantastic draws in both games, but it's Humans, their plan is so straightforward that it's hard not to have awesome draws.

So you would think that coming in 2nd wouldn't make me feel like I need to re-think the list, but that ain't me. The Death's Shadow dude got me thinking about Narnam Renegade. I think I would have to do a little work on the mana to ensure Revolt when I need it, but I think I could actually play that card and we could see what happens. It's cheap, it's at least a little aggressive, it trades with gigantic Champion of the Parishes and Thalia's Lieutenants and blocks or attacks into pretty much everything else in the Humans deck. I felt like the exact card choices against the Humans deck isn't what does you in, it's the tempo that they gain from Hierarchs, Vial, and Thalia, and so I just want to make the deck faster by adding cards that are quick, but hopefully still have some late game utility. I think it'll be good against Death's Shadow and Hollow One as well.

It's important to note that late game, most of the time, I can still turn revolt on when necessary. Because of Tracker and Fatal Push, I'm already just leaving excess fetchlands around and not cracking them on my opponent's end step very often. I think that's an important thing to keep in mind when tuning a deck, these little play patterns that push you to make one decision or another. Pairing Tireless Tracker with Fatal Push and Narnam Renegade will really solidify the idea that we should be keeping those lands around and not cracking them. Having an extra basic land or two in the deck helps facilitate this, because you are still going to want that mana from time to time but not want to take 2 to cast stuff.

I also want to play an extra Fatal Push. I didn't really play against anything where Fatal Push wasn't good, and it'll make the mana costs cheaper. Also, the Dark Confidant swap I made seemed awesome as well.

I had pipe dreams of adding Liliana the Last Hope to the deck, but after this event I'm not sure. It wouldn't have been good against much that I faced because it's slow, and even against Humans that has a million one-toughness creatures, you can't expect them to still be one-toughness by the time Liliana comes down. I still like my Shadow Guildmages a lot out of the board.

Thanks for reading, and check out the youtube page here where I just finally actually uploaded three videos I made from a while back. Enjoy some cube!

At least the burrito was good

Thanks for reading!

Breaking Down the Breakdown

I don't know what to call the Pro Tour right now. Pro Tour 25th Anniversary? Pro Tour M19? Everyone is calling it PTA25, which maybe makes sense in French. Tour de professionale anniversaire vingt-cinque? Whatevs. We're gonna talk about the decks they are playing and how to beat them.

It's teams, so the Modern metagame is different than it normally would be, and it's also the Pro Tour, so it's different there too. In what ways? Well, for a SCG Open that's teams, I like to assume that players just play their pet decks, which usually means lots of control strategies, maybe Storm, something that they enjoy playing. Less players are playing a deck they don't enjoy playing, because they can just play a different format altogether. Pro Tour players, however, don't usually care about having fun, they just care about winning, and that includes how they divvy up their formats between themselves. This metagame seems like a pretty good indicator of the best decks in Modern by the players who know it the best, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's a list of the things you're likely to expect in the Magic Online leagues or at FNM or whatever, so let's be aware of that while we take a look:

After this is 19 decks that have just one team playing them and three more that have two teams, "Modular Affinity", UW Spirits, and RG Scapeshift.

Humans

I used to like the Humans matchup, until they printed this card. This card is just what the doctor ordered to swing the matchup in Humans' favor against stuff like Jeskai and midrange decks. It is pretty slow, as far as Modern cards go, but if the rest of your deck is disruptive, cheap creatures, then it's definitely worth it. Luckily, we play Thoughtseize.

The best way to beat Humans is to have some cheap removal to protect your life total and then overwhelm them with card advantage. Noble Hierarch and Aether Vial give them a huge tempo advantage, but trying to interact with their acceleration rather than saving your removal for their real threats is oftentimes a mistake, but sometimes not, and knowing when to use that Kolaghan's Command or Abrupt Decay on a Vial is tricky. In addition to having the cheap interaction to fight off their fast starts and Thalias, your late game stuff is going to have to do a lot of heavy lifting due to their own late game value generators: Bugler, Dire Fleet Daredevil, and the virtual card advantage of having few lands in the deck to topdeck late. Even if you make it to the late game, you can have a board locked up and lose it all to a topdecked Mantis Rider or two, so turning the corner quickly is important. That's why I like Huntmaster so much in this matchup (and since it's the most popular deck, the format as a whole), it keeps on generating value for you over time that clears the path to let you kill them.

Nothing in the deck has four toughness, except for gigantic Champion of the Parishes, so Bolts are great. Fatal Push is also okay, but setting it up to hit a Mantis Rider can take time that you might not have. Dreadbore, as great as it is in other matchups, isn't at its best here when compared to the instant speed Abrupt Decays and Terminates you could play instead, but at least you usually don't get them hit by Meddling Mage. Out of the sideboard, Anger of the Gods is clearly great, but it's not that versatile of a card, so you might not have space for it. Grim Lavamancers are good but slower than Shadow Guildmage, which does most of the same job.

UW Control

If you played Type 2 in 2000, then you know basically everything you need to about this deck. Almost, since along with counterspells and Wrath of Gods, you have 8 copies of Jayemdae Tome that also kill your opponent. The good news is that they don't pressure your life total, so Bitterblossom is even better here than against Jeskai, but it's tough to keep up on cards against them. The bad news is that it's harder to keep up on cards against them, since what they lack in ability to pressure you, they gain in inevitability. Also, unlike against Supreme Verdicts and Bolts out of Jeskai, we can't utilize our graveyard as much with Kolaghan's Commands and Kitchen Finks, since their removal is Terminus and Path.

I'm not especially scared of this deck, unless they are playing the version with Spreading Seas, which is not usually a difference maker but just counts as another way to randomly lose. Also, watch out for Rest in Peace out of the sideboard. Usually it's not the hugest of deals, but the games go long enough that you will lose out on some utility that you would have liked to have had. The prevalence of this deck is making me reconsider whether I want Kitchen Finks in my sideboard at all, since against the Rest in Peace/Path to Exile/Terminus deck that doesn't pressure life total, it may as well be Balduvian Barbarians. Permanent card advantage cards, like planeswalkers, Bobs, Bitterblossoms, and maybe even Phyrexian Arena are the key to getting ahead here. A single 2 for 1 from a Bloodbraid Elf helps, but doesn't swing the tide like you'd want, since their whole deck is card advantage.

Ironworks

The key that I've found here is that, since their deck is so redundant and they have so many cantrip effects, you need early pressure to stop them. A bunch of discard spells and Kolaghan's Commands isn't going to get it done without a Goyf or Tireless Tracker or whatever. Liliana is great because it taxes their total resources if you can live long enough, and Scavenging Ooze helps stop Scrap Trawlers and Myr Retrievers that they'll draw. Fatal Pushes and Dreadbores are dead of course, and Bitterblossom is awful, but drawing them isn't a death sentence, since you'll need something to discard to your Lilianas.

Out of the board, the cool tech is to play Wurmcoil Engine against Jund. I don't think it's as good as just playing more card advantage, since Jund is just going to board into a bunch of ways to kill artifacts anyways. I'm not sure how prevalent that plan actually is, and I could honestly see people shying away from it since Jund numbers are down. Ironworks runs into a lot of the same problems that Storm does post-board, since you can beat them with a multitude of different disruption effects. Discard spells, artifact destruction, and graveyard hate all work wonders, and that's without counting more targeted stuff like Damping Sphere. You'll have enough space in after sideboard to load up when you take out the dead cards.

Tron

Bacteria and viruses have been at war with each other for billions of years. Viruses commandeer and infect bacteria to infiltrate their DNA and use the infected bacteria to reproduce their own viruses. Bacteria fight back by an ever-adapting immune system against the infection to prevent the viruses' attacks. However, long before, there was Jund vs Tron.

Ever since the Eye of Ugin ban, Tron has about 18 really powerful late game draws they can hit once (if) you've stripped their hand of anything relevant. Sometimes your discard spells have to hit their Expedition Maps and Sylvan Scryings to slow them down, but even then, you need a really good clock to kill them, since if they hit six mana and stop you in your tracks with Wurmcoil Engine, you know that Karn and Ugin are coming the next two turns to seal it up.

Pundits like to say that Damping Sphere doesn't do enough in the matchup, and maybe it doesn't, but it's one of the best things we've got. Fulminator Mage slows their good draws down by one turn, but Damping Sphere slows them down by four, and sometimes they just don't draw the six or seven lands necessary to deploy their threats even if you don't have much pressure. Discard is also real good, and this other thing called crossing your fingers seems to work as well. In seriousness, I don't think there's much we can do better than boarding in extra discard and Damping Spheres. If you're really gung ho about beating LeTron James, play a third Sphere.

Hollow One

How good do you think Naya Zoo would be if your creatures got +1/+1 but 15% of the time you had to discard all your creatures for no reason? Instead of Wild Nacatl we have Hollow One and instead of Knight of the Reliquary we have Gurmag Angler, other than that it's bolts and dorky creatures. This is one of the big reasons I shy away from Abrupt Decay, since it doesn't hit either of Hollow One's important threats. However, at it's core, this is just a Zoo deck, and it can lose to removal spells and Tarmogoyfs just the same. You get run over by double or triple Hollow One draws some number of times, but also you sometimes strand them with uncastable cards after Thoughtseizing their single Goblin Lore and win that way some amount of the time too. Unlike Zoo, it's susceptible to graveyard hate out of the sideboard, but not as susceptible as something like Dredge or Living End.

The real way to beat this deck isn't necessarily with sideboard cards as much as it's with keeping it in mind when making your removal suite. Fatal Push is okay but not great, same with Lightning Bolt, since they kill Flameblade Adept, but not much else. Dreadbore, Terminate, Maelstrom Pulse, and Kolaghan's Command are great since they kill the big stuff. They cannot in a million years beat the card Scavenging Ooze, unless you play it sloppily and open it up to Bolts and Collective Brutality, so that's another card to max out on if this deck is on your radar. If there was a one mana card that could kill both Gurmag Angler and Hollow One in red, black, or green, it would turn the whole metagame around for us. Stupid Gurmag Angler.

B/R Vengevine

I still don't know why they printed this card. Why did they make a 0 mana 4/3 haste? Why would you do that?

This deck is brand new, and it's somewhere on the spectrum of the Dredge/Hollow One spectrum of combo-aggro decks that utilize the graveyard to varying degrees. I don't know enough about it, but cheap removal is okay against it, Scavenging Ooze seems awesome, and graveyard hate out of the sideboard isn't an immediate KO, but it's really good.

Bant Spirits

Would the Merfolk matchup be harder if all the Merfolk had flying? Yes. Luckily, there's no Spreading Seas and no Silvergill Adept, but Rattlechains and Drogskol Captains can ruin your removal plans lots of the time to make up for the loss of card advantage.

Grim Lavamancer and Shadow Guildmage are gonna be really good here, much better than Anger of the Gods and stuff like that, since the opponent can have Selfless Spirit and Mausoleum Wanderer to ruin our plans. Bitterblossom should also be solid as long as you focus on killing their Supreme Phantoms and Drogskol Captains. Otherwise, it's all kind of the same as Humans. They have a threat dense deck and lots of creatures that pump their buddies, so cheap removal to reach the midgame safely and big dudes to turn the corner are how you win the game.

Pump the breaks

Gonna stop here since I am headed off to watch the second day of the Pro Tour with some buddies. Before I go, a couple of things I thought were interesting.

1. Alpine Moon seems much worse than Damping Sphere, since Valakut has fallen off and Storm and KCI are alive and well.

2. This is just the metagame breakdown, not, like, a "winner's metagame" (whatever that means) or some matchup predictor. That might not be useful a few weeks from now, but since it's a team tournament, the results don't really matter that much anyways, since you can go 0-14 and make the Top 8 if you break it in the other two formats. Even still, checking out what all these teams figured out was the best after weeks of testing is valuable information in itself.

3. The other neat M19 card, Infernal Reckoning, doesn't have a lot of targets right now, since Eldrazi Tron and Affinity are pretty low on the totem pole, and Wurmcoil Engine doesn't seem to be super prevalent or even hard to beat.

4. Follow me on twitter here and check out my Youtube channel here.

5. 

Weird Variations

So here are some decks that I've got on my radar for the right moment. These moments may never happen, but it's useful to think about the way you would adapt to whatever situation would arise.

It's also interesting to look at a list and consider the reasons that it isn't good, or at least not good right now. Identifying weaknesses helps us to avoid those same vulnerabilities with other lists in the future.

4 Wild Nacatl
4 Tarmogoyf
4 Bloodbraid Elf
4 Dark Confidant
2 Lingering Souls

4 Liliana of the Veil
3 Thoughtseize
3 Inquisition of Kozilek
4 Lightning Bolt
1 Fatal Push
2 Terminate
1 Maelstrom Pulse

3 Marsh Flats
3 Verdant Catacomb
3 Bloodstained Mire
3 Windswept Heath
3 Wooded Foothills
1 Overgrown Tomb
1 Stomping Ground
1 Blood Crypt
1 Godless Shrine
1 Temple Garden
1 Swamp
3 Shambling Vent

Sideboard: 2 Rest in Peace, 2 Stony Silence, 2 Gaddock Teeg, 2 Ancient Grudge, 2 Alpine Moon, 2 Duress, 1 Thoughtseize, 2 Aven Mindcensor

This deck is for when your life total truly doesn't matter. If the format has lots of or all combo and little interaction, this deck is good for two reasons. One, Wild Nacatl gives your clock a boost and turns you into more of an aggro/control deck. Bloodbraid Elf's aggressiveness helps here, almost as much as the cascade, and Lightning Bolt becomes one of the best removal spells because it can go upstairs, which will be more useful when you're aggro. Liliana still is kickin' it because she supplements your clock with hand disruption, forcing your opponent to go off earlier than they would like to and be less likely to succeed.

Secondly, white's addition helps out our sideboard tremendously. While having extra discard in the sideboard like I've usually got is a pretty good catchall, white's additions are just killers. Stony Silence, Rest in Peace, Gaddock Teeg, Aven Mindcensor. Ka Pow! In Modern, if you focus your sideboard on beating up on just a couple of decks or strategies, you can really go hog wild make it almost unwinnable for them.

The reasons why this deck isn't good? Well, the mirror match suffers immensely, for starters. You life total matters a lot in the mirror, and Wild Nacatl just isn't as good as the other cards your opponent will have. Scavenging Ooze looks like a nightmare for this list, not to mention stuff like Huntmaster of the Fells and other dedicated sideboard stuff. Burn also is unwinnable when you start every game aggressively going to 11 life for your lands and Thoughtseizes. Having said that, a variation of this deck with Death's Shadow is also probably just a few steps away, if we really wanted to destroy our own life total.

Additionally, mana bases are getting taxed at the moment not just because of life loss, but also because of Field of Ruin and Blood Moon. You can't really protect yourself from those cards and play four colors at the same time.

To top it all off, the biggest problem with Wild Nacatl is Snapcaster Mage. As long as Bolt-Snap-Bolt is a play pattern that you expect to face in a tournament, Wild Nacatl isn't something you want to register. The aggressive Burn list that I've got is a list that I like a lot better in situations when I feel like Jund is playing too fair for the format. I love to load my Burn deck up with knock-out blow sideboard cards like Rest in Peace and Stony Silence, so that we have a consistent and quick plan A and some amazing action in games two and three to beat opponents trying to race us with their own combo.

4 Dark Confidant
4 Snapcaster Mage
4 Tarmogoyf

4 Liliana of the Veil
2 Maelstrom Pulse
2 Thoughtseize
4 Inquisition of Kozilek
3 Fatal Push
2 Murderous Cut
2 Abrupt Decay
1 Jace, the Mind Sculptor
4 Ancestral Vision

4 Polluted Delta, 4 Verdant Catacomb, 3 Misty Rainforest, 2 Swamp, 1 Island, 1 Forest, 2 Overgrown Tomb, 1 Breeding Pool, 1 Watery Grave, 2 Blooming Marsh, 3 Creeping Tar Pit

Sideboard: 3 Obstinate Baloth, 2 Kitchen Finks, 1 Ashiok, 3 Duress, 3 Damping Sphere, 1 Seal of Primordium, 2 Damnation

This deck has dangerous amounts of value. It looks like it's almost impossible to win a midrange mirror with this list. Ancestral Vision and Snapcaster Mage are just lights out in any matchup where you're grinding, and we still have all the usual suspects of big threats and good versatile removal spells.

However, this deck really pales in comparison to Jund or Abzan when it comes to fighting against almost anything other than a midrange mirror. Against aggro decks, we miss Lightning Bolt, Terminate, and Dreadbore so much and lean way too heavily on Liliana's -1 and Fatal Push to get rid of any small creatures. Our inability to interact with early creatures also makes us run behind on mana if an opponent has Noble Hierarch or Birds of Paradise.

We also lose out on most of our clock, so despite having the same amount of hand disruption as normal Jund, we'll never have enough of a clock to really pressure our opponent and eventually they'll draw their Ulamog or Scapeshift or Krark Clan Ironworks and kill us with it. For Ancestral Vision to be good, we need the game to last until turn 5 to get its payoff, and most decks just aren't about that.

Also, once we get to turn 5, are we sure that we're even ahead of our opponents? Because as good as Snapcaster and Ancestral Vision are, they might be worse going long than Teferi, Search for Azcanta, and Cryptic Command. We can trade 1 for 1 as well as any deck out there, but going super duper long, we probably have a lot of trouble against Jeskai's long game advantage, not to mention the danger of getting tempo'd out by Lightning Bolts and Celestial Colonnade attacks.

I think that somewhere, there is a list that's got a lot of these same elements that also has red in it to fix some of its early game problems. Lightning Bolt and Terminate are amazing at keeping you low to the ground and extending the game, so it's a welcome addition. However, we run into the same problem as the other four-color deck above where our life total is getting nailed and we are susceptible to our opponents attacking our mana. Again, Death's Shadow is an option here, which would help with our clock problems and take advantage of the mana, but I don't see it as being good against anything in the format right now.

Anywho, sometimes the time does arrive when you either need to really beat down and be disruptive like the Nacatl Jund list, or you should be grinding out like a baller with Snapcasters. Don't get me wrong, I love a good value mirror match, but it doesn't seem feasible here in 2018. But, when some of the pillars of the format fall and the metagame changes, be on the lookout for stuff like this. You never know what's going to be good in the future.

SCG Worcester - Team Open!

So we headed off to Worcester, Massachusetts. I was on Jund for Modern, Ryan was playing Bolas Brew in Standard, and Ze'eva was playing Sneak and Show in Legacy. I predicted going in that we'd see a lot of Celestial Colonnade and mirror matches, so I was ready.

4 Tarmogoyf

3 Bitterblossom

2 Scavenging Ooze

2 Tireless Tracker

2 Huntmaster of the Fells

1 Grim Lavamancer

1 Dark Confidant

4 Inquisition of Kozilek

3 Thoughtseize

3 Lightning Bolt

2 Fatal Push

2 Dreadbore

1 Abrupt Decay

4 Liliana of the Veil

3 Kolaghan's Command

4 Bloodstained Mire

4 Verdant Catacombs

1 Wooded Foothills

1 Blooming Marsh

1 Blackcleave Cliffs

2 Raging Ravine

2 Hissing Quagmire

2 Overgrown Tomb

1 Stomping Ground

1 Blood Crypt

2 Swamp

1 Forest

1 Mountain

3 Kitchen Finks

1 Huntmaster of the Fells

2 Blightning

2 Duress

2 Damping Sphere

1 Shadow Guildmage

1 Engineered Explosives

1 Jund Charm

2 Nihil Spellbomb

Long story short: I liked my deck a lot, and it was pretty good against the metagame I expected. In fact, I liked all three of the decks we played, but the other two were brand new formats and kinda-sorta crapshoots. Sneak and Show was great, but in the later stages of the day, opponents were prepared for it. The Grixis Midrange brew was also pretty solid in Standard, but the mana was a little wonky and some mirror-match-ish opponents had more streamlined lists. We missed day two.

It's a real shitty thing to be the person who goes "Well my team lost, but I went undefeated" or whatever when it's a team event. It's really just not conducive to success at team formats. I had plenty of room for improvement as a teammate in-match and as a tester and deck tuner for the other two decks we played leading up to the event. Team events are much more than three people playing three separate matches of Magic. Having said that, in the interest of evaluating the testing process for the Jund deck for this blog, I will say that I was pretty happy with the deck and we beat up on Celestial Colonnade all day Going forward, I don't really think there's anything I would change from the deck right now. We have a huge selection of cards that come in against the control and mirror matches while still having enough stuff to hit all the different stuff Modern will throw at you, and it showed this weekend.

My losses were to Ponza (which seems bad but kinda isn't) and Black/White tokens (which seems bad and definitely is). I defeated four control decks, and I also took down a Storm opponent. I was in the middle of game two against KCI in round 8 when our match was decided and we dropped from the tournament, however we played that game out for funsies and I was able to take it down. I'd love to play against that deck some more, I think that I've got enough hate for it, but you never know.

For the moment, I think that this list is great and I don't have any changes that I want to make. I am interested in trying some new stuff, specifically Infernal Reckoning from M19 out of the sideboard. It can hit Wurmcoil Engines cleanly out of Tron, exiles all sorts of Eldrazi including Matter Reshaper, and is solid enough against Affinity. On top of all of that, KCI's big midrange sideboard plan is to find Wurmcoil Engine and cast it and recur it a bunch, but even without that plan Infernal Reckoning hits Scrap Trawler and Myr Retriever quite nicely. I was previously interested in trying out Runic Armasaur in place of Tireless Tracker, but Tracker has been bonkers for me lately so that's probably not happening.

That's pretty much the whole story for this weekend. I think later this week I'll do a more in-depth write-up about how to play the Jeskai/UW Control matchups, because they are everywhere right now. See you then!