Jump Like A Willy's In Four Wheel Drive

I like the way they've rolled out Historic Jumpstart. First, show us all the bad news, the cards they are printing for Arena only that make the game feel closer to Hearthstone. Then, show a bunch of high-rate cards that will be injected into Historic. Then, delay the release so that the anger dissipates and now everyone is excited to play with the new cards. Perfect!

We should take just about any Planeswalker seriously, since they're basically tailor made for midrange decks. They can play multiple roles, are proactive threats, and turn your removal spells into card advantage spells, since keeping them alive nets you value. My gut reaction says that Davriel is just not quite there for us, but I could definitely be wrong about that. There's a whole bunch of research you have to do to figure out Davriel's second ability, but the gist is that you get a big reward and a slightly smaller cost. The problem with Davriel is that you can't really plan on what that reward is going to be, which makes it harder to carve out a game plan. That's critical in Jund, being able to line up your removal with their stuff or your stuff with their removal, or whatever. I also think the +1 ability is too weak and that four mana for a planeswalker is a little slow in this format. When you're competing for the same slot as Vraska, Golgari Queen and Chandra, it's tough. It's worth a shot, but I don't have high hopes. Also, maybe it's just fun as hell, which is enough reason to play it anyways.

Pretty solid card, but it doesn't seem as useful as stuff like Disfigure or Shivan Fire. Funnily enough, not being able to effectively kill a Vesperlark is a problem, but this could be worth trying.

This one is intriguing. In the late game, it's Hero's Downfall. Early on, it's Barbed Lightning, which isn't good. But anytime past turn three, you're usually killing your target with this. The other part of this whole equation is whether 2R: Hero's Downfall is even good enough to play, which it would have been six months ago but now I'm not sure. Again, another one to try out. It's hard when there's no precedent for this kind of mechanic.

I'm not a huge fan of Lightning Strike or Roil Eruption or anything like that in Historic and never have been, but Lightning Bolt is a mainstay of Modern Jund and Standard Jund back in the day, so it's not like it's an effect we don't want. This is getting a little closer to the range of Lightning Bolt in power level, but to really maximize it, you'll want to play all four, which might just not be in the cards. The other problem is that this would likely take the slot of Eliminate out of the deck, and I can't really say that reducing the number of instant speed removal spells is a great idea, given the Vesperlark combo and the new creaturelands that are in the format.

Yeah, now we're going deep. This isn't entirely out of the question. It's got some real Pack Rat vibes but is less vulnerable to removal. Maybe a one-of in the sideboard. I feel like it's gotta be really hard to beat this in a long drawn out game, but that isn't what Historic is often going to be about.

Almost certainly too good to not play. What's fantastic is how it utilizes the graveyard for that extra little value, but is totally fine if your opponent has a Leyline or Rest in Peace. We're going to be running a little close to The Graveyard Trap, but all of our graveyard synergy cards are still just fine to just cast and then attack with.

I think that Pyromancer makes Jegantha not a thing anymore, which is sad but we'll be okay. It's less necessary now with creaturelands and the graveyard ability on the Pyromancer itself. Double red on turn three is going to be a tricky thing to nail down, but the good thing is that Pyromancer on turn eight is even better than Pyromancer on turn three anyways.

Also, Pyromancer is going to make a lot of other decks better as well, like Izzet Phoenix and potentially Rakdos Arcanist, but I'd imagine any Red deck will play this.

I think I've actually somehow managed to get myself more psyched up for Dark Dwellers than for Pyromancer. This thing is the Thragtusk value-plus-large body we've been looking for, and the value you get from it is chosen by you. Maelstrom Pulse loves this, as does Inscription of Ruin. I'm not sure how many is the right number to run, but this thing resolving will translate into a win so often that I have to imagine it's at least 2.

Verdant Command lives in that weird spot where it's a little narrow for a main deck card but a little underpowered and unfocused for a sideboard card. What's nice about this over something like Witherbloom Command is that the baseline ability to just make two 1/1s isn't far off on rate for a two mana card anyways, so the rest is kind of gravy. But, in a deck like Jund, I'd like to think we're doing better than Raise the Alarm on rate, so this might not be for us, but instead for a deck that can utilize the tokens better. Any card that's a constructed-quality card from a Modern Horizons set is worth taking a look at though.

This exists in the same space as the Momir card, where if you have this in the ultra late game you can create a pretty huge advantage. The downside to that is your six mana spell has to not get countered and has to not get blanked by Rest in Peace. There is precedent for this with Season's Past, a one or two-of late game hammer that usually ended any game it resolved. Resolving this for four or more and then untapping should be the game, since your graveyard is usually going to be all gas, but only a few matchups are going to go that long, given not only the makeup of the format but the build of our own deck. Similarly to Verdant Command, if it came from Modern Horizons, it's worth keeping in mind.

I don't really have a decklist that I think I'm going to be playing on day one, because I think a good strategy for new sets is to try out a couple copies of anything you're interested in and see how it goes. So I'll probably have a Momir artifact and a couple Davriels or whatever to see what's up, but I can't imagine that that's going to be a useful list to try. If I had to guess what I thought the deck will look like five days after the release, it's something like this:

I haven't been the biggest fan of Witch's Vengeance in the past, half of that is because there are better options and half of that is because of Jegantha. But there are a few good Goblins and Elves cards in the new set and we might want help there, in addition to some Merfolk stuff and who knows what. Plus, three mana sorceries look even better with Goblin Dark Dwellers in the deck.

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I have a video going up on Youtube right now with a nice Modern Jund list. I tried a little bit of Pioneer Jund but basically I don't know enough about that format to really try and be any kind of an expert there, so I ported the Pioneer cards I liked into Modern, namely Bonecrusher Giant. You can find that video here. Thanks for reading.

22 Tournament Today

Hey folks, just wanted to post here and say that I'll be commentating a tournament today, August 7th. It's an MTG Melee tournament run by Jaffer, a cool streamer. He runs a sort of tournament series called Gouda Wars. I've played in a few events, they're a fun time and pretty low key. It's a nice, low-pressure way to get your feet wet if you've got a semi-competitive deck.

The format is Standard 22, which from what I've seen so far is a pretty nice, fresh format. Nothing is really overpowered yet, but we'll see how the format shakes out. It reminds me a little bit of Standard formats from a long time ago, where the mana fixing was bad and there were a few cards that were head and shoulders above the rest, but everything was kind of balanced. It's hard to just try to play all the good stuff because your mana base might not support it that well. Goldspan Dragon, Esika's Chariot, and Alrund's Epiphany seem to be the best cards, but nothing is really oppressive, and there's enough good aggressive stuff going on that if you try to stretch your mana too far then you can get really punished. Various Mono White, Mono Red, and Elves decks are perfectly good choices, and there's good control stuff going on, too.

Here's a link to the tournament if you're interested in playing, and here is where you can watch the stream.

Didn't Have One Good Word To Say

Brainstorm got banned. Suspended I guess, but whatever.

For pretty much every banning in the last couple years, my gut is to say "I don't think this should have been banned, but I just think it shouldn't have been printed." That sounds dumb and shortsighted, but like, is it as dumb and shortsighted as printing Oko? I just can't get my head around injecting a card into the format, that's been thoroughly tested for 25 years, that is obviously head and shoulders above everything else in the format. It's not like we didn't know how it was going to play out. The same can be said, to a certain degree, to lots of the stuff in the last couple years. Omnath? What was the goal?

The Time Warp banning was frustrating. Not only do you have to identify that the Jeskai Turns deck was an actionable problem, but then you have to identify that Time Warp was the problem. I think that both of those things are false. The best deck after the Time Warp banning was clearly just going to be the next best Brainstorm deck. But the other part of the equation is that we just aren't letting people find answers to the best decks anymore. Part of the fun of Magic is learning and figuring out how to beat your opponents instead of just waiting until the card you can't beat gets banned. I also feel that the narrative of the Magic Hivemind solving formats is far overplayed and cards and decks exist to beat the top stuff most of the time. Except with Oko.

I think what it boils down to is that printing a bunch of super powerful stuff and then banning it gets a lot of packs sold, and paying out wild cards for the banning reimbursement doesn't amount to very much. It's a stark departure from the past, when bans only happened once a decade in something like Standard and rarely in other places as well.

Anyways, what does the Brainstorm ban mean for Jund? Well, first is that Inquisition of Kozilek starts to look quite a bit better. An opponent responding to your Thoughtseize with Brainstorm was annoying, but an opponent responding to your Inquisition with a Brainstorm was huge. Inquisition was particularly bad here, but all discard spells get a little bit better now.

I'm not sure what it will do to the metagame at large, but stuff like Izzet Phoenix is likely still pretty good. Brainstorm was just there for support and it's more of a Faithless Looting deck. Brainstorm Teferi decks might take a hit, but they'll still be around. My biggest question is whether Arasta is still necessary, or if we should go back to Jegantha. Arasta is so super beyond lights out against Phoenix, but the Jegantha versions of the deck feel the best to me outside of that matchup.

Even with the creature lands from DnD, Jegantha is still a welcome addition. And as far as those are concerned, I've found Lair of the Hydra to fit this deck the best. It can pick off planeswalkers, threaten lethal, and is the best mana maker. Den of the Bugbear is the most powerful, but the red mana isn't that useful. Interestingly, fitting Lair of the Hydra into a deck without Jegantha is hard, because the mana requirements are steeper.

As for a current decklist, here's a snapshot of where I'm at. It's hard to say exactly what to do next after the banning and where the format will end up after things shake out here, but a good place to start when the format is shaken up is just to play nuts and bolts anti-aggro Magic. Chevill has been great as of late, and the fourth copy in the board to just go in deep is real nice. I like Shivan Fire out of the board too.

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That's it for now. I gotta admit, I just got a Nintendo Switch today and I might just go real deep on Pokemon Unite because it's fun as hell. But also, I want to do some Modern stuff this week as well. Thanks for reading.

I Made A Patreon

I made a Patreon. I don't do content full time or anything so I've set the contribution amount to just $1. Maybe I'll bump that up some day if I keep doing more stuff and turn this into a side gig or whatever. In the meantime, that means that for this blog, I'll keep doing most of my normal posts, but maybe put some stuff behind the $1 paywall. Between videos, streaming, and blog posts, I figure that some amount of the blog posts would be enough to make it worthwhile to become a patron, but still have almost all of the stuff for free.

I'm doing this mostly because Twitch's economy system is a pretty unfavorable for the artists. I still might stream on Twitch from time to time, but I'd recommend becoming a Patron instead of subbing on Twitch if you're interested in doing that sort of thing. It's cheaper for you and I get to keep more of the money.

I also set up a Discord server but have yet to do anything with it at all. Apparently Discord servers are useful for Patreon users but I haven't gotten that far yet. Check it out and say hi if you want, I'll try to get some stuff up and running there soon.

As for the more near future, I have a video that I'm going to try and finish up editing and then export and upload to Youtube tomorrow for Modern, then I'll get started in on Dungeons and Dragons in Historic. After a handful of matches on the ladder today, I can say that I'm pretty excited and that there's a lot of cool stuff going on. Ebondeath looks like the real deal, and the utility lands are proving worthwhile as well.

Thanks for reading, see you soon.

Just Like Mary Shelly, Just Like Frankenstein

I'm a little late to comment on the new D and D set, mostly because I didn't realize it was a real set. It's going to be in Standard and everything.

The cards in this set are a little underwhelming so far, at least the ones that I'm interested in, but the whole set hasn't been spoiled yet. Let's take a look.

Four is a lot of mana, and it's not particularly good on defense. But, Ebondeath looks phenomenal against any type of control strategy. We usually don't get a flash creature like this that has the potential to just end the game immediately like this, plus it's got some recursivity. Given you have time, I would imagine this is also pretty solid in a mirror match, if such a thing exists.

Ebondeath lives in a weird spot, where it's so geared towards one specific type of opponent and just okay against others, that it seems like more of a sideboard card. But, in a format with a wide variety of opponents, you want sideboard cards that can do work against multiple opponents as well, like Duress effects and Wrath effects. Ebondeath reminds me a little of Klothys, where it's a good one-of in the main deck, and the way that you make it work against decks that it isn't specifically made for is to make the rest of your deck more effective in that matchup. If Ebondeath is the stones against half the format and just okay against the other half, just tune your deck to be better against that other half.

Probably too slow, and also probably just not as good as the other five drops available. I think that this card would have been good a year or so ago, when Historic first came out. I would have loved to have Ob Nixilis Reignited or a similar effect, but at this point we're pretty far past that. I am having trouble imagining when I'd rather have this over something like Angrath or Eldest Reborn.

Probably a little less narrow than Cast Down these days, this might be the go-to Doom Blade effect for the format. That's not always something that's going to be useful, especially because the decks that have few creatures are likely to use stuff like Angels or Dragons as creatures. I still like Flunk more, but this might be a more maindeckable card, if that's something you're interested in.

This card excites me a lot. It reminds me of Finale of Eternity but I think it's more flexible and also has a more impressive ceiling. 1RRR to kill anything isn't that bad when you consider you have the ability to just go ham when you get to five or six mana. The problem, of course, is the triple red. Having said that, Shatterskull Smashing gets you part of the way, and another card that's in this set can help as well. If it can be set up to be reliably castable, then I like this as a 2-of in Historic Jund. That's a big ask for a 2-of, but we'll see.

I like graveyard hate, and I like creatures that gain life, but five mana is too much.

Great card. It costs a lot to activate it, but having a creature land with very little restriction like this is really nice. Whether or not it's going to work in a deck with Castle Locthwain remains to be seen, but if we are going for the Meteor Swarm deck, Locthwain might not be what we want anymore.

This card is definitely less powerful than Den of the Bugbear, but it might be better for two reasons. One, it can cast a Thoughtseize on turn one, something not even Castle Locthwain can do. Second, get a little graveyard hate thrown into your mana base for pretty much free, since black Treetop Village is something we're in the market for anyways. Add to that the extra point of toughness, which can be important in a format with Prismari Command, Kolaghan's Command, and Bonecrusher Giant.

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Anyways, just threw this one together because I realized that this set was going to be legal and not some kind of weird supplemental product. Also, I made a video last weekend and have been having trouble with Youtube getting the quality settings to work the way I want it to. I'll keep working on it, but take a look if you're interested. Thanks for reading.

Honey Come Quick With The Iodine

It's been a little while for me. Historic is in a weird place and Modern is the hotness so I haven't opened up Arena for the last few weeks. I also haven't played a ton of Modern on Modo though, either. Instead, I've been working on a custom cube and just finished it recently. This will be a pretty big departure from the normal content here, but I think it's interesting, at least.

This is the cube. It contains some real cards and some cards that I came up with on the program Magic Set Editor. It was really fun but also a lot of work, but I think it came out okay.

I think that here is where I clarify that I don't own any of the art on these cards and the original artists are listed on the artist line of the card. I'm not making any money off of this, it's purely for fun.

Every year my friends and I have a cube party for my birthday. In the past I've slid in copies of some of my own creations to the cube, but this time I kind of designed it from the ground up and then included the real cards that I thought would work well in it.

The format is set up so that players are incentivized to play the two-color combinations that I feel best complement each other, UW, UR, RG, GB, and BW. The mechanics of these color pairs complement each other pretty nicely, and also there are more dual lands and gold cards in those colors. However, you're not entirely confined to those colors. Mono color, three color or more, and the other five color pairs are totally fine but might be tougher to build.

White's primary mechanic in the set is Battalion. There are lots of early aggressive white creatures to go along with some stuff like this card, Dual Wielder. Also, Blue and Black are colors that excel at putting tokens into play to enable Battalion creatures, Black with its Uncover ability and Blue with Rebirth ability.

My hope was that lots of the cards that were homemade were cards that were pretty easy to get your head around, both on a micro and a macro scale. Dual Wielder is a grizzly bear with a small upside, so you don't have to spend a lot of time reading it if it's your first time seeing it, and also it's not too hard to conceptualize what kind of deck is going to want it. That's key for when players haven't seen the cards before (since they aren't real).

Blue's primary mechanic is Rebirth, which is kind of like Flashback except it just makes a 1/1 flying token. All of the colors have some Rebirth cards, but it's most present in Blue. It can be on any kind of card, not just creatures. The idea here is that the Rebirth tokens help out White's ability to turn on Battaltion, and Red's self-mill effects help you put Rebirth cards right into your graveyard.

Rebirth is an effect that's kind of playing with fire as far as a design goes, because it's repetitive and it turns the game into board stalls. It also has the potential to be very good, since you're just getting a lot of cardboard out of your spells. Not that there was really any development to this cube, but I would say that this was kind of fixed in development by adding in cards that happen to be good against 1/1 creatures. Stuff like Maelstrom Pulse and Goblin Chainwhirler can take out all the spirit tokens, and there are creatures with Menace and Protection from White and stuff to work around them. Rebirth also gave me the ability to amp up the power on some one-toughness creatures, like some great red and white 1 drops.

Black's primary mechanic is Uncover. It's a mechanic that I hoped would feel pretty black, as in you have to throw away resources to get a small board advantage. It's certainly aggressive and can lead to some busted starts, but it's not too breakable since it isn't repeatable and you're only discarding lands. It's not like you can pitch Griselbrand for value and then Reanimate it. Uncover helps out White by enabling Battalion, but also helps out Green by helping enable Threshold.

I think Uncover might be little underpowered, but I'm not sure anyone has totally figured it out, at least not during the two cube drafts I did this weekend. It certainly changes the way you have to play, when you have Uncover cards in your deck, and also changes how to build your deck. It requires you to have an aggressive slant to make use of the pressure the Zombie lays on, but it also requires you to have a high land count to make sure you can both cast your spells and get your Uncover bonus. But you also have this problem where you don't want to play any lands past your fourth or whatever, and so you aren't going to want to have a high curve, which makes your high land count a little weaker. It's definitely a tough nut to crack, but the potential is there.

Red's mechanic is self-mill creatures. It's not really for any reason for the creatures themselves, but rather it's kind of a more interesting way of flipping a coin and seeing if you get a bonus on attack. There's a little bit more you can do with the ability, like scrying to ensure you flip a land, or playing a high land count to help maximize your chances. The self mill is good at enabling Threshold and for flipping over Blue's Rebirth cards.

Similarly to Uncover, it makes you have to re-think how to build your land, like if you have seven of these creatures in your deck, are you supposed to go up to 19 or 20 land in your deck to maximize your chances of getting the bonus?

Green has cards with Threshold. It's a pretty simple concept, but the issue in execution for me was that most of the cards are cheap creatures that gain a small power and toughness boost. That makes it so that a real graveyard deck doesn't exist in the Threshold space, since it's not like you can spend your early turns casting Mulch and stuff and then win because your Grizzly Bears are 4/4s on turn 10 or whatever. Instead, you kind of need to find some sort of synergy with Green's partner colors Red and Black to fill up your graveyard while keeping pressure on.

I also threw in some special utility lands for Green, although there are lots of utility lands. The idea was that Uncover in Black and self-mill creatures in Red are asking you to have a higher land count, so getting some value out of those lands becomes a lot more necessary in those colors. I'll talk about changes I am thinking about making later, but adding a Tranquil Thicket might make sense.

The idea behind all of this is to make drafting a more interesting experience. Cube drafting in general has this problem, in my mind anyway, where some cards are only good in one deck and other cards are busted in every deck. Take, for instance, Brain Freeze. There's only one deck you can draft in a cube that's actually looking for Brain Freeze, so there's not a lot of tension there. If you're the only Storm drafter, you'll get it if it's opened. If there were more decks in the cube that utilized Brain Freeze, like a mill deck or a Dredge deck, then Brain Freeze would be a lot more interesting. Instead, it's a role player that goes in just one deck.

This cube has a lot of cards that are role players but go into multiple decks. That means that there's some tension whether or not you're going to pick up the role player cards you need, like Lizard Warrior would be perfect in your Blue/Red deck with lots of Rebirth, but another drafter might want it for their Red/Green Threshold deck, or even a plain old mono-red deck, so you have to weigh that differently than normal. Otherwise, we may as well just be handing out the High Tides and Brain Freezes to player A and the Reanimates and Griselbrands to player B and so on.

The other thing that makes this happen is that the role player cards are mostly just good, solid, workmanlike cards. Cheap-to-medium creatures, utility spells, card draw spells. These are cards that decks relying on synergy or just plain decks are going to be rounding out their builds with. Divination with Rebirth might not be the most busted thing in your cube deck, but it's going to be perfectly playable for lots of people, so they might snatch it up.

There are some other things that I added in to clean up the experience. For one, I added in a lot of ability to fix your draws. There are lots of cards that scry or can tutor up a land, there's lots of dual lands to fix your colors, and also you're kind of incentivized to play fewer colors and cheaper cards anyways. I also decided to be relatively safe with the power level of some of the homemade stuff. I put in some stuff like Ragavan and Jace the Mind Sculptor, so I think the best cards in the cube are not made by me. I don't think anything was totally busted.

Having said that, there are some changes I would make. First, I think Carnage Tyrant, Blood Baron of Vizkopa, and some other non-interactive stuff was not a ton of fun. I think I want to have some powerful high-drops like that are great when they resolve but are at least able to be interacted with. Hexproof and Shroud create a pretty helpless feeling, which isn't great when the goal is to have fun anyways.

I think we also need just a few more utility cards to deal with some problematic stuff. One or two more cards that deal with Planeswalkers, artifacts, enchantments. I also think that the green decks really weren't that good, so maybe some extra Threshold payoffs and utility lands would be nice, like Tranquil Thicket. And then maybe beyond that, one more good Burn spell that rounds out both the Red aggro decks and the control decks with red in them. Also, an extra graveyard hate card might be worth it, just in case it's needed.

What's nice is that if there's an effect I want but can't find the right card for it, I can just make it. Like, the first thing that comes to mind to replace Carnage Tyrant is just making a green Grave Titan, maybe it makes Wolves instead of Zombies but still has Deathtouch. That's still be pretty strong, maybe even moreso than Tyrant, but at least it's more fun than Tyrant, and accomplishes the goal I want for the cube.

This experience was really fun and led to some good times had by me and my friends. I'm excited to keep tinkering with it to try and make it as much fun as possible over time, now that the brunt of the work has been done. I'd suggest trying this for yourself, but it was actually a ton of work and if I wasn't a Magic player for 20 years and a game designer already, it might not have been that fruitful. But, if you listen to a bunch of Patrick Sullivan's monologues and rants, you have a pretty good head start on card design.

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Now that the cube experiment is over, I can focus on Modern in earnest. So far, I have a shell that I like, but I'm waiting to see where the format shakes out before I can do anything concrete. Right now, it's kind of the wild west. I'll be planning on streaming, blogging, and videoing when I get some time and am comfortable with a build. Thanks for reading. 

Clank Your Chains and Count Your Change

Gonna talk about Modern Horizons 2 in this post, but let's talk about Historic a little first.

Here's a list for my first foray into Kolaghan's Command land. I'd recently been on a Dragonsguard Elite and Young Pyromancer kick, but maybe Knight of the Ebon Legion is just the way to go. It's less splashy, but it's only one mana and it's never awful. Also, I already was down on Esika's Chariot after lots of decks started playing Prismari Command, and now with Kolaghan's Command it looks even worse.

Kolaghan's Command itself has been a solid addition, but I wouldn't say it's solving any problems we have already. What's great about it is that making the opponent discard a card is excellent in this deck, whereas it might be worse in other builds, since we have so much discard already. Also getting back a creature has some great value, since they could be Ooze or Ebon Legion, hence the power of Inscription of Ruin. But popping off their cheap creatures and gaining some value is already something that Bonecrusher Giant does really well, and gaining some card advantage with some flexibility added in is something that Inscription does really well. I like it, but I don't think it makes the deck broken or anything.

With that out of the way...

It's been a while since I played or wrote about Modern, so let's get into it. This thing looks awesome.

I'm not the hugest fan of mana dorks. It's kind of not really the game I like to be playing. But opponents who play Noble Hierarch end up having such a huge advantage that it changed my mind in Modern. In spite of my efforts to always reduce the average mana costs in the spells in my decks, I still lose games with cards in my hand I didn't have time to cast. Everything in the format is better when it gets into play faster, and being able to keep pace is huge.

As for whether or not this is going to see play in Modern Jund, I think it kind of has to. It's too good. If Deathrite Shaman taught us anything, it's that even if you're not in the market for mana acceleration, when it's really good you should just play it anyways. You'll get a boost when you draw it and you'll be fine when you don't.

Speaking of that, what, if any, changes need to be made to accomodate this? We're going to be playing a deck that is capable of acceleration, but won't draw it every game, and also won't be expecting it to survive that often when we do draw it. This means we can't go hog wild and play all four drops or whatever. But when we do in fact draw it, we need to make sure the cost of the cards in our hand is worth the boost in mana. Hierarch does basically nothing in a hand full of all one drop spells. Jund loves cards that are versatile, but what we are looking for now are cards that are versatile in their mana cost, or get much better if they land earlier.

Liliana is already a huge one, of course. A second turn Liliana is backbreaking against a lot of decks. Also, Liliana is a card that rewards us for emptying our hand quickly, since her +1 doesn't affect you if your hand is empty. So yeah, play Liliana in Jund, got it. Liliana the Last Hope also looks solid, since you're a turn earlier getting to ultimate, and more likely to pick off an opposing X/1. Note that there will be more X/1s in the format after MH2, including opposing Hierarchs. Bloodbraid also likes to hit the board early, but Hierarch isn't going to be the greatest cascade, so that's a maybe. Hexdrinker and Scavenging Ooze are cards that you can pump excess mana into, and also are threatening enough to win the game on their own, which makes a less threat-dense deck still able to compete. Dark Confidant and Kolaghan's Command are excellent at giving you card advantage, recovering from the low-impactness of the Hierarch, and Ignoble Hierarch is excellent at making sure you can cast your new found cards.

I don't know if you want to play Abundant Harvest in a deck with Hierarch. Harvest is good at giving you action when you want it and mana when you want it, and Hierarch throws a wrench in that plan. Hierarch does, however, let you use your Harvest for spells more often, and/or helps alleviate the fact that the spell you find essentially costs and additional green mana. I could be convinced either way.

Thoughtseize and Inquisition of Kozilek specifically are not excellent with Hierarch. The point discard spells are good because they are cheap, and they pare the game down so you can grind the opponent out. Hierarch gives you extra mana, which means it doesn't matter as much that they're cheap, and is low impact by itself, making it hard to grind the opponent out. One thing that Hierarch does, though, is make your life total less of a problem, since you're less likely to get run over by fast opposing starts, or you can afford to play shocklands tapped more often. That makes Thoughtseize look a little better than Inquisition. Plus, Thoughtseize is a better answer to Wraths and Cryptic Commands and stuff, which is the best way for the opponent to get back in the game after a quick Hierarch start. I expect to see fewer discard spells overall and leaning more towards Thoughtseize with Hierarch in the deck.

Castle Locthwain is a card that strikes me as working nicely with Ignoble Hierarch. You can empty your hand faster, you don't have to worry about your life total as much, and you'll be in the market for drawing more action to make up for the Hierarch itself. Creature lands like Treetop Village and Raging Ravine accomplish this as well, and work nicely with the Exalted trigger, but enter the battlefield tapped, which kind of dampens the benefit of the Hierarch anyways.

I'll touch on Grief for a bit, but I don't think it's actually that great. What Grief has going for it in future versions of Jund is that it's solid in hands that have Ignoble Hierarch and in hands that don't. 3/2 Thoughtseize guy for four mana looks much better when you cast it on turn three and it actually attacks for four, and using Unmask starts to look better when you're trying to keep up on tempo because you didn't draw your Hierarch. My initial evaluation is that Grief isn't what we want to be doing in Jund, but I could certainly be wrong about that, given its flexibility.

Tourach, on the other hand, I really like. Similarly to a card like Valki, the unkicked version of the card isn't something you'd play by itself, but can do some work and make life annoying for the opponent. Protection from White is kind of a big deal, and it grows with a lot of the cards in the deck, including Liliana and Kolaghan's Command, but also extra copies of itself. It gets around the legend rule because your opponent discarding two cards and putting two +1/+1 counters on your creature is a fine thing to be doing. Plus, if you can get it to trade off early, you might be able to finagle a way to get it back in your hand with Liliana the Last Hope or Kolaghan's Command and nail 'em later on.

The kicked version of this card is a monster. Random discard is extremely powerful. Lots of times this will be nabbing the last two cards in their hand, so it doesn't matter, but when you hit their Scapeshift or whatever out of a full hand, it's incredible. Add to that Tourach himself will just kill them super fast and you've got a card that's just incredible. It does everything we want in a deck with Ignoble Hierarch, since it's better the earlier it comes down, it's a fast clock, it recoups the card advantage lost from Hierarch, and it's got a safety valve for when you don't have the Hierarch and just need to get something on the board quickly. A truly incredible card.

So I've seen a lot of folks talking about Ragavan on the ol' World Wide Web. Some have called it the best red one drop ever, and possibly even the best one drop creature in Legacy. But it seems like most of the hoard of Jund fanatics out there are silent on Ragavan. If Ragavan is as good as they're saying it is, I think it's great in Jund, and here's why. Consider Ohran Viper.

Why does Jund not play this card? Well, because it's situational in that it has to attack to do anything, it doesn't have a ton of toughness, it's not that great on defense, drawing an extra card doesn't help that much, it doesn't actually close the game. That's all true, but the real reason we don't play Ohran Viper is because it costs too much mana. If it cost one mana, we'd play it. Ragavan is good because it's way cheaper than it should be. It gives you a bunch of options and a random assortment of value that you can do whatever you want with, for just one mana. If the best one drop creature is in your colors and the only condition it has to make it effective is that your opponent has a life total, then you should play it.

I like that Ragavan can act as a pseudo Ignoble Hierarch for when you don't draw one in your newly Hierarch-tuned deck. Also, Ragavan looks like it's exceptional with Hierarch, in that it likes to attack for three on the second turn, right into any one power creatures they might have, and that you want to have extra mana with which to cast the cards you steal with Ragavan.

Thoughtseize and Inquisition are nice with Ragavan, since they clear out opposing removal for it, and the bevy of removal we play also helps clear the way for Ragavan to get in. I'm not a hundred percent sold on Ragavan being an automatic four of, since it's legendary, but jeez. It gets around the legend rule by just winning the game if they don't kill it. What a card.

Here is an early sketch of what the deck might look like. Please disregard the dollar amounts next to the cards, it will only make you sad.

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Those four cards are the main ones I'm interested thus far from this set, but there's a lot to like here. I'm sure more cards will trickle in for Jund, and there's plenty of cool stuff to talk about outside of Jund colors. I've been interested in getting the ol' Magic Online account up and running again to play some Modern, but we'll see. I can play Jund in Historic free to play, and Jund in Modern is, ah, not. I'd love to make some Modern Jund content again like I did a while ago, including in the early stages of this blog and my Youtube channel. That about does it for today, thanks for reading.