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.

The Sun Went Down in Honey, The Moon Came Up in Wine

 Made Mythic with this.

I'm actually not sold on whether or not I like Young Pyromancer or Dragonsguard Elite, but a friend wondered if maybe with Abundant Harvest we had enough action to use Dragonsguard Elite. I was always looking for something to better fit in the Valki slot, and the Elite worked pretty well. I then tried Pyromancer and while it's also pretty good, I can't really decide which one I like better. I think it comes down to Pyromancer being better if you expect black removal and Dragonsguard being better if you expect red removal. I ended up actually crossing the finish line to make Mythic with Pyromancer in the list, but whichever one you like better is fine. Both work great. It's not a huge focus of the deck to maximize them, but it is a focus of the deck to get some little bits of value out of our cheap creatures, so they work here.

Cling has taken the spot of Grafdigger's Cage in the sideboard. I don't like bringing in Cage if there's just a graveyard subtheme, like if your deck can win without using the graveyard. So Cling works much better against Torrential Gearhulk decks, still has plenty of usage against Phoenix and Dreadhorde Arcanist, and also works just fine against normal old control decks as a late game draw engine, since we only can afford to run two Castle Locthwain with the tighter mana base.

Thragtusk in the board has been okay, but I find myself wanting something that has a similar effect and is cheaper. Five mana is a lot, especially when we only run 22 lands and are expecting to be grabbing nonland cards with Abundant Harvest. Grakmaw and Chariot are the two things that come to mind, so maybe that will work in the sideboard, but I'm looking for other ideas. They all block and trade off with attackers for value, and they all play well against removal, so they're good at either winning a value fight or turning a game into a value fight. I'll keep trying some more stuff, but if you're in the market for a five drop at the moment, I do think that Thragtusk is the one.

Tainted Pact is the new hotness. It's kind of funny, most combo decks that turn out to be great go from dedicated combo to be more like midrangey interaction-based with a combo element. What made Splinter Twin such a good deck wasn't Splinter Twin, it was Snapcaster Mage and Lightning Bolt. Tainted Pact seems to be going the other way. I originally envisioned this deck as being a midrange deck with the combo added in, since you can only play so many copies, but instead people are playing things like Solve the Equation and Mastermind's Acquisition. There's a little bit of interaction in the deck, but a good recipe of a quick clock and disruption will be awesome against Pact and similar decks. You strip away their combo pieces, and then don't give them the time to find new ones. I've found the matchup to be a little tough because we don't have that quick of a clock from most of our creatures, like Chevill and Ooze, but you can mess with the numbers if Pact becomes what the format is entirely about.

I see a lot of people on the internet asking for a Tainted Pact or Thassa's Oracle ban. I guess I'm just kind of tired of banning the best deck all the time. The next best deck in the format at large is probably the Gearhulk Magma Opus deck, so are we just going to ban that too? Don't get me wrong, the deck is great, but I think that part of the challenge of Magic is trying to either become a master with a deck you like, or trying to come up with creative ways to attack a metagame. I like rewarding people who get good at playing the best decks, and I like rewarding people who can identify the best deck's weaknesses and exploit them. It sucks to work really hard to be good at Tainted Pact mirror matches and then have the deck banned, and it also sucks to finally figure out how to beat the boogeyman and then they just ban it anyways.

Let's talk Historic Anthology 5. Unlike the last Historic Anthology, pretty much every card in the set is a hit. As for us, I think Kolaghan's Command is the only really good one.

I am going to start with a 2-of Kolagahn's Command, though off the top of my head I'm not sure what to replace for it. The easy thing would be to say Inscription of Ruin, since it does lots of similar things, but right now I'd play six Inscriptions if they let me. Kolaghan's Command is a discard spell that works well with other discard spells, since it's an instant and can get the card they draw when their hand is empty. The all Mind Rot deck will often leave their hand empty, so this will come up often. Plus, with Pact as the frontrunner of the format, more discard spells are better.

My initial thought is to cut one Maelstrom Pulse and one Esika's Chariot. I also don't want to go down on creature count, since, you know, you want creatures in your graveyard to rebuy. It's honestly not a great format for Kolaghan's Command, since the creatures are big and there aren't that many artifacts, but this kind of flexibility is perfect for our deck.

Out of all the cards in the set, I think that the biggest deal is Into the North. This will be the first time that we have a pure Rampant Growth effect in the format. If you're a fan of straight green-black decks, maybe try this one out for a spin. You ramp, you fix your mana, and if you want to you can fetch Faceless Haven. All extremely good stuff. Plus, a hand of two lands and Into the North will get you to at least three mana every time, unlike two lands and Explore. I tried Explore as the Farseek substitute in a more RTR/INN Jund deck for Historic, but Explore just isn't what that kind of deck is looking for.

Outside of Into the North, I think Ojutai's Command is very good and will be losing to it a lot, and Atarka's Command is very good and an easy slot-in for Gruul decks. I also wouldn't be surprised to see Grisly Salvage do some good work. You don't ever want to be the the second or third best graveyard deck in the format, but Grisly Salvage sets you up to just cast your stuff if your graveyard shenanigans are offline.

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That's about it for me today, I plan on firing up the stream a little bit this week and testing out some Kolaghan's Command. Thanks for reading.

Back To Back Chicken Shack

 On a nice little run with this list, let's talk about it.

A question I get on stream from time to time is what card from Jund in older formats would I like to see put into Historic. There's no real perfect answer to that question because the format is changing at a rapid pace and the tools that you would want change quickly. Lots of cards would be good in certain situations, others wouldn't really be as useful because of the decks you're likely to run up against. One card I always kind of wish we had though was Sprouting Thrinax.

Having said that, there were a couple of big reasons to not play Grakmaw up until now. One is the amount of Claim the Firstborn in the format. Between Rakdos Arcanist and Jund Sacrifice, which were at times two of the top three most popular decks in the format, getting this hit by Claim was such a high risk that it didn't seem worth it. It's honestly still a little sketchy. However, the amount of Claim the Firstborn in the format has fallen off drastically.

The second reason to not play Grakmaw was that if the first 3/3 didn't kill an Uro, the second 3/3 wasn't going to either. Before Strixhaven, Historic was a format of haymakers. Even beyond Uro, there was Nissa, Emergent Ultimatum, etc. As the format as a whole gets more lower-to-the-ground and decks are more interested in using one for one removal, Grakmaw starts to create some real problems. It's great against decks trying to remove it with Lightning Helix and it's great against decks trying to attack into it with Gruul Spellbreaker.

This, like all cards but more than usual, is subject to change if certain metagame shifts happen. Specifically, if Claim the Firstborn starts to creep into the equation more than it is, then Grakmaw will have to hit the sideline again. But I like how it's playing for now.

I'm still a huge fan of this card, but there's a few reasons why I'm playing Chariot over it for now. One, I wanted to go down to two four drops and when you do that, the cost that Professor has on your sideboard becomes a lot tougher. All of a sudden you're drastically debilitating yourself in post-board games for a much smaller payoff, since you're only 2/3 as likely to draw a Professor. 

Secondly, I'm finding that either the card you get off it doesn't need to be cast to win the game, or you lose with it in hand. Like I mentioned before, the format is getting much lower to the ground and while two for ones are great, drawing a card that you don't have time to cast isn't really a two for one.

Third, I moved back to Maelstrom Pulse from Murderous Rider, so the utility of getting a Naturalize effect wasn't as necessary. A little thing, but worth noting that it's nice to not be cold to Experimental Frenzy and hardcast Shark Typhoons if you don't have to be.

For what it's worth, I tried out Rekindling Phoenix in this slot, looking for a good threat that was hard to deal with one for one but could close a game quickly if it wasn't dealt with. That was nice, but it took about one time not being able to cast it for lack of red mana to change my tune. So Chariot's back.

Play 4. It's too good.

In our new low-to-the-ground format, things like Mono-Red and Gruul are great decks. They are consistent, low-to-the-ground themselves, and punish people who are messing around with Brainstorms and Abundant Harvests. Since that's the case, Thragtusk looks awesome if you can get it to resolve in those matchups. Fewer decks are trying to get fancy with Righteous Valkyrie and stuff, but instead they are going straight for your face. Add to that how great Thragtusk is against Teferi decks and mirror matches, and we've got a really solid card for the format right now. If their plan is to either attack into it or remove it, then Thragtusk is a slam dunk.

Since we always have to make this comparison, I like Thragtusk a lot more than Gargaroth at the moment. Thragtusk is almost always lights out against red decks and Gruul decks. Gargaroth is as well, but Tusk is better against the grindy matchups than Gargaroth by quite a bit.

Another thing is that as of right now, we're Jegantha ready. A month ago I'd have insisted on Jegantha being in the board, but the world has changed quite a bit since then. There are two reasons for this. One, the graveyard decks are a lot better than they used to be because of Faithless Looting, which stretches your sideboard in an extra direction and requires lots of slots. Go Blank of course has been awesome there, but you still need as much action as you can get. In addition, other decks like Rogues and combo decks are really sleek and strong, and you need to tune your 60 with cheap interaction after sideboard to have a shot. What I'm getting at is that sideboard real estate is at a premium right now, so if there was ever a time that Jegantha wouldn't be worth the sideboard slot, it's now.

Second, you're just not very likely to need to fetch it and cast it. Trying to spend eight mana on Jegs in a 22 land deck is just a completely different world than in a 27 land deck. It isn't that the deck wouldn't like to have it, it's more that we simply cannot access it very often. Games are over or essentially over quicker, and you'll be operating on less than five lands quite often.

Having said all of this, I'm still not sold that it shouldn't be included. We've already made all of the deck construction costs, so the only thing we have to do is make one sideboard cut in order to have it. If Jegantha wins one game out of every 30, is that more or less useful than one extra sideboard card? It's tough to run the numbers, but if the Companion mechanic has taught us anything, it's that it's more worth it than you'd think.

To touch on this quickly, I tried a Dreadhorde Arcanist build of this deck for a little while but ended up moving away from it. First, you're running into the graveyard trap. Grafdigger's Cage is usually a blank and Rest in Peace is pretty limited against us, but with the Arcanist build you're running headlong into it, at a time when graveyard hate is a huge necessity in everyone's sideboards. Second, the deck had trouble closing games. I'd have times where I literally cast five free spells off an Arcanist and lost because I didn't have enough ways to actually kill the opponent. Arcanist decks usually do this with Kroxa, but unless you want to go in on Stitcher's Supplier and Faithless Looting, then it's harder. Third, you really do have to warp your deck around Arcanist to make it consistent. I was going way up on discard spells and even main deck Cling to Dust in order to have enough Arcanist food and it still often wasn't enough. Don't get me wrong, I usually love cutting mana costs, but this was a little too much. Hence why I didn't have space in the deck for cards to close the game with.

I think that this list looks very good, but it's a little different from what I want to be doing. Note that if the graveyard decks are going to have easier access to cards to get rid of opposing graveyard hate, you need to really max out on that effect, and that Go Blank specifically is great because it can't get Assassin's Trophy'd or Abraded.

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I played in and streamed JafferMTG's big tournament championship thing this weekend and had a great time. I had no idea what I was doing in Standard, but if I was to do it again, I think I would play this deck by a player named Mertcan. I got beaten badly by it and it looked well tuned. I'm hoping to have a little time this week to fire up the stream again and run some Historic Jund on the ladder. Thanks for reading.

A Brand New Crescent Moon

Strixhaven has been fun. Speculation on the set leading in was that there would not be as many obviously busted cards as in the past, but some neat stuff to try out. That, plus the Mystic Archives has ramped up the consistency and general power of Historic as a whole, what with Brainstorm, Faithless Looting, and Memory Lapse et al. I like that we've got powerful and cheap utility spells but not an influx of over the top, out and out busted stuff, like Uro or Omnath.

If they had printed, like Hymn to Tourach or whatever, it would have been pretty easy to just know that that would be good and include it in the deck. Strixhaven came with a lot of cards that look versatile but not especially powerful, so some exploration was necessary. That, along with jamming four Abundant Harvest and some number of Inquisition of Kozilek, has led me to this.

Gnarled Professor isn't blowing anybody's doors off, but it's been pretty good. A 5/4 Trample is a great body as long as it comes with enough of a bonus to make it worthwhile. Like I've said in my stream, fetching a Lesson from your sideboard isn't the greatest thing ever, but it's about as powerful as drawing a card, so if you imagine Gnarled Professor as a beefy Rogue Refiner, it starts to look good. The deck seems to flow pretty nicely with Professor in the list, as it's a nice top end to the deck where it stabilizes a board, and then turns into a mana sink later with the Lesson you get. Unlike stuff like Polukranos that fill that same role, Gnarled Professor can get you value even if it gets dealt with or has to trade in combat.

There are some major drawbacks to playing the Professor. One is that you can't play Jegantha, or Lurrus for that matter. Is that okay? It seems to be. The Professor itself can sort of play that same role that Jegantha played, where if you and your opponent are both topdecking you have something to use your mana on. Whether you win with a 5/5 or a Mascot Exhibition doesn't really matter, you still get access to this card that you didn't have to draw to utilize and will win you the game.

The second issue is that the sideboard space takes a pretty major hit when you have to play Lessons. So far I've found these four Lessons to be the only ones super necessary to play, so it's only four cards. Pest Summoning is also a consideration if the metagame turns to more cheap red creature decks, but that hasn't been very prevalent on the ladder. However, there are some new versatile sideboard cards from Strixhaven that I've been loving and make great use of sideboard slots, which I'll get to in a second. Also, you kind of have to imagine Professor itself as extra copies of sideboard cards that you can access. No need to run Wilt in your sideboard when you have Containment Breach, or a late game value hammer when you have Mascot Exhibition.

Building the deck with Professor in mind changes up a few things. Similarly to stuff like Esika's Chariot, it's a medium-to-big sized threat that needs to be dealt with but provides card advantage even if it is. That's a great fit for this deck, just like Chariot, so there isn't a lot in the way of strategic changes to make. One thing we will need is access to enough green mana to make it work, but we were already trying to make that happen with Scavenging Ooze in the deck. Also, we want to make sure we're capable of dealing with the stuff that a Professor can't do for us. There's no Doom Blade lesson, so we still need to play plenty of removal spells to trigger Chevill. There's no Thoughtseize lesson, so we want plenty of hand disruption. But the things that Professor does get aren't as necessary to have anymore. I'm much less afraid of Search for Azcanta and hard cast Shark Typhoons with Professor in the deck, so Pulse isn't as necessary and opens the door for Murderous Rider in that slot. Mascot Exhibition is a fine late game finisher, so we can keep the rest of the mana curve in the deck a lot lower and not have to play big expensive cards to fight a midrange arms race with.

Professor has been an interesting case study because it seems to be the type of card that Jund typically is looking for, but also is at odds with what we're doing. We gain advantage by having denying our opponents resources so that things like a 5/4 Trample can just win the game by itself. We also like cards that are versatile and are capable of disrupting as many different strategies as possible with the same card. Professor does both of these well. But, Jund usually also seeks to utilize its post-sideboard advantage by having no real attackable plan, but also have access to the best sideboard cards against whatever our opponent is doing. Professor is very much at odds with this facet of Jund deckbuilding. It's certainly possible that the cost of the sideboard slots ends up not being worth the value we get from Professor, depending on how this format's metagame shakes out, in which case stuff like Esika's Chariot or more Planeswalkers might be necessary. I like Professor for now, though. I've been surprised.

Until I started playing Historic, and specifically with Chevill, I never really thought of Terror as a sideboard card. Shock or something that costs one mana makes sense because it hits small creatures and lowers your mana curve to keep up, Wraths make sense because not everyone is going to be playing lots of creatures out at the same time, Infest makes sense against swarms of small cheap creatures, but a two-mana removal spell like this is good for its flexibility, not its focus. But, because of the construction of this deck and the metagame as a whole, having extra access to Terror effects is exactly what we want a lot of the time, so much so that loading up on them after sideboard is worth it. What makes Flunk especially good out of the sideboard is that you know that it's going to be good against any deck you'd want creature removal for, because those are the decks most likely to play out the cards in their hand quickly.

Flunk turns out to have the most applications as a removal spell among any of the other Doom Blade effects. It's better than Cast Down against stuff like Questing Beast and Sram. It's better than Eliminate against stuff like Questing Beast and other expensive creatures. It's better than Actual Factual Doom Blade against black decks, obviously, which includes stuff like Mayhem Devil and Kroxa that you really need to kill. It's also better than Abrade against straight up creature decks. And, it's better than Heartless Act in a deck that plays Chevill.

Like I mentioned, when you have Chevill, extra straight up removal spells gain a lot of value. Ideally you pick up a new removal spell with every one you cast, running your opponent out of cards and keeping your life total out of reach. Flunk also just works because we're a deck that wants to trade early and then win with the leftovers, be it Professor, Castle Locthwain, or Scavenging Ooze. But Flunk is nice specifically in this deck where we are going to be playing removal spells. Inscriptioning an opponent's hand is a likely scenario even when you'd expect to be using the removal spell mode most of the time, so we can help our opponent empty their hand and make sure Flunk works how we want it.

As far as sideboard options go, I think that Flunk is the best of the bunch for this effect. If you're interested in playing some main deck two mana removal spells, I would play Eliminate.

I am so incredibly high on this card. It's definitely the best Strixhaven main set card in the set for us. 

It takes the place of Davriel in the sideboard. Against a pure control deck, I'd say it's worse than Davriel in a vacuum but it's not quite as simple as that. Lots of players are going to be having stuff like Search for Azcanta or Commit/Memory, and also Torrential Gearhulk, which Go Blank takes care of. Also, Davriel isn't always going to make them discard three cards if they have stuff like Shark Typhoon.

In addition to all of this, Go Blank is one of the best graveyard hate card ever printed. You can expect to play against quite a few matchups where casting this on turn three just ends the game immediately. The discard effect gets more powerful the closer to exactly two cards your opponent has in hand, so if your opponent is spending their cards and mana casting Faithless Looting, Stitcher's Supplier and whatever else, then the discard effect is going to be even more brutal. You're usually hitting all of their graveyard, and the graveyard synergy payoffs they were planning on using. It's honestly unfair.

Like I mentioned with Professor, the fact that you get to roll your graveyard hate card into the same sideboard slots as your value Mind Rot slot, makes your whole deck better. You get to open up real estate in your sideboard, which is crucial in a deck and format like this.

Basically everything I mentioned about Blex in my post a few weeks ago holds true now. Blex has been solid enough against the format's aggressive decks, but not all aggressive decks are gunning for your life total that much. Some are trying to use evasion, some are trying to make huge creatures, only some are straight up coming at you with damage as fast as possible. So Blex has been slightly worse than I'd hoped, but Search for Blex has been really strong. If you can resolve it, which is honestly pretty easy to do with the amount of discard we play, then you can set yourself up really nicely for the rest of the game. Like I mentioned before in videos and streams and stuff, it's not just draw three cards, it's basically a Dig Through Time that lets you take three cards, or more. You get the best stuff. If you can assume your life total isn't at risk at all, then Search for Blex is one of the best things you can be doing. I haven't hated a one-of.

We're kind of already going long here, but Abundant Harvest is a must have, absolutely the best card in the deck. You're going to want to lower your land count, I'm playing 22 as of right now and it feels like it's absolutely enough. You're also going to want to have a lot of green sources so you can play your Harvests early. It's phenomenal. I'm going to play four of these in every deck for as long as they let me.

That about does it for Strixhaven Cards. A couple other things to note about this list as it's built now is that the format continues to get more low-to-the-ground. I've been liking Thragtusk as a versatile card that can come in against pretty much any non-combo deck. Control, midrange, Gruul, all of them carry the wrong number of spears. I also have been liking Murderous Rider. If a 2/3 Lifelink is something that's useful in the format, then Murderous Rider starts to look good. Otherwise, there are often better removal spells options, like Bedevil and Maelstrom Pulse. Both Thragtusk and Murderous Rider leave behind serviceable but not amazing cards for you to close out a game with, which is excellent in a format where players are trading one-for-one.

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I'll be streaming this Saturday for a cool tournament put on by JafferMTG on Twitch. It'll be Standard so I have no idea what I'm doing but you can check it out if you'd like. Feel free to ask questions or make suggestions in the comments. Thanks for reading.

Video

Posted this today, has a lot of my thoughts on the new set. Check it out.

Fireworks, Calliopes, and Clowns

First, to check in, I'm going to be playing the top 1200 tournament thing this weekend. I don't know what it's called. I'm pretty sure that I'm just going to play the list that I've got written on the sidebar, but could potentially make some small changes. I didn't play in the Historic Challenge thing this weekend, but my friends who did say they saw a lot of Gruul and other aggro decks. If that's the case, then I like where the list is.

Let's go over some Strixhaven cards. The Mystic Archives are definitely the major hitters for this set, but there are a lot of cool things that could turn out to be good.

To start, let's look at this thing. The lesson/learn mechanic is cool, but you need two things for it to be worth playing: the cards with Learn being good enough, and the cards with Lesson being good enough. Professor definitely checks the first box. It's a big creature that draws you a semi-useful card, and that's solid enough on its own. The problem is the Lessons themselves, so let's take a look.

These are the standouts, and they aren't that great. There's a Disenchant, a Planeswalker removal spell, a big value token creator, and a small defensive roadblock type thing. I don't hate it, but it kind of seems like a worse version of a Karn wishboard, which I've seen from time to time. I'll certainly give it a shot, but I think it's too slow.

The easy thing to say here is that Valentin breaks up Witch's Oven stuff, but there's a lot more to it. First, I'm not super comfortable with my metagame call Jund Sacrifice hoser being a one tougness creature. Secondly, it shuts off our own Chevills and Sarulfs. On the plus side of this one, you can get some value out of it if you have some mana lying around, whether you're playing Jund Sac or any other creature deck, and if you draw a Chevill or Sarulf, you just cast a 4/4. Lisette is a good backup plan, but also works pretty well with Ooze and kind of with Chevill, which is nice because those are the two cards that don't work with Valentin. 

Jund isn't always going to be about looking at the spoiler and finding the busted cards and going "Oooh Aaahh". When I look at a spoiler list, I'm looking for tools with which I can win matches, not do explosive stuff. Blex exemplifies this.

This is the perfect recipe for a good green and black card. Whether or not it's good enough for the format is a different question, but it helps you play the two different roles you're trying to play in your matchups. In almost every matchup, you're either trying to make trades and keep your life total high, or you're using your unpressured life total to gain card advantage. I'm excited about this one. It might just turn into another Griffin pet card, but whatever.

This card is neat and versatile like Blex, but just a little worse at everything. However, maindeckable graveyard hate is a good thing to have, so there's certainly a case for playing this, depending on the meta.

Sedgemoor Witch is a more narrow creature than the other ones we've seen but has a lot of power. Something I want to try out is this, Magmatic Channeler, and possibly even Young Pyromancer in a deck with lots of discard, removal, and Abundant Harvest. Sedgemoor Witch costs a mana more than Young Pyromancer does but all the abilities on the card are built for winning races and you get a lot of strength out of that extra mana. So far it seems like this clearly gets there on rate in Historic, the question is whether it fits any decks.

I usually stay away from exile effects because of Chevill, but we're not actually tied to playing Chevill. If it makes sense we can just cut it and play more exile effects. If that's something we want to do, is this going to be better than Vraska's Contempt or Eat to Extinction? I think the answer is yes, but the drawback for the discounted price on this card is tougher on midrange decks than it might be for other decks. But, like a dual face card, more options is a good place to be for something like this. I hope some day that someone targets a Thassa's Oracle with this while the Oracle's trigger is on the stack and the opponent has an empty library.

This card is pretty sweet. Instant speed is fantastic, it's cheap, and it can hit small creatures early and big creatures late, which is exactly what you'd hope for. It's going to go really nicely in a deck with discard spells as well, you know, like Jund. I can't say right now if I think it's better than Eliminate, but there's a lot to like here so it's worth a shot.

Mortality Spear is like a better Baleful Master. It hits anything, which is nice because of stuff like hardcast Shark Typhoons and Search for Azcanta, or The Great Henge or whatever. Plus, gaining life is something you have a little control over when you play Scavenging Ooze, but also Chevill and Klothys can make this cheaper from time to time. Like with all potentially playable removal spells, being better than Maelstrom Pulse is a big ask.

I'm a big fan of cards that are good against small creatures. One of my favorite cards in Modern is Shadow Guildmage. The reason isn't that Shadow Guildmage kills every card in your opponent's deck, it's that it kills enough of their small stuff that you can save your removal spells for their bigger stuff. I've certainly lost games where I Lightning Bolted my opponent's Noble Hierarch and Thalia, then died to Mantis Riders. Culling Ritual won't hit your opponent's biggest stuff, but it does stop smaller creatures and lets you save your Bloodchief's Thirsts and Maelstrom Pulses for the Questing Beasts and Mayhem Devils of the world. The mana bonus is nice here too, since you can cast it and wipe away their small creatures and also Pulse something big on the same turn. I think this might be the best Wrath effect for a deck like this, but the question is whether or not we want a Wrath effect at all. So far I haven't missed them, but the fact that this thing also hits stuff like Food tokens, Treasure tokens, Witch's Ovens, and Trail of Crumbs, plus every Aura and creaturein the Auras deck, means it's certainly worth looking at.

It's innocuous, but this is the single card that I'm most excited for out of the Strixhaven main set. The thing you have to remember with Strixhaven is that Faithless Looting just got printed too, so graveyard hate is going to be important. Go Blank doubles as a perfectly fine Mind Rot to board in against control decks while also serving as graveyard hate. It's an incredible card against stuff like Arclight Phoenix or Dreadhorde Arcanist decks, where you're playing a card advantage game but they also have graveyard synergies. I love opportunities to condense sideboard space with cards that are useful against multiple strategies. Plus, Mind Rot effects tend to be good against decks that have some incidental graveyard interactions anyways, so you get to shut off stuff like Torrential Gearhulk and Commit/Memory just as a bonus. I think this takes the spot of Davriel in the sideboard as soon as it's printed, not that it's better than Davriel straight up (although it's close) but it has a ton of effect across the whole format.

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I would post a way-too-early Strixhaven decklist to think about, but I think that a lot of these cards are going to require their own research. I think that a lot of cards from this set look like they are close to playable, but we have to remember that, with every set that's released, the minimum power level of a card to be included goes up and up, especially after something like Mystical Archives. My prediction is that most of these are good but just miss the cut, but certainly would not be surprised to be wrong. Anyways, I'm planning on streaming the Historic tournament this Saturday on Twitch if you're interested. Thanks for reading.