MTG Salvation

This primer is never going up, is it lol. I remember reading back since late 2017/early 2018 that it's gonna go up. Fast forward and two months of 2019 have passed

Smooth 3-0 tonight, deck felt smooth and powerful. Beat Jeskai 2-0, Runaway Red 2-0, Sultai Midrange 2-1.

Damping Sphere on Runaway Red proved very, very efficacious.

May be Titanshift's time to shine actually!

Apart from UW control / Burn which can be a toss up, Titanshift is rather favored against the top of the meta now - Dredge, Humans, Tron, Spirits, BGX....

Hmmmm.

Didn't really do well in SCG.

With the Dredge menace rising, I'm moving to 4 leylines and 2 angers in the board. Probably gonna try swapping the 3 Confidants for Flayers as well, given that I'm trying out Vital Force. Bob seems too painful with that sideboard, and Flayer can dump unwanted leyline copies into the yard as well.

Not to mention a 4 Flayer jund list made top 8 in a Japanese GP one or two months ago. Gotta be some merit in that.

KCI is tough. I had to have Sphere and Relic both on the field game 2 to have a chance. Then the last game he got antsy when I came out with multiple ramp spells at the start, and tried to go off on turn 3 but fizzled. I untapped and slammed a damping sphere and that was it

Not really needed for Tron but really helpful. These recent monogreen iterations hit turn 3/4 tron with frightening consistency. In the 3 games we played, he had turn 3 tron twice and turn 4 tron once. Luckily he couldn't produce any karn, just a Wurmcoil that STE can fog. The last Game he had planned to slam t4 Ulamog before I cast the Damping Sphere and that's all it took.

Quite a versatile card I must say.

Humans seem okay barring those Thalia, Kitesail Meddling Made starts.

Haven't been playing much but getting back in the groove in time for PPTQ season.

I've been bruising up my LGS the last couple of weeks with this. Faced and put away Jeskai and Affinity this week. Things seem to be looking up. Just put a MB rec sage just in case.

Had good results again with the 24 land, 12x 1 CMC spell list. Second 3-0 result in a row.

Beat Affinity 2-0 in both rounds 1 and 2, and Burn 2-1 in round 3.

At this juncture, having early access to cheap kill spells / discard feels integral. I'm quite reluctant to want to move back to the clunkier 25 land builds.

Damnation overperformed for me from the sideboard, wiping out the Affinity players' boards in both post-board games in both rounds. I 4 for 1'ed him on turn 4 despite being on the draw, at 4 life. 2 of those creatures were Etched Champions. Then landed Ooze next turn to lock up the game.

I think that with 6x 1CMC removal, 3x 2CMC removal, Kommand and Pulses backed by Liliana, we don't need Anger in the board to kill little critters. Therefore I used Damnation in its place in view of Eldrazi and Etched Champion. It's a good O ***** button.

I've had some trouble against decks that swarm the board and tax removal as well. It's really because we have shaved on kill spells.

Sweepers in the side are now more appealing IMO.

Thanks for the responses. Awesome community.

If I can sum up the salient points for the infect matchup:

1) Generally, let the infect player make the first move unless their attack kills us naturally. Kill the infect creatures either at the end of their turn, or anytime out of combat when we can hope to blank or waste their protection spells (especially if they’re tapped out).

2) Save the better / unconditional removal for Inkmoth

3) Be alive to the ramifications of LOTV -2 on dryad arbor when they have a fetchland in play

4) For sideboarding:

Cards to take out / consider taking out:

- 1 land (on 25 land builds)
- Some BBE (don’t want to tap out for it most of the time)
- Maelstrom Pulse or sorcery speed removal (cannot hit inkmoth – but can hit things like Shaper’s Sanctuary, Wild Defiance postboard)
- Scooze
- Tarmogoyf (I won’t personally do this, but if there is more removal in the sideboard Goyf can go)

Cards to bring in / consider bringing in:
- 2 Ancient Grudge
- 2 or 3 Fulminator Mage
- Collective Brutality
- Last Hope
- Needle
- Lavamancer

Lastly - do we want to max out on discard postboard or shave some? How about Anger of the Gods, worth bringing in?

Great update as always. And yes, we need Bloodbraid in that banner somehow.

If a card would go to any players hand, graveyard, or library other than its owner it instead goes to its owners respective zone. So if you cast Uro in this manner it will enter the battlefield, you will draw a card, gain 3 life, have the option to play a land, and then it will be sacrificed and put into your opponent's graveyard.

In this case, assuming Arcbound Ravager entered with only one +1/+1 counter on it, Arcbound Ravager will be 0/0 as soon as it's on the battlefield (C.R. 613.3c-d, 611.3c, 613.4) and die as a state-based action (C.R. 704.5f), making its modular ability trigger (C.R. 603.2, 702.42a); however, it will still have had a +1/+1 counter at the last moment it's on the battlefield; when your opponent puts the modular ability on the stack, the opponent targets an artifact creature (not: "another creature he [or she] controls") (C.R. 702.42a, 603.3d, 601.2c), and the opponent chooses to put as many +1/+1 counters on it as Arcbound Ravager last had -- here, one -- when the ability resolves (C.R. 608.2g, 603.5, 702.42a).

EDIT (Jul. 22): Clarification.
EDIT (Jul. 21, 2019): Use better rule citation. Other minor edits.

I may have comprehension issues, but sentences such as:

The format feels awful because playing against Dredge, Phoenix, Hollow One, Tron, and Titan all the time is pretty awful

are all over this thread.

its like ktkenshinx has been saying, modern is trying to do a whole lot, and at the end of the day some people have to endure disappointment and unrealized expectations; or...just not play modern

I agree with this statement.

I definitely don't think it needs a ban at this point. But I was just thinking about the question posed above, what deck would you build to beat Humans... I'm not sure there is one

Quote from wtyyy »

Hey didn't know you check in on this thread! Was a treat seeing you do that make-or-die play with Bob, choosing to terminate the Sculler instead of Flickerwisp. What was the thought process behind that decision?

Would love a deck tech - how instrumental has Hazoret been for you?

Anyway, best of luck

Basically I was at 4 life with Blood moon in play when i drew terminate, sculler had my damnation and flickerwisp was going to bring me down to 1 on its next attack. The decision was to either kill flickerwisp and hope i find an answer for my own Bob before it kills me, mind you my opponent is locked by my moon but he still has a swamp in play and could potentially draw a fatal push to kill my bob and start attacking w his sculler. I felt like my opponent still had live draws and i also knew that I had lots of turns where my own bob could kill me if i dont draw a removal spell for it. Therefore, I went for the high risk high reward play of killing sculler since that meant i had to only dodge one bob trigger as I was getting my damnation back to my hand but couldnt cast it the same turn due to my own moon. It ended up working out, I was very conscious that I needed to get lucky, but this involved getting lucky only once, the other option involved getting lucky potentially multiple times and that was my reasoning.

Hazoret was insane the whole tournament, I loved it. I just wish I would have played vs grixis DS a bit more. Hazy absolutely seals the game in that matchup, I didnt play against DS until day 2 when i was already dead for top 8. I did however play vs tron 4 times and went 2-2, the wins involved blood moon draws and the losses where those games that I didn't have the moons. Matchup is just so hard.

My buddy Michael Olson finished top 32, we had a pretty similar list. He decided to go against blood moon in favor of fulminator mage. But I convinced him into running a Hazoret and he told me that it was great for him. He had a split of 1 kalitas and 1 hazy, where I had 2 Hazorets. In retrospect, maybe I should have had that same split with Kalitas, since Kalitas is great vs matter reshaper and races tron pretty well, I just thought that DS was going to be more popular. But I was wrong, tron was everywhere!

Quote from FlyingDelver »

I am not agreeing on Jund being on its death bed, but its certainly hard to win tournaments now. I play Jund every FNM still, I do also manage to have more wins than losses but ever so often I get paired against some kind of Big Mana deck which screws with my score and prevents me from winning the FNMs. I am always up in the better half of the participants but am struggling to reach to number 1. I feel there are just too many bad or hard matchups for Jund where we just have too many dead cards. We are the king of removal, but against all those Scapehisft, Tron or Control decks it feels at least a third of our deck is just dead. Sometimes more, sometimes less. So its definitely hard to pilot the deck and adjusting it to the meta when half of the meta just dodges most of our goodstuff cards.

My win % vs big mana decks has improved a ton with blood moon. Scapeshift is a cake walk once you slam the moon. Tron is the only matchup where they are still capable of winning through the blood moon, thanks to expedition map and having all is dust. Still don't really know how to improve that matchup, been trying several things but ive only managed to go 50/50 vs them.

In this scenario, with the assumption given in comment 2, Arcbound Ravager will be 0/0 as soon as it's on the battlefield and die as a state-based action -- which happens even before any player gets priority to activate abilities, including Arcbound Ravager's first ability (C.R. 116.3b, 116.5, 116.1b; see also comment 2).