I employed the ghost quarter strategy years ago when I played Abzan, and it felt like if you had to GQ your opponent turn 2 on the draw you were set so far behind that it didn’t make a difference in the end. Consequently I went with field of ruin since it’s the more powerful card in more scenarios, but I could reevaluate.
I haven’t been impressed with finks lately in modern. It feels like the 3/2 and 2/1 bodies aren’t that relevant anymore in modern unless they come stapled to extra cards, like bob or BBE.
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The baloths are a hold over from when I was playing the 4-of tracker build and had a hard time winning the mirror. In general I’ve really enjoyed baloth against lightning bolt decks, especially mardu and jund since the card is obviously great against kcommand and LotV. It’s also pretty good against control I’ve found since they help put pressure on your opponent to have path. It’s pretty good against hollow one I think, I haven’t seen many people board out burning inquiry, though I confess that I don’t get to play this matchup as often as I’d like.
I’m not married to them, but I’ve boarded them in quite frequently and they’ve really overperformed. Did you have something else in mind Delver?
It's been pretty sweet. It's not such a far departure from the usual jund list, but the biggest tech is splitting the difference between tracker and BBE, the reasoning being that BBE can't cascade into other BBEs whereas it can cascade into tireless trackers. It helps maximize your cascades, and it marginally lowers the probability of hitting the crappy cascades since you effectively have more cascade targets in the deck. Plus, there are some matchups where the tempo of BBE is more valuable and other matchups where the grindy-ness of tracker really shines so it's nice to have both MD.
I know I've railed on confidant, but unfortunately I just couldn't really see a way around playing confidant anymore. After playtesting a bunch, lavamancer and brutality are a bit too hyper-specific for maindeck inclusions in the end. They're not disastrous, but also not great half the time. Collective brutality for instance I have to move to the board in like 75% of matchups and it ended up feeling so narrow that I just cut it in general. It's really only there anymore to beat burn, which just isn't very relevant in modern anymore. Since I have to put some additional low-end spells in the deck to round out the curve, dark confidant is really the most sensible option; grim flayer just doesn't really do it for me.
2 confidants is I think the maximum I'd ever play though as I stand by the opinion that it's a horrible card in multiples and a big weak link for the BG archetype in general.
Field of ruin is a pretty sweet 1-of for a 25 land build. It really adds a unique element to the deck since our maindeck isn't usually capable of destroying a problematic land. With that field of ruin, it might be correct to fit a basic mountain in there somewhere.
Lastly, haven't really had a chance to play against too much big mana and not sure about the '2 moon, 1 mage, 1 sphere' split. I know I want 4 spots for the big mana decks, and I know I want at least 1 damping sphere and 1 fulminator mage, but that's all I know.
One should not overlook the obvious, Grim Lavamancer can do repeated damage to the dome. there are match-ups where this ability is highly desirable.
Yeah, that was my thinking. Unfortunately though based on testing, the 5th spot removal spell probably needs to take precedence over lavamancer in the maindeck. In hindsight I think even though lavamancer only costs 1 mana, he’s actually more of a mid game spell rather than early game. He can be cast on turn 1, but he’s hard to enable early and less mana efficient than something like push.
Regarding your thought Delver, I used to run jund a couple of months ago with no lavamancer and like 3 sweepers. Part of the problem is that humans, a matchup where that should be good, ended up feeling kind of medium. The combination of Thalias, meddling mages, and freebooters makes resolving a sweeper challenging whereas they don’t play nearly as many ways to interact with lavamancer. I haven’t tried a second EE though, mostly due to the insane price tag on that card. That could work out though where a second anger might not. Probably not good to lean on EE too much in a deck with BBE, but in a build with no BBEs that might be more powerful.
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Just curious, do you guys see fatal push as being 100% necessary in the maindeck against the field? Like I'm curious what your thoughts are about the following 1cmc "removal" suites:
The pros of having the lavamancer maindeck as opposed to fatal push is it's comparatively much more useful against non-creature decks since fatal push obviously can't be pointed at the face. It's also repeatable removal vs 1 time use, and it's an infinitely better cascade off of BBE on an empty board.
The cons obviously is that you have 1 fewer maindeck answer to cards like tarmogoyf and death's shadow. Lavaman can team up with a bolt to kill some of those creatures, but push is a much cleaner answer without a doubt. Lavaman is also not an immediate effect like push is, meaning that if you can't afford to let your opponent untap with a creature, push is much more useful.
What do you think? I know prevailing logic is to play a maindeck push before lavamancer, but worth exploring the alternative.
I’ll go even a bit further and just say that Olivia has been largely eclipsed by Liliana the last hope. She’s not a strict 100% upgrade, but she provides a similar ability as Olivia while being far less mana intensive and generally more flexible. Ltlh is a decent board card against control and against tron when paired with fulminator mages, whereas Olivia is pretty lackluster in both matchups.
Olivia can shine in the right set of circumstances, but I don’t think there are enough decks jam-packed with x/1s and x/2s for her to prey on at this point, and even if there were, LtLH has a strong case for just being the better card.
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Yeah that's kinda what I'm thinking epica. 12-13 3drops is maybe a bit much lol, but like 10 3cmc spells and 2 BBEs is actually a less painful curve as far as bob's concerned (compared to your average list with 8 3cmc and 4 BBEs) and two trackers + two BBEs should give you approximately the same staying power. Been trying the following top end setup:
and the BBEs have felt way more valuable on average. Could just be running a bit hot, which is why I'm gonna go a little deeper and try +1 Tracker, -1 BBE which I'm expecting to be quite nice. I'm playing 2 bobs for my curve's sake and because it's always nice to reevaluate cards you've previously written off, but after adding that second tracker it's a bit tempting to keep the 3rd BBE over the second bob. We shall see.
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I’ll go on record as saying that playing a bunch of maindeck trackers goes a long way towards smashing the crap out of value town I’m like 3 or 4-0 against value town with the tracker build. I have to imagine that otherwise you’ll have a hard time though.
I’ve had an overwhelmingly positive impression of damping sphere. I’ve had no luck vs tron before sphere came along. The ability to take tron offline on turn 2 means you aren’t just cold to turn 3 tron on the draw, which means your game 3 win rate goes up considerably. And where fulminator is good against the fair matchups in modern, sphere is good against a bunch of the combo matchups, including KCI which can be otherwise quite challenging without access to stony silence. Some other decks that can have a rough time comboing through a sphere include obviously storm, grishoalbrand, Cheerios, and ad nauseum to a degree. Obviously those aren’t a top priority as far as board space is concerned, but it’s better not to sleep on them anyways if you can afford 1 card or so.
From testing I’ve found that 4 sideboard cards is kind of the sweet spot needed to beat tron with some consistency. Running fewer than that means you’re unlikely to draw your hate on time vs tron. Notably, Reid duke has been registering 3 fulminator 1 sphere in his last couple modern videos too. You can certainly go with 5 hate cards if you hate tron that much lol though I’d be concerned about your other matchups too.
EDIT: also, as I’ve been thinking about it this past week, what if part of the reason that people have been disappointed with BBE since its unban is that people are jamming 4-of BBE in a deck with only 8ish 3cmc hits? If you really think about it, that means you’re playing 12 top end cards, but only 8 of them can be cascaded into, so you’ll pass over 1-2 BBEs mid-cascade and end up on a brick some % of the time (and I don’t know about you guys, but that % has not felt negligible). What if the way to make BBE better is to replace copies 4 and maybe even 3 with more 3 drops like tracker, kcommand, etc. so that you’re running fewer BBEs, but each one is more valuable? Food for thought I guess, maybe I’m being naive in assuming this hasn’t already been realized.
Just saw it and what's even better one beat Scapeshift in the quarterfinals and one beat Mono G Tron which is not something you would normally see. It's nice to see Jund doing good although MKM series have always been pretty BGx infested.
You can even see on their metagame breakdown that BGx was the second most-played archetype with 24 copies. A nice result to be sure though, and a pretty dominant performance from jund in the top 8.
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I have a question for you all. Say you were gonna play Reid duke’s most recent list from the modern challenge, but make the following changes:
-1 LotV, +1 thoughtseize
-1 confidant, +1 some disruptive element
My question is, what card would you play as that “disruptive element”? I’ve been rolling with collective brutality, but I feel like I have to board it out an annoying proportion of the time.
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I think this would be too much tension on mana. You cant really crack clues, play pkns and sac the thopter tokens at the same time.
You would simply not get full potential out the cards in my mind.
Well, I'm just talking about bombing one's opponents with the clues. Any artifact will do, right?
It’s also worth noting, if you haven’t already, that tireless tracker reads “when you sac a clue, get a counter” regardless of how you sac’d it, meaning that saccing a clue to PnK still grows tracker. I don’t think this interaction is anywhere among the most powerful things jund can be doing, but it’s 100% on my modern bucket list.
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I mean theoretically you have a lot to gain from a delirium package to enable traverse, epica. If you'll notice, the *entire* sideboard can be tutored with traverse if delirium is enabled, so you can play these 1-of silver bullets and tutor them up pretty consistently when appropriate. That's not trivial, and it's a big part of the reason why birthing pod was once upon a time one of the top tier decks in the format. I also really like the tech of architects of will being both a 2-type cycler (artifact and creature), and a 4cmc spell that you can't cascade into. If you played bauble instead, you'd almost definitely need to remove the BBEs as cascading into a bauble sounds pretty awful.
Also chaos, I think there's merit to not playing death's shadow. This should theoretically only be a jund deck with a watery grave if you need to cast architects in an emergency. I think the notion thief and maybe also the hostage taker are a bit too cute and should probably be trimmed, at which point you're basically splashing blue for 5-6 cards and 4 of them you never really intend to cast. I think it's reasonable to expect not to take much more damage off your lands per game.
Of course, as with any traverse deck you're probably gonna have a bad time if your opponent casts a rest in peace, starts with leyline of the void, etc. You're not totally dead in the water, but all of your creatures except your 4 drops are gonna be pretty abysmal and you can't even traverse for the cards that don't suck anymore. Not on its own a reason not to play the deck (abzan traverse did just get 2nd at a GP after all), but it's definitely something you have to consider when asking "why play this over standard jund". It looks like a deck that uses the graveyard enough to get moderately hosed by hate, but doesn't abuse the graveyard enough to get free wins if your opponent doesn't draw said hate, and that's kind of the worst spot to be in.
It's a neat idea, has at least gone 5-0 in a modern league, and I think there's enough merit that you should test it out guitar90x. If it turns out to be really good, I'm totally down for playing a deck like that.
Personally epica, I’d do the 7th discard spell. Turn 1 discard is such a powerful opener and playing 7 discard is reasonably free when you have faithless looting, plus it will help cheapen your bedlam revelers where LotV might not. Just from personal experience, 7 discard spells has felt really great if you can mitigate their weakness as a late-game topdeck.
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http://www.starcitygames.com/decks/StarCityGamescom_Modern_Open/2018-07-28_modern_Indianapolis_IN_US/1/
EDIT: Ayyyyyyy, Jund on top baybeeeee.
UMerfolkGBW
Melira PodRIPGBW Abzan Midrange
GBR Jund Midrange
EDH
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I haven’t been impressed with finks lately in modern. It feels like the 3/2 and 2/1 bodies aren’t that relevant anymore in modern unless they come stapled to extra cards, like bob or BBE.
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Melira PodRIPGBW Abzan Midrange
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I’m not married to them, but I’ve boarded them in quite frequently and they’ve really overperformed. Did you have something else in mind Delver?
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I've been personally testing with this list for the past couple weeks:
4 Verdant Catacombs
1 Wooded Foothills
3 Bloodstained Mire
2 Overgrown Tomb
1 Blood Crypt
1 Stomping Ground
2 Swamp
2 Forest
4 Blackcleave Cliffs
3 Raging Ravine
1 Treetop Village
1 Field of Ruin
CREATURES
2 Dark Confidant
4 Tarmogoyf
3 Scavenging Ooze
2 Tireless Tracker
2 Bloodbraid Elf
4 Lightning Bolt
1 Fatal Push
4 Inquisition of Kozilek
2 Thoughtseize
1 Terminate
1 Dreadbore
1 Abrupt Decay
3 Kolaghan's Command
3 Liliana of the Veil
2 Maelstrom Pulse
1 Duress
1 Fatal Push
1 Grim Lavamancer
1 Golgari Charm
1 Engineered Explosives
1 Anger of the Gods
2 Obstinate Baloth
1 Fulminator Mage
1 Damping Sphere
2 Alpine Moon
1 Grafdigger's Cage
2 Nihil Spellbomb
It's been pretty sweet. It's not such a far departure from the usual jund list, but the biggest tech is splitting the difference between tracker and BBE, the reasoning being that BBE can't cascade into other BBEs whereas it can cascade into tireless trackers. It helps maximize your cascades, and it marginally lowers the probability of hitting the crappy cascades since you effectively have more cascade targets in the deck. Plus, there are some matchups where the tempo of BBE is more valuable and other matchups where the grindy-ness of tracker really shines so it's nice to have both MD.
I know I've railed on confidant, but unfortunately I just couldn't really see a way around playing confidant anymore. After playtesting a bunch, lavamancer and brutality are a bit too hyper-specific for maindeck inclusions in the end. They're not disastrous, but also not great half the time. Collective brutality for instance I have to move to the board in like 75% of matchups and it ended up feeling so narrow that I just cut it in general. It's really only there anymore to beat burn, which just isn't very relevant in modern anymore. Since I have to put some additional low-end spells in the deck to round out the curve, dark confidant is really the most sensible option; grim flayer just doesn't really do it for me.
2 confidants is I think the maximum I'd ever play though as I stand by the opinion that it's a horrible card in multiples and a big weak link for the BG archetype in general.
Field of ruin is a pretty sweet 1-of for a 25 land build. It really adds a unique element to the deck since our maindeck isn't usually capable of destroying a problematic land. With that field of ruin, it might be correct to fit a basic mountain in there somewhere.
Lastly, haven't really had a chance to play against too much big mana and not sure about the '2 moon, 1 mage, 1 sphere' split. I know I want 4 spots for the big mana decks, and I know I want at least 1 damping sphere and 1 fulminator mage, but that's all I know.
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Melira PodRIPGBW Abzan Midrange
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Yeah, that was my thinking. Unfortunately though based on testing, the 5th spot removal spell probably needs to take precedence over lavamancer in the maindeck. In hindsight I think even though lavamancer only costs 1 mana, he’s actually more of a mid game spell rather than early game. He can be cast on turn 1, but he’s hard to enable early and less mana efficient than something like push.
Regarding your thought Delver, I used to run jund a couple of months ago with no lavamancer and like 3 sweepers. Part of the problem is that humans, a matchup where that should be good, ended up feeling kind of medium. The combination of Thalias, meddling mages, and freebooters makes resolving a sweeper challenging whereas they don’t play nearly as many ways to interact with lavamancer. I haven’t tried a second EE though, mostly due to the insane price tag on that card. That could work out though where a second anger might not. Probably not good to lean on EE too much in a deck with BBE, but in a build with no BBEs that might be more powerful.
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Melira PodRIPGBW Abzan Midrange
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4 Lightning Bolt
1 Fatal Push
1 Fatal Push
1 Grim Lavamancer
vs
4 Lightning Bolt
1 Grim Lavamancer
2 Fatal Push
The pros of having the lavamancer maindeck as opposed to fatal push is it's comparatively much more useful against non-creature decks since fatal push obviously can't be pointed at the face. It's also repeatable removal vs 1 time use, and it's an infinitely better cascade off of BBE on an empty board.
The cons obviously is that you have 1 fewer maindeck answer to cards like tarmogoyf and death's shadow. Lavaman can team up with a bolt to kill some of those creatures, but push is a much cleaner answer without a doubt. Lavaman is also not an immediate effect like push is, meaning that if you can't afford to let your opponent untap with a creature, push is much more useful.
What do you think? I know prevailing logic is to play a maindeck push before lavamancer, but worth exploring the alternative.
UMerfolkGBW
Melira PodRIPGBW Abzan Midrange
GBR Jund Midrange
EDH
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Olivia can shine in the right set of circumstances, but I don’t think there are enough decks jam-packed with x/1s and x/2s for her to prey on at this point, and even if there were, LtLH has a strong case for just being the better card.
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Melira PodRIPGBW Abzan Midrange
GBR Jund Midrange
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and the BBEs have felt way more valuable on average. Could just be running a bit hot, which is why I'm gonna go a little deeper and try +1 Tracker, -1 BBE which I'm expecting to be quite nice. I'm playing 2 bobs for my curve's sake and because it's always nice to reevaluate cards you've previously written off, but after adding that second tracker it's a bit tempting to keep the 3rd BBE over the second bob. We shall see.
UMerfolkGBW
Melira PodRIPGBW Abzan Midrange
GBR Jund Midrange
EDH
GBR Prossh
UMerfolkGBW
Melira PodRIPGBW Abzan Midrange
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From testing I’ve found that 4 sideboard cards is kind of the sweet spot needed to beat tron with some consistency. Running fewer than that means you’re unlikely to draw your hate on time vs tron. Notably, Reid duke has been registering 3 fulminator 1 sphere in his last couple modern videos too. You can certainly go with 5 hate cards if you hate tron that much lol though I’d be concerned about your other matchups too.
EDIT: also, as I’ve been thinking about it this past week, what if part of the reason that people have been disappointed with BBE since its unban is that people are jamming 4-of BBE in a deck with only 8ish 3cmc hits? If you really think about it, that means you’re playing 12 top end cards, but only 8 of them can be cascaded into, so you’ll pass over 1-2 BBEs mid-cascade and end up on a brick some % of the time (and I don’t know about you guys, but that % has not felt negligible). What if the way to make BBE better is to replace copies 4 and maybe even 3 with more 3 drops like tracker, kcommand, etc. so that you’re running fewer BBEs, but each one is more valuable? Food for thought I guess, maybe I’m being naive in assuming this hasn’t already been realized.
UMerfolkGBW
Melira PodRIPGBW Abzan Midrange
GBR Jund Midrange
EDH
GBR Prossh
You can even see on their metagame breakdown that BGx was the second most-played archetype with 24 copies. A nice result to be sure though, and a pretty dominant performance from jund in the top 8.
UMerfolkGBW
Melira PodRIPGBW Abzan Midrange
GBR Jund Midrange
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-1 LotV, +1 thoughtseize
-1 confidant, +1 some disruptive element
My question is, what card would you play as that “disruptive element”? I’ve been rolling with collective brutality, but I feel like I have to board it out an annoying proportion of the time.
UMerfolkGBW
Melira PodRIPGBW Abzan Midrange
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GBR Prossh
It’s also worth noting, if you haven’t already, that tireless tracker reads “when you sac a clue, get a counter” regardless of how you sac’d it, meaning that saccing a clue to PnK still grows tracker. I don’t think this interaction is anywhere among the most powerful things jund can be doing, but it’s 100% on my modern bucket list.
UMerfolkGBW
Melira PodRIPGBW Abzan Midrange
GBR Jund Midrange
EDH
GBR Prossh
Also chaos, I think there's merit to not playing death's shadow. This should theoretically only be a jund deck with a watery grave if you need to cast architects in an emergency. I think the notion thief and maybe also the hostage taker are a bit too cute and should probably be trimmed, at which point you're basically splashing blue for 5-6 cards and 4 of them you never really intend to cast. I think it's reasonable to expect not to take much more damage off your lands per game.
Of course, as with any traverse deck you're probably gonna have a bad time if your opponent casts a rest in peace, starts with leyline of the void, etc. You're not totally dead in the water, but all of your creatures except your 4 drops are gonna be pretty abysmal and you can't even traverse for the cards that don't suck anymore. Not on its own a reason not to play the deck (abzan traverse did just get 2nd at a GP after all), but it's definitely something you have to consider when asking "why play this over standard jund". It looks like a deck that uses the graveyard enough to get moderately hosed by hate, but doesn't abuse the graveyard enough to get free wins if your opponent doesn't draw said hate, and that's kind of the worst spot to be in.
It's a neat idea, has at least gone 5-0 in a modern league, and I think there's enough merit that you should test it out guitar90x. If it turns out to be really good, I'm totally down for playing a deck like that.
UMerfolkGBW
Melira PodRIPGBW Abzan Midrange
GBR Jund Midrange
EDH
GBR Prossh
UMerfolkGBW
Melira PodRIPGBW Abzan Midrange
GBR Jund Midrange
EDH
GBR Prossh