I think the 4 Tracker/2 Tasigur configuration is people copying Jeff Hoogland's list, which he's been streaming to a reasonable amount of success. The 3 Brutalities in the main and no Dark Confidant basically makes it pre-boarded for the creature matchups, which is a solid place to be. I think his list struggles a bit against Celestial Colonnade decks though, because it's a little less threat dense. His post-board configuration for the B/G/x mirror also doesn't look great on paper. Given the general MTGO metagame, with that in mind it doesn't strike me as surprising that this type of configuration is doing well.
I've been really torn on Kalitas, I'm still running a 1/1 split between the main and sideboard but I've been getting closer and closer to cutting them. He's so great when he's great, but he's just so bad when he's not, and I've probably lost more games with him in my hand at this point than I've won because of him. The fact that Spirits, Humans, and Hardened Scales all have evasion on some of their best creatures makes him feel really dumb sometimes, too. It's too bad Ishkanah, Grafwidow is just a little too hard to make work in normal B/G, because she's pretty much what I'd want out of a big, bomb creature against those decks.
I'm really loathe to cut Confidant entirely because it's backbreaking to resolve on turns 2/3 against U/W Control, still great against decks not trying to kill you on turn 4, and I'm concerned about not being able to deploy threats in a timely mannger, so right now I'm trying 4 Goyf/3 Confidant/3 Ooze/4 Tracker/1 Kalitas. I'm also running 3 Brutalities in the sideboard to have a clean swap with Confidant in the matchups where he's bad.
In addition to what's been stated, I think that Lingering Souls is actually overrated as a grindy card and that a lot of it's reputation comes from before Twin was banned. When I started playing Jund (the fall before the Twin ban), the midrange decks at that time did have a very hard time dealing with Souls. Jund only played a single Maelstrom Pulse and 1-2 Anger of the Gods in the sideboard while Twin/Jeskai/Grixis played some number of Electrolyze but that still wasn't quite enough. In that meta, a single flashbacked Lingering Souls would often take so many resources to fully address that resolving a second one would just put your opponent in a position where they needed to race. It's very hard to beat Lingering Souls with 1-off spells, which is still true today.
Then they printed Liliana, the Last Hope, which is a brutal card to face down when you're trying to cast Souls. I think things have gotten even worse for Souls in B/G/x mirrors with the unbanning of BBE and the widespread inclusion of Treetop Village in all flavors of B/G/x.
Even outside of B/G/x mirrors, Souls has lost equity. The current builds of U/W and Jeskai run more sweepers than the Snapcaster control decks of the aforementioned era, which leads you to not want to flashback Souls too aggressively. However, the planeswalkers those decks play have to be answered immediately, which puts more pressure on you to want to have a strong battlefield presence. The planeswalker issue gets better with the printing of Assassin's Trophy, but that still doesn't change how their answers line up against Souls. Cards like Thalia and Mausoleum Wanderer also make it clunkier against some of the more popular creature decks in the format right now.
The real final nail in the Lingering Souls coffin for me was Tireless Tracker, which is so good that people are experimenting with it as a replacement for Dark Confidant.
All of that being said, Souls is still a fine card, but I think it's just fine, and that we have better options now.
That was the list that I initially based mine on, and I was a little dubious about that mana base as well. I've probably played about a dozen matches with that mana base, and my issue was more with taplands than a lack of black sources. I do think that with how black-heavy my sideboard is, I may end up needing to swap the third Treetop Village with a Hissing Quagmire, but Quagmire is just so much worse as a manland that I'm only going to do it if I find myself consistently having issues getting enough black sources. I would probably try replacing the 5th fetch with a Twilight Mire before I added Quagmire, but that can be real rough alongside 4 Field of Ruin. It's really unfortunate that the dual-colored manland cycle was finished in one of the weakest Standard sets in recent history, I really wish we could have seen them at a power level more in line with Kaladesh/Dominaria/Guilds of Ravnica.
I think Pulse is still a great card, and I'm not really sure what I'd run instead (I do not like Brutality maindeck). The fact that my list runs no sweepers leaves me a little more vulnerable to go-wide and token strategies, which Pulse is decent against. I think my list has a lot of ways to deal with Lingering Souls, in particular.
I'm really interested in playing against the graveyard decks you mentioned, because those are three matchups where Flaying Tendrils really shines over the single-target removal spells I'm running. I'm hoping that the combination of Surgical, 3 Ooze, and 2 Kalitas is good enough, but I'm not really sure. Most of my experience against those decks is with Grixis Shadow, which runs a totally different gameplan.
I finally got to play my first league with Assassin's Trophy last night. I went 2-3 overall, losing to U/G Hardened Scales (not sure what the blue was for), Bant Spirits, and Scapeshift, beating Storm and Blue Moon. The deck is much better than my record indicates, and I'm still learning the Hardened Scales and Spirits matchups. I also only have access to 1 Surgical Extraction online, which is important in the Scapeshift matchup.
Some brief explanations:
- I swapped the 4th Treetop Village for a 5th fetchland. 4 taplands is just too many, and Tracker is happier with another fetch anyway. Up until the BBE unbanning, Jund very commonly played 3 Raging Ravine, which always felt to me like the right number of manlands.
- I dropped Flaying Tendrils and Natural State in the sideboard for a second Darkblast and a pair of Disfigure. I have no idea if this is correct, but I want to see if the creature matchups become easier with access to more 1-mana removal spells. While Disfigure isn't exactly a Modern all-star, I didn't want to play more than 2 Darkblast because they don't seem great in multiples, and I just couldn't think of a better 1-mana black removal spell. It can also kill things through Welding Jar and Selfless Spirit, which is relevant. My current sideboard plan against Spirits/Scales/Humans would be -2 Thoughtseize, -2 LotV, and -1 Confidant all the time, and -1 more Confidant on the draw vs -1 Inquisition on the play.
- I swapped Vraska, Golgari Queen for the second Kitchen Finks. This isn't a knock against Vraska, I just want to focus on refining the overall list before testing individual new cards, and Finks is extremely solid.
In general, I really liked my maindeck outside of some clunky mana issues that I've hopefully addressed. The deck was extremely dominant in the matches that I won, the Blue Moon matchup almost felt like a bye because it was so easy for me to answer my opponent's threats and so hard for them to answer mine. I can't promise that this is the best list for Assassin's Trophy, but it's at least not the worst.
I think there are very few cards that make the Tron matchup favorable on the draw, but the ability to even break up Tron before it's assembled is going to give us some wiggle room that we've never had reasonable access to before. I actually think that a B/G list like the one I posted on the last page goes pretty even with Tron because you have so many ways to disrupt their assembly of Tron. When I was putting together the sideboard I didn't even feel like I needed additional land destruction, and my plan is just to bring in the Surgicals, Duress, and the Natural State.
As far as Jund and Abzan go, I think that Trophy does a lot less for them in the Tron matchup. I think that they're unlikely to run the full playset of Trophy, and their manabases can't support Field of Ruin without opening themselves up to some real mana consistency issues. Fulminator Mage is still an option, but then their sideboards are just as constrained as they are now.
My hot take is that a more favorable matchup against Tron and U/W Miracles is going to make straight B/G the "best" B/G/x deck for the fall.
It's not at it's best against Humans, but I think it's passable. Like you said, it always answers Thalia, Hierarch, and Phantasmal Image in the main, and Sin Collector out of the sideboard. It also answers Champion of the Parish and Thalia's Lieutenant if you can play it in time, which I'll admit isn't always possible. The deck usually leads with Hierarch, Champion, or Vial on turn 1, and Darkblast can answer 2/3 of that, which seems okay. It's also possible to use the "Darkblast in upkeep, dredge Darkblast, Darkblast again" trick to kill x/2s, but that does have its own drawbacks. Speaking of x/2s though, it's common to play Liliana, the Last Hope against Humans, which pairs decently well with Darkblast. It can also team up with Flaying Tendrils to kill x/3s, but that's not something I would want to depend on.
It doesn't have the "win on the spot" potential of Damnation, but I think in the average game against Humans it can help round out your removal suite.
Yeah, playing it in an Abzan shell definitely allows you to get some value out of the Dredge. I've never been a huge fan of Damnation in the sideboard of B/G/x, and I think that Jund gets away with not needing it because of the presence of Grim Lavamancer. While Darkblast obviously isn't on that same power level, I think that it can be a reasonable replacement as a repeatable removal spell out of the sideboard that isn't Liliana, the Last Hope. I've also been playing a bunch against Hardened Scales lately and have really struggled with not being able to kill a Steel Overseer in a timely manner because of Welding Jar. It also seems like Phantasmal Image is everywhere these days, which Darkblast is a great answer to.
The hyperbole is getting really out of control, we're not even talking about real-world scenarios at this point. My plan is to not keep awful hands and sequence my cards to the best of my ability, which is what it's always been.
In the interests of getting the thread back on topic, I've really been liking the look of the B/G shell that went 6-1 in the recent Modern Challenge - https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/1351409#paper. I've been playing list a bit in paper and have liked how it plays out so far, it feels really nice to be playing Kalitas again.
My day 1 list post-Trophy is basically that one with Trophy in place of the clunkier maindeck removal spells, with a mildly tweaked sideboard:
I think that Darkblast is well-positioned with the rise of Spirits. It's really hard to resolve something like Damnation through both Thalia and Mausoleum Wanderer, but Darkblast lines up super well against them. I also really wanted a 5th 1-mana removal spell, and the alternatives weren't super exciting.
I'm so confused by this assessment. The average B/G/x deck, of any flavor, plays 5-6 discard spells, 4-6 1-mana removal spells, 1-3 3-mana removal spells, 4-5 Lilianas, and anywhere from 12-16 creatures. What decks are you playing against where they are consistently presenting some permanent that you have to kill, on the spot, through all of that disruption, on turns 1-2? You're looking at the card in a hyper-vacuum and making straw-man arguments that run fairly contrary to how games actually play out with the archetype. Nobody is taking the stance that you're arguing against, and everyone in this thread has acknowledged that ramping is a drawback in the early turns.
The mirror is right now not relevant at all actually. This might surely change, but from the current point of view, a decay is very bad.
It's going to be more relevant once Assassin's Trophy releases, even if it's just for a few weeks. There was a ton of Jund everywhere when BBE was unbanned, people just like playing B/G/x. This forum consistently undervalues cards (Grim Flayer, Collective Brutality, and Lily the Last Hope as recent examples) because people look at cards in a vacuum.
Decay is a problem right now because there's a bunch of relevant stuff that it doesn't hit. That problem is alleviated once we have access to Assassin's Trophy, which will give us 3-4 maindeck answers to anything. When you have that many answers to anything, your narrower answers get the opportunity to line up better, and it's easier to work within Abrupt Decay's CMC restriction. I'm not saying any of this to advocate for playing Abrupt Decay in an Assassin's Trophy world (jury's still out on that), but within that context Vraska's -3 is more likely to find a target, provided you've sequenced your removal to maximize that chance. I think that having that effect as a repeatable option is also incredibly good, the same way that getting multiple uses out of LotV's -2 can snowball a game.
I think that you can actually bring Vraska in against any midrange or prison deck that plays a lot of permanents, I was using the B/G/x mirror as an example because I think we'll be playing a lot of them this fall.
The new Vraska just screams "B/G/x mirror breaker" to me.
+2 - Mitigates flooding, allows you to sac Clue tokens without paying mana, lets you cash in a Dark Confidant for value, and has the synergies already mentioned with Lingering Souls. The fact that the sacrifice is a may ability means that it's still functional even when you don't have anything that you want to sacrifice. Going up to 6 loyalty the turn she's played is also no joke, and has always been one of the strengths of Nahiri, the Harbinger.
-3 - I'm baffled by people saying that this is "just" Abrupt Decay. Abrupt Decay is an incredible card in the mirror, able to answer all of the commonly played creatures except BBE as well as both 3 CMC Liliana's. The fact that Vraska can kill the Lilianas is a big deal, I would be much less interested in the card if it could only target creatures. While not hitting manlands is a pain, that's also a weakness that both Lilianas share, and something we're already used to dealing with. I think it'll also be somewhat alleviated by Assassin's Trophy.
-9 - While not game-ending on its own, this can put an immense amount of pressure on your opponent to play around. The synergy with Lingering Souls has already been brought up, but two other commonly payed B/G/x cards with evasion are Treetop Village and Grim Flayer, which play very well with this emblem. The fact that you can kill whatever blocks those two creatures to have the trample damage carry over anyway is another boon.
I don't think that Vraska is going to upend the archetype the way that Assassin's Trophy is set up to, but the power level of the card is very real. I think she's at her best in Abzan, strong in B/G, and might be an issue for Jund because they already run a bunch of 4-drops. That being said, she's not a build-around. Playing cards like Bitterblossom to try to get more value out of Vraska is going a step too far when she synergizes very well with what B/G/x decks are already doing.
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I've been really torn on Kalitas, I'm still running a 1/1 split between the main and sideboard but I've been getting closer and closer to cutting them. He's so great when he's great, but he's just so bad when he's not, and I've probably lost more games with him in my hand at this point than I've won because of him. The fact that Spirits, Humans, and Hardened Scales all have evasion on some of their best creatures makes him feel really dumb sometimes, too. It's too bad Ishkanah, Grafwidow is just a little too hard to make work in normal B/G, because she's pretty much what I'd want out of a big, bomb creature against those decks.
I'm really loathe to cut Confidant entirely because it's backbreaking to resolve on turns 2/3 against U/W Control, still great against decks not trying to kill you on turn 4, and I'm concerned about not being able to deploy threats in a timely mannger, so right now I'm trying 4 Goyf/3 Confidant/3 Ooze/4 Tracker/1 Kalitas. I'm also running 3 Brutalities in the sideboard to have a clean swap with Confidant in the matchups where he's bad.
Then they printed Liliana, the Last Hope, which is a brutal card to face down when you're trying to cast Souls. I think things have gotten even worse for Souls in B/G/x mirrors with the unbanning of BBE and the widespread inclusion of Treetop Village in all flavors of B/G/x.
Even outside of B/G/x mirrors, Souls has lost equity. The current builds of U/W and Jeskai run more sweepers than the Snapcaster control decks of the aforementioned era, which leads you to not want to flashback Souls too aggressively. However, the planeswalkers those decks play have to be answered immediately, which puts more pressure on you to want to have a strong battlefield presence. The planeswalker issue gets better with the printing of Assassin's Trophy, but that still doesn't change how their answers line up against Souls. Cards like Thalia and Mausoleum Wanderer also make it clunkier against some of the more popular creature decks in the format right now.
The real final nail in the Lingering Souls coffin for me was Tireless Tracker, which is so good that people are experimenting with it as a replacement for Dark Confidant.
All of that being said, Souls is still a fine card, but I think it's just fine, and that we have better options now.
I think Pulse is still a great card, and I'm not really sure what I'd run instead (I do not like Brutality maindeck). The fact that my list runs no sweepers leaves me a little more vulnerable to go-wide and token strategies, which Pulse is decent against. I think my list has a lot of ways to deal with Lingering Souls, in particular.
I'm really interested in playing against the graveyard decks you mentioned, because those are three matchups where Flaying Tendrils really shines over the single-target removal spells I'm running. I'm hoping that the combination of Surgical, 3 Ooze, and 2 Kalitas is good enough, but I'm not really sure. Most of my experience against those decks is with Grixis Shadow, which runs a totally different gameplan.
I've slowly come to the conclusion that I don't want to rely on 3-4 CMC spells against the current creature decks because they're extremely difficult to resolve through Mausoleum Wanderer, Thalia, Guardian of Thraben, Spell Queller, Meddling Mage, and Kitesail Freebooter. I'm looking to try a different approach, which led me to tweak my list to this:
4x Blooming Marsh
4x Field of Ruin
2x Forest
2x Overgrown Tomb
1x Polluted Delta
4x Swamp
3x Treetop Village
4x Verdant Catacombs
Instant (8)
4x Assassin's Trophy
4x Fatal Push
4x Dark Confidant
1x Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet
3x Scavenging Ooze
4x Tarmogoyf
3x Tireless Tracker
Sorcery (8)
4x Inquisition of Kozilek
2x Maelstrom Pulse
2x Thoughtseize
Planeswalker (6)
4x Liliana of the Veil
1x Liliana, the Last Hope
1x Choke
2x Collective Brutality
2x Darkblast
2x Disfigure
1x Duress
1x Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet
2x Kitchen Finks
1x Liliana, the Last Hope
3x Surgical Extraction
Some brief explanations:
- I swapped the 4th Treetop Village for a 5th fetchland. 4 taplands is just too many, and Tracker is happier with another fetch anyway. Up until the BBE unbanning, Jund very commonly played 3 Raging Ravine, which always felt to me like the right number of manlands.
- I dropped Flaying Tendrils and Natural State in the sideboard for a second Darkblast and a pair of Disfigure. I have no idea if this is correct, but I want to see if the creature matchups become easier with access to more 1-mana removal spells. While Disfigure isn't exactly a Modern all-star, I didn't want to play more than 2 Darkblast because they don't seem great in multiples, and I just couldn't think of a better 1-mana black removal spell. It can also kill things through Welding Jar and Selfless Spirit, which is relevant. My current sideboard plan against Spirits/Scales/Humans would be -2 Thoughtseize, -2 LotV, and -1 Confidant all the time, and -1 more Confidant on the draw vs -1 Inquisition on the play.
- I swapped Vraska, Golgari Queen for the second Kitchen Finks. This isn't a knock against Vraska, I just want to focus on refining the overall list before testing individual new cards, and Finks is extremely solid.
In general, I really liked my maindeck outside of some clunky mana issues that I've hopefully addressed. The deck was extremely dominant in the matches that I won, the Blue Moon matchup almost felt like a bye because it was so easy for me to answer my opponent's threats and so hard for them to answer mine. I can't promise that this is the best list for Assassin's Trophy, but it's at least not the worst.
As far as Jund and Abzan go, I think that Trophy does a lot less for them in the Tron matchup. I think that they're unlikely to run the full playset of Trophy, and their manabases can't support Field of Ruin without opening themselves up to some real mana consistency issues. Fulminator Mage is still an option, but then their sideboards are just as constrained as they are now.
My hot take is that a more favorable matchup against Tron and U/W Miracles is going to make straight B/G the "best" B/G/x deck for the fall.
It doesn't have the "win on the spot" potential of Damnation, but I think in the average game against Humans it can help round out your removal suite.
In the interests of getting the thread back on topic, I've really been liking the look of the B/G shell that went 6-1 in the recent Modern Challenge - https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/1351409#paper. I've been playing list a bit in paper and have liked how it plays out so far, it feels really nice to be playing Kalitas again.
My day 1 list post-Trophy is basically that one with Trophy in place of the clunkier maindeck removal spells, with a mildly tweaked sideboard:
4x Blooming Marsh
4x Field of Ruin
2x Forest
2x Overgrown Tomb
4x Swamp
4x Treetop Village
4x Verdant Catacombs
Instant (8)
4x Assassin's Trophy
4x Fatal Push
4x Dark Confidant
1x Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet
3x Scavenging Ooze
4x Tarmogoyf
3x Tireless Tracker
Sorcery (8)
4x Inquisition of Kozilek
2x Maelstrom Pulse
2x Thoughtseize
Planeswalker (5)
4x Liliana of the Veil
1x Liliana, the Last Hope
1x Choke
2x Collective Brutality
1x Darkblast
1x Duress
2x Flaying Tendrils
1x Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet
1x Kitchen Finks
1x Liliana, the Last Hope
1x Natural State
1x Nihil Spellbomb
2x Surgical Extraction
1x Vraska, Golgari Queen
I think that Darkblast is well-positioned with the rise of Spirits. It's really hard to resolve something like Damnation through both Thalia and Mausoleum Wanderer, but Darkblast lines up super well against them. I also really wanted a 5th 1-mana removal spell, and the alternatives weren't super exciting.
It's going to be more relevant once Assassin's Trophy releases, even if it's just for a few weeks. There was a ton of Jund everywhere when BBE was unbanned, people just like playing B/G/x. This forum consistently undervalues cards (Grim Flayer, Collective Brutality, and Lily the Last Hope as recent examples) because people look at cards in a vacuum.
Decay is a problem right now because there's a bunch of relevant stuff that it doesn't hit. That problem is alleviated once we have access to Assassin's Trophy, which will give us 3-4 maindeck answers to anything. When you have that many answers to anything, your narrower answers get the opportunity to line up better, and it's easier to work within Abrupt Decay's CMC restriction. I'm not saying any of this to advocate for playing Abrupt Decay in an Assassin's Trophy world (jury's still out on that), but within that context Vraska's -3 is more likely to find a target, provided you've sequenced your removal to maximize that chance. I think that having that effect as a repeatable option is also incredibly good, the same way that getting multiple uses out of LotV's -2 can snowball a game.
I think that you can actually bring Vraska in against any midrange or prison deck that plays a lot of permanents, I was using the B/G/x mirror as an example because I think we'll be playing a lot of them this fall.
+2 - Mitigates flooding, allows you to sac Clue tokens without paying mana, lets you cash in a Dark Confidant for value, and has the synergies already mentioned with Lingering Souls. The fact that the sacrifice is a may ability means that it's still functional even when you don't have anything that you want to sacrifice. Going up to 6 loyalty the turn she's played is also no joke, and has always been one of the strengths of Nahiri, the Harbinger.
-3 - I'm baffled by people saying that this is "just" Abrupt Decay. Abrupt Decay is an incredible card in the mirror, able to answer all of the commonly played creatures except BBE as well as both 3 CMC Liliana's. The fact that Vraska can kill the Lilianas is a big deal, I would be much less interested in the card if it could only target creatures. While not hitting manlands is a pain, that's also a weakness that both Lilianas share, and something we're already used to dealing with. I think it'll also be somewhat alleviated by Assassin's Trophy.
-9 - While not game-ending on its own, this can put an immense amount of pressure on your opponent to play around. The synergy with Lingering Souls has already been brought up, but two other commonly payed B/G/x cards with evasion are Treetop Village and Grim Flayer, which play very well with this emblem. The fact that you can kill whatever blocks those two creatures to have the trample damage carry over anyway is another boon.
I don't think that Vraska is going to upend the archetype the way that Assassin's Trophy is set up to, but the power level of the card is very real. I think she's at her best in Abzan, strong in B/G, and might be an issue for Jund because they already run a bunch of 4-drops. That being said, she's not a build-around. Playing cards like Bitterblossom to try to get more value out of Vraska is going a step too far when she synergizes very well with what B/G/x decks are already doing.