It’s time to kick off the new year right! Yesterday was perhaps one of the most important days for Magic Online grinders across the globe. It’s the day that Season One starts for the Magic Online Championship Series. If you do not know what this means, I’ll inform you.
For about the next 28 days, doing well in tournaments will not just get you packs. They also give you Qualifier Points, or QPs, towards an invite-only tournament at the end of the season. Not only does this tournament give nice pack prizes and promos, it allows first place to go to a Championship Tournament. You need fifteen qualifier points to get an invite, and every ten points after that will give you a bye for up to two byes. If you play Magic Online, it is good to make getting 35 QPs every season a New Year’s resolution.
So, why go off on this Magic Online tangent/advertisement?
The reason is because I want to talk about Block Constructed innovations as much as possible, but this topic is utterly irrelevant to people who only plan to play in tournaments in person. However, I feel like real grinders should play both in person and online in order to play the most competitive Magic they possibly can. Ben Friedman and I have been stressing the importance of Block Constructed, and I hope we have been convincing more people to play the format. Now, let me tell you what decks I’ve been using on Magic Online.
After playing the generic aggressive decks of the format (i.e. Tom Ma’s G/W Tokens list and Boros, akin to Ben Friedman), I knew I wanted to try a more controlling deck in this well-defined format. Jund appeared to have a lot of the answers, so I decided to turn to Zwischenzug’s list:
Creatures (7)
Planeswalkers (8)
Lands (19)
Spells (26)
There are a lot of things going well for this decklist. First of all, it plays both of the planeswalkers in Innistrad. In Lorwyn Single-Set Block Constructed, the best deck was a B/U/G deck with Jace Beleren, Garruk Wildspeaker, and Liliana Vess. In Scars of Mirrodin Single-Set Block Constructed, the best decks had either Venser, the Sojourner with Elspeth Tirel, Koth of the Hammer, or a bunch of ramp cards and Wurmcoil Engines. It only makes sense that the best decks play the best types of cards.
Next up, it plays all of the best removal in the format. Geistflame will almost always be a two-for-one against aggressive decks, or it will just “trade” with a Midnight Haunting. Devil’s Play is the secret win condition. Having two in your hand usually means that you can probably just send the burn to the dome.
My problem with the deck? I hated playing the mirror match. It was always whoever drew the best cards would win (or there was little room to out play your opponent). Zwischenzug went a step in the right direction by splashing Desperate Ravings to allow you to dig into your spells, specifically more Devil’s Plays.
What did I want to do with Innistrad though? This Jund deck seemed to be fine but would sometimes lack some consistency or would have a boring mirror match. People who talk to me a lot in person seem to associate me with two cards when I talk about Innistrad: Burning Vengeance and Laboratory Maniac. Let’s look at the Burning Vengeance list that I brewed up and went 3-0-1 in a Daily Event with:
Lands (15)
Spells (45)
Oh man do I love Burning Vengeance! You have by far the best late game possible because you can always draw cards and ensure that you will reach your Devil’s Plays to burn out your opponent. The Rolling Temblors are a must right now, giving you the ability to keep up with Boros and the Invisible Stalker decks. The Tribute to Hungers in the sideboard are also a concession to Invisible Stalker. As far as alternate win conditions, I leaned on Manor Gargoyle and Sturmgeist. These guys are only easily answered by Liliana of the Veil, but you should be able to play around those.
I notice people trying to stick an early Liliana of the Veil to avoid the non-existent Dissipates in your deck and will keep on +1ing her in hopes of ultimating you. As a consequence, they will usually go “all-in” on their Liliana of the Veil in play and discard all of the extra Liliana of the Veil in their hand. While they are doing this, you are digging through your deck and eventually find a Devil’s Play, which will answer Liliana of the Veil. If you can’t kill it when you play Devil’s Play from your hand, you can always just flash it back.
The last two oddball choices are Dream Twist and Ancient Grudge. In the maindeck, you need to have Ancient Grudge as a concession to maindeck Witchbane Orbs. If you can’t kill that card, you simply just can’t win the game. Dream Twist is used to allow you to dig for flashback cards as early as turn one. Flashback cards are the key in this deck, and having a card that you can flashback for two mana can allow you to narrowly kill your opponent sometimes. Lastly, this card can give you an alternate win condition against the B/U/G self-mill deck, by milling them with your Dream Twists. Four times three times two is 24… I don’t know if a self-mill deck can survive that.
Are there any changes I would make to this? Of course! Most decklists could usually use improvements. To be honest, I never really felt like I needed my alternate win condition fatties in the sideboard. Also, the Undead Alchemists were sort of underwhelming against the self-mill decks. I think that Laboratory Maniac with Memory’s Journey may just be the best win condition against them. Killing them is pretty hard when they have Gnaw to the Bones in their deck. I suppose that another route could be playing Runic Repetition with Memory’s Journey to “go infinite” once you mill your whole deck and just Sever the Bloodline them every other turn. Lastly, I would change the Stensia Bloodhall into a Nephalia Drownyard, in order to support this strategy. I thought the reach of the Bloodhall would be needed, but I never needed it.
That is what I have been playing during our Season One Pre-Season, or whatever they call it in sports terms. What do I plan on playing in-season? Well, I have been playing one list quite a bit as well, and it happens to be a fusion between Jund and Burning Vengeance. Zalae made this one, and he coincidentally is the same person as Zwischenzug, go figure… I suppose that Burning Jund could be an appropriate name:
Creatures (8)
Planeswalkers (4)
Lands (13)
Spells (35)
- 6 Forest
- 7 Mountain
- 3 Mulch
- 1 Ancient Grudge
- 3 Think Twice
- 4 Devil's Play
- 3 Sever the Bloodline
- 4 Geistflame
- 4 Desperate Ravings
Sideboard
However, he said that he drew a lot of inspiration from the following list:
Creatures (17)
Planeswalkers (4)
Lands (16)
Spells (23)
- 4 Forest
- 4 Island
- 4 Mulch
- 1 Silent Departure
- 1 Spider Spawning
- 4 Forbidden Alchemy
- 2 Sever the Bloodline
- 3 Gnaw to the Bone
Sideboard
Zalae really liked the concept of Royal’s deck. Royal’s plan was just to mill himself and then eventually mill out his opponent. However, he found this endgame rather inefficient, but he liked the concept of both Avacyn’s Pilgrim and Mulch. I, too, like the addition of Mulch because it is a lot like Dream Twist but allows you to dig for lands, which has admittedly been a problem in my Burning Vengeance deck.
Zalae decided to combine Avacyn’s Pilgrim and Mulch with the best cards in the format: Garruk Relentless, Devil’s Play, and Olivia Voldaren. It is no wonder that I liked this list so much since he made the Jund list with Desperate Ravings previously posted in this article.
The main change between this list and “Zwischenzug’s” list is the sideboard. Zalae really wanted to have Burning Vengeance in the sideboard for control decks. Usually, certain versions of Jund would rely on Heretic’s Punishment to win the game. However, Burning Vengeance plays a lot better with a card draw engine of Desperate Ravings and Think Twice. The extra draw spell allows this Jund deck to be even more consistent.
The card I wasn’t immediately sold on was Avacyn’s Pilgrim. However, there is almost no acceleration in this format. I considered playing Deranged Assistant in its place in order to mill myself more, and the acceleration seems to want to go from two mana to four mana, not one mana to three mana. However, after talking to Zalae, he told me the main reason for Avacyn’s Pilgrim.
It was in there for the aggressive matchups. A turn-two Avacyn’s Pilgrim is just as good as a turn-one Avacyn’s Pilgrim except on the draw against aggressive decks post sideboarding. I won a match that I normally would have lost that involved the following:
He was playing Boros and led with a turn-one Champion of the Parish. I led with a turn-one Avacyn’s Pilgrim. He followed up with Cloistered Youth. I calmly untapped and clicked on the Rolling Temblor in my hand. His follow-up Champion of the Parish looked like nothing at this point in time. However, if I didn’t have access to turn-two Rolling Temblor, I would have easily died to a 3/3 Champion of the Parish and a 3/3 flipped Cloistered Youth. This makes me think about how people should be playing Whipflare in Standard… food for thought!
The last card I wanted to talk about is one that is in the sideboard of both Zalae’s and Royal’s decklist. That card is Bramblecrush. This card is severely underrated; I really want to pair this card with Snapcaster Mage.
First of all, manabases are very shaky in this format. I mean, just look at any of the decklists that I have posted so far. You can probably snag a few wins by simply Bramblecrushing a key Woodland Cemetery on the play.
Another reason is that it is an answer to some of the most powerful cards in the format, or at least some of the most annoying. Here is a quick list of some of the many cards it answers:
- Liliana of the Veil
- Garruk Relentless
- Heretic’s Punishment
- Burning Vengeance
- Witchbane Orb
- Nephalia Drownyard
- Gavony Township
- Intangible Virtue
- Butcher’s Cleaver
- Spectral Flight
Yeah… I hope to be seeing this card in the sideboard more.
And there you have it! That is what I have been playing in Block Constructed for the last couple weeks. We will see if any big new innovations will happen before Dark Ascension. In my opinion, it is just bound to happen. Let me know how you felt about this article (both topic and writing style) in the comment section below. See you next week!
Thanks for reading,
Jonathan “Watchwolf92” Sukenik