I have seven discard spells, but I lean further and further towards eight due to how well-set-up you are to get on the battlefield on Turn 2 between your creatures and Wrenn. Rakdos Death’s Shadow already proves that you don’t need Street Wraith to enable Death’s Shadow and there’s much less pressure to machine-gun down your life total to get on the battlefield than there was just a few short years ago when Grixis Death’s Shadow was the best deck in Modern. Wrenn and Six gives you plenty of additional ammo for hurting yourself with your lands, and Nurturing Peatland contributes to the cause as well as being a robust card advantage engine with your planeswalker. The reality is that you just need some fetchlands (sometimes on both sides) and some chip shots. The amount of “enablers” you need to play cards like Death’s Shadow and Scourge of the Skyclaves is historically overblown. Think of Lurrus as those cards for us, except we get to play nineteen lands and we also get to sleeve up a bunch of 8/8s. Anyway, the point is that I’m acknowledging there’s a cost here, but the upside of being equipped to play deeper games and picking up copies nine through twelve of creatures that can singlehandedly win the game in Tarmogoyf is a huge upside.ĭespite playing Scourge of the Skyclaves, we’re really built like traditional Jund Midrange, just a much leaner approach that leverages these hard-hitting threats to close the game quickly when paired with interaction instead of slowly grinding an opponent to dust and getting over the hump with a Raging Ravine or Bloodbraid Elf. We’re touching a very small Traverse the Ulvenwald package, which I’ll get to further shortly, and this element of the deck might be missing enough that I’m interested in a singleton copy of Ghor-Clan Rampager, borrowed technology from pre-pandemic life. What we’re really missing is Temur Battle Rage, which gives the deck a unique angle of dunking on opponents quickly or sidestepping messy battlefields full of Zombies tokens and all other manners of nonsense, and I’m missing it to the point where I’ve included it in the sideboard behind “break in case of linears” glass. There will be linear matchups where you’ll miss this setup, but again, the evolution of the metagame points to opponents that are well-prepared to handle cheap aggressive threats. Let’s look at it from a slightly different angle.Įschewing Bomat Courier, Monastery Swiftspear, Mutagenic Growth, and (maindeck) Temur Battle Rage clearly paints us as a less aggressive deck. It’s also not groundbreaking news that Wrenn and Six is a powerful Magic card, but the demand for getting up pieces of cardboard is getting higher, and more so than that, the existence of Lurrus of the Dream-Den means that continuing to hit your land drops throughout the game has more value than ever.įurther, in the rare cases that your opponent isn’t cooperating with fetchlands to jump-start your Scourge of the Skyclaves, Wrenn and Six has the modest mode of going upstairs for a point. The catalyst for this process is Wrenn and Six. It’s time to slow down just a little bit, and in the process reimagine what Jund Midrange can be. In these scenarios, I don’t want to be scrapping with Monastery Swiftspear. Rakdos Death’s Shadow is strong, no doubt, and typically fairly well-built, but to me it doesn’t really make sense when the demands of the format become more creature-based and folks slowly but surely become more prepared to play deep games. These Rakdos Death’s Shadow decks are glorified disruptive aggro decks that play a small number of threats but with eight “premium” creatures can often end games in only a handful of turns. This is another potent threat that fits into the Death’s Shadow gameplan of “hurt myself and then hurt my opponent” that can often vastly outscale the original namesake Death’s Shadow. Rakdos Death’s Shadow is starting to creep up in popularity since the release of Zendikar Rising, due to its new toy Scourge of the Skyclaves. There have been Modern formats dominated by the blinding speed of combo decks or the overpowering nature of fast mana decks, but as the number of Uros, Omnaths, and Skyclave Apparitions keeps ticking up, the games are going longer and the format is becoming more interactive on balance. More so than almost any other non-rotating format, Modern absorbs recently printed power outliers at the fastest rate due to its depth and excellent mana. As is also often typical, Modern in the macro sense is also in a transitionary period. As it often is, Modern is in a state of flux.
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