By: Charles Herman

Charles Herman — Sun, 06 Nov 2016 14:54:06 +0000

First off, big fan of your work. However I think you are missing what makes Jeff’s original deck relevant. The relatively painless manabase is huge. It leverages the new fastlands better than any other brew I’ve seen so far. This, in combination with four helix, gives him game against the aggro heavy meta of modern and allows him to play the 8 phyrexian spells easily. I think going four color and using the list you do causes two fatal flaws. A crazy damaging manabase that puts you behind in any racing situation, and using interaction that is frankly less relevant overall in the meta. There really are not a lot of decks that you need to fight on the stack anymore. They are either slower than you or not a big enough part of the format to warp a main deck around. I don’t think slowing yourself down is worth it. This is an aggro deck that packs lots of relevant interaction when needed but the big thing is that the spells can be proactive to just get them dead. It’s not a tempo deck. The bolts, helix, snag and snap in the jeskai deck fights the decks that can race you (infect, death’s shadow, burn etc) or just kill them when you don’t need to interact. Almost every draw is live. You can be straight up faster than the decks that you would want the counters for. Check out his testing videos. There are a lot of turn 4 wins with some turn threes sprinkled in as well. I have been testing the list as well and it has game against a ton of the field. The only matchup that is super rough is dredge. I think a few surgicals that can hit the enablers in narcomoeba and Bloodghast can really help out of the board however.
Try it against the gauntlet. I think the deck is hitting a sweet spot in the meta right now. It seems pretty good against an open field. It can play the burn game against the controlling decks like jund and nahiri or just beat other things by racing or using the interaction to slow them down til they die.
Side note: dismiss his later version he was testing with colonnades. He admits 18 land is one or two less than ideal, which I agree with, but using man lands that take five mana to activate in an aggro deck like this is really silly and frankly a bad idea. I think 19 lands with one twisted image is the build moving forward. The deck really want three lands on turn three and the fourth is often welcome as well. Add another scalding tarn and call it a day.

Comments on: Mo’ Mantis, Mo’ Problems: Going Green In Jeskai Aggro

By: Charles Herman