Sideboard

Sorcery (2)

Artifact (4)

Enchantment (3)


As of Jan 9, 2021 the rules allow you to cascade Bloodbraid Elf into Valki, God of Lies  , then you can cast Tibalt, Cosmic Impostor instead without paying its mana cost. This ruling has been confirmed by WotC staff: https://twitter.com/WotC_Matt/status/1347319802356928512. If you thought cascading BBE into a 3 drop was spiking it, wait until you cascade into a 7 drop Planeswalker!

This build attempts to maximize our chances of getting turn 4 Tibalt, while still functioning as a solid Jund (really Rakdos splashing BBE) midrange deck without it. I've crammed the numbers through the Hypergeometric Calculator and came up with a 22% chance of dropping turn 4 Tibalt (yes, that already factors in the possibility of missing land drops). That's over a fifth of our games that we basically get handed a free win! You can see my calculations here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ModernMagic/comments/kuhhgh/turn_4_tibalt_possible_in_22_of_games_with_jund/

Guaranteed Combo:

We can guarantee to cascade into Tibalt by putting Valki on top of our library with Witch's Cottage, then casting BBE. Conveniently, both BBE and Witch's Cottage become active turn 4 so long as all our lands are Swamps. Even more conveniently, we have a special land called Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth to even "correct" our non-Swamps into Swamps.

As for getting Valki from our hand into our grave, that's a trivial matter. For one, we can just play it and let our opponents throw removal at it. They're all but forced to kill Valki on sight since we're holding their creature ransom and threatening to untap and transform into it. With that in mind, if we're going for turn 4 Tibalt our turn 1 discard should leave them any non-exile removal because we do want Valki to end up the grave. Our priorities are to go for any counterspells for Tibalt, Thoughtseize for our BBE, graveyard hate for our Witch's Cottage, or removal that can kill Tibalt such as Assassin's Trophy.

If the opponent doesn't have removal (against many tribal creature decks), we can usually just trade Valki off in combat. And if the opponent just won't interact with our Valki in any way (against Ad Nauseam or Tron), we can get Valki in the grave ourselves. We are a Jund deck after all. The best ways to do that are to discard it with Liliana of the Veil, Magmatic Channeler, or Seasoned Pyromancer so that we're spending Valki as a resource, rather than spending a resource on binning our own Valki. But if that's not possible, we can point discard or removal at Valki (if you noticed, every other spell we play besides our two Kroxa, Titan of Death's Hunger can put Valki in our grave). That's bleeding resources, but we'll make it back several times over with turn 4 Tibalt.

Card choices:

Magmatic Channeler: our replacement for Tarmogoyf. It plays into our game plan perfectly by discarding Valki, digging towards Valki and BBE, and hitting our early land drops when necessary.

Seasoned Pyromancer: three copies rather than the usual two in stock Jund. Seasoned Pyro gives us draw power to dig to our BBE and Valki, and it is the best way to put Valki in our grave. It is also excellent insurance against Blood Moon. We could even go up to 4 copies, which would make our combo more consistent but would also make us very top heavy.

Fatal Push/Lightning Bolt: I chose a 4/2 split instead of the stock 2/4 because our mana is so black heavy, and since lot of the value of Lightning Bolt came from pairing it with Wrenn (which we're not playing) to kill 4 toughness/loyalty cards. This split makes our BBE worse against creatureless decks, but we can avoid that by fixing our cascade with Witch's Cottage.

Dreadbore: this is over Terminate because Tibalt annoyingly can't kill Planeswalkers, and over Abrupt Decay and Assassin's Trophy because we have a Rakdos-based manabase. Teferi, Time Raveler is a must-kill in particular since its passive ability prevents us from casting cascaded spells from BBE, stifling our combo.

Marsh Flats/Polluted Delta: No Wooded Foothills because we need to find Witch's Cottage. 1/1 split because Field of the Dead exists and is a card we can rip from Tibalt's +2, not to mention the one in a million game where the opponent plays Sorcerous Spyglass and catches us with our pants down holding two Deltas in hand.

Witch's Cottage: even though this is the centerpiece of our combo, we really don't want too many tapped lands. We're still a Jund deck that loves to curve out, so it's better to just play a bunch of fetchlands that act as untapped lands turns 1-3 and as Cottages turn 4+.

Snow basics: aww, but we don't play any snow-matters cards. Why can't I play my favorite Guru/Unhinged/Theros-Pokemon basic arts? Because WotC loves making normal basics obsolete with snow basics. We need snow basics because we're playing our opponent's deck with Tibalt and Valki's transformation, and sometimes our opponents play snow-matters cards. Our opponents might not play any snow-matters cards, but they'll never play any normal-basic-matters cards, so it's strictly better to play snow.

Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth: this is a terrific land in our deck. We can get away with three copies because we have Liliana, Channeler, and Seasoned Pyro as discard outlets for extra copies. Not only does it let us play non-Swamps turns 1-3 and still have untapped Witch's Cottage turn 4, but it also lets us tap our fetches for mana. That's great when we can't fetch (Leonin Arbiter, Ashiok, Dream Render, Blood Sun (Urborg still works like normal because of layers nonsense)), when we need to conserve life, or when we've run out of fetchables. It even makes any Flooded Strand we hit off Tibalt's +2 still tap for mana! The downside however is that it helps out the opponent in all the same ways, so be mindful of your land sequencing and don't fix their mana when you don't need to. It also makes Ashiok Dream Render a significantly weaker sideboard card, so that's a large reason we run Blood Moon in Ashiok's place.

Why not play?

Tarmogoyf: a heretical cut for sure, but getting green mana turn 2 is no trivial matter when we need double red on turn 3 and quadruple black on turn 4. We'd likely need to fetch for our turn 2 green source, but we'd much rather save fetches for our Witch's Cottage. Cutting this means we just need to fetch basic Swamps to insulate us from Blood Moon.

Kolaghan's Command: I love the card but it'd be totally redundant here. Tibalt already deals with artifacts and Witch's Cottage recurs our creatures.

Wrenn and Six: seems like a strange cut, especially when we're trying to hit our land drops for BBE and maybe even lategame hardcast Tibalt. However, because of Witch's Cottage considerations, we have 8 lands that don't cast this card on turn 2. It was a tough cut, but I couldn't find a way to get the mana to work for Wrenn without sacrificing our turn 4 Tibalt odds.

Scavenging Ooze: green is our splash color, so a green intensive ability makes no sense here. We need double red for Seasoned Pyro and escaping Kroxa and quadruple black for Cottage. If you need more graveyard hate, just move some Nihil Spellbombs to the main.

Violent Outburst/Demonic Dread: we're a midrange deck with a small, low investment combo package (think of Jeskai control with Cleansing Wildfire and Flagstones of Trokair), not a combo deck running 90% midrange cards. Unlike BBE, these cards are pure trash when we don't have the combo set up. If you want to make these two work with Tibalt, you'd need to build your deck to look something more like Living End than Jund Midrange.

Suggestions

Updates Add

Comments

Attention! Complete Comment Tutorial! This annoying message will go away once you do!

Hi! Please consider becoming a supporter of TappedOut for $3/mo. Thanks!


Important! Formatting tipsComment Tutorialmarkdown syntax

Please login to comment

Casual

100% Competitive

Date added 3 years
Last updated 3 years
Legality

This deck is Modern legal.

Rarity (main - side)

13 - 0 Mythic Rares

27 - 5 Rares

14 - 4 Uncommons

2 - 6 Commons

Cards 60
Avg. CMC 2.06
Tokens Elemental 1/1 R, Emblem Tibalt, Cosmic Impostor
Votes
Ignored suggestions
Shared with
Views