What makes tarmogoyf so good

This is a fairly stock list with a few tweaks. What makes the deck so good? Oh, and every once in a while the ultimate wins the game. It costs three! Confidant is fragile for a two-drop, but when it lives it gets there. In the end, Jund is a pile of the best spells in the game. How do you combat goodstuff. Unfair decks are so labeled because they deny you the possibility to interact. Belcher, for example, wins on turn one, outracing whatever the opponent was planning.

Paying one green mana was a cost that many decks happily paid to be able to cast this beater, and at one point in Modern's history, playing any green deck meant playing a playset of Tarmogoyfs. Tarmogoyf has been hit hard by the changing metagame of Modern brought on by the power creep we've seen in both creatures and non-creature spells.

While Tarmogoyf was an irreplaceable threat back in , Modern players now have a multitude of options and answers to the two-drop that can either outclass the card or cleanly deal with the creature. Go-wide decks that didn't exist in their current iterations, such as Five-Color Humans and Bant Spirits, can present creatures that snowball out of control and become bigger than Tarmogoyf.

Non-creature spells have come a long way in dethroning Tarmogoyf as well. Even the introduction of Abrupt Decay in 's Return to Ravnica still meant that a player was trading evenly in mana for the honor of removing a Tarmogoyf. The printing of Fatal Push was momentous for Modern in that, for the first time in the format, players had a removal spell that would put them up on mana when removing Tarmogoyf with zero downside.

Even looking outside of the realm of removal spells, cards such as Rest in Peace turn Tarmogoyf into a useless chump blocker. Jace, the Mind Sculptor and Teferi, Hero of Dominaria can also answer Tarmogoyf with the added benefit of leaving behind game-ending planeswalkers on the battlefield. Modern is stacked to the brim with powerful cards, and Tarmogoyf finds itself in a crowded space.

Jason had identified that Tarmogoyf could be an incredibly strong card when grown fast, and was willing to play a few slightly weaker cards so that his Tarmogoyf s would be as powerful as possible. This is something good deck builders try to do: see the whole of the deck as more than just the sum of its parts. If you've identified something really strong your deck can do, it can be worth playing a few odd cards to make your strategy the best it can be. It's an important deck-building lesson to always keep in mind.

This was the first era of Tarmogoyf , but it was far from the last. Like Tarmogoyf itself, the card's ubiquity quickly grew with time and experience. The card began to crawl into every Standard crevice.

While the first decks, like Jason's above, made sure to diversify card types to make the Tarmogoyf huge, that trend quickly turned into a quite simple philosophy: "Just play Tarmogoyf in everything.

While Jason's deck-building instincts of making his own cards powerful were generally right and especially in Block Constructed , it turned out that a card that could consistently have 2-plus power on turn two and grow to be enormous in the late game was plenty good on its own.

It didn't need many deck-building concessions to be good; between you and your opponent's graveyards, it was set. The turning point for me was when it became a fixture of Extended—a format kind of like today's Modern—where it sat alongside fetch lands and plenty of cheap-to-cast cards that could get into the graveyard quickly. That showed that Tarmogoyf wasn't just a flash in the Future Sight pan; it was here to stay. It was also the format that revolutionized how me and many other players would look at Tarmogoyf forever.

Until then, it had been seen as a card for beatdown and midrange decks. A large creature, towering over its ilk. But Patrick Chapin would change all of that. Patrick's brilliant deck, Next Level Blue, not only catapulted the phrase "next level" into the Magic lingosphere, but sent an entire new generation of decks into the Pro Tour—qualifying spotlight.

This is a blue control deck through and through, playing Counterspell and Spell Snare for early countermagic, the eternally potent Counterbalance and Sensei's Divining Top to lock your opponent out of the game, and Vedalken Shackles. Check out those sleek Threads of Disloyalty , poised to steal any Tarmogoyf s that came across its path.

It also featured four copies of a single green card in the main deck, supported by a couple well-inserted fetchable sources. A card that was how the deck intended to close the game.

By this point, Tarmogoyf had been in some slower decks before, sure. Remi Fortier's winning deck from Pro Tour Valencia shortly before, a three-color control deck, was a good example of this.

It's unfair to give Chapin all the credit, surely. But this was the first deck I remember that tore up the PTQ season and felt like something else entirely, so distinctly playing green just for Tarmogoyf. Though Chapin's original versions also sported Living Wish as well. A fundamental part of making this work was that Tarmogoyf only has a single green mana in its mana cost.

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