Valakut is a card that was originally banned in Modern, but has since been unleashed upon the format, opening up all manner of Primeval Titan and Scapeshift decks. At the most fundamental level, there are two styles of Valakut decks: there are ones that are built to combo off, either with Scapeshift or Primeval Titan and Through the Breach, or there are ones that are built to sometimes win without their haymaker cards, usually via Prismatic Omen. Last weekend, Collins Mullen showed is that there may be a hybrid build now, thanks to an exciting new card in Hour of Devastation:

Valakut Ramp - Modern | Collins Mullen

• Creatures (9)
• 1 Wood Elves
• 4 Primeval Titan
• 4 Sakura-Tribe Elder

• Instants (1)
• 1 Summoner's Pact

• Sorceries (16)
• 1 Explore
• 3 Farseek
• 4 Hour of Promise
• 4 Scapeshift
• 4 Search for Tomorrow

• Enchantments (7)
• 3 Prismatic Omen
• 4 Khalni Heart Expedition

• Lands (27)
• 2 Forest
• 6 Mountain
• 1 Misty Rainforest
• 3 Cinder Glade
• 3 Windswept Heath
• 4 Stomping Ground
• 4 Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle
• 4 Wooded Foothills

• Sideboard (15)
• 2 Engineered Explosives
• 2 Relic of Progenitus
• 1 Chameleon Colossus
• 2 Obstinate Baloth
• 1 Reclamation Sage
• 3 Lightning Bolt
• 2 Anger of the Gods
• 1 Crumble to Dust
• 1 Shatterstorm

Buy This Deck

Previously, it was completely reasonable for your opponent to allow your ramp spells to resolve and just strip away your six to eight haymakers with discard spells or countermagic while using something like Ghost Quarter or Spreading Seas to fight the one Valakut you found naturally. Now, there are fully twelve spells that your opponent probably can’t afford to let you resolve, especially given how Collins has rebuilt the deck to take advantage of more consistent access to Valakuts.

There are two substantial changes to Collins deck relative to other flavors of Valakut: Prismatic Omen and Khalni Heart Expedition. Prismatic Omen is pretty straightforward. This card makes it so that even your Valakuts trigger themselves and your fetches get two triggers. This either gives you a ton of extra reach or makes it easier to keep the board stable while you look for one more ramp spell to close out the game. Secondly, Khalni Heart Expedition makes it more likely that you’re able to resolve a spell like Hour of Promise or Primeval Titan and then immediately trigger two or more Valakuts to sweep your opponent’s board and buy yourself time to start point damage at their face.

The deck has always been a reasonable choice in Modern, but the inclusion of Hour of Promise substantially increases the redundancy of the deck, and improves your ability to fight through interaction. However, the cost is that there’s less space available for interactive elements. There are no Lightning Bolts or Pyroclasms in the maindeck, which means you are very much all in on your Valakuts in the first game and accurately predicting which sideboard cards you’re going to need in the subsequent games. For that, you gain a powerful, proactive gameplan that’s difficult for many decks in Modern to keep up with.