Blue Monster Group

Posted on August 29, 2017

Eldrazi Tron is one of the decks with the most raw power in Modern. If you lead with Multiple Eldrazi Temples or early Urzatron and start jamming Thought-Knot Seers and Reality Smashers, plenty of decks are going to be hard-pressed to find anything powerful enough to keep up. Because of how good the deck is, people have started exploring how to get edges in the mirror. UrbanaTheMA has some thoughts on how that might be possible, while also making the deck more interactive with the various spell-based combo decks in the format:

Blue Eldrazi Tron - Modern | UrbananaTheMA, 5-0 Modern League

Instants (13)
2 Dismember
3 Repeal
4 Condescend
4 Remand

Sorceries (2)
2 All Is Dust

Artifacts (4)
4 Expedition Map

This deck is doing a couple of cool things for Modern. This isn’t the first time that I’ve seen

UrzaTron decks, but it is the first time I’ve seen

Eldrazi Tron. The idea is that, rather than doing nothing in the early turns, you have the option of leaving up counterspells like Remand and Condescend. This makes you less vulnerable to spell-based combo and control decks, since you’re less dependent on Thought-Knot Seer to interact with them. It also gives you an edge in the mirror, since you can counter their haymakers and fire back with one of your own.

One of the disadvantages of this is that you have less space for cool singleton lands, since you have to make space for Blue sources. No Sea Gate Wreckage or anything like that. The big advantage is that you have more card selection in Condescend and Remand, which makes it more likely that you can assemble Tron in the first couple turns of the game. Because of that, you can go bigger than the colorless Eldrazi decks. Rather than playing Reality Smasher and Hangarback Walker, this deck chooses to play Conduit of Ruin and Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger. You’re still more than capable of trading with opposing Reality Smashers, but can also go much, much bigger than your opponent.

If you expect to play primarily against midrange decks like Eldrazi and variants, then this deck seems like a pretty reasonable choice, splitting the difference between Eldrazi and more traditional Tron decks so that you have some of the speed of the Eldrazi deck, the haymakers of the Tron deck, and some Blue elements to pull it all together and make sure you can interact.