There's no doubt that Modern currently exists in the shadow of Faithless Looting.

Izzet Phoenix has taken up the rarely held title of "best deck in Modern," with Dredge not far behind. The problem is trying to metagame against the "best deck" in Modern is a fool's errand. While the best deck in imbalanced Standard formats may end up being 40-50% of the metagame, Modern decks very rarely creep past a 20% metagame share. There's just too many decks and too many players who want to do their own thing.

So while you might want to play something like Rock, which has an excellent Izzet Phoenix matchup, the reality is you won't be playing against Izzet Phoenix every round. Even every other round would be quite the stretch, and for all those rounds you're not playing against Phoenix your deck is just fundamentally underpowered.

Well if you're looking for a deck with inherit power that also has a great Izzet Phoenix matchup, look no further than Tron.

Time Stamps:

Match 1 - 00:03:49

Match 2 - 00:18:44

Match 3 - 00:35:41

Match 4 - 00:56:15

Match 5 - 01:08:06

Tron | Modern | Jim Davis | 8th Place SCG Cincinnati

• Creatures (9)
• 1 World Breaker
• 2 Walking Ballista
• 4 Wurmcoil Engine
• 2 Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger

• Planeswalkers (6)
• 2 Ugin, the Spirit Dragon
• 4 Karn Liberated

• Sorceries (8)
• 4 Ancient Stirrings
• 4 Sylvan Scrying

• Artifacts (18)
• 3 Oblivion Stone
• 3 Relic of Progenitus
• 4 Chromatic Sphere
• 4 Chromatic Star
• 4 Expedition Map

• Lands (19)
• 1 Ghost Quarter
• 1 Sanctum of Ugin
• 4 Urza's Mine
• 4 Urza's Power Plant
• 4 Urza's Tower
• 5 Snow-Covered Forest

• Sideboard (15)
• 2 Spatial Contortion
• 3 Thought-Knot Seer
• 4 Thragtusk
• 1 Grafdigger's Cage
• 1 Dismember
• 4 Nature's Claim

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This was clearly a very odd set of matches, as all of our games were against fast/hard to interact with combo decks (Infect, Ad Nauseam) or decks with maindeck land hate like Leonin Arbiter or Blood Moon. Where were the Izzet Phoenix decks?! That's Modern!(TM)

Still, the good news is that we aren't trying to have interactive games of Magic with Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet or Scavenging Ooze. In our bad matchups we still have the ability to just Karn Liberated them on turn three and steal games on raw power alone.

Tron is excellently positioned at the moment, while also having the power and pedigree of an established and successful Modern deck.

Just make sure you mulligan aggressively!