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Main » Articles » Modern at a Glance

Modern at a Glance

Nassim Ketita
Posted on August 27, 2013
 Reddit

So, as it turns out, there’s a good chance I’ll be able to make it out to Grand Prix Detroit in a couple weeks. Since last time I touched Modern was when it was a Pro Tour Qualifier format, I should probably take a look at what the format looks like now. The last Modern Pro Tour was almost a year ago, so the metagame has been largely defined by the handful of recent Grand Prix tournaments as well as the World Championship. As I’ve done in previous articles, I like to see what decks are doing well on Magic Online. I normally don’t include Daily Events in my analyses, but as there are far fewer Modern Premier Events than Standard, I would otherwise have too few observations to say anything meaningful. I’m going for a broad overview of the format this week, just to bring myself (and you guys) up to speed in preparation for Detroit. I’ll save the more in-depth discussions for another time.

Here’s what the online metagame looks like:

Unlike previous metagame reviews, I’ve lumped together decks that fall into broad categories. There are just too many distinct decks to cover, but many of them follow similar patterns. How you play and prepare against, say, Jund as opposed to B/G or Junk isn’t dramatically different.

I’ll start by looking at the Pod decks. The last two Modern events were won by Melira Pod decks, and the Modern Magic Online Champion Series (MOCS) featured two Melira Pod decks in the finals. Let’s look at an example:

"Melira Pod by prolepsis9"

In case you’re not familiar with it, this deck’s Plan A is to combine Melira, Sylvok Outcast, a sacrifice outlet such as Viscera Seer, and a creature with persist and an enters-the-battlefield ability. Melira allows you to recur these abilities infinitely to either gain an arbitrarily large amount of life with Kitchen Finks or kill your opponent with Murderous Redcap. On the surface, this seems to be a very fragile three-card combo, but the deck is actually remarkably consistent and resilient to hate cards. Cards like Birthing Pod and Chord of Calling allow you to search for a creature that wins you the game in almost any situation, hence the large number of singletons. And if that’s not enough, Gavony Township plus the menagerie of random dorks works pretty well in a pinch.

An alternate version of this deck uses Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker to make an arbitrarily large army of Restoration Angels, but the concept is basically the same: Find the most efficient way to win with an active Birthing Pod. The mana base is quite different in order to accommodate the triple-red needed for Kiki Jiki, but otherwise, the deck plays many of the same cards. This version of the deck isn’t susceptible to graveyard hate like Grafdigger's Cage, but it does need to actually attack, so cards such as Rakdos Charm can win out of nowhere, and a desperation Cryptic Command can buy a turn. The Melira version of this deck has been more successful lately, but that hardly makes the Kiki-Jiki version bad.

The largest category of decks is what I call “Deathrite Shaman Midrange.” Decks that fall under this category are “traditional” Jund, Junk, B/G midrange, and the Jund deck that splashes white for Ajani Vengeant and Lingering Souls. All of these decks play similar cards and play the same basic game plan. Let’s compare the two extremes in terms of color choices.

"Vengeant Jund by TikyTon"

"B/G Midrange by Josh Utter-Leyton"

Besides lands, these decks share twenty-five cards in common in the main deck. There’s a trade-off between power and consistency, and there are enough cards in the Modern format to allow you to move that slider anywhere you want, so to speak. The abundant mana-fixing you gain from fetch lands, shock lands, and Deathrite Shaman doesn’t hurt either. There’s nothing, in theory, stopping you from playing the full five colors, although I suspect that might be a little too ambitious.

Like Rock decks of old, the current generation of B/G midrange decks have a decent matchup against pretty much everything. Dark Confidant naturally lends itself to playing a bunch of cheap cards so you have a ton of game against aggressive decks. Tarmogoyf has been serving undercosted beatdowns since 2007, and cards like Thoughtseize, Inquisition of Kozilek, and Liliana of the Veil make life miserable for any control or combo deck. Few games will be blowouts, which is both a good and a bad thing. You don’t have very many free wins, but you’re never a dog in any matchup—well, almost any matchup.

"R/G Tron by celldweller"

Cedric Phillips has been playing this deck on his stream since basically the beginning of time and has had a lot of success with it. While this is not a deck I particularly enjoy playing with or against, I can’t argue with results. No matter how many Blood Moons and Sowing Salts people put in their sideboards, this deck never seems to go away.

This is about as single-minded as a deck can be. It aims to generate as much mana as possible with Urza’s lands—or the Urzatron as they’re often called—to play huge bombs such as Karn Liberated and Emrakul, the Aeons Torn. There are very few spells in the deck that require red or green mana—this is essentially a mono-brown deck that splashes Pyroclasm and Sylvan Scrying. Both of those cards are hugely important though. Pyroclasm helps you to not be run over in case you can’t cast Wurmcoil Engine on turn three against aggressive decks. Sylvan Scrying helps a ton with making the deck more consistent, although the deck does run a large number of cheap cantrips. Very few decks can beat a turn-three Karn, and Eye of Ugin represents an unbeatable late game.

If Tron has any weakness, it’s its inability to interact with its opponents. Any fast combo deck, such as one with Splinter Twin or Pyromancer Ascension, is hard for this deck to beat. Also, you sometimes just draw a bunch of useless cards early in the game, start to fall behind, and can’t find your Oblivion Ring to get back in it.

The last deck I’ll look at is the most popular pure aggressive deck of the format: Affinity.

"Affinity by FREEROLLIN"

You know things have changed when Affinity decks don’t even bother with Frogmite anymore. I remember playing during the days of Disciple of the Vault and Skullclamp, so this version of the deck is nowhere near as scary, but it can still beat the crap out of an unprepared opponent. Cranial Plating is as much a pain in the ass as it’s ever been, and Arcbound Ravager has a few new friends to play with. Like, Tron, this is really not my style, but if you’re looking for an aggressive deck to play, you could certainly do a lot worse.

I hope you guys found this survey of what’s being played in Modern these days useful for your future Modern events. Next week, we learn how the badger got his stripes, and I’ll be playing more records by bands you’ve never heard of and don’t like very much.

Take care,

Nassim Ketita

arcticninja on Magic Online

http://www.youtube.com/nketita

TAGS articles, metagame, constructed, magic online, analysis, deck lists, modern, nassim ketita

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