MTG Salvation

To be fair I've alternated between one and two rivers with two dismember main and i would say I use black mana for dismember like one out of twenty times. Casting for two mana at sorcery speed is rarely effective vs one mana instant speed; although it's nice to k ow it's possible.

Colonnade is definitely an important target that I missed.

I still think there's a case for MB spatial though, it's definitely not fair to say that there's not even a chance. Each has clear upsides and downsides, it's a matter of weighing them vs the current meta and the rest of your deck.

Also, river of tears is never something you should be relying on to reduce the life loss- even if you run 3 or 4 rivers, a 2-mana sorcery-speed kill spell (that still costs 2 life) is just not very good. Unless I'm at <4 life, I'd rather be holding up counters or instant-speed removal.

A friend of mine convinced me to go to a pptq with him on Saturday. I don't currently have a modern deck so he's letting me use his U Tron deck. I've never piloted this deck before but I have played against and know the jist of what I'm trying to do. Any tips for piloting the deck or letting me know the good/bad matchups would be greatly appreciated

Crappy phone; double post sorry.

Good Luck this weekend, Tips for piloting the deck.. uh if you think your opponent is a fast aggro deck try to rush tron and play a wurmcoil or large ballista early. Control matchups depends, but I normally just keep a good hand and our late game is more powerful. Combo.. depends on the type but normally counter spells are key here and if they are creature combo, walking ballista is a house. I've been considering just playing 4 ballistas.

Additionally this is what I've found useful thinking, "don't try to win until your opponent can't win".

Most important thing for a new u Tron player is to realize this is not a ramp deck. You get Tron when you get it, you are a control deck first and foremost. Turn three Tron is rarely even good - you need blue mana to cast your spells. It is not uncommon to expedition map for an island instead of third Tron piece of you do that have blue mana yet.

Your hand might change the equation but more often than not we don't have Tron that quickly. We condescend and remand and thirst for k owledge and often then hardcast the six mana wurmcoil with six lands. Then you hit Tron and now it's an ugin or ballista with counterspell backup or a mindslaver lock and that's when it's over.

You can eot Bounce blood moon or damping sphere and untap with your Tron mana online.

You will often discard two cards to thirst rather than an artifact.

Could we use unmoored ego

Hi All. A couple of PPTQs after using this deck and a bunch of testing against teammates and I've come up with my final list for my 3rd PPTQ on Sunday:

4 Walking Ballista
2 Wurmcoil Engine

4 Telling Time
4 Condescend
2 Remand
2 Supreme Will
2 Thirst for Knowledge
2 Dismember
2 Repeal
1 Spatial Contortion
1 Cyclonic Rift

4 Expedition Map
2 Chalice of the Void
1 Oblivion Stone
1 Mindslaver

2 Ugin, the Spirit Dragon

4 Urza's Tower
4 Urza's Mine
4 Urza's Power Plant
1 Academy Ruins
1 Gemstone Caverns
1 Field of Ruin
1 Flooded Strand
2 River of Tears
6 Island

Sideboard:
1 Chalice of the Void
2 Surgical Extraction
1 Grafdigger's Cage
1 Spatial Contortion
2 Negate
1 Summary Dismissal
1 Field of Ruin
1 Karn, Scion of Urza
1 Nimble Obstructionist
1 Engineered Explosives
1 Hurkyl's Recall
2 Spreading Seas

Self Notes:
Walking Ballista - I strongly believe that blue tron needs to play 4 of these in the current metagame. It also has the potential to just take over a game.
Telling Time - Haven't seen this card mentioned here nor have seen a U Tron build that plays this but I like it a lot. It gives the option to dig earlier and cheaper. It goes 3 cards deep which is pretty good value and is also versatile in dodging discard spells (i.e. I usually fire off this card in response to an inquisition or thoughtseize, hide a card I want to get but don't want taken on top of my library etc.)
Chalice of the Void - Pondered long and hard if I should just leave 1 on the main board but on match ups where it's really good, you really want to have 2 in and it usually just flat out wins you the game.

Things I've played and have cut (for now):
1 of snapcaster mage.
tolaria west - opportunity cost is simply to high.
2 thirst for knowledge - this is still a very very good card especially in this deck, but I'm loving me some Telling Time a lot in recent play tests that cutting down to 2 seems the right number for me.

https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/9guv3b/grn_mnemonic_betrayal_so_many_insane_plays/
Could this be playable in Utron?
We have some ways to create black mana for it. With tron we usually have a lots of colorless mana and this would be one way to use it and even without tron we could play cheap stuff to survive and create value.
Against control we could use their cantrips, planeswalkers and couterspells and not care about the color restrictions.
Against creature decks we could play their cheap creatures we have countered.
Against Gx tron we could play their cards to find tron or cast their payoffs karn, World Breaker.
At the end I think the opportunity cost to play this would be pretty low and being able to play even few cheap cards without tron could buy extra turn or two in the worst case.

Any thoughts?

The only reason to play telling time is to flip delver or setup terminus. The fact neither delver nor miracles play it should tell you something.

Remand, repeal, condescend, thirst and supreme will are the decks dig spells. I would play anticipate way before telling time in this deck, and id probably play squelch before anticipate.

The ub mythic isnt good enough even for tron where we might have eight mana to work with. For it to be good three mana gy exile would have to be playable with the casting stuff just a random late game upside. The going rate for exiling a gy is 0-1 mana so thats that.

In case you all haven't seen it yet:

https://tkos7.github.io/Mono-U-Tron/

This is a 99-page primer on Utron, written by u/tkos7 on reddit. Mad props to him, definitely worth a read.

I'm working on putting a list together and currently have everything except Ugin and Cyclonic Rift. Are there any replacements for those or are they mandatory to play this deck?

Ugin will save you a lot of the time, he just wins games when cast against certain decks. Rift is super helpful but I'm sure you could try just playing another repeal in its place. A lot of the time rift is just 2 Mana bounce a thing, but when overloaded obnoxiously good.

Aetherize could be a budget option for Rift too. I‘d rather go with Repeal though.

Checked the primer out. He skips over surgical as an option and promotes kozilek the great distortion as a legit card. Curious if anyone has actually played new kozilek? I've not even seen it In a list let alone tried it myself. I did try emrakul promised end and found it was too slow and no synergy w thirst/ruins. I'd guess kozilek comes up the same.

IIRC surgical is in the combo hate section.

As for kozilek, he says it’s kinda like Ugin, but for spells instead of creatures... My first thought was that mindslaver was pretty much better for the 10cmc, but I can see times where the cast trigger would matter, and we can definitely take advantage of the counter ability. My main concern is that it’s a flat 10 instead of mindslaver’s 6+4, which means it’s more likely to get stuck in hand, and we can’t pitch it to thirst.

He has played Kozilek himself with succes and I'm inclined to test it myself before discarding it as an option, it seems alright and the on cast draw to seven seems really good. Though it doesnt stabilise the board like wurmcoil engine, ugin or ballista, and it doesnt give us an extra turn like mindslaver.

Hi guys,

Don't post here much but I do use you all as a resource, so I figure I should give back when I can. Not too much to say actually, because I didn't take any notes but I wanted to report I got 17th place with U Tron at GP Hong Kong last week. I was very close to making top 8, but I lost the last round to Jund (of all things!) Ending up with a 11-2-2 record after 15 rounds of Swiss.

No intentional draws. The story is that round 1 I was paired against UW control and that game ended in a draw, putting me in the "draw bracket" for the rest of day one. I would never advise anyone intentionally getting a draw round one (it is, for example, a reason I didn't make top 8), but perhaps only playing against other decks with draws set me up for some good matchups, or at least avoiding a lot of the bad ones.

For my matches, again sorry, I didn't take any notes, but I recall playing UW control 4 times, G Tron, Humans 2 times, Eldrazi Tron, Bant Spirits, Jund 2 times, and a home brew UG midrange good stuff deck. The rest I forget. My 2 draws were to UW control, and 1 loss to Humans, 1 loss to Jund.

Jund is a pretty good matchup for us, so I was sad to lose out of top 8 because of it. But, to be fair, this Jund was a bit different. Very agro, he had 4 Bloodbraid Elfs, and he even had a Spring Cleaning for my Wurm Coil!

As for my deck:



Sooo, I've been playing U Tron for many years, but this past year I've mostly switched over to EDH and actually haven't been playing any Modern at all. This was actually my first paper Modern tournament since last years GP. I had a about a month of cramming on MTGO before this GP, but I still felt unprepared as to the meta. So my deck choices are what they are.

One thing I will say, is that I've never liked the Talismans, and am not impressed with the new Karn. I used to play 2 Wurm Coils, 1 Ugin main. I switched it to 2 Ugins main, 1 Wurm coil to help with the Humans matchup.

Congratulations on making 17th place!

I hope you didn‘t get cheated in the final Jund game: Spring Cleaning works on enchantments but not artifacts.
What are your experiences with Ulamog? Haven‘t been playing any Eldrazi in U Tron since the banning of Eye of Ugin.

Perhaps he meant deglamer? I've played that in June before specifically for wurmcoil.