Alright, I added the "not" after desperate on Humans. Fixed the non capital letter "i" on last sentence of Jund guide, and added the things you want to add after the Liliana hyperlink. About the no hyperlink on Humans. I did not add the hyperlinks anymore in there to save on space. People can still use the guide just fine even if cards are not linked.
Glad you're giving the time to contribute knowledge to fill in the primer. It would help people new to the deck, as well as help those having problems fighting against tough opponents. So far I think we covered most competitive decks already.. Amulet Titan, Dredge, Humans, Infect, Burn. Is Grixis Shadow still alive in your area? If you like to make a guide for GDS, then I will add it to the primer as well.
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Top 8 section update.
I removed the results from 2018 and below. And added two more results from 2019.
A few more thoughts. I remember the Standard mono white version of Emeria in the History section of the primer also used Stoneforge. The deck did not have a chance to use sfm in Modern, because she was banned for a long time. Now with sfm uban, we are finally able to use the power of the kor. I believe we are headed in the right direction adding sfm to the deck.
Thank you for the extra work on the Jund text, my apologies for taking more of your time with these edits. If it is your choice not to use hyperlinks on the Humans guide, then that seems fine. As long as you added the missing word "not", it should still stand well enough on its own.
As to your other question, I would be happy to do a write-up on Shadow, I have played against it quite a bit, and even ran one of the early Grixis versions at a GP. I am likely not going to be able to do much over the next few days, however, as I am going to be busy with schoolwork. You can probably expect the detailed breakdown by Monday evening, however.
With reference to the new results, Fincown's mono-white list has an advantage in his ability to run 9 basic plains, which notably makes his Burn matchup slightly better than mine. His maindeck Charming Prince are another significant advantage there, so I am beginning to suspect that our differences may best be explained as a bias towards our respective metagames (he plays mostly online and I play exclusively paper Magic). Apart from that, we have discussed the relative merits of Brought Back, which he is taking full advantage of with 5 fetchlands plus the Ranger-Captain of Eos and Kami of False Hope plan. The cards are all individually strong, but I have not found success with this strategy. If MTGO is a predominantly Burn and Combo-oriented environment, this would clear up a significant discrepancy in the data for me.
With respect to Julie Terrats' list, I have far more pressing questions, beginning with the elephant in the room in choosing not to run Wall of Omens?!? Taking up its spots the 3-of Watcher for Tomorrow and the singleton maindeck Venser, Champion, and Sword speak to me of lack of testing, as do the 4 sideboard Leonin Relic-Warder and Deputy of Detention. Speaking of inclusions, the most puzzling one for me is the maindeck Weathered Wayfarer as one of only two targets for the full set of Ranger-Captain of Eos, which requires a very fortunate series of draws indeed to avoid playing a 3/3 beater with no text against some decks. More to the point, Weathered Wayfarer and Emeria, the Sky Ruin work at cross purposes (one wants to make every possible land drop until turn 8, and one wants fewer lands than the opponent), and the manabase includes ZERO copies of either Field of Ruin or Ghost Quarter. What do I know, though; the results bear out that these were all reasonable decisions on the day.
Most of these issues are probably answered by the fact that the tournament was very small - only 13 players. I would not be surprised to find out that the odd number of players had given Julie's list a boost with a round-one bye. It is certainly possible that the list simply lined up well with the field, though, especially considering that six of the twelve other decks at the tournament went far off the beaten path with sheer abandon. In addition to the moderately interesting Goblins with maindeck Fling and Abzan Rock with maindeck Ashiok, Dream Render, there were two (!) flavours of smallpox builds, an Affinity list fighting a fair game without Mox Opal (which managed to take third place), and a truly original Gruul Dramatic Entrance/Genesis Wave/Progenitus and Elves hybrid. If this eccentric lineup represents a normal metagame, then I want to be there every week - it seems absolutely wild.
What do people think of Dream Trawler? It feels like another possible win-con... although it might be a win-more card, because it can only have hexproof if we have something to discard.
Things have opened up for me due to the university's closure, so here is the GDS writeup. Also, I would say that Dream Trawler can be included among the 6-mana finishers, but I would be skeptical because a) the fourth Sun Titan is already too awkward on the curve b) double blue is not an insignificant cost c) it plays poorly with wraths and d) there is no immediate value other than the lifelinking body. If I was looking for an extra finisher and wanted to gamble on the blue mana requirement, I might look at Azor, the Lawbringer. Since I generally do not, my best results with an extra finisher have come from Elspeth, Sun's Champion. I find that these cards stabilize the game in more relevant situations for Emeria strategies, but there are obviously always going to be corner cases where the Trawler could shine. On to the write-up!
Grixis Death's Shadow is another positive matchup for Emeria control in its current form, with several comparisons to Jund being possible, beginning with overall win rate. Other important similarities include a reliance on hand disruption and multiple copies of Fatal Push or other situational removal. These combine with Stubborn Denial to create a clear disadvantage in topdeck wars, but there the similarities end. Being far less versatile, less value-focused, and far less threat-dense, the critical aggressive exchanges of the matchup are often forced much earlier in games than against Jund. Card selection is far more reliable here as well, which allows Grixis to sculpt strong sequences in the midgame. The matchup is consequently much more volatile, and tends more towards emphasizing tempo plays, which Emeria is far less adept at defusing, so break points that would not be game-ending against other decks quickly become pivotal. The win percentage remains relatively high due to Emeria the Sky Ruin attrition being well-suited to throwing up obstacles, but losses are much more convincing overall here.
Both pre- and post-sideboard, Supreme Verdict is an enormous trump sequence, since nothing other than Snapcaster Mage and the occasional burn spell threaten life totals at anything other than sorcery-speed. The 2/1 Human Wizard is itself vulnerable to Mortarpod and Court Hussar alike, and is difficult to play into Pilgrim's Eye or Wall of Omens if these are present instead. The desperation play of hard-cast Street Wraith is little better as a finisher, and so the only true menace is found in hard-hittig Death's Shadow and Gurmag Angler, which are reasonably well held back in the mid- to late-game by either potential vigilant counterattacks from Batterskull and Sun Titan, or by sweepers. Complications tend to arise, though, whenever the otherwise dead Stubborn Denial and spot removal can be used to push one of these two threats through for a hit with Temur Battle Rage.
Stabilization which will first force and second invalidate a double-striking Trample attack is therefore at a premium, and the good news on this front is that Shadow is far less likely to punish an extra land from Path to Exile or to be able to remove a Detention Sphere if these can be cast while they are tapped out, but the presence of countermagic is always a possibility requiring delicate risk management. Kolaghan's Command is also a concern anytime Batterskull is involved, though if lethal damage is not presented it can be important to encourage its casting while there are no Shadows/Anglers to return, since running the Grixis player out of significant threats is easier to accomplish when this value is denied. Mistveil Plains can also return dead equipment to the library for re-tutoring later on, so baiting out removal while gaining free value blocking with Germs is an important tactic.
Since there is generally no lifegain on the Grixis side (and their life totals are necessarily low whenever Shadow is involved), games tend to end quickly in both directions, so the third copy of Emeria, The Sky Ruin is less valuable. Settle the Wreckage is similarly very difficult to successfully cast through both discard and countermagic, so it is also worse, and these two cards therefore make room for two Celestial Purge as extra removal which can interact with potential enchantments or other odd strategies once the board is stable. Crucible of Worlds is too likely to be damaged by either graveyard hate or artifact removal, so it may also be removed for Blessed Alliance, which can prevent an early Death's Shadow from hitting the table with targeted lifegain (just remember to save this for when the card is on the stack, if you can, otherwise Ferocious might enable a crippling hard counter rather than an irritating Force Spike). Removing Wrath of God is also possible to bring in Lavinia, Azorius Renegade as a relevant method of containing Gurmag Angler, but using sweepers as clean 1-for-1 removal on big threats is a useful enough play pattern that it is worth the risk of potential countermagic if game one is already in hand.
Where countermagic is concerned, Teferi, Time Raveler is a fantastic resource which also happens to line up exceedingly well with the more powerful threats, buying extra turns and card velocity while denying unexpected interaction whenever it can hit play. On the subject of things put into play, be aware that Surgical Extraction will likely have the chance to remove a card or two post-board if your plan is to recur anything with Sun Titan, so be aware of the contents of your hand and/or your outs when you try to accrue value with the 6/6 giant. Mistveil Plains again becomes useful here given time, since its ability can fizzle the Lobotomy effect. Overall, their topdecks are still the important question in terms of finding threats in games 2 and 3, but in these cases it is much more likely that their middling draws will contain a more relevant mixture of spells than their frequent "removal and discard flood" in game one. Temur Battle Rage versus Supreme Verdict is essentially the name of the major battle here, so try to attack their Red mana while they work on buying themselves an open turn to resolve a significant threat. They typically only have three or four sources of that colour, so it is the most vulnerable in any case. Remove their Anglers and Shadows, however, and they are at a severe disadvantage.
Thank you for your continued work and updates, I am happy to be contributing to a project that feels as though it is going somewhere. Speaking of direction, I had written the Shadow guide with a few direct comparisons to Jund, and so perhaps it makes somewhat less sense to present it first. For the sake of these references, would it be possible to put Jund before GDS in the primer, just after Amulet? In my experience, the combination of discard, removal, and big green threats is a very popular one, and is probably worth putting in a more prominent position overall. Please let me know if you disagree, and I will re-write the Shadow guide to avoid the out-of-context passages.
Thank you for your well-wishes, by the way, and the same to you. I hope you and yours have the best of luck over the next little while, and invite you to let me know if there is anything a university student can do to help at a distance. I assume there is not much, but for a start I can say that you should have no worries at all if things are a little chaotic over the coming weeks; I completely understand. I actually had a thought that I might go to a PTQ this weekend, but Social Distancing due to the Coronavirus made me think better of it, and the event (as well as many others) was ultimately cancelled. Here in central Canada, the low population density and cold climate provide some amount of natural buffers to the spread of such a virus, but the close-quarters enforced by our winter temperatures make an eventual outbreak a particularly concerning possibility if a first foothold is established before the springtime.
How is your community doing? How are individuals treating each other? At the moment, for us, there is some amount of tension as people are keeping an eye on the South, mostly towards the United States, to see how our neighbours there deal with the pandemic, but things have mostly gone strangely quiet as no one really knows what to expect. Are there ways of helping other affected areas socially? Are people finding methods of maintaining calm and positive attitudes?
I hope things keep well enough that you will still find the time to post here for the next few days, this pastime of ours is pretty trivial compared to the real problems at hand, but if it can continue to serve as a diversion I will feel a little better. Failing that, I have always liked the sub-title of the game as a nod to the importance of interpersonal relations for it, and would like to try to keep "The Gathering" in mind through what may be stressful times ahead.
Be well, I hope everyone here will be able pull together when it counts.
you're welcome. Alright did what you asked. Jund is now below Amulet Titan in the mmtchup guide. It's fine, if you think something needs to be edited there, just tell me. Well, our deck is not tier 1 but it could put up a good fight against the more popular competitive decks like Amulet, Humans, Dredge.. and the ever present Infect, Burn and Jund. It's my hobby to update and add useful things to the primer we have here, so if someday this forum close down and become "read only", people who come here can read useful advice. So I'm glad someone like you who is experienced in the deck is giving matchup advice. I also basically have no experience using sfm version, so the things you write really helps.
oh, so you're from Canada? some of my relatives live somewhere in Mississauga. Over here in the Philippines.. things are getting serious, a community lockdown is implemented urging everyone to just stay home. 2 people died just 1 km from my house. All public gatherings including church mass are forbidden until April 14. I went out for last time today to buy some supplies, canned goods, noodles, basic necessities. I'm also feeling intense anger at China because this cake of a virus came from them, and now the whole world is suffering for it.. damn them to hell. I think it's correct to cancel the magic event in your area.. you can always play once this problem passes, right now there is a risk of death.. so safety first before play.
Back to the primer. I know it's a bad matchup, but do you have experience playing against Tron? If you are interested, we need an updated guide against that deck too. Fincown already wrote for Eldra Tron, so we only need one for normal tron.
I am glad to hear that you are okay, and I am sorry to hear of the recent losses in your community. You have probably heard this before, but as you limit your interactions with others you should remember that these precautions are mostly to slow the infection rates for the benefit of people you may never meet. Apart from that, stay safe, wash your hands, and keep them away from your face. I don't know if it helps your anger, but we are in this together now: I have not gone outside the 4 blocks around my home in over 72 hours. In China many people who had nothing to do with this have been in a similar situation for weeks, now. Even if it is the source of this most recent outbreak, this could just as easily have come from Africa during the Ebola outbreak five years ago, and I am grateful that we are a little better prepared than we were at that time.
Where Emeria control is concerned, I am not so certain that the deck isn't sometimes Tier 1 in the way I have it built. It has almost zero free wins, so it has a big disadvantage against its bad matchups, and it carries a high time-investment barrier to entry at the top levels due to a very flat learning curve, but overall it has the legs to take down a competitive tournament in many metagames. If you divide Modern into seven archetypes, it lines up well against a good portion of them. Against Control, Midrange, Aggro, Tempo, and Prison, the deck is strongly positioned, but loses outright to most Combo, and is generally at a heavy disadvantage to Ramp. Although the distribution of these strategies make this number a touch misleading, I would confidently say that Emeria begins the game with an inherent advantage over 5 out of the 7 Modern strategies, with a fighting chance over many examples of the other two. In addition, Wizards is historically prone to banning the decks that get too far out of control from these two sectors, while Emeria's fair gameplan is relatively immune from such interference.
With regards to the Tron write-up, I would be happy to contribute there as well. I have played against it for years, now, in many different incarnations, and I am confident in my understanding of the matchup. It is a bad one, but the printing of Field of Ruin has given Emeria a few small chances here. Apart from this landmark addition in conjunction with the maindeck Crucible of Worlds, nothing I have found has ever really made a difference in the win percentages that stem from their overwhelming mana advantage. I am currently trying to finish transferring to an online course, since the University of Saskatchewan has cancelled classes in-person, but I will probably have time to collect my advice over the next few days.
thanks, that's comforting. My anger has also subsided a bit. Anyway, have not got out into the street for the past 24 hours as well. And I've had the habit of washing my hand often, and not touching my face. That's good, you can continue studying online.. much safer than going to school.
About Tron... I think the sfm build has a better chance than the classic build, because it can go aggro faster with a batterskull. Will be waiting for your writeup then.
Good to hear, and good job keeping things together with the thread!
Best of luck with the outbreak, then, it is a stressful time we live in. Keep well.
Before I go on, I have another typo to report; the word "one" was cut off to "on" in the visible portion of the Infect breakdown, where I mention my loss to the Gitaxian Probe version. If the "e" could be added back in, I would appreciate it. Moving forward, here is my Tron write-up. It is quite long, so I chose not to include too many of the smaller corner cases, but there are many relevant ones:
Tron- Tron is the cost that is paid for the advantages gained by playing a slow strategy in Modern, and appears to be an irrevocably bad matchup as of 2020. Since its inception, the deck has been composed of an almost unadulterated mixture of lands, card velocity, and enormously powerful topdecks. There are a few rare exceptions in certain metagames where there is a hope that the occasional maindeck Dismember and/or Pyroclasm will grant some small reprieve from the general pattern, but by and large the deck plays the attrition war exceedingly well against Emeria as long as it has its mana. Winning game one is possible, at which point the match is indeed up for contention, but this is a very rare occurrence, and the number of times Tron manages to win both games post-board makes the true count a depressingly lopsided 70-30 matchup in their favour. Every mistake will be punishing for Emeria eventually, and several draw steps must line up in sequence for there to be any real doubt as to the outcome.
As is the case with other such matchups, a high prevalence of Tron makes the decision of playing W/u Emeria a poor one, but a bittersweet saving grace is that the deck is not enormously popular in the top tier at the moment. Alas, this makes including a targeted sideboard plan for the deck a fool's errand, and one that may not even win regardless, so the best strategy I have found thus far has focused on winning every possible game using overlapping hate from other matchups. In this effort, the game revolves around the axis alluded to by its namesake as phrased by Julez Santana in "The Second Coming": "United we stand, divided we fall, together we form Voltron- And take on all". To clarify; there is a small chance that the deck will draw only their least impressive threat in Wurmcoil Engine after the Urza lands appear, but in every other case the game is next to unwinnable if Urza's Mine, Urza's Power Plant, and Urza's Tower remain on the battlefield unmolested. This happens a non-zero amount of the time as early as turn three (even without library manipulation), which restricts reliable interaction to just 1 or 2 mana plays, with every other more costly strategy being part of an increasingly precarious tower of dominoes.
The bad news does not end there, however, because even through multiple copies of the best interactive spells on-colour to prevent this in Spreading Seas, closely followed by Damping Sphere (which are conveniently enough all very neatly countered by their sideboard Nature's Claim), the deck can still play a slower version of their strategy by simply casting Karn Liberated and Ugin, the Spirit Dragon on-curve. It is often only academic whether these are less devastating on turn 7 and 8 than on turn 3 and 4; they will still win many games regardless unless a clock can be established while they are being delayed. Even worse is that Oblivion Stone is a backbreaking play which requires only a three-mana investment, and immediately breaks free of any lock pieces to unleash an immediate horrorshow as of the turn it can be activated. Breaking apart their manabase synergy is still the key, but the fact that they can often win regardless of that fact is what makes this pairing an unavoidable death sentence for Emeria in well over half the games played against it.
Understanding this humbling disadvantage, and accepting it, leads to finally grasping the tightrope that must be walked to come out victorious by your own hand in an encounter with the colourless monstrosity that is Tron. The matchup is NOT unwinnable, merely close to it, and the greatest care must be taken not to become bitter or discouraged at that fact. They will have more than their fair share of improbable and frustrating wins no matter what, but if you remain diligent and alert your reward will be the fact that you have won a game that you can unequivocally say that you have earned. Daring and cold calculation are required when building a very narrow bridge towards the lategame is the only reliable path forward, and it is the tightrope walk along this tenuous path which should not be compromised; even facing the full fury of the Blind Eternities.
The threats are consistent and oppressive, and the spells Emeria musters against them are underwhelming, but the key is found in the lands. Not the Tron player's manabase, but its own. The only significant change in the matchup percentages across the seven-year history of my battle against turn-three Karn Liberated was heralded by the printing of Field of Ruin. Ghost Quarter was a longtime temporizing play in the matchup, but unless (and sometimes despite) being backed up by a true desperation play in sideboard Surgical Extraction, the effect was never enough unless it had a chance to become a Strip Mine. This usage became orders of magnitude more viable when manabase disruption could happen before its first activation, and after the thought of recurring it with Sun Titan became more than a vague pipe-dream. Herein lies the secret. Unless it is protecting a chance to deal lethal damage, setting Emeria's curve back by a land is a horrible play. Closing out the game is impossible if a premature Wasteland effect prevents Crucible of Worlds or a Titan from hitting the table. Field of Ruin, Crucible of Worlds, Ghost Quarter, and Sun Titan. These four cards are what every Wall of Omens and Court Hussar should always be seeking to find, pre- and post-sideboard, nearly always in that order.
Pressure is not unimportant, and the deck-thinning provided by Stoneforge Mystic for Batterskull is also not negligible, but it is the chances of drawing the previous four-card package which should always be kept in mind when sequencing. Do everything in your power to avoid wasting the digging potential of the Anticipate trigger on your 1/3 by using as many search effects as you can afford to before you cast it. Life totals are simply a distraction from the true battle in most cases, so do not spend any Path to Exile on speculative offense through a Wurmcoil Engine if you can afford to use them to build up your own manabase towards an early Titan. When you draw the 6/6/ Giant on turn six, be aware that you might at this point have the option of playing a sandbagged Ghost Quarter, tapping five mana, playing and using the search effect on yourself, and tapping the land you searched up to make mana number six, which will return the Quarter to play for immediate usage on a Tron piece. This often goes against what Emeria, the Sky Ruin wants to do, but in this matchup nothing but early and frequent Titan triggers are relevant to our most relevant endgame. The play just described requires true discipline in order to set up, but is rewarded because they might not see the first Ghost Quarter until it is too late to dig for their ubiquitous maindeck copies of Relic of Progenitus until after a 6/6 recursion engine is already gaining relevant value.
The timing and targeting on the manabase disruption is also very important. Whenever they do not enable the only maindeck instant-speed threat in Oblivion Stone activations, Field of Ruin and Ghost Quarter should be used only after they have an additional chance of drawing their last Basic Forest. This is often shortcut to mean "during their draw step" to prevent them from reaching a mainphase with Tron assembled, but every extra percentage point of the best-case Strip Mine scenario should be taken, even though they commonly run at least two to four Basic Forests (and up to seven, in one notable extreme). Pointing these cards at the same named Tron piece is the priority, in order to reduce their odds of drawing them naturally as the game goes long, but try to avoid destroying Urza's Tower unless you have already broken up the set. When Tower is the last land they play to re-connect Tron, it can allow them to resolve a key Oblivion Stone (which will eventually disrupt recursion loops) before they pass the turn. Fetch out Mistveil Pains as early as possible, it can permit victory despite the threat of decking if they are able to attack multiple times with Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger before the board is stabilized with the otherwise useless Settle the Wreckage. Nerves of steel are necessary at times, since on the draw it is suicide to use Ghost Quarter against the threat of Karn Liberated off of three consecutive Urza lands; the best hope in such a situation is to pretend they do not have it, or less realistically hoping to use Detention Sphere on it.
The sideboard is currently a massive improvement, but layered just as precariously as in game one - on the back of Field of Ruin. The only exceptions are Pithing Needle (typically first for Karn Liberated and then for Oblivion Stone) and Lavinia, Azorius Renegade, which sometimes steal a few critical turns of tempo on the draw. Karn, the Great Creator is a very good target for Needle, but unlike its seven-mana incarnation from New Phyrexia it can be beaten by a normal array of creatures. Aura of Silence and Disenchant are important answers to several threats here, can be timed on an ETB to reduce the blowout potential of removal on Detention Sphere, and contribute to locking out access to Karn's often unpredictable wishboard. Sideboarding begins with removing all five of the 4-mana sweepers, and then continues by trimming an Emeria, the Sky Ruin and two Pilgrim's Eye. They make room for every version of Pithing Needle, the two Disenchant effects, the Lavinia, Azorius Renegade, and the crucial copies of Glen Elendra Archmage (or Aven Mindcensor, if these are used instead). All the equipment and copies of Path to Exile remain in place for their deck-thinning value, and to support as much aggression as can be spared around the battle to keep the lands within reach of a semi-fair contest.
alright, updated the Tron guide. It's below the Humans guide in the matchups section. thanks again for the contribution.
oh, I remember you participated in a team event? I saw it a few pages back.
If you like. Can you share how the matches went? If you will share a report, then I will link it to the tournament reports section of the primer.
I have had three events posted here since I started getting in practice for the larger team trios event which was to come up in April, but it is now likely to be cancelled. Regardless, all of them were very small (3 or 4 rounds) so they never had a chance to establish a real tournament metagame, and as such can't provide more than anecdotal data. If you want to read them, the first two are found next to each other in the bottom three posts of page 67 on this thread, and the third is the first post at the top of this page. These posts provide potentially informative gameplay, but I would not recommend using them for any larger analysis purposes; the stakes are insufficient for them to be treated as serious competitive tournaments.
I am glad the Tron guide may be helpful, you are most welcome. Did you get a chance to correct the typo on the Infect guide I mentioned?
Anyway, it seems we've finished updating the primer with relevant matchup data against currently active decks in modern.
Do you think there's something missing? I sort of wanted to add a guide to fight Bant Snow, but I think there's not enough data on it, because covid cancelled some tournaments.
I have now played against Bant Snowblade three times (2 wins and 1 loss), and I can offer a tentative breakdown there if you wish, but I will have to preface it with a caveat concerning the level of play and the sample size. The major dynamics seem pretty clear to me now, but the way a good pilot might approach them might be different than my experience so far. Based on this, let me know if you would like me to proceed, and I will follow your advice.
Since it is such a diverse format, there are many decks still missing. Apart from Uroza, though (which shares a few important elements with Bant Snowblade), none of them comprise over 3% of the Modern metagame going by MTGgoldfish, so I think the primer is in pretty good shape at the moment with just under 50% of expected opponents represented on our home page. If this statement is surprising to make from a board control pilot knowing less than half their field, it is because 3% is roughly the share at which expecting to face any given strategy at least once over the course of a 16-round GP begins to pay off (3x16=48% chance). What irks me here is that I have still not managed to be paired against any Urza deck, and am now unlikely to do so until well into the summer when tournaments might start again. If someone could step up to speak theoretically about their experiences with or against Whirza/Uroza decks, it would go a long way towards giving us some information to work with until we could get relevant match analysis.
One last note is that the Underworld Breach decks are still being fine-tuned in Modern, and it is entirely possible that they may become a threat if they innovate some new technology or gain a new tool in the coming months, so any experience there would also be valuable to bring forward for discussion. Although I have only briefly seen it in action, I am not very concerned with the deck in its current form. It is (more or less) a three-card combo, and even if it is reasonably consistent and on paper quite resilient, disruption does hurt it and can interact with the board in Artifacts, Enchantments, and Creatures, in addition to the Stack, the Hand, or the Graveyard. This gives opponents a lot of play, and specifically offers many layers of disruption to Emeria. I may be wrong, but I think the deck is waiting on at least one more strong synergy to become a true breakout.
That is all for now from me, then, and I will hope to hear back from anyone on these subjects.
let me hear it then, even if it's only a short tentative breakdown on Bant Snow. I will put it on the primer.
Can be updated later when we get more information.
As for Urza decks.. last time I talked with Fincown, he said it's a bad matchup for Emeria. Although I'm not sure if it's as bad as tron.
1. Humans
2. Amulet Titan
3. Dredge
4. Burn
5. Dredge
6. Bant Snow Control
7. Temur Fire Turns (sweet Astrolabe deck)
8. Burn
9. Temur Superfriends Midrange (only 2 Astrolabes; also sweet)
10. Jund
11. Mono G Tron
12. Temur Urza
13. Mono R Prowess
14. Humans
15. Eldrazi Tron
16. Mono R Prowess
nice, most of the decks we prepared a sideboard guide against showed up in the top 16 of the Super Qualifier.
Hey Fluff, sorry for the late response, I have been making sure I can still access my files as the University shuts down.
As for the Urza decks, they may be a bad matchup but the important cards can be interacted with successfully using Path to Exile, Detention Sphere, and Teferi, Time Raveler, while Emeria's essential shell of lands, cantrip creatures, and sweepers remains at least moderately relevant in the maindeck, and gets more focused post-board. This story is the one that the strategy relies on, and Tron is the deck in Modern that invalidates these angles the best. It is difficult for me to imagine a matchup that could be worse (although the Dimir Inverter deck from Pioneer may one day make me eat my words if the format ever finds a way to make it efficient enough to port it to Modern).
The next worst matchup is likely Scapeshift, followed an appreciable distance later by Gifts Storm and Ad Grace, which flip-flop position depending on the particular build. The common elements among these four decks are; an effective immunity to creature removal, a tremendous amount of non-interactive explosive potential from any open turn (particularly when threatened before Emeria's key four-mana watermark), an internal reward for patience when not under pressure, and a manabase relatively impervious to meaningful disruption. These factors combine only very rarely, and typically engender some other weakness based on volatility to compensate (as with Neobrand, for instance), so Emeria maintains a very good win-rate across many different metagames unless bannings are imminent. The exception has always remained Tron, whose consistency is more or less limited to colourless spells, and seems thereby to have been mostly judged an acceptably healthy pillar of the Modern metagame.
In other news, thank you for the breakdown of the Super Qualifier, there are some very interesting results to dig into there. I looked at the top 32 decklists in the link you provided, and I think the metagame would have been a relatively good one for Emeria overall. There were a few big-mana decks, but they seem to have been preyed upon by the Control decks. I am also somewhat surprised by the total lack of fast combo, and at the fact that the top tables were overall light on aggro (7 of 32, but 3 of these appearing in the top 8). The Uro/Stoneforge/Batterskull trifecta from Astrolabe decks seems to be undergoing a serious metagame adjustment by the faster lists at the moment. Perhaps related to this is the fact that Mana Leak effects seem to be making a quiet comeback as well, with Metallic Rebuke providing a functional analogue to it after a turn-1 Arcum's Astrolabe. Also noteworthy is that the Dredge decks seem to have punished Ashiok, Dream Render severely, as many lists had that as their primary graveyard hate, and the only two Stinkweed Imp lists in the top 32 BOTH made the top 8.
I suspect the winning Humans list might have deliberately planned to take this multi-colour Control challenge on, with an attrition package based on Militia Bugler in the sideboard, and a dedicated plan dovetailing out of it with Magus of the Moon (which also had a good showing over the weekend in several R/g Ponza decks) against Tron and Amulet Titan, plus a way to break through both Germ tokens and Green blockers with Mirran Crusader. Three Auriok Champion may have also helped more against Jund than the Burn lists they might have been hedging against, though the semifinals was probably their time to shine. The maindeck was also designed to punch through blockers, with a committed four-of Reflector Mage, and extra reach in Kessig Malcontents. It seems as if they figured out a way to play Scissors, with a Rock-like sideboard plan, in a Paper-dominated metagame. Very impressive, and quite sophisticated overall. I will continue thinking on this, but I must get back to work now. You can expect the Bant Snowblade write-up either tomorrow afternoon or Friday evening.
we are in a lockdown, and have all the time to talk. Better to do your important university work first. We are not sure how long this pandemic will last. I hope you and your family are still safe. Over here, the government already banned old people froim walking in the streets, they are not allowed to leave their houses anymore. We bought a large batch of food and vitamin c tablets today.
From the conversations I've seen on Inverter. The combo is slow, going off at around turn 5. Also Dig Through Time is banned here.
Although some people might someday make a powerful modern port of it. We need to observe how the deck evolves.
You mention Ponza.. hmm, that was my deck before playing Emeria titan. Good enough when it works, but it does not have much card draw and library manipulation.
Yeah, that's an interesting Humans list. Do you think we can beat something like that just fine, or will it be a tough fight?
I know some of my choices are a bit unorthodox, but they've all performed pretty well in my testing. The Squadron Hawks have been really good in pretty much any matchup except combo. Against control, it's four blockers to help you buy time to stabilize, and against control it gives you a bit of pressure to keep your opponent on their toes. Generous Gift is sort of the stand-in for Deputy of Detention, and it works pretty well at that. I feel like I should probably make room for some number of Charming Prince in the deck, including some mainboard, but I'm not really sure where. Anyways, any feedback on the list would be appreciated!
Private Mod Note
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Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
It's flavor-tastic
Sig made by Tiiratore. PM him if you want one.
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My Decks:
Modern:
(online)Enduring Ideal
(online)BUG
(paper)Mono White Control
Standard:
(paper) Whatever I can throw together
(online) UWR Control
Legacy:
(paper)The Gate
(paper)Dream Halls
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Alright, I added the "not" after desperate on Humans. Fixed the non capital letter "i" on last sentence of Jund guide, and added the things you want to add after the Liliana hyperlink. About the no hyperlink on Humans. I did not add the hyperlinks anymore in there to save on space. People can still use the guide just fine even if cards are not linked.
Glad you're giving the time to contribute knowledge to fill in the primer. It would help people new to the deck, as well as help those having problems fighting against tough opponents. So far I think we covered most competitive decks already.. Amulet Titan, Dredge, Humans, Infect, Burn. Is Grixis Shadow still alive in your area? If you like to make a guide for GDS, then I will add it to the primer as well.
__________________________
Top 8 section update.
I removed the results from 2018 and below. And added two more results from 2019.
Locâtum El Perello - Juli Terrats - 10/20/19
MTGO Modern League #2 - Fincown - 10/1/19
_______________________
A few more thoughts. I remember the Standard mono white version of Emeria in the History section of the primer also used Stoneforge. The deck did not have a chance to use sfm in Modern, because she was banned for a long time. Now with sfm uban, we are finally able to use the power of the kor. I believe we are headed in the right direction adding sfm to the deck.
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Want to play a UW control deck in modern, but don't have jace or snaps?
Please come visit us at the Emeria Titan control thread
Thank you for the extra work on the Jund text, my apologies for taking more of your time with these edits. If it is your choice not to use hyperlinks on the Humans guide, then that seems fine. As long as you added the missing word "not", it should still stand well enough on its own.
As to your other question, I would be happy to do a write-up on Shadow, I have played against it quite a bit, and even ran one of the early Grixis versions at a GP. I am likely not going to be able to do much over the next few days, however, as I am going to be busy with schoolwork. You can probably expect the detailed breakdown by Monday evening, however.
With reference to the new results, Fincown's mono-white list has an advantage in his ability to run 9 basic plains, which notably makes his Burn matchup slightly better than mine. His maindeck Charming Prince are another significant advantage there, so I am beginning to suspect that our differences may best be explained as a bias towards our respective metagames (he plays mostly online and I play exclusively paper Magic). Apart from that, we have discussed the relative merits of Brought Back, which he is taking full advantage of with 5 fetchlands plus the Ranger-Captain of Eos and Kami of False Hope plan. The cards are all individually strong, but I have not found success with this strategy. If MTGO is a predominantly Burn and Combo-oriented environment, this would clear up a significant discrepancy in the data for me.
With respect to Julie Terrats' list, I have far more pressing questions, beginning with the elephant in the room in choosing not to run Wall of Omens?!? Taking up its spots the 3-of Watcher for Tomorrow and the singleton maindeck Venser, Champion, and Sword speak to me of lack of testing, as do the 4 sideboard Leonin Relic-Warder and Deputy of Detention. Speaking of inclusions, the most puzzling one for me is the maindeck Weathered Wayfarer as one of only two targets for the full set of Ranger-Captain of Eos, which requires a very fortunate series of draws indeed to avoid playing a 3/3 beater with no text against some decks. More to the point, Weathered Wayfarer and Emeria, the Sky Ruin work at cross purposes (one wants to make every possible land drop until turn 8, and one wants fewer lands than the opponent), and the manabase includes ZERO copies of either Field of Ruin or Ghost Quarter. What do I know, though; the results bear out that these were all reasonable decisions on the day.
Most of these issues are probably answered by the fact that the tournament was very small - only 13 players. I would not be surprised to find out that the odd number of players had given Julie's list a boost with a round-one bye. It is certainly possible that the list simply lined up well with the field, though, especially considering that six of the twelve other decks at the tournament went far off the beaten path with sheer abandon. In addition to the moderately interesting Goblins with maindeck Fling and Abzan Rock with maindeck Ashiok, Dream Render, there were two (!) flavours of smallpox builds, an Affinity list fighting a fair game without Mox Opal (which managed to take third place), and a truly original Gruul Dramatic Entrance/Genesis Wave/Progenitus and Elves hybrid. If this eccentric lineup represents a normal metagame, then I want to be there every week - it seems absolutely wild.
Thanks for the update, I will speak to you soon!
hmm, all I can say is I'm liking that there are many ways to build this deck which can still be succesful.
no rush in making the guide for GDS. School is more important.
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Want to play a UW control deck in modern, but don't have jace or snaps?
Please come visit us at the Emeria Titan control thread
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Want to play a UW control deck in modern, but don't have jace or snaps?
Please come visit us at the Emeria Titan control thread
Things have opened up for me due to the university's closure, so here is the GDS writeup. Also, I would say that Dream Trawler can be included among the 6-mana finishers, but I would be skeptical because a) the fourth Sun Titan is already too awkward on the curve b) double blue is not an insignificant cost c) it plays poorly with wraths and d) there is no immediate value other than the lifelinking body. If I was looking for an extra finisher and wanted to gamble on the blue mana requirement, I might look at Azor, the Lawbringer. Since I generally do not, my best results with an extra finisher have come from Elspeth, Sun's Champion. I find that these cards stabilize the game in more relevant situations for Emeria strategies, but there are obviously always going to be corner cases where the Trawler could shine. On to the write-up!
Grixis Death's Shadow is another positive matchup for Emeria control in its current form, with several comparisons to Jund being possible, beginning with overall win rate. Other important similarities include a reliance on hand disruption and multiple copies of Fatal Push or other situational removal. These combine with Stubborn Denial to create a clear disadvantage in topdeck wars, but there the similarities end. Being far less versatile, less value-focused, and far less threat-dense, the critical aggressive exchanges of the matchup are often forced much earlier in games than against Jund. Card selection is far more reliable here as well, which allows Grixis to sculpt strong sequences in the midgame. The matchup is consequently much more volatile, and tends more towards emphasizing tempo plays, which Emeria is far less adept at defusing, so break points that would not be game-ending against other decks quickly become pivotal. The win percentage remains relatively high due to Emeria the Sky Ruin attrition being well-suited to throwing up obstacles, but losses are much more convincing overall here.
Both pre- and post-sideboard, Supreme Verdict is an enormous trump sequence, since nothing other than Snapcaster Mage and the occasional burn spell threaten life totals at anything other than sorcery-speed. The 2/1 Human Wizard is itself vulnerable to Mortarpod and Court Hussar alike, and is difficult to play into Pilgrim's Eye or Wall of Omens if these are present instead. The desperation play of hard-cast Street Wraith is little better as a finisher, and so the only true menace is found in hard-hittig Death's Shadow and Gurmag Angler, which are reasonably well held back in the mid- to late-game by either potential vigilant counterattacks from Batterskull and Sun Titan, or by sweepers. Complications tend to arise, though, whenever the otherwise dead Stubborn Denial and spot removal can be used to push one of these two threats through for a hit with Temur Battle Rage.
Stabilization which will first force and second invalidate a double-striking Trample attack is therefore at a premium, and the good news on this front is that Shadow is far less likely to punish an extra land from Path to Exile or to be able to remove a Detention Sphere if these can be cast while they are tapped out, but the presence of countermagic is always a possibility requiring delicate risk management. Kolaghan's Command is also a concern anytime Batterskull is involved, though if lethal damage is not presented it can be important to encourage its casting while there are no Shadows/Anglers to return, since running the Grixis player out of significant threats is easier to accomplish when this value is denied. Mistveil Plains can also return dead equipment to the library for re-tutoring later on, so baiting out removal while gaining free value blocking with Germs is an important tactic.
Since there is generally no lifegain on the Grixis side (and their life totals are necessarily low whenever Shadow is involved), games tend to end quickly in both directions, so the third copy of Emeria, The Sky Ruin is less valuable. Settle the Wreckage is similarly very difficult to successfully cast through both discard and countermagic, so it is also worse, and these two cards therefore make room for two Celestial Purge as extra removal which can interact with potential enchantments or other odd strategies once the board is stable. Crucible of Worlds is too likely to be damaged by either graveyard hate or artifact removal, so it may also be removed for Blessed Alliance, which can prevent an early Death's Shadow from hitting the table with targeted lifegain (just remember to save this for when the card is on the stack, if you can, otherwise Ferocious might enable a crippling hard counter rather than an irritating Force Spike). Removing Wrath of God is also possible to bring in Lavinia, Azorius Renegade as a relevant method of containing Gurmag Angler, but using sweepers as clean 1-for-1 removal on big threats is a useful enough play pattern that it is worth the risk of potential countermagic if game one is already in hand.
Where countermagic is concerned, Teferi, Time Raveler is a fantastic resource which also happens to line up exceedingly well with the more powerful threats, buying extra turns and card velocity while denying unexpected interaction whenever it can hit play. On the subject of things put into play, be aware that Surgical Extraction will likely have the chance to remove a card or two post-board if your plan is to recur anything with Sun Titan, so be aware of the contents of your hand and/or your outs when you try to accrue value with the 6/6 giant. Mistveil Plains again becomes useful here given time, since its ability can fizzle the Lobotomy effect. Overall, their topdecks are still the important question in terms of finding threats in games 2 and 3, but in these cases it is much more likely that their middling draws will contain a more relevant mixture of spells than their frequent "removal and discard flood" in game one. Temur Battle Rage versus Supreme Verdict is essentially the name of the major battle here, so try to attack their Red mana while they work on buying themselves an open turn to resolve a significant threat. They typically only have three or four sources of that colour, so it is the most vulnerable in any case. Remove their Anglers and Shadows, however, and they are at a severe disadvantage.
I hope this helps!
And thanks for the update on our GDS matchup guide. I placed it under the Amulet guide.
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Want to play a UW control deck in modern, but don't have jace or snaps?
Please come visit us at the Emeria Titan control thread
Thank you for your continued work and updates, I am happy to be contributing to a project that feels as though it is going somewhere. Speaking of direction, I had written the Shadow guide with a few direct comparisons to Jund, and so perhaps it makes somewhat less sense to present it first. For the sake of these references, would it be possible to put Jund before GDS in the primer, just after Amulet? In my experience, the combination of discard, removal, and big green threats is a very popular one, and is probably worth putting in a more prominent position overall. Please let me know if you disagree, and I will re-write the Shadow guide to avoid the out-of-context passages.
Thank you for your well-wishes, by the way, and the same to you. I hope you and yours have the best of luck over the next little while, and invite you to let me know if there is anything a university student can do to help at a distance. I assume there is not much, but for a start I can say that you should have no worries at all if things are a little chaotic over the coming weeks; I completely understand. I actually had a thought that I might go to a PTQ this weekend, but Social Distancing due to the Coronavirus made me think better of it, and the event (as well as many others) was ultimately cancelled. Here in central Canada, the low population density and cold climate provide some amount of natural buffers to the spread of such a virus, but the close-quarters enforced by our winter temperatures make an eventual outbreak a particularly concerning possibility if a first foothold is established before the springtime.
How is your community doing? How are individuals treating each other? At the moment, for us, there is some amount of tension as people are keeping an eye on the South, mostly towards the United States, to see how our neighbours there deal with the pandemic, but things have mostly gone strangely quiet as no one really knows what to expect. Are there ways of helping other affected areas socially? Are people finding methods of maintaining calm and positive attitudes?
I hope things keep well enough that you will still find the time to post here for the next few days, this pastime of ours is pretty trivial compared to the real problems at hand, but if it can continue to serve as a diversion I will feel a little better. Failing that, I have always liked the sub-title of the game as a nod to the importance of interpersonal relations for it, and would like to try to keep "The Gathering" in mind through what may be stressful times ahead.
Be well, I hope everyone here will be able pull together when it counts.
-Stéphane
oh, so you're from Canada? some of my relatives live somewhere in Mississauga. Over here in the Philippines.. things are getting serious, a community lockdown is implemented urging everyone to just stay home. 2 people died just 1 km from my house. All public gatherings including church mass are forbidden until April 14. I went out for last time today to buy some supplies, canned goods, noodles, basic necessities. I'm also feeling intense anger at China because this cake of a virus came from them, and now the whole world is suffering for it.. damn them to hell. I think it's correct to cancel the magic event in your area.. you can always play once this problem passes, right now there is a risk of death.. so safety first before play.
Back to the primer. I know it's a bad matchup, but do you have experience playing against Tron? If you are interested, we need an updated guide against that deck too. Fincown already wrote for Eldra Tron, so we only need one for normal tron.
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Want to play a UW control deck in modern, but don't have jace or snaps?
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I am glad to hear that you are okay, and I am sorry to hear of the recent losses in your community. You have probably heard this before, but as you limit your interactions with others you should remember that these precautions are mostly to slow the infection rates for the benefit of people you may never meet. Apart from that, stay safe, wash your hands, and keep them away from your face. I don't know if it helps your anger, but we are in this together now: I have not gone outside the 4 blocks around my home in over 72 hours. In China many people who had nothing to do with this have been in a similar situation for weeks, now. Even if it is the source of this most recent outbreak, this could just as easily have come from Africa during the Ebola outbreak five years ago, and I am grateful that we are a little better prepared than we were at that time.
Where Emeria control is concerned, I am not so certain that the deck isn't sometimes Tier 1 in the way I have it built. It has almost zero free wins, so it has a big disadvantage against its bad matchups, and it carries a high time-investment barrier to entry at the top levels due to a very flat learning curve, but overall it has the legs to take down a competitive tournament in many metagames. If you divide Modern into seven archetypes, it lines up well against a good portion of them. Against Control, Midrange, Aggro, Tempo, and Prison, the deck is strongly positioned, but loses outright to most Combo, and is generally at a heavy disadvantage to Ramp. Although the distribution of these strategies make this number a touch misleading, I would confidently say that Emeria begins the game with an inherent advantage over 5 out of the 7 Modern strategies, with a fighting chance over many examples of the other two. In addition, Wizards is historically prone to banning the decks that get too far out of control from these two sectors, while Emeria's fair gameplan is relatively immune from such interference.
With regards to the Tron write-up, I would be happy to contribute there as well. I have played against it for years, now, in many different incarnations, and I am confident in my understanding of the matchup. It is a bad one, but the printing of Field of Ruin has given Emeria a few small chances here. Apart from this landmark addition in conjunction with the maindeck Crucible of Worlds, nothing I have found has ever really made a difference in the win percentages that stem from their overwhelming mana advantage. I am currently trying to finish transferring to an online course, since the University of Saskatchewan has cancelled classes in-person, but I will probably have time to collect my advice over the next few days.
I will hope to talk to you again very soon, then!
About Tron... I think the sfm build has a better chance than the classic build, because it can go aggro faster with a batterskull. Will be waiting for your writeup then.
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Want to play a UW control deck in modern, but don't have jace or snaps?
Please come visit us at the Emeria Titan control thread
Best of luck with the outbreak, then, it is a stressful time we live in. Keep well.
Before I go on, I have another typo to report; the word "one" was cut off to "on" in the visible portion of the Infect breakdown, where I mention my loss to the Gitaxian Probe version. If the "e" could be added back in, I would appreciate it. Moving forward, here is my Tron write-up. It is quite long, so I chose not to include too many of the smaller corner cases, but there are many relevant ones:
Tron- Tron is the cost that is paid for the advantages gained by playing a slow strategy in Modern, and appears to be an irrevocably bad matchup as of 2020. Since its inception, the deck has been composed of an almost unadulterated mixture of lands, card velocity, and enormously powerful topdecks. There are a few rare exceptions in certain metagames where there is a hope that the occasional maindeck Dismember and/or Pyroclasm will grant some small reprieve from the general pattern, but by and large the deck plays the attrition war exceedingly well against Emeria as long as it has its mana. Winning game one is possible, at which point the match is indeed up for contention, but this is a very rare occurrence, and the number of times Tron manages to win both games post-board makes the true count a depressingly lopsided 70-30 matchup in their favour. Every mistake will be punishing for Emeria eventually, and several draw steps must line up in sequence for there to be any real doubt as to the outcome.
As is the case with other such matchups, a high prevalence of Tron makes the decision of playing W/u Emeria a poor one, but a bittersweet saving grace is that the deck is not enormously popular in the top tier at the moment. Alas, this makes including a targeted sideboard plan for the deck a fool's errand, and one that may not even win regardless, so the best strategy I have found thus far has focused on winning every possible game using overlapping hate from other matchups. In this effort, the game revolves around the axis alluded to by its namesake as phrased by Julez Santana in "The Second Coming": "United we stand, divided we fall, together we form Voltron- And take on all". To clarify; there is a small chance that the deck will draw only their least impressive threat in Wurmcoil Engine after the Urza lands appear, but in every other case the game is next to unwinnable if Urza's Mine, Urza's Power Plant, and Urza's Tower remain on the battlefield unmolested. This happens a non-zero amount of the time as early as turn three (even without library manipulation), which restricts reliable interaction to just 1 or 2 mana plays, with every other more costly strategy being part of an increasingly precarious tower of dominoes.
The bad news does not end there, however, because even through multiple copies of the best interactive spells on-colour to prevent this in Spreading Seas, closely followed by Damping Sphere (which are conveniently enough all very neatly countered by their sideboard Nature's Claim), the deck can still play a slower version of their strategy by simply casting Karn Liberated and Ugin, the Spirit Dragon on-curve. It is often only academic whether these are less devastating on turn 7 and 8 than on turn 3 and 4; they will still win many games regardless unless a clock can be established while they are being delayed. Even worse is that Oblivion Stone is a backbreaking play which requires only a three-mana investment, and immediately breaks free of any lock pieces to unleash an immediate horrorshow as of the turn it can be activated. Breaking apart their manabase synergy is still the key, but the fact that they can often win regardless of that fact is what makes this pairing an unavoidable death sentence for Emeria in well over half the games played against it.
Understanding this humbling disadvantage, and accepting it, leads to finally grasping the tightrope that must be walked to come out victorious by your own hand in an encounter with the colourless monstrosity that is Tron. The matchup is NOT unwinnable, merely close to it, and the greatest care must be taken not to become bitter or discouraged at that fact. They will have more than their fair share of improbable and frustrating wins no matter what, but if you remain diligent and alert your reward will be the fact that you have won a game that you can unequivocally say that you have earned. Daring and cold calculation are required when building a very narrow bridge towards the lategame is the only reliable path forward, and it is the tightrope walk along this tenuous path which should not be compromised; even facing the full fury of the Blind Eternities.
The threats are consistent and oppressive, and the spells Emeria musters against them are underwhelming, but the key is found in the lands. Not the Tron player's manabase, but its own. The only significant change in the matchup percentages across the seven-year history of my battle against turn-three Karn Liberated was heralded by the printing of Field of Ruin. Ghost Quarter was a longtime temporizing play in the matchup, but unless (and sometimes despite) being backed up by a true desperation play in sideboard Surgical Extraction, the effect was never enough unless it had a chance to become a Strip Mine. This usage became orders of magnitude more viable when manabase disruption could happen before its first activation, and after the thought of recurring it with Sun Titan became more than a vague pipe-dream. Herein lies the secret. Unless it is protecting a chance to deal lethal damage, setting Emeria's curve back by a land is a horrible play. Closing out the game is impossible if a premature Wasteland effect prevents Crucible of Worlds or a Titan from hitting the table. Field of Ruin, Crucible of Worlds, Ghost Quarter, and Sun Titan. These four cards are what every Wall of Omens and Court Hussar should always be seeking to find, pre- and post-sideboard, nearly always in that order.
Pressure is not unimportant, and the deck-thinning provided by Stoneforge Mystic for Batterskull is also not negligible, but it is the chances of drawing the previous four-card package which should always be kept in mind when sequencing. Do everything in your power to avoid wasting the digging potential of the Anticipate trigger on your 1/3 by using as many search effects as you can afford to before you cast it. Life totals are simply a distraction from the true battle in most cases, so do not spend any Path to Exile on speculative offense through a Wurmcoil Engine if you can afford to use them to build up your own manabase towards an early Titan. When you draw the 6/6/ Giant on turn six, be aware that you might at this point have the option of playing a sandbagged Ghost Quarter, tapping five mana, playing and using the search effect on yourself, and tapping the land you searched up to make mana number six, which will return the Quarter to play for immediate usage on a Tron piece. This often goes against what Emeria, the Sky Ruin wants to do, but in this matchup nothing but early and frequent Titan triggers are relevant to our most relevant endgame. The play just described requires true discipline in order to set up, but is rewarded because they might not see the first Ghost Quarter until it is too late to dig for their ubiquitous maindeck copies of Relic of Progenitus until after a 6/6 recursion engine is already gaining relevant value.
The timing and targeting on the manabase disruption is also very important. Whenever they do not enable the only maindeck instant-speed threat in Oblivion Stone activations, Field of Ruin and Ghost Quarter should be used only after they have an additional chance of drawing their last Basic Forest. This is often shortcut to mean "during their draw step" to prevent them from reaching a mainphase with Tron assembled, but every extra percentage point of the best-case Strip Mine scenario should be taken, even though they commonly run at least two to four Basic Forests (and up to seven, in one notable extreme). Pointing these cards at the same named Tron piece is the priority, in order to reduce their odds of drawing them naturally as the game goes long, but try to avoid destroying Urza's Tower unless you have already broken up the set. When Tower is the last land they play to re-connect Tron, it can allow them to resolve a key Oblivion Stone (which will eventually disrupt recursion loops) before they pass the turn. Fetch out Mistveil Pains as early as possible, it can permit victory despite the threat of decking if they are able to attack multiple times with Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger before the board is stabilized with the otherwise useless Settle the Wreckage. Nerves of steel are necessary at times, since on the draw it is suicide to use Ghost Quarter against the threat of Karn Liberated off of three consecutive Urza lands; the best hope in such a situation is to pretend they do not have it, or less realistically hoping to use Detention Sphere on it.
The sideboard is currently a massive improvement, but layered just as precariously as in game one - on the back of Field of Ruin. The only exceptions are Pithing Needle (typically first for Karn Liberated and then for Oblivion Stone) and Lavinia, Azorius Renegade, which sometimes steal a few critical turns of tempo on the draw. Karn, the Great Creator is a very good target for Needle, but unlike its seven-mana incarnation from New Phyrexia it can be beaten by a normal array of creatures. Aura of Silence and Disenchant are important answers to several threats here, can be timed on an ETB to reduce the blowout potential of removal on Detention Sphere, and contribute to locking out access to Karn's often unpredictable wishboard. Sideboarding begins with removing all five of the 4-mana sweepers, and then continues by trimming an Emeria, the Sky Ruin and two Pilgrim's Eye. They make room for every version of Pithing Needle, the two Disenchant effects, the Lavinia, Azorius Renegade, and the crucial copies of Glen Elendra Archmage (or Aven Mindcensor, if these are used instead). All the equipment and copies of Path to Exile remain in place for their deck-thinning value, and to support as much aggression as can be spared around the battle to keep the lands within reach of a semi-fair contest.
I hope this is informative!
oh, I remember you participated in a team event? I saw it a few pages back.
If you like. Can you share how the matches went? If you will share a report, then I will link it to the tournament reports section of the primer.
edit: fixed the typo on Infect.
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Want to play a UW control deck in modern, but don't have jace or snaps?
Please come visit us at the Emeria Titan control thread
I have had three events posted here since I started getting in practice for the larger team trios event which was to come up in April, but it is now likely to be cancelled. Regardless, all of them were very small (3 or 4 rounds) so they never had a chance to establish a real tournament metagame, and as such can't provide more than anecdotal data. If you want to read them, the first two are found next to each other in the bottom three posts of page 67 on this thread, and the third is the first post at the top of this page. These posts provide potentially informative gameplay, but I would not recommend using them for any larger analysis purposes; the stakes are insufficient for them to be treated as serious competitive tournaments.
I am glad the Tron guide may be helpful, you are most welcome. Did you get a chance to correct the typo on the Infect guide I mentioned?
Hope everything is going well for you,
-Stéphane
Anyway, it seems we've finished updating the primer with relevant matchup data against currently active decks in modern.
Do you think there's something missing? I sort of wanted to add a guide to fight Bant Snow, but I think there's not enough data on it, because covid cancelled some tournaments.
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Want to play a UW control deck in modern, but don't have jace or snaps?
Please come visit us at the Emeria Titan control thread
I have now played against Bant Snowblade three times (2 wins and 1 loss), and I can offer a tentative breakdown there if you wish, but I will have to preface it with a caveat concerning the level of play and the sample size. The major dynamics seem pretty clear to me now, but the way a good pilot might approach them might be different than my experience so far. Based on this, let me know if you would like me to proceed, and I will follow your advice.
Since it is such a diverse format, there are many decks still missing. Apart from Uroza, though (which shares a few important elements with Bant Snowblade), none of them comprise over 3% of the Modern metagame going by MTGgoldfish, so I think the primer is in pretty good shape at the moment with just under 50% of expected opponents represented on our home page. If this statement is surprising to make from a board control pilot knowing less than half their field, it is because 3% is roughly the share at which expecting to face any given strategy at least once over the course of a 16-round GP begins to pay off (3x16=48% chance). What irks me here is that I have still not managed to be paired against any Urza deck, and am now unlikely to do so until well into the summer when tournaments might start again. If someone could step up to speak theoretically about their experiences with or against Whirza/Uroza decks, it would go a long way towards giving us some information to work with until we could get relevant match analysis.
One last note is that the Underworld Breach decks are still being fine-tuned in Modern, and it is entirely possible that they may become a threat if they innovate some new technology or gain a new tool in the coming months, so any experience there would also be valuable to bring forward for discussion. Although I have only briefly seen it in action, I am not very concerned with the deck in its current form. It is (more or less) a three-card combo, and even if it is reasonably consistent and on paper quite resilient, disruption does hurt it and can interact with the board in Artifacts, Enchantments, and Creatures, in addition to the Stack, the Hand, or the Graveyard. This gives opponents a lot of play, and specifically offers many layers of disruption to Emeria. I may be wrong, but I think the deck is waiting on at least one more strong synergy to become a true breakout.
That is all for now from me, then, and I will hope to hear back from anyone on these subjects.
Can be updated later when we get more information.
As for Urza decks.. last time I talked with Fincown, he said it's a bad matchup for Emeria. Although I'm not sure if it's as bad as tron.
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Want to play a UW control deck in modern, but don't have jace or snaps?
Please come visit us at the Emeria Titan control thread
nice, most of the decks we prepared a sideboard guide against showed up in the top 16 of the Super Qualifier.
Humans, Dredge, Amulet Titan. Jund, and Burn
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Want to play a UW control deck in modern, but don't have jace or snaps?
Please come visit us at the Emeria Titan control thread
As for the Urza decks, they may be a bad matchup but the important cards can be interacted with successfully using Path to Exile, Detention Sphere, and Teferi, Time Raveler, while Emeria's essential shell of lands, cantrip creatures, and sweepers remains at least moderately relevant in the maindeck, and gets more focused post-board. This story is the one that the strategy relies on, and Tron is the deck in Modern that invalidates these angles the best. It is difficult for me to imagine a matchup that could be worse (although the Dimir Inverter deck from Pioneer may one day make me eat my words if the format ever finds a way to make it efficient enough to port it to Modern).
The next worst matchup is likely Scapeshift, followed an appreciable distance later by Gifts Storm and Ad Grace, which flip-flop position depending on the particular build. The common elements among these four decks are; an effective immunity to creature removal, a tremendous amount of non-interactive explosive potential from any open turn (particularly when threatened before Emeria's key four-mana watermark), an internal reward for patience when not under pressure, and a manabase relatively impervious to meaningful disruption. These factors combine only very rarely, and typically engender some other weakness based on volatility to compensate (as with Neobrand, for instance), so Emeria maintains a very good win-rate across many different metagames unless bannings are imminent. The exception has always remained Tron, whose consistency is more or less limited to colourless spells, and seems thereby to have been mostly judged an acceptably healthy pillar of the Modern metagame.
In other news, thank you for the breakdown of the Super Qualifier, there are some very interesting results to dig into there. I looked at the top 32 decklists in the link you provided, and I think the metagame would have been a relatively good one for Emeria overall. There were a few big-mana decks, but they seem to have been preyed upon by the Control decks. I am also somewhat surprised by the total lack of fast combo, and at the fact that the top tables were overall light on aggro (7 of 32, but 3 of these appearing in the top 8). The Uro/Stoneforge/Batterskull trifecta from Astrolabe decks seems to be undergoing a serious metagame adjustment by the faster lists at the moment. Perhaps related to this is the fact that Mana Leak effects seem to be making a quiet comeback as well, with Metallic Rebuke providing a functional analogue to it after a turn-1 Arcum's Astrolabe. Also noteworthy is that the Dredge decks seem to have punished Ashiok, Dream Render severely, as many lists had that as their primary graveyard hate, and the only two Stinkweed Imp lists in the top 32 BOTH made the top 8.
I suspect the winning Humans list might have deliberately planned to take this multi-colour Control challenge on, with an attrition package based on Militia Bugler in the sideboard, and a dedicated plan dovetailing out of it with Magus of the Moon (which also had a good showing over the weekend in several R/g Ponza decks) against Tron and Amulet Titan, plus a way to break through both Germ tokens and Green blockers with Mirran Crusader. Three Auriok Champion may have also helped more against Jund than the Burn lists they might have been hedging against, though the semifinals was probably their time to shine. The maindeck was also designed to punch through blockers, with a committed four-of Reflector Mage, and extra reach in Kessig Malcontents. It seems as if they figured out a way to play Scissors, with a Rock-like sideboard plan, in a Paper-dominated metagame. Very impressive, and quite sophisticated overall. I will continue thinking on this, but I must get back to work now. You can expect the Bant Snowblade write-up either tomorrow afternoon or Friday evening.
Hoping this finds you well,
-Stéphane
From the conversations I've seen on Inverter. The combo is slow, going off at around turn 5. Also Dig Through Time is banned here.
Although some people might someday make a powerful modern port of it. We need to observe how the deck evolves.
You mention Ponza.. hmm, that was my deck before playing Emeria titan. Good enough when it works, but it does not have much card draw and library manipulation.
Yeah, that's an interesting Humans list. Do you think we can beat something like that just fine, or will it be a tough fight?
Nexus MTG News // Nexus - Magic Art Gallery // MTG Dual Land Color Ratios Analyzer // MTG Card Drawing Odds Calculator
Want to play a UW control deck in modern, but don't have jace or snaps?
Please come visit us at the Emeria Titan control thread
https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/2213524#paper
I know some of my choices are a bit unorthodox, but they've all performed pretty well in my testing. The Squadron Hawks have been really good in pretty much any matchup except combo. Against control, it's four blockers to help you buy time to stabilize, and against control it gives you a bit of pressure to keep your opponent on their toes. Generous Gift is sort of the stand-in for Deputy of Detention, and it works pretty well at that. I feel like I should probably make room for some number of Charming Prince in the deck, including some mainboard, but I'm not really sure where. Anyways, any feedback on the list would be appreciated!
Modern:
(online)Enduring Ideal
(online)BUG
(paper)Mono White Control
Standard:
(paper) Whatever I can throw together
(online) UWR Control
Legacy:
(paper)The Gate
(paper)Dream Halls