No matter what you do, you're in for a rough time with Storm. Otherwise, ENCOhRE has the right of it: play 3-4 Leyline of Sanctity if you play any (I don't), and 4+ Negate or Disdainful Stroke will go a long way towards anti-combo. I would also increase the Tormod's Crypts and Surgical Extractions to at least 4x total.
What do you guys think about the new Field of Ruin from Ixalan as a replacement for some number of Ghost Quarters/Tectonic Edges? I like how it gives you a plains too for Emeria, but the mana cost might be too restrictive
I haven't decided, but I'm definitely considering it. Most decks do run basics these days as well. The only real problem is that it doesn't stop them from landing a full Urza-Tron on turn 3 the way Ghost Quarter does, but using GQ in the first few turns is a huge setback anyway, in a way Field of Ruin wouldn't be. Field of Ruin also has more potential as a way to spur you from Sun Titan mana to 7 Plains. However, we also lose two of the less important possibilities for GQ: eventually destroying the opponent's entire manabase, or targeting your own nonbasics.
I have never seen a list with 4 Spreading Seas main board. Could you elaborate on that choice? I like your list otherwise! Makes me consider also cutting my Blade Splicers. I play with 3 Fiend Hunters and 2 Blasting Station for combo wins though, and I really like having that. I'd listen to any criticism of that too
I run 4 Spreading Seas because it is a proactive disruption element that can delay Tron, Eldrazi, and Devotion, turn off man-lands, and disrupt more fragile mana-bases like Jund. It also replaces itself, so it's never a total loss. The other option would be to play Negate or something similar, which I did for a while, but I found it to be less effective for proactive strategies like ours.
Blade Splicer isn't a bad card, but it makes us closer to a Blue-White Midrange deck than a control deck. The combo win is also nice to have. Ultimately, after Emeria, Flickerwisp, and Sun Titan, it's a highly customizable deck. Pick to suit your playstyle and metagame.
I have moved over to traditional UW control lately, but still follow this thread.
Has anyone considered the new Search for Azcanta? It seems pretty perfect for Emeria.
We generally run at most 25% non-land, non-creature cards. Therefore, despite putting cards in our graveyard (which is good for us), it doesn't actually dig once flipped the way we'd like. It has much more potential in traditional, low-creature count Blue-White Control, where Snapcaster can still recycle lost spells and spells comprise the majority of your deck once flipped.
Yeah, formats in which Fatal Push is good are generally not good for Celestial Colonnade. I dropped down to two Emeria, the Sky Ruin a while ago. I'd love to go back to three, but can't figure out what to cut that it would be better than. Usually I find one, and I can only think of one time the limit has been "not enough Emeria" rather than "not enough Plains."
Exactly. Early on, Hussar acts sort of like an Anticipate plus chump-block versus Death's Shadow or Tarmogoyf. Lingering Souls is not enough pressure for us to care at all, nor is one extra point of potential power. Later on, the self-destruct feature means that if we have nothing useful to bring back with Sun Titan or Emeria, the Sky Ruin, we instead get to churn through our deck to find something that is useful. Seeing four cards per turn is really good.
Knowing when to hit the opponent's land requires knowing the opponent's deck. Urza-Tron should be disrupted early, ideally on turn 2, by any means possible. You also kill man-lands as is convenient. If you can hold off until they start missing land-drops, you can sometimes identify colors you can knock them out of (this is very powerful against some 3-color decks, like Jund).
Generally, I'm willing to drop Seas early, but I try to hold off on GQ until the last minute, since developing mana up to Sun Titan is often very important.
Glad you could join the conversation, it's always nice to hear from a fresh perspective, welcome! Like lord_darkview said, your decklist look fine overall. The only thing that I'd nitpick over is the lack of a basic Island. Bloodmoon is a popular and powerful card in modern, one that has warped how people generally build their manabases. I wasn't sure if this was intentional given the you said you're new to modern but by switching one basic Plains for a single Island you'll find it easier to play around Bloodmoon and stabilize against aggro strategies in the early game. There is of course tricks featuring Flickerwisp
and Spreading Sea's but I won't get into that. The only other thing I'd change is to switch out a Prairie Stream for an Irrigated Farmland but that's largely inconsequential.
As someone who has been playing Magic since long before fetch-lands and all the different modern versions of dual-lands duals existed, I contend that Blood Moon is not "warping" people's mana-bases so much as normalizing them closer to how they ought to be. Non-basics should be spice, not the majority.
As for Prairie Stream versus Irrigated Farmland, I am not convinced the latter adds anything significant to this deck. Beyond the first Prairie Stream, even those are debatable.
Hey everyone, sorry I'm late to the party. I have just recently gotten into Modern on MTGO and have absolutely fallen in love with this deck! I am a control player at heart (usually Grixis or Dimir) but I really like the feel of the UW version of this deck. Very grindy with tapout control elements and fantastic card value, especially towards mid to late game. I have slowly been building my deck up and currently run the following in my MD:
Land (24)
3x Emeria, The Sky Ruin
4x Flooded Strand
4x Ghost Quarter
3x Hallowed Fountain
8x Plains
3x Prairie Stream
Planeswalker (2)
1x Kytheon, Hero of Akroas
1x Gideon of the Trials
Creature (19)
3x Blade Splicer
4x Flickerwisp
3x Lone Missionary
2x Fiend Hunter
3x Sun Titan
4x Wall of Omens
Enchantment (7)
3x Detention Sphere
4x Spreading Seas
Instant (4)
4x Path to Exile
Artifact (2)
2x Blasting Station
Sorcery (3)
3x Supreme Verdict
It's still a work in progress as I am testing out the build of the deck. I recently switched out the 3 Hussars for Blade Splicers and have been pleased with the results. I think both are great cards based on if you wish to be more proactive (Splicer) vs reactive to the current board state (Hussar). I may go back, but for now the Splicers have won me three games in a row. Another switch is having the 2 Blasting Stations vs Mortapods and 2 Fiend Hunters in the deck. I have read about the drawbacks on both (Blasting as a 3cmc, Fiend Hunter as a removal target when it exiles, etc), however I have won games where the opponent has locked out my ability to attack only to be blown away by the Hunter + Titan+ Station combo. At its worst, Station has been a Mortapod that is easier to activate multiple times a turn while Hunter has either been a great removal target, forcing my opponents hand, to a Journey to Nowhere, taking out my opponents Ulamog. I may take them out for another Gideon of the Trials/Elspeth if they stop proving useful, as GotT is amazing in this deck with the current meta. I also run a Kytheon, since both Gideon's are recurrable, he's easy to flip over, keeps the Gideon emblem activated, can defend and attack for us, and with the new planeswalker rules, both will be able to be on the field together. Any thoughts on deck improvements? Have others found the combo still viable? Any thoughts on if the new planeswalker rules can help this deck? Great thread and enjoying the reads!
Welcome to mtgsalvation.
First hint: when providing a decklist, use the deck tags, which will automatically hyperlink every card in the deck.
Regarding the deck itself: it looks fine. Blasting Station or Mortarpods are solid if your meta looks like mine, which has more of those damned creature combos. Otherwise, I find the card advantage and selection of Hussar more advantageous to the punching and blocking of Golems, but YMMV. I'm not crazy about Kytheon: we don't run a ton of creatures, and he often flips a little later than you'd get another version anyway. The OG Gideon Jura would be my preferred secondary Gideon in this deck.
I really like your version, I do have questions, with only ten blue sources and five colorless lands do you have any issues getting mana for an early Spreading Seas? Also would Inspector work better as a three of to increase Hussar count? Also with less lifegain MD how is the Burn Matchup?
13 sources is better for a turn 2 Seas, but 9 will do fine for turn 3. I'd lean higher.
I generally like Hussar better than Inspector, and would never play less than 3 Hussar.
Gideon effectively acts as lifegain in G1. That SB is also really strong against Burn in later games.
The ratios are up to you. I'm going primarily in accordance with this classic article on the topic. If you intend to cast a turn 1 Thoughtseize/Duress/IoK, you should have 14 B sources that don't enter the battlefield tapped. If your main worry is Sculler (or one of the above spells) on turn 2, 13 is sufficient; 11 for turn 3, and 9 for turn 4.
My general sentiment is that turn 4 disruption is too late, turn 3 is marginal (often too late), and I'm much rather do something else on turn 2. That leaves turn 1 as ideal, which is what prompted the 14 B sources. If you're comfortable with playing it later than that, you can get away with fewer fetches.
When I play W/U, I generally find that there are gaps in my curve, particularly at my first and fifth land, where I can get the Ravinca land and just let it enter tapped without really losing anything by it. After I have six land, I rarely care whether what I fetch is tapped or not.
If you're playing W/B instead of W/U, the first opportunity is more likely to be somewhere else on the curve, just because because a turn 1 Thoughtseize is so powerful. It may pay to fit in a basic Swamp as well if you can, but that mana base is a bit tight.
The green splashes are punchy, but I'm still not convinced they add enough. MD Seas are definitely good versus Tron, and can put in some work against several decks with more greedy manabases. They float in and out versus Negates, depending on the meta. There probably isn't enough to justify Snapcaster, though a more consistent mana base could handle more Witnesses, which are similar enough.
W/B is not a significantly weaker manabase. You lose some of the ally typed duals, but you still have shocks which, with Fetches, should get you enough. Ideally, you'd want a manabase like:
This gets you 14 B sources and 20 W sources, with a total of 8 Plains and 10 Fetches to reach Emeria activation in the mid-game, with Sun Titan returning Fetches or any destroyed Plains. If you're willing to cut GQ, this manabase can get extremely stable. Right now, it should be enough to reliably use turn 1 discard, and should still be able to activate Emeria in the mid-late game, which is when you want it.
The ease of Blue's manabase has more to do with seeing extra cards (using Court Hussar) and not needing the mana until later (because you rarely need U until turn 3, so 11 sources is easily enough). If you play Pilgrim's Eye, you're still fine for finding them later on, and needing them earlier is the price to pay for such amazing proactive disruption as Thoughtseize and Duress.
I searched the thread and noticed that no one's brought up Eldrazi Displacer. I imagine it'd be much easier on the manabase to include that than to try to make the deck go three colors, and it's got a ton of value written on it. Thoughts?
I currently run a budget monowhite build of the deck. Haven't tried the Displacers myself, but interested in what others might think.
Displacer was discussed, but maybe more in the old thread. It's a potentially powerful effect. The problem is that it's a fiddly card that is vulnerable while requiring a lot of mana to be useful. And in some ways colorless is actually harder than adding another color. Plains count has to be kept high, and very few Plains add colorless mana.
That said, mono-white is a perfectly playable build and more budget. It tends to focus even harder on anti-creature control, and thus doesn't adapt well to other metas. It often uses a combo-finisher like Blasting Station, and Mind Stones act as supplemental acceleration, cantriping, and late-game card draw (via recursion).
Modern: Merfolk UU // Green Devotion GG // SkRed Red RR
Legacy: Death & Taxes WW // Burn RR // Death's Shadow Delver UB
Commander: Brago UW // Karlov WB
I haven't decided, but I'm definitely considering it. Most decks do run basics these days as well. The only real problem is that it doesn't stop them from landing a full Urza-Tron on turn 3 the way Ghost Quarter does, but using GQ in the first few turns is a huge setback anyway, in a way Field of Ruin wouldn't be. Field of Ruin also has more potential as a way to spur you from Sun Titan mana to 7 Plains. However, we also lose two of the less important possibilities for GQ: eventually destroying the opponent's entire manabase, or targeting your own nonbasics.
I run 4 Spreading Seas because it is a proactive disruption element that can delay Tron, Eldrazi, and Devotion, turn off man-lands, and disrupt more fragile mana-bases like Jund. It also replaces itself, so it's never a total loss. The other option would be to play Negate or something similar, which I did for a while, but I found it to be less effective for proactive strategies like ours.
Blade Splicer isn't a bad card, but it makes us closer to a Blue-White Midrange deck than a control deck. The combo win is also nice to have. Ultimately, after Emeria, Flickerwisp, and Sun Titan, it's a highly customizable deck. Pick to suit your playstyle and metagame.
We generally run at most 25% non-land, non-creature cards. Therefore, despite putting cards in our graveyard (which is good for us), it doesn't actually dig once flipped the way we'd like. It has much more potential in traditional, low-creature count Blue-White Control, where Snapcaster can still recycle lost spells and spells comprise the majority of your deck once flipped.
Modern: Merfolk UU // Green Devotion GG // SkRed Red RR
Legacy: Death & Taxes WW // Burn RR // Death's Shadow Delver UB
Commander: Brago UW // Karlov WB
Modern: Merfolk UU // Green Devotion GG // SkRed Red RR
Legacy: Death & Taxes WW // Burn RR // Death's Shadow Delver UB
Commander: Brago UW // Karlov WB
Modern: Merfolk UU // Green Devotion GG // SkRed Red RR
Legacy: Death & Taxes WW // Burn RR // Death's Shadow Delver UB
Commander: Brago UW // Karlov WB
Modern: Merfolk UU // Green Devotion GG // SkRed Red RR
Legacy: Death & Taxes WW // Burn RR // Death's Shadow Delver UB
Commander: Brago UW // Karlov WB
Generally, I'm willing to drop Seas early, but I try to hold off on GQ until the last minute, since developing mana up to Sun Titan is often very important.
Modern: Merfolk UU // Green Devotion GG // SkRed Red RR
Legacy: Death & Taxes WW // Burn RR // Death's Shadow Delver UB
Commander: Brago UW // Karlov WB
As someone who has been playing Magic since long before fetch-lands and all the different modern versions of dual-lands duals existed, I contend that Blood Moon is not "warping" people's mana-bases so much as normalizing them closer to how they ought to be. Non-basics should be spice, not the majority.
As for Prairie Stream versus Irrigated Farmland, I am not convinced the latter adds anything significant to this deck. Beyond the first Prairie Stream, even those are debatable.
Modern: Merfolk UU // Green Devotion GG // SkRed Red RR
Legacy: Death & Taxes WW // Burn RR // Death's Shadow Delver UB
Commander: Brago UW // Karlov WB
Welcome to mtgsalvation.
First hint: when providing a decklist, use the deck tags, which will automatically hyperlink every card in the deck.
Regarding the deck itself: it looks fine. Blasting Station or Mortarpods are solid if your meta looks like mine, which has more of those damned creature combos. Otherwise, I find the card advantage and selection of Hussar more advantageous to the punching and blocking of Golems, but YMMV. I'm not crazy about Kytheon: we don't run a ton of creatures, and he often flips a little later than you'd get another version anyway. The OG Gideon Jura would be my preferred secondary Gideon in this deck.
Modern: Merfolk UU // Green Devotion GG // SkRed Red RR
Legacy: Death & Taxes WW // Burn RR // Death's Shadow Delver UB
Commander: Brago UW // Karlov WB
Modern: Merfolk UU // Green Devotion GG // SkRed Red RR
Legacy: Death & Taxes WW // Burn RR // Death's Shadow Delver UB
Commander: Brago UW // Karlov WB
13 sources is better for a turn 2 Seas, but 9 will do fine for turn 3. I'd lean higher.
I generally like Hussar better than Inspector, and would never play less than 3 Hussar.
Gideon effectively acts as lifegain in G1. That SB is also really strong against Burn in later games.
It's not the list I'd prefer, but it's solid.
Modern: Merfolk UU // Green Devotion GG // SkRed Red RR
Legacy: Death & Taxes WW // Burn RR // Death's Shadow Delver UB
Commander: Brago UW // Karlov WB
My general sentiment is that turn 4 disruption is too late, turn 3 is marginal (often too late), and I'm much rather do something else on turn 2. That leaves turn 1 as ideal, which is what prompted the 14 B sources. If you're comfortable with playing it later than that, you can get away with fewer fetches.
Modern: Merfolk UU // Green Devotion GG // SkRed Red RR
Legacy: Death & Taxes WW // Burn RR // Death's Shadow Delver UB
Commander: Brago UW // Karlov WB
If you're playing W/B instead of W/U, the first opportunity is more likely to be somewhere else on the curve, just because because a turn 1 Thoughtseize is so powerful. It may pay to fit in a basic Swamp as well if you can, but that mana base is a bit tight.
Modern: Merfolk UU // Green Devotion GG // SkRed Red RR
Legacy: Death & Taxes WW // Burn RR // Death's Shadow Delver UB
Commander: Brago UW // Karlov WB
W/B is not a significantly weaker manabase. You lose some of the ally typed duals, but you still have shocks which, with Fetches, should get you enough. Ideally, you'd want a manabase like:
4 Marsh Flats
4 Flooded Strand
2 Arid Mesa
2 Emeria, the Sky Ruin
4 Ghost Quarter
This gets you 14 B sources and 20 W sources, with a total of 8 Plains and 10 Fetches to reach Emeria activation in the mid-game, with Sun Titan returning Fetches or any destroyed Plains. If you're willing to cut GQ, this manabase can get extremely stable. Right now, it should be enough to reliably use turn 1 discard, and should still be able to activate Emeria in the mid-late game, which is when you want it.
The ease of Blue's manabase has more to do with seeing extra cards (using Court Hussar) and not needing the mana until later (because you rarely need U until turn 3, so 11 sources is easily enough). If you play Pilgrim's Eye, you're still fine for finding them later on, and needing them earlier is the price to pay for such amazing proactive disruption as Thoughtseize and Duress.
Modern: Merfolk UU // Green Devotion GG // SkRed Red RR
Legacy: Death & Taxes WW // Burn RR // Death's Shadow Delver UB
Commander: Brago UW // Karlov WB
Displacer was discussed, but maybe more in the old thread. It's a potentially powerful effect. The problem is that it's a fiddly card that is vulnerable while requiring a lot of mana to be useful. And in some ways colorless is actually harder than adding another color. Plains count has to be kept high, and very few Plains add colorless mana.
That said, mono-white is a perfectly playable build and more budget. It tends to focus even harder on anti-creature control, and thus doesn't adapt well to other metas. It often uses a combo-finisher like Blasting Station, and Mind Stones act as supplemental acceleration, cantriping, and late-game card draw (via recursion).
Modern: Merfolk UU // Green Devotion GG // SkRed Red RR
Legacy: Death & Taxes WW // Burn RR // Death's Shadow Delver UB
Commander: Brago UW // Karlov WB
This has been endlessly discussed. It's a strong card in tempo, but pretty weak in control. We're playing control.
Modern: Merfolk UU // Green Devotion GG // SkRed Red RR
Legacy: Death & Taxes WW // Burn RR // Death's Shadow Delver UB
Commander: Brago UW // Karlov WB