Unlocking the Vault #44 – Eternal is Eternal

Modern PTQ season ended a couple weeks back. Since the season finished, many people have spoken outwardly about their feelings on the format, and what changes they’d like to see to make Modern better. Being someone that loves all things eternal, I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I was also curious if there was any way to look at the format differently through the eyes of a Classic player.

Since the initial announcement of Modern back in the summer of 2011, I had been slowly accumulating the Modern staples with the expectation that I would one day want to play the format. I also was doing it as a speculation effort to obtain the cards at a lower value than what they might be in the future [to be clear, I was not speculating to make a profit, just to buy in at a lower price]. I appeared ready to give the format a try about a year ago, but the rampant speculation that the shock lands would be reprinted in the fall of 2012 kept me on the sidelines; I was, after all, trying to get in on the format as cheaply as I could. It certainly helped that many Modern-legal cards are also staples in Classic!

Now that all 10 shock lands have been reprinted, the Gatecrash prices stabilized, and the Modern PTQ season was over, I was finally ready to give the format a fair shake. Before I get into what my experience was, let me take you through some of my initial thoughts when looking at the format from the outside.

Preconceived Impression

Like many people, I looked at the card pool and noticed the distinct lack of the super-powerful cards that scream “Play Me!” In Classic, there are pillars of the format that are insanely powerful; cards like Oath of Druids, Mishra’s Workshop, Yawgmoth’s Will. These cards are what make the format unique and, in my eyes at least, fun. Suffice it to say, if Classic were viewed through the lens that WotC uses for Modern, all of these cards would be banned.

Thus, when looking at the Modern card pool, it was very easy to notice that here is no Jace, the Mind Sculptor, Stoneforge Mystic, Ancestral Vision, Green Sun’s Zenith, Ponder/Preordain, etc. Looking back, those are almost all blue cards, so it makes sense that I would notice those cards first seeing that I’m a Classic player and blue is a major factor in that format. That’s not to say there aren’t other interesting cards that are on the banned list that I would consider playing if they were available.

Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of Modern from an outsider’s perspective is the complete randomness that the banned list entails. I can see why Jace would be banned (though I’m not entirely sure how powerful Jace would be if he were unbanned right now along with his best check-and-balance card Bloodbraid Elf (BBE)). Jace is such a powerful card that Vintage players regularly feature it. When you look at a 1-mana cost creature like Wild Nacatl and its name appears next to Jace on the banned list, it makes you scratch your head in disbelief. Same goes for Seething Song, BBE, and Mental Misstep.

The banned list has become a mishmash of cards stemming from its initial banned list set before the MTGO Community Cup (MTGOCC) in 2011. It was painfully clear at the MTGOCC that Jace and Stoneforge were the best cards in the format. Additionally, Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle, Hypregenesis, Ancestral, Bitterblossom, Glimpse of Nature, Dread Return, and Mental Misstep were all banned after the MTGOCC due to their power level. WotC was correct in placing them on the banned list when the first official list was revealed as the format was initially announced. Since then, WotC has been on a rampage to ban any card that might contribute to a consistent victory prior to Turn 4. This led to the banning of Nacatl, the Green Zenith, Blazing Shoal, BBE, Cloudpost, Ponder, Preordain, Punishing Fire, Rite of Flame, and Seething Song.

Beyond the banned list, when looking at the popular decks in the format, I couldn’t help but notice that they all appeared to be mediocre Standard decks from years past, simply upgraded with better options for certain cards as the card pool would allow. Jund, Pod, Splinter Twin, Affinity, the Ramp decks (i.e., Tron), and Delver of Secrets all resemble their Standard counterparts. Supporters of Modern claim that the format is wide open and ripe for brewing up new decks not possible in previous Standard seasons, but I wasn’t seeing them. There are a few innovative decks in Modern, but they are hidden amongst the redesigned Standard decks.

Overall, though, the format did not really draw me in. If I had not already had 90% of the cards before acquiring the last set of shock lands, I probably wouldn’t have bothered to play the format at all. It just didn’t look appealing to me.

Preparing to Start the Modern Experiment

Since I had many of the cards and was compelled to give the format a try, I needed to pick a deck or two to get started. I was first drawn to the blue decks since I am a softy for Islands. There were a few blue decks running around the format since the ban of BBE that I was open to trying:

UWR Counter-Burn
UW Control
Gifts Ungiven

Of these, the first one that reminded me of Classic/Legacy decks was the Gifts deck. Gifts is restricted in Vintage, but it is unrestricted in Classic. Classic hasn’t really used Gifts to great advantage in a long time. Vintage used it as a win condition which led to its restriction in 2007. When looking at what Modern Gifts decks try to do, it seems like the most powerful game-ending card that one can cast right now.

I started off with this list:

Gifts

Creatures (8) 4 Deathrite Shaman 1 Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite 1 Eternal Witness 1 Iona, Shield of Emeria 1 Snapcaster Mage Other Spells (26) 3 Abrupt Decay 1 Disfigure 1 Dismember 1 Engineered Explosives 4 Gifts Ungiven 1 Life from the Loam 3 Liliana of the Veil 4 Lingering Souls 1 Maelstrom Pulse 2 Mana Leak 2 Path to Exile 1 Raven’s Crime 1 Thoughtseize 1 Unburial Rites Lands (26) 1 Breeding Pool 3 Creeping Tar Pit 1 Darkslick Shores 1 Forest 1 Ghost Quarter 1 Godless Shrine 1 Island 1 Hallowed Fountain 3 Marsh Flats 2 Misty Rainforest 1 Overgrown Tomb 1 Plains 1 Snow-Covered Swamp 1 Swamp 1 Tectonic Edge 1 Temple Garden 1 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth 3 Verdant Catacombs 1 Watery Grave Sideboard (15) 1 Batterskull 1 Darkblast 1 Duress 1 Gideon Jura 1 Go for the Throat 1 Negate 1 Rest for the Weary 2 Stony Silence 1 Supreme Verdict 1 Surgical Extraction 1 Thragtusk 1 Thoughtseize 1 Timely Reinforcements 1 Wrath of God

Buy this Deck

The goal of the deck is to play a control game then cast Gifts at the end of your opponents turn for Unburial Rites and either Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite or Iona, Shield of Emeria, depending on which bullet you need. You only choose 2 cards, which forces your opponent to put both in the graveyard. On your following turn, you flashback Rites targeting your fatty and proceed to win.

In this deck, Gifts can also be used as a value card to tutor up the card or cards that you need to get back into the game. A typical Gifts package in this scenario would be Snapcaster Mage, Eternal Witness, and some combination of 2 instants and/or sorceries. This package gives you access to both of the spells no matter what combination your opponent chooses. If you need land, you can make a Gifts pile of 3 different lands (which is why the Snow-Covered Swamp is in there) and a Life from the Loam.

The versatility of the deck combined with the powerful interaction with Unburial Rites made this an easy choice to start out with.

One deck would not cut it, however, and luckily I was able to build the other 2 blue decks minus the Thundermaw Hellkite that the Counter-Burn deck was using. I also built a Jund Deck in order to get a different look at the format.

Playing Practice Matches

I played some matches in the Tournament Practice room and switched between the 4 decks to try and get a feel for the format. During this process a strange thing happened that I never imagined… I was having fun. Honest to goodness fun.

Perhaps much of the fun could be contributed to the freshness of the gameplay in Modern. Classic is a format I know well and aside from a few minor tweaks to the established decks, there aren’t a whole lot of things undiscovered. Modern, on the other-hand, was completely foreign to me. Every spell, every creature, every land was a new way to play the game. Over time, I suppose that it should be expected that I will reach the same level of expectations playing Modern that I do when I play Classic, but for now, it is a refreshing change of pace.

I’ve played a couple dozen matches and probably played against 6 or 7 distinctly different decks. There are some established Modern decks that I didn’t get to play against in my testing but with just a few matches under my belt I think 6 or 7 decks is pretty good. The bulk of my testing was with the Gifts deck, though I can share some of my thoughts on the format from the point of view of all 4 of the decks I played.

Gifts

With respect to Gifts, the deck performed as I imagined it would. It was quite powerful and it was certainly satisfying to reanimate a game winning fatty. More often than not, I found that I was going for Iona first in order to either lock my opponent out if they are a mono or predominantly one colored deck, or to lock them out of their likely removal spell. [An aside on Unburial Rites – Why is this card not banned and Dread Return is? It’s far easier to flashback Rites than a Return (4 mana is much easier than 3 creatures) and Dredge is not a deck in Modern…even if WotC was worried that Dredge would dominate with Return available, all they have to do is ban some other enabler such as Narcomoeba and Bridge from Below which are not played in a single deck at the moment.]

One of the difficult things for the deck to manage is other control decks and graveyard hate. Because the countermagic in Modern is not nearly as strong as other Eternal formats, against other control decks, you need at least 6 mana available to try to resolve a Gifts in order to counter their countermagic. Dispel is a great answer to counter magic, but it’s quite narrow against many decks in the format.

Graveyard hate is a little easier to deal with since Gifts is an instant and can be cast after your opponent has a chance to play their sorcery speed hate. You still have to be wary of the available instant-speed hate such as Jund Charm and Rakdos Charm, however.

UW Control

UW Control seemed a little soft, in my brief testing, to the fast, aggressive decks in the format. Supreme Verdict is a real important card to recover against all the creatures in the format and Sphinx’s Revelation is just as good as it (would seem to be) in Standard to refill your hand and grab a few extra life points to help stabilize. As mentioned before, the countermagic in Modern is quite weak, so playing this deck requires a little more creativity than just sitting back and countering all their stuff. Cryptic Command is a powerful card, but getting to 4 mana to counter a key spell seems like forever in some cases, especially against Affinity and the hyper aggressive Green-Red Aggro decks. Another powerful interaction, that might actually have some playability in Classic, is with Restoration Angel and Snapcaster Mage. There is a lot of potential value to be gained through flashing-back all of your spells.

Counter-Burn

I probably played only a couple games of the Counter-Burn deck. I don’t have a Hellkite yet, so I used Baneslayer Angel instead. The lack of haste on the Angel was quite telling in a deck suited to hit hard and fast.

Aside from the lack of Hellkites, the deck performed exactly as I believed it would. There was one game where I had a fist full of burn spells and a Snapcaster and made quick work of my opponent. On the other-hand, there was also a game where I was drawing blanks against Affinity and was steamrolled by Turn 5. Overall, it was a fun deck that I will look to play more with in the future once I obtain some Hellkites.

Jund

I did not have the optimal Jund build featuring the latest innovations following GP San Diego, specifically the Ajundi version splashing white. I did find a list featuring Bloodhall Ooze which I had the necessary cards for.

My impression of the deck is not as favorable as it would have been if BBE had still been legal. The deck is still strong, but it lacks a lot of the explosiveness that the Jund decks of old had. The 4-drop slot in my deck was split between Huntmaster of the Fells and Thrun, the Last Troll. I did not try the Ghor-Clan Rampager version of the deck, but I found the other 4-drops to be underwhelming. Perhaps splashing white is the way to go, but I’ll need to pick up another Ajani Vengeant and the Hellkites before trying it out.

Clearly, the best card in the deck is Tarmogoyf. I can’t recall winning very many games where I didn’t cast ‘Goyf. While it wasn’t a 100% win percentage when I did cast ‘Goyf, it was well above 50%. Jund is still the best ‘Goyf deck and ‘Goyf is still probably one of the best 2 or 3 cards in the format. As long as ‘Goyf is legal, Jund is a good choice for Modern.

Final Thoughts

Originally, I was of the mindset that WotC should unban everything and start over. Perhaps that’s still the best case to make Modern more appealing to the non-believers who want to play with the best cards that have been printed since 8th Edition.

I still don’t think that with the poor countermagic and lack of cheap card drawing options in the format, that Jace would be a huge problem, but if I were to see one blue card be unbanned, it would be Mental Misstep. There were far too many games in which I felt completely helpless which would have gone differently had Misstep been available to me. With a card like Cavern of Souls now in the format, I don’t see how much damage Misstep could really do in a metagame that has so few 1-drop bombs to begin with. Certainly Misstepping a Lightning Bolt is a poor use of the card. The other side of the coin, where blue matches would degenerate into Misstep battles would not seem to be much of a problem. Blue decks don’t have many 1-casting-cost spells worth fighting over, unlike Legacy, which has dozens of great ones.

With Modern Masters on the way, perhaps Modern will become more accessible, something that Legacy has struggled to deal with. MTGO doesn’t have quite the card accessibility/cost problems that paper Modern players have to deal with. Modern is far cheaper to play online, mostly due to the cost of the mana base. ZEN fetch lands and shock lands (despite being reprinted) are much more expensive in paper.

Either way, Modern is a decent format as is. I don’t like the argument that a format has to be “interactive”. Many people have different definitions for interactivity. I prefer to think of how engaging a format is. Modern is most certainly a back and forth affair. Each game that I played was skill-rewarding and felt as if I could draw out of a problem at any given point. I suppose WotC has succeeded in providing an eternal format that straddles the line between over-powered and under-powered, even if it leans much more towards the latter than the former.

Is Modern without its faults? Of course not, but the engaging nature of each match makes the format enjoyable, and I highly recommend that people at least give it a fair shot before dismissing it as a lame-duck PTQ-only format, like Extended before it.

enderfall
Clan Magic Eternal
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