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Main » Articles » Modern Brewing

Modern Brewing

Blake Rasmussen
Posted on January 14, 2014
 Reddit

With Pro Tour Born of the Gods in Valencia next month, I’ve been turning my attention toward Modern. Given that I love brewing but feel pretty constrained by “small” Standard, I’ve really enjoyed revisiting old Standard favorites with Modern updates. In fact, a lot of these strategies were the kinds of things I was excited to revive when Modern was announced, only to realize that the format was utterly and completely busted on its first iteration.

But as we continue to see more people buy into the format and explore it more, new strategies keep rising up. Ninja Delver and Disrupting Shoal are the first to rear their heads prior to the Pro Tour, but there’s so much more exploring to do that I actually can’t help but brew now and then, even outside of the season.

I won’t promise to break the format, but some of these lists are, at the very least, competitive and, at best, potential players in a better-explored format.

Cruel Control

This is actually my favorite of the four decks I’m looking at in this article, and I recently played it in a local tournament with pretty good results. Check it:

"Cruel Control"

I started with Patrick Chapin’s deck from Grand Prix Detroit, which looked similar but had two key differences:

Cruel Ultimatum
No Jace Beleren – He played one Jace, Architect of Thought, which was okay, but it didn’t impress me. Beleren, on the other hand, has been insane. I know everyone has access to Lightning Bolt, but careful play can work around that pretty easily. The level-one strategy for this deck is to use a ton of cheap spells to keep the board clear and then use more cheap spells alongside Jace to keep the party going. And you want the party to continue in order to cast the entire point of the deck: Cruel Ultimatum.

No main-decked Thoughtseize – It seemed insane to me to play Spell Snare (he had three, I believe) without even touching on Thoughtseize. I eventually scaled back to two copies in the main and another in the side, but I can’t imagine not playing it in the main.

I’m also playing Serum Visions, which Chapin didn’t play at the tournament but that he did recommend afterward. They’re okay and probably necessary, but I would kill to be able to play Preordain instead. It’s amazing how just switching the order of those two abilities makes Preordain so much better.

The basic point of the deck is to survive and draw cards until you can Cruel the opponent right out of the game, eventually winning with man lands, burn, and Snapcaster Mage beats.

Properly tuned, I do think Grixis has the potential to be among the best decks in the format—and the best proper control deck.

R/W/U Reveillark

I first wrote about this deck here.

It’s difficult to be a graveyard deck these days. Deathrite Shaman is ubiquitous, and Scavenging Ooze is a major player, and both of them are often played in the most popular deck. Additionally, if graveyard strategies do ever perk up, there are so many tools to send them back where they came from that a lot of people don’t even bother to look in the direction of the discard pile anymore.

Reveillark
However, as Dredge often proves in Legacy, graveyard strategies can be powerful if they attack from the right angle at the right time against an unprepared field. And while Oozes and Shamans roam freely, there are virtually no copies of Leyline of the Void, Tormod's Crypt, or Rest in Peace to be found, and Relic of Progenitus really only sees play out of Tron.

Still, an out-and-out graveyard strategy is probably bending a little too far. You can reliably utilize your graveyard (Snapcaster Mage is still a star, after all), but you probably can’t rely on it.

With that in mind, a few months ago, I revived one of my favorite Standard strategies of all time: Reveillark combo.

For those who don’t know, Reveillark was, for a time, among the best Standard decks, overshadowed only by Faeries at its height. The basic combo is Reveillark and Body Double plus a sacrifice outlet and a creature Reveillark can bring back (Mulldrifter, Riftwing Cloudskate, Venser, Shaper Savant).

Now, on one hand, this sounds a lot like the Melira Pod combo, but substituting far more expensive creatures (the entire Melira combo costs, at its cheapest, as much as evoking a single Reveillark) and removing the Pod chain. Seems bad, right?

Well, kind of. The major difference is that, against a deck that can kill all of the things, Mulldrifter is a significantly better top-deck than Viscera Seer, and Venser, Shaper Savant is just an all-around good Magic card. Body Double is the weakest of the bunch, but still not irrelevant on its own.

For those of you too lazy to click the link back to my last article on this, here’s the deck as I wrote it up then:

"R/W/U Reveillark"

It turned out that Gifts Ungiven, despite being my favorite card ever, was just too clunky, and, with it, Unburial Rites had to go as well. At the time, I turned those three slots into two Cryptic Commands and a Restoration Angel, but Wall of Omens, Remand, and Lightning Helix all deserve spots at the table.

Izzet Signet also probably isn’t necessary and could easily be replaced with simply more 2-drops. Remand and Wall of Omens are good places to start since they help you find the mana sources Izzet Signet was standing in for.

The cool part is that despite ostensibly being a graveyard combo deck, it plays out like much more of a value–control deck and actually felt like a slight favorite against Jund; since discard often played into your combo, you have enough removal to fight off Deathrite Shaman, and you can often just win—or at least fight back from a disadvantageous position—with a single top-deck.

All in all, I still feel this one is worth exploring.

Greater Good

As much success as I’ve had forming working lists that I’m relatively happy with for the other three decks in this article, I have yet to satisfactorily solve Greater Good.

Greater Good
For everyone who isn’t as old as I am, Greater Good was a strategy back around Kamigawa–Ravnica Standard that revolved around sacrificing Yosei, the Morning Star to Greater Good and then locking your opponent out of the game with Goryo's Vengeance.

For reference, you can find Frank Karsten’s Worlds runner-up deck from 2005 here.

It’s not a deck that very directly ports to Modern for a few reasons. First, Sensei's Divining Top is banned, and it was a key component of making that deck work. Second, Kodama's Reach is too slow, and there aren’t any other cheaper splice enablers you really want to play.

Most damning, however, the deck is just too do-nothing for a format as robust as Modern. The combination of both Gifts Ungiven and Greater Good clogging up the 4-drop spot and not affecting the board is pretty bad in modern Modern.

In Standard at the time, you could rely on Sakura-Tribe Elder and Wrath of God—and occasionally Loxodon Hierarch—to buy you the time you needed. Those just aren’t the same speed bumps they once were.

Given that, I’ve moved away from Greater Gifts and abandoned blue completely. If you want to sacrifice Yosei to Greater Good (and I do—I definitely do), green and white are obvious musts, and black is pretty close to a must thanks to Goryo's Vengeance, Footsteps of the Goryo, and Kokusho, the Evening Star. Liliana of the Veil is actually very good here as well, and the deck can start taking steps toward being a Junk deck that happens to top off with Dragons.

Here’s a potential starting place:

"Modern Greater Good"

As you can see, space is pretty tight in a deck like this. The whole package is difficult to fit in alongside anything else, but Tarmogoyf and Knight of the Reliquary both feel necessary as ways to do things early in the game that matter and also to act as large enough Greater Good sacrifice targets. There’s potential there, but it’s a tough nut to crack.

R/W/U Kiki Midrange

I can only take partial credit for this one, and even then only very small, in-my-own-mind credit.

The basic concept is pretty simple: Graft Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker onto a somewhat atypical, but still relatively mainstream, R/W/U Control list, and you have a way to win very suddenly out of nowhere rather than always grinding out an advantage.

I first tried this idea many months ago when I was messing around with the Reveillark shell. I played Kiki-Jiki in the sideboard of that deck for a bit, mostly because it was powerful and fun, though not necessarily because it was good. Because I already naturally had access to Restoration Angel, now and then, I would combo someone out from that direction (and that was actually the plan against graveyard hate). It was cool, the mana was awkward, and I shelved the idea as I wasn’t able to play Modern for a while.

Then I came across another version of the deck on Reddit here. The list below was apparently played by Tiago Chan, a version of which he played at Grand Prix Antwerp to an 11–4 record.

"R/W/U Kiki Midrange"

This list is one hundred percent not mine, but I don’t know that there’s much I’d change outside of tweaking the numbers. Running only two Mana Leaks seems low, and three Lightning Helixes seems high, but I wouldn’t know for sure without playing a ton of matchups. The new legend rule helps Kiki with Clique turn into a disruptive machine gun, and you obviously have the game-ending combination of Kiki and Restoration Angel at relatively little cost.

The cost, however, is the lack of Sphinx's Revelation and/or Think Twice (Think Twice feels like the greater loss—Revelation always felt clunky in both this deck and Modern generally) and a mana base that has to be slanted further red than we would realistically want, thanks to Kiki-Jiki’s triple-red cost. Additionally, Kiki-Jiki is pretty bad without friends, though that’s probably a rare occurrence. They’re small costs, but they add up.

Still, it’s another possible shot in the arm to R/W/U—and one that should be on people’s radars, as should all four of these archetypes, whether for a local tournament or for the bigger stage in Valencia. I know I’ll be watching for them.

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TAGS articles, constructed, decklists, modern, brewing, brew, blake rasmussen

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