We’ve seen a couple of iterations on various Time Warp decks in Modern. There are a couple Blue-White builds that utilized the likes of Narset Transcendent and Celestial Colonnade along with Timely Reinforcements and Wrath of God. We’ve seen a handful of Time Sieve builds with Thopter Foundry and Sword of the Meek. There are Blue-Green variants that utilized cards like Lotus Cobra and Eternal Witness to both get the engine rolling early and keep it going longer once you got started. But all of these decks have a similar weakness against the fast, linear decks. But Lejay may have found what, in retrospect, seems like an obvious solution:

Blue-Red Time Warp - Modern | Lejay, 5-0 Modern League

• Creatures (4)
• 4 Snapcaster Mage

• spells (35)
• 4 Dictate of Kruphix
• 4 Exhaustion
• 4 Lightning Bolt
• 4 Remand
• 4 Serum Visions
• 4 Temporal Mastery
• 4 Time Warp
• 3 Ancestral Vision
• 2 Day's Undoing
• 2 Gigadrowse

• Lands (21)
• 9 Island
• 1 Mountain
• 4 Scalding Tarn
• 4 Sulfur Falls
• 1 Mikokoro, Center of the Sea
• 1 Minamo, School at Water's Edge
• 1 Steam Vents

• Sideboard (14)
• 1 Dispel
• 1 Disrupting Shoal
• 1 Flame Slash
• 2 Forked Bolt
• 2 Jace, Vryn's Prodigy
• 2 Overwhelming Denial
• 2 Spell Pierce
• 3 Thing in the Ice

Buy This Deck

The core of this deck is relatively unchanged. You want to use early turns to hit land drops and sculpt your draws so that you can start Time Warping on turn five or six. The idea is that you can use Ancestral Vision and Dictate of Kruphix to keep the cards coming so that you can keep Time Warping. Particularly potent is the combination of Serum Visions and Temporal Mastery, which will ensure that you have enough mana to both take an extra turn and start developing your end game.

The difference is that this particular build has managed to be a little lower to the ground. The combination of Snapcaster Mage and Lightning Bolt has shown itself to be good enough to keep aggro decks in check on its own. Combine that with the ability to use Exhaustion to effectively Time Walk aggressive decks and to Snapcaster Mage it back more efficiently than Time Warp, and you’ve got yourself an engine for extra turns that may just be able to keep up with the aggro decks.

The only real concern here is making sure that you can win the game in a timely fashion once you’ve started taking all the extra turns. Other builds have powerful Planeswalkers and creature lands, but this one is heavily reliant on using Gigadrowse to let your Snapcaster Mages get through, which means you’ve got to be careful against decks with enough efficient instant-speed removal.

This deck is very much a metagame call. If you expect lots of linear aggressive decks, this is probably not a great choice. The addition of Exhaustion and Lightning Bolt give you a chance, but aggressive decks still aren’t your preferred matchups. This deck wants to see lots of midrangey and control decks that can’t kill you quickly. Blue decks in particular are incredible matchups, since you can just do nothing until you find Gigadrowse and then take all the turns. If your local metagame is comprised of mostly Blue decks, then it might be a great time to sleeve up some Time Warps.