PTQ Dragon's Maze
The upcoming schedule for PTQ Dragon's Maze in Florida is:
1-5 Maitland, Fl - Cool Stuff Games
1-19 Pensacola, Fl - Home Field Sportscards
2-10 Tampa, Fl - Armada Games
3-9 Davie, Fl - Cool Stuff Games
After Ft. Lauderdale, the big elephant in the room was PTQ Dragon's Maze. I knew I'd have to face the questions eventually, but everyone wanted to know: what are the plans for Casual Net and the next PTQ season? Was I going to compete? Honestly, I didn't have an answer. After spending countless months studying the M13 and Return to Ravnica Limited formats for the PTQ Gatecrash season, the amount of preparation and time required for those events took their toll and it left me worn out. When the season ended, I realized I never had to look at another Return to Ravnica booster pack every again.. and was promptly overjoyed. Needless to say, I celebrated a little after Ft. Lauderdale and indulged on a lot of sleep and non-Magic themed entertainment. Soon after; however, the nostalgia started to settle in. The past season was incredibly fun and challenging so it left my creative mind craving more. I started to remember the adrenaline rush of sitting at the Top 8 draft table in Tampa and the high-octane swiss rounds of the most insane Magic I've ever played in Ft. Lauderdale. I suddenly found myself opening RtR draft simulators and looking at the cards like a habit stuck in my daily repertoire.
The drive to compete was still very much alive, but I didn't know whether I'd have the means to create a deck myself or even have the audacity to pick up the knowledge base for a new format. After finishing up with the final exams of a relatively brutal semester, I found myself sitting at home with not much to do, since most of my friends were still locked in hardcore study sessions. After a bit of coaxing from some players on Casual Net who wanted to compete in the Modern season and a little touch of my own curiosity, I took a peak at the format, just to see what all the fuss was about. Roughly 3 days later and reading into the last year's worth of Modern tournament results, it hit me: 'I can do this..'
Approaching a new constructed format can be a little scary for many because Modern has so many cards that are legal to play and the format is a rather unstable. Furthermore, some of the higher demand cards in popular archetypes are pretty expensive, so it leaves players with little motivation to really learn and pursue what's going on since they can't afford all the cards. I'm going to take the rest of this article to give a primer of the Modern format and discuss popular archetypes, weaknesses of those archetypes, and the overall 'central dogma' of the format. I'm hoping this will bring a lot of people who were interested in competing this season up to speed and help those who really enjoy reading these articles some context when we sit down and start talking about some of the finer mechanics behind gameplay as the season unfolds.
First, we need to look at the differences between preparing for a Limited format (last season's PTQ Gatecrash) and preparing for a Constructed format (this season's PTQ Dragon's Maze).
In a Limited format, the card pool is much smaller so getting familiar with the cards available is a lot easier to do. Once you do get familiar with the cards, you can focus on tuning your gameplay and optimize how much weight each of your cards carries. Optimization is based off how much damage one of your creatures deal over several turns or how much card advantage you can generate off of removal spells or draw spells. Since the quality of most cards in Limited is relatively low, being able to generate more card advantage than your opponent is extremely important. A great deal of Limited preparation is also dedicated to how well you can follow the overrating and underrating of certain card choices. Some of the commons/uncommons may get better as players catch on to or shy away from certain strategies.
In a Constructed format like Modern, your preparation is more focused on matchup analysis, sideboard construction, and making strong mulligan decisions. Since the power level of most of the cards in any competitive Modern deck is relatively high, trying to have more cards than your opponent is less important. Instead, you're goal is to get into an advantageous board position or have the right combination of cards in hand so you can kill off your opponent quickly. Furthermore, your focus is a little away from creative deck construction since most of the decks that place high in Grand Prixs or Pro Tours generally are really solid decks as is and only require some tweaking based off of metagame decisions and personal preference For Modern specifically, innovating a new deck is very possible since the format is still relatively young and as the season progresses, will be influenced by an influx of roughly 250+ new cards from Gatecrash, so there's plenty of room for creativity, but nothing we can prepare for at the moment.
What are some of the paradigms of thought circulating in the Modern scene? Before we start looking at popular archetypes, we need to define the difference between a 'fair' deck and an 'unfair' deck. I'm going to use these terms to help define some of the archetypes we'll be looking at today and I'm going to use them in a slightly unconventional way. You'll often find Modern players use these terms to describe the different decks in the format. Since Modern has so many different archetypes and variations of those archetypes, it's really useful to have a simple distinction to help define what category any certain deck falls under. What constitutes a fair or an unfair strategy? A fair strategy is a deck that follows a traditional progression curve that relies on advantageous board position, some amount of disruption, and eventually tries to overwhelm its opponent with either card advantage, tempo, or both. Aggro, attrition, and control decks generally fall under fair strategies. An unfair strategy is an archetype that attempts to take advantage of a given opportunity, whether their opponent is tapped out or your opponent has no way to interact with your strategy, so you go for the instant kill as quickly as possible and can often have those 'oops, I won' moments. Generally these strategies largely ignore what their opponent is doing and narrowly focus on their own strategy. Combo decks or decks that win off of an all-in strategy fall under this category. If this concept of 'fair and unfair' is a little abstract right now, hopefully it'll make more sense once we start talking about the actual decks.
So what exactly are the more popular archetypes in Modern? I'll briefly summarize what some of the more popular Modern decks do, they're approximate cost, and some of the pros and cons to running that type of strategy. This is a snapshot of post-Return to Ravnica Modern; let's begin!
Although these three decks are very different, they all follow roughly the same plan: win quickly or get out of reach of dying quickly. For R/U Combo, the deck uses a large number of mana producing rituals including Desperate Ritual, Seething Song, and Manamorphose to increase its spell count for the turn to cast a large/lethal Grapeshot or Empty the Warrens. One of the biggest weaknesses to the Blue-based Combo decks is the lack of strong Blue cantrips (spells that draw a card and increase the quality of cards in your hand). With the loss of Preordain, Ponder, and Rite of Flame (that I discussed last year in this article), R/U Combo took a huge hit and has to rely on unconventional methods to hit the consistency it needs to function. With the help of weaker cantrips including Peer through Depths, Sleight of Hand, and Serum Visions the deck now runs on a Pyromancer Ascension engine complimented by Past in Flames to help the deck achieve a critical mass of spells around turns 4-5 to win the game.
Eggs was a relatively underdeveloped strategy until Stanislav Cifka Egg's list took 1st Place finish at Pro Tour Return to Ravnica. Although the strategy is still largely unpopular because the deck is rather complicated to pilot and is largely non-interactive, the deck still may see some play because of its extremely high finish at the Pro Tour. The deck uses a large amount of 'eggs' or artifacts that filter mana and draw cards like Chromatic Star, Chromatic Sphere, and Elsewhere Flask to pitch to the graveyard and bring back to the battlefield using a Second Sunrise or a Faith's Reward and constantly generate mana while using Conjurer's Bauble to place the White instants on the bottom of the deck. Once back in the library, you rely on Fetch lands, Reshape, and Ghost Quarter to re-randomize the deck and increase the probability of re-drawing either of the instants and chain them to keep generating card advantage and mana. While you dig throughout your whole library and generate a ton of mana, you're then able to cast a lethal Banefire with the Krark-Clan Ironworks variant or kill them off with a Pyrite Spellbomb.
Fortunately, these combo decks are fairly cheap to purchase, fetching roughly $100-200 to complete the entire deck. Their downsides mainly attribute to their difficulty to pilot since you don't have the luxury to mulligan aggressively with these styles of decks because you need almost every card in your hand to guarantee the win before your opponent's early investment into board position pays them dividends.
Of all the categories I'm discussing today, this archetype has the most variety. The most common variant you'll run into is Mono Red aggro with a Black and/or White splash for hand disruption or Combo prevention (like Rule of Law or Ethersworn Canonist) in the Sideboard. Mono Red runs large suite of burn spells including Lava Spike, Lightning Bolt, and Rift Bolt that take their opponent's life total from 20 to 0 over 3 or 4 turns. The deck also runs aggressively costed creatures including Hellspark Elemental and Goblin Guide that can punch in for large chunks of your opponent's life total. Since most archetypes are greedy with Fetch and Shock lands, most players' life totals will start roughly around 16-18, so the Mono Red burn deck only has to commit about 6 spells to kill their opponent since their plethora of 1 drop burn spells deal roughly 3 damage each.
Other aggro decks include Melissa De Tora's 9th Place finishing B/W tokens list from GP Toronto using the token-generating powerhouses of Lingering Souls and Spectral Procession to generate a ton of pressure backed up by Intangible Virtue and Honor of the Pure to speed up the clock. This B/W tokens list also has the luxury of running black for hand disruption and the very annoying Tidehollow Sculler that can also be rather effective in combat. Other aggro variants include an array of tempo decks including B/G Dredgevine, U/W Zoo, R/U/G Delver, Tribal Flames variants, as well as a large number of G/W variants that all deal large amounts of mid game pressure. The price of most aggro decks range anywhere from $100-500, which is relatively low compared to some of the more expensive decks in the format. Traditional Aggro decks are generally easy to pilot and don't have many difficult lines of play across most of their matchups.
The downsides to Traditional Aggro decks are far and few between since they are relatively consistent in what they're trying to accomplish. Unfortunately, these decks generally lack the ability to interact with some of the more unfair decks and tend to leave a lot of opportunity open for the unfair decks to 'steal' wins from behind. Traditional Aggro decks also have a really poor Eggs and Martyr-Proc matchup. Although both Eggs and Martyr-Proc are relatively uncommon strategies, it's still noteworthy.
Birthing Pod Variants: Fair/UnfairBirthing Pod variants are definitely the most unique and confusing archetype in the Modern format. The deck plays a lot of different creatures and many of them are 1-ofs that give the deck a lot of versatility. The deck traditionally uses a large number of mana dorks such as Birds of Paradise or Noble Hierarch to ramp into an early Birthing Pod and use the artifact engine to tutor (or search up) any creature you need out of your library for any given situation. This helps the deck stay favored in Game 1 against a lot of matchups since you have the luxury of playing some cards that are traditionally in the Sideboard like Spellskite or Linvala, Keeper of Silence in your main list since your Birthing Pods can easily tutor them up whenever you need them. Birthing Pod variants generally fall under two categories: Melira Pod and Kiki Pod. Melira Pod is generally G/B/W and focuses on using Melira, Sylvok Outcast, Viscera Seer and either Kitchen Finks or Murderous Redcap to either deal lethal damage with Persist triggers on the Goblin or gain near infinite life with Persist triggers on the Ouphe. Melira Pod has a ton of resiliency with cards like Ranger of Eos to hunt mana dorks or combo pieces while having the ability to rebuy combo pieces with Reveillark in the late game. Kiki Pod, on the other hand is generally G/W/R/u and tries to get a Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker on the board alongside either a Deceiver Exarch, Restoration Angel, or Zealous Conscripts to create a token copy of the afforementioned targets and use those copies to untap the legendary Goblin and continue to make many more copies until you can deal near-infinite damage with a large number of hasty tokens. Kiki Pod is slightly less resilient than Melira Pod, but intends more on exploiting the power of the Birthing Pod engine, while the Melira version is better equipped to abuse Gavony Township. The real lure to playing Pod is its ability to be flexible across many different matchups and its ability to both play a fair game and have those 'oops, I won' moments.
The downsides to Birthing Pod variants start with its monetary cost, which is roughly $550-700 because you're playing anywhere from 3 to 4 different colors and your mana fixing is vital to the deck's success. Because your mana is a little unstable, you'll end up taking a good chunk of damage on Fetch and Shock lands in the early game, so Mono Red and other hyper aggressive aggro decks don't have the obstacle of a full 20 life to knock down. Birthing Pod itself also deals a good amount of damage to its controller because of the Phyrexian mana cost in its casting cost and activated ability that helps speed up the Pod strategy. One blatant downside to Melira Pod is the prevalence of a playset of of Deathrite Shaman in the very omnipresent Jund archetype that can exile your Kitchen Finks or Murderous Redcaps when they're in the graveyard with the Persist trigger on the stack and consequentially shut down the combo while it's in progress. Although the Melira version isn't strictly trying to complete the combo in the Jund matchup, it still takes away one of the deck's win conditions. Pod is also generally a difficult deck to pilot since the deck is capable of doing so many different things, the correct line of play may not always be clear.
*Birthing Pod is what I'm sleeving up for Maitland!
The Urza Tron deck focuses on getting out an Urza's Tower, Urza's Mine, and an Urza's Power Plant to generate a ton of colorless mana to cast huge spells very early and overwhelm its opponent with extremely high quality threats. The Tron archetype is done traditionally in U/W and R/G. For U/W Tron, the deck functions as an attrition-based control deck that runs a suite of removal and countermagic like Remand, Path to Exile, Oblivion Ring, and Echoing Truth to stabilize in the early game and follows the late game up with Emrakul, the Aeon's Torn, Ulamog the Infinite Gyre, and Kozilek, Butcher of Truth as the finishing spells. U/W Tron variants are also characteristic of running a Gifts Ungiven engine using any large threat (ex: Iona, Shield of Emeria) and Unburial Rites, while 'failing to find' two other cards, so your opponent is forced to dump all of those cards in your graveyard. This allows you to flashback Unburial Rites and rush a huge threat onto the battlefield that most decks are unprepared to fight against. For the R/G version, the deck runs a lot of spells dedicated to fetching out the correct lands such as Expedition Map and Ancient Stirrings and completely ignores any early game attrition other than a playset of Pyroclasm which is largely to fight off hyper aggressive strategies like Infect and Mono Red Affinity. R/G traditionally uses 3-4 copies of Karn Liberated and 3-4 copies of Wurmcoil Engine as its finishers (sometimes with an eldrazi sprinkled in). Since R/G variant lacks early game removal, the planeswalker and huge lifelink Wurm are necessary for stabilizing after presumably taking a lot of damage from pressure in the early game. The upsides to playing Tron are definitely in its cost since the deck costs roughly $200-250 depending on the variant and the types of threats you elect to play. The deck also is relatively easy to play, since the U/W variant simply forces 1:1 trades in the early game and the R/G variant ignores early pressure altogether in favor of consistent threats around turns 3-5.
The downsides to playing Tron are its poor matchups against aggro-based decks and decks that can achieve fast kills. With Wrath-effects like Supreme Verdict and Wrath of God seeing almost no play in the higher tier decks, aggro decks like Mono Red Affinity, Infect, and B/W tokens run amok and are able to amass a large, sizable army that Tron is largely unable to deal with in the early game unless you are able to draw into a Pyroclasm. Furthermore, the U/W Tron variant loses a ton of consistency since it's mana is locked up in the early game with removal spells to fend off pressure. Like U/R Storm, U/W Tron also loses a lot of consistency because of the lack powerful cantrips to allow it to find the Tron pieces it needs to reach an aggressive mid game. The R/G Tron variant also needs to mulligan aggressively going into Games 2 and 3 and wastes some of its slots on removal spells from the sideboard; slots the Tron player would rather spend on land tutors and mana-filtering spells.
Infect: UnfairFor Pro Tour Return to Ravnica, Kelvin Chew took B/U Infect to an extremely impressive Top 8 finish. Since the Pro Tour, Infect has evolved to splash Black for opposing hand disruption to fight off Jund and to help cast it's premier, evasive Infect Flyer, Plague Stinger. Infect plays very similarly to a Combo deck but with more resiliency. The deck has the ability to get Turn 2 wins but has some consistency around dealing large chunks of Infect damage very quickly by using Exalted triggers from Noble Hierarch and Pendelhaven activations with the huge support of an array of pump effects like Might of Old Krosa, Groundswell, and Mutagenic Growth. The deck also runs protection spells like Apostle's Blessing and Vines of the Vastwood to fight off its opponent's early removal spells. The sprinkled in hand disruption spells also help keep instant-speed removal spells out of your opponent's hand and double up as protection for your Infect creatures so they can keep pushing for poison counters every turn.
The downsides to playing Infect start with its cost, hitting roughly $600 for the entire deck. Furthermore, Infect has a relatively poor Jund matchup since the hand disruption and plethora of removal spells from the Jund player prevents any creatures from staying on the board and often 'brick walls' the Infect player's aggression. The prevalence of Lingering Souls not only from Jund, but from the rise of White-based aggro strategies make combat very difficult for the suite of 1 toughness Infect creatures to make profitable attacks. This weakness is largely apparent from the appearance of only a single Infect deck in the Top 16 of Grand Prix Toronto.
Mono Red Affinity/Robots: FairMono Red Affinity or Robots has little variation when it comes to the general deck list with minor adjustments to different Sideboard options. Tzu Ching Kuo's 1st Place finishing list from Modern Worlds in 2011 is a great place to start when approaching this archetype. The deck has an extremely explosive start by dropping a ton of early pressure with Memnites, Ornithopters and Frogmites to clutter the board with artifacts. The deck also uses the backbone of Mox Opal and Springleaf Drum to continue spamming your entire hand of spells by roughly turn 2. The deck had amazing success in early 2012 and late 2011 because most decks weren't able to respond to it's extremely quick starts and countermagic like the popular Spell Snare was unable to touch any the deck's relevant spells quick enough. The deck prompted U/W Control's 'tap out' control strategy and explains why the control deck elects to play very few counter spells. The real engine of the deck is the full playset of Cranial Plating that helps dish out tons of damage in the early, mid, and late game that helps fuel the deck's huge amount of aggression across all stages of the game. The deck also has some reach with Blinkmoth Nexus to deal the last points of damage needed to make the kill or you can jump on the Infect plan with Inkmoth Nexus and Cranial Plating when your opponent burns through their removal spells trying to stay alive in the early game. The biggest pro to playing Mono Red Affinity is its cost since the deck costs roughly $200 to build from the ground up and has had a ton of success of the past year.
The downside to playing Mono Red Affinity is the deck is easily sideboarded against with extremely narrow cards like Kataki, War's Wage, Stony Silence, Nature's Claim, and Ancient Grudge. Most Sideboards have at least 3 slots dedicated strictly against Affinity since the deck is a relatively common strategy and the Artifact removal also side's well against Birthing Pod decks. For Game 1, Affinity is generally favored since most decks don't have a way to interact with Affinity's early mass creatures, but loses a lot of steam going into Game 2 and Game 3 after sideboarding, which might be one deterrent to sleeving up this archetype.
For reference, here's Yuuya Watanabe's 2nd Place list from Pro Tour Return to Ravnica. Jund is the strongest deck in the room and has the highest placing finishes over the past few months in high-level Modern tournaments. Seeing almost 40% of the playing field at Pro Tour Return to Ravnica, Jund saw a huge surge in popularity. Any deck that could not beat Jund was extremely unfavorable in any Modern tournament. Jund plays very similarly to a Macro-style deck that plays a very aggressive attrition game in the first 1-3 turns and uses card advantage engines like Dark Confidant to replenish cards in the mid to late game in order to continue applying pressure to your opponent when they've ran out of gas. The deck also has a ton of resiliency and reach because of the multiple copies of Deathrite Shaman that can produce early mana acceleration and damage/lifegain in the late game and Bloodbraid Elf that generates a free spell when it's cast with a hasty 3 power body to boot. Furthermore, the deck's reach continues into its mana base with Raging Ravine and Treetop Village that serve as late game mana sinks and are impossible to kill with sorcery speed removal spells like Oust and Supreme Verdict often seen in traditional U/W Control decks and are large enough to survive Pyroclasm in R/G Tron decks. Jund's strength is vast and the deck is relatively easy to pilot since the power level of almost every card in the deck is very high and the strategy is straightforward. Jund is favored in almost every combo matchup because of the heavy suite of discard spells including Thoughtseize and Inquisition of Kozilek which removes vital pieces of the combo and makes completing the combo extremely difficult.
The downsides to playing Jund start with its price tag, fetching around $1k-1.5k to build the deck from scratch, where most of its price derives from its playset of Tarmogoyf and a playset of Dark Confidants. Another downside to playing Jund is its constant evolution. The most recent lists of Jund have been electing to play Lingering Souls and making a small splash of White in the main board to ward off the more aggressive/all-in strategies like Infect and Nivmagus Elemental, while helping the deck stabilize well against the mirror match. This influx of Jund decks sleeving up Lingering Souls prompted some tech that Willy Edel brought to a 1st Place finish at GP Toronto using the backbone of Thundermaw Hellkite to kill the Spirit Tokens and uses Lotus Cobra to provide the sufficient mana to support the dragon. I feel the tug of war between the hellkite and Lingering Souls is the biggest advantage non-Jund decks have against the monstrosity. The Lingering Souls variants fall very easily to the Hellkite since Jund doesn't elect to run any anthem effects like Intangible Virtue (like B/W Tokens would). Fortunately, the mirro-matchup favored Hellkite variant is a little slower than more traditional Jund lists, so the quicker, more aggressive strategies like Traditional Aggro and Infect can capitalize on Jund's greediness and commit a ton of early aggression that could overwhelm the Jund player if they're not prepared. Finally, Jund is a really common deck to face against, so players have the opportunity to practice the matchup considerably before PTQs and high level events to show up with a strict sideboard plan and familiarity against the overplayed archetype.
Unfortunately, this article can only scratch the surface of the Modern format, but I hope that if you weren't familiar with Modern before, this article was a good crash course into the format and the expectations of the PTQ Dragon's Maze season. With the first PTQ on home turf in Maitland, we have our work cut out for us since it'll be the first opportunity for most of us to play with these cards. Personally, I'll be spending the next week prepping for the PTQ and working on my sideboarding plan against Pod's unfavorable matchups. Hopefully, everyone planning on attending drives there safely and I'll see a lot of you in a week. Until Maitland, Magic players!
-David J.
