Video: Jeskai Solution In Modern!
Sam Black has an eccentric and powerful list with some not-so-subtle hate for the new Modern metagame! Sleeve it up for the $5,000 Premier IQ at #SCGOAK!
Sometimes a metagame gets warped enough that a deck built around extremely narrow cards to attack certain strategies can be successful. Today, I’m wondering if Modern has gotten to that point, and I’m playing a deck inspired by Zvi Mowshowitz’s Pro Tour Tokyo winning Invasion Block deck, “The Solution.” That deck used protection from red creatures to beat R/G beatdown decks. I’m going to use protection from red creatures that gain life to try to beat Burn decks. My thinking is that almost every deck uses red removal, so protection from red creatures are generally good, and in a deck based on drawing cards and killing creatures, all I care about is having any random creature in play, so I might as well play creatures that have a lot of upside in the most common matchups.
I’ll be playing the following list:
Round 1
Starting off with a loss against the deck I designed my deck to beat is a little discouraging. Auriok Champion definitely felt a little slow, and it’s very awkward against Skullcrack. It’s possible that I don’t have enough creatures, and I’d be better served by Burrenton Forge-Tender, but I’ll give it a few more chances.
Show Summary
Round 2
That wasn’t necessarily the most representative match against Scapeshift, but it did show how the deck can try to play an aggro control game with creatures that are essentially Grizzly Bears but that it’s conceivable that the protection could be helping. Again, Auriok Champion is much worse at this due to only having a single power.
Show Summary
Round 3
This is definitely not a matchup I’m set up well for. Things are looking really grim for Auriok Champion in this deck. The games looked closer than I expected, which I guess maybe is what I should have expected, as I’m not that far from a deck that is set up well for the matchup.
Show Summary
Round 4
That felt like a fitting final match for a failed experiment–I think my opponent’s deck is basically a better version of what I’m trying to do, despite playing entirely different cards. I’ve been impressed by the white deck’s ability to stay ahead of decks that I’ve built that are just trying to use spot removal on each of their creatures. Flickering Blade Splicer is an amazingly good plan in those matchups.
Show Summary
I think the key takeaways for me are that Modern is still too open to play cards that aren’t generally good, and that Auriok Champion is very unimpressive against red unless you’re dedicated to making a lot of creatures. Kor Firewalker is a card that I think might still be worth experimenting with in maindecks, but this isn’t the right set of support cards, and simply including it in a deck won’t give you a favorable matchup against red; it needs to be part of a large strategy to beat them.