Introduction
《Underworld Breach》 is the best deck in Modern – there’s no denying that.
Throughout all the Regional Championships, 《Underworld Breach》 decks posted an unstoppable win rate, despite being a known presence and everyone bringing eleven sideboard cards for the matchup. Perhaps it could be interpreted that picking up and learning 《Underworld Breach》 would be the best course of action for now.
But – if you are stubborn and prefer to beat them rather than join them – let’s examine what you could do. Eleven sideboard cards are a lot, and cutting eleven cards leaves you with tons of possible permutations … Are you sure you are making the best use of the tools you registered?
What Changed In Breach?
The recent dominance of Breach is, of course, the unbanning of 《Mox Opal》.
《Underworld Breach》 decks used to be those half-midrange, half-combo decks. Jack of all trades, master of none – using the 《Underworld Breach》/《Grinding Station》 combo to threaten their opponents while beating them down with a motley crew of creatures and 《Urza’s Saga》 constructs. 《Grinding Station》 was slightly awkward to spend mana on, 《Mox Amber》 could be unreliable when your legendaries got killed, and cantrips were pretty bad.
That is no longer the case.
Breach is now first and foremost a combo deck. The extra mana from Moxen and Eldrazi Spawns made casting 《Grinding Station》 an afterthought; 《Malevolent Rumble》 is so good at finding 《Grinding Station》 that when the 《Underworld Breach》 deck pulls ahead, they will assemble their combo almost by accident.
You could still make 《Urza’s Saga》 constructs if push comes to shove, but other decks are stronger and grind better. Beating, for example, an Energy deck with constructs is somewhat rare.
Some players choose to trim on 《Urza’s Saga》 – Allen Wu’s 11th-place decklist from Regional Championship Portland only runs a pair! Strong statement, signalling that Allen believed in the Breach combo ending every game.
Temur Breach by Allen Wu – Regional Championship Portland 11th Place
And rightfully so! While Allen ran a single 《Urza, Lord High Artificer》 and cards like 《Kappa Cannoneer》 or 《Six》 used to show up in sideboards occasionally, the combo is just too strong and too easy to perform to abandon.
Secondary threats are comparatively too bad. Overpowering the hate with card draw and interaction is a more natural plan. The most popular grindy post-board option in Breach currently is 《Flame of Anor》 – overloading hate by simply running even more card advantage and interaction.
Choosing Your Hate
Breach Combo uses the graveyard. It doesn’t mean all graveyard hate is blanket great – a trap that’s easy to fall into!
《Ghost Vacuum》 is commonly seen in Energy sideboards – it’s a great way to stop 《Phlage, Titan of Fire’s Fury》 in the mirror! But while clearing a single card per turn can harass 《Emry, Lurker of the Loch》, it won’t do much against their combo. Sniping their wincon card doesn’t happen often post board, as Breach routinely will bring their extra 《Grapeshot》 or 《Jace, Wielder of Mysteries》.
《Nihil Spellbomb》, 《Relic of Progenitus》, or other one-shot exile effects are stronger at handling the combo but suffer against 《Emry, Lurker of the Loch》. Still, it’s not a way to stop the 《Underworld Breach》 deck forever. Given enough time, Breach can easily play around a graveyard exile effect. Exiling their graveyard can be helpful when looking to shut down lines that replay 《Malevolent Rumble》 a bunch, but it’s not necessarily crucial.
Permanents that prevent the combo – 《Stony Silence》, 《Deafening Silence》, 《Aven Interrupter》, 《Drannith Magistrate》, 《Collector Ouphe》, 《Soulless Jailer》, or 《Karn, the Great Creator》 are all great. 《Ranger-Captain of Eos》 is great as a dual role card: effectively an on-board counterspell that also keeps the pressure up.
Even 《Dauthi Voidwalker》 matches up extremely well against Breach – as it did in the past, being a major reason Scam used to be a rough matchup for earlier iterations of Breach – and it’s a shame that it’s evidently too hard to commit this much to black mana in this 《Grief》-less world.
Hate permanents function as a solid core of your anti-Breach strategy. A subtle advantage of those that’s easy to miss is that Breach’s main cantrip is 《Malevolent Rumble》, a card (mostly) unable to find sideboard answers to those permanents.
Diversifying card types is useful to stretch their removal further, but if the game bogs down too much, you have to expect your 《Stony Silence》 to die to a simple end-of-turn 《Nature’s Claim》. To complete your plan, you need some protection.
Layering permanents works better in some situations and less in others. A pair of 《Stony Silence》 will look silly if 《Underworld Breach》 lets the opponent simply replay their 《Nature’s Claim》 and proceed; on the other hand, 《Drannith Magistrate》 is not subjected to such an issue.
Another way to protect yourself is playing cheap instants that will stop your opponent from comboing for a turn. 《Orim’s Chant》 comes to mind, but largely, any 《Disenchant》 effect will do the job. Disenchants have the additional upside of shutting down the threat of 《Urza’s Saga》‘s constructs even harder. Cheap instants are also easiest to keep up early in the game before you are able to set up your defenses fully.
To summarize, if I’m going to commit eleven sideboard cards towards fixing my Breach matchup, I’d want to play prison hate pieces, protect them with a sprinkle of disenchants, and prioritize threats that are hard for Breach to deal with, even if they are slower.
Amulet Titan VS. Breach
Amulet Titan matches up pretty well into Breach Combo. While I wouldn’t have the confidence to necessarily call the matchup “Good” or “Easy”, there are aspects of it that are nice for Amulet Titan.
It all boils down to a single dynamic – the Breach deck doesn’t have access to cards that interact very well with 《Primeval Titan》. 《Unholy Heat》 fights an uphill battle against Enters-the-battlefield triggers, while 《Consign to Memory》 is a temporary solution. Given time, Titans offer a good deal of inevitability to the Amulet player. Searching for 《Boseiju, Who Endures》 and 《Bojuka Bog》 is often enough to remove the threat of the combo.
On the other hand, Breach DOES have great ways to interact with 《Amulet of Vigor》, and even more so, 《Urza’s Saga》. 《Nature’s Claim》 and 《Haywire Mite》 alongside 《Emry, Lurker of the Loch》‘s recursion will heavily punish a Saga-reliant draw; while 《Urza’s Saga》‘s Chapter Ⅲ trigger is a juicy target for 《Consign to Memory》, an otherwise medium card.
Breach is also a very fast deck. Losing to Breach on turn three is not uncommon, and even turn two kills are not unheard of. While a natural response would be to play all of your “fast” cards to match their speed, relying on 《Urza’s Saga》 in the face of their effective interaction would be, actually, very foolish.
Considering the above, my matchup plan became:
■Matchup Plan
1. Minimize the number of spots where Breach’s interaction is a blowout.
2. Make up for the speed lost by introducing effective interaction. 《Collector Ouphe》 in play blocks off the 《Grinding Station》 combo as well as card advantage from their creatures, while 《Force of Vigor》 and 《Boseiju, Who Endures》 fend off Breach attempts.
3. Make land drops and work my way towards the Titan win condition. If my win condition is hard for them to beat, I’m happy sideboarding in a way that slows down both decks.
As an example, this is a recent list I’ve used to get ninth in a Magic Online Showcase Challenge.
Amulet Titan by kanister – Modern Showcase Challenge 9th Place
And here’s the Breach sideboard plan I used:
vs. Breach
Out
In
Could a similar template work in different decks?
Boros Energy VS. Breach
Once again, it’s easy to once again think that since Breach is a fast deck, you need to keep your fast cards. That you need to come out of the gates at them with your 《Ocelot Pride》. We do have to keep in mind that Breach, of course, sideboards as well, and their sideboard often includes some 《Whipflare》.
If we apply the Amulet Titan strategy, we should try to minimize their punishing points of interaction. Breach can often be well-equipped to handle small creatures with 《Pyroclasm》 or 《Firespout》. Losing multiple creatures to a sweeper can be devastating, prolonging the game and letting the Breach player take control and comfortably assemble their combo.
On the other hand, 《Phlage, Titan of Fire’s Fury》 is a threat they can’t answer easily. 《Soul-Guide Lantern》 can be awkward to time and is not necessarily a card the Breach player would otherwise want, and Red removal just fails to stop 《Phlage》. 《Phlage》‘s initial casting even answers the card advantage-generating Wizards!
It’s also important to note that 《Phlage》 can only be considered a “Slow” card in the context of the rest of the Energy shell. Escaping is trivial anyway because of Surveil lands, and alongside 《Arena of Glory》, 《Phlage》 deals 12 damage in a turn. Realistically, Breach can’t survive two Phlage attacks; so in reality, it’s quite unfair to call Phlage a “Slow” clock.
Here is one of my MOCS matches from January. I piloted Temur Breach, and we can see Andrei Klepatch sideboarding in a way that rendered my interaction pretty bad.
Boros Energy by Andrei Klepatch – 2024 Magic Online Champions Showcase Season 3 3rd Place
Andrei’s sideboard plan he used against me:
vs. Breach
Out
In
Notice that Andrei decides to cut 《Blood Moon》 here. There is something to be said about specifically the combo of 《Blood Moon》 and 《Stony Silence》 – most traditional Breach lists contain almost no way of getting out of such a lock. My MOCS Breach decklist ran a sideboard 《Forest》, which disincentivized such strategies, but the more 《Stony Silence》 you play, the better 《Blood Moon》 becomes.
Obviously, 《Phlage, Titan of Fire’s Fury》 is not a great plan against a blisteringly fast combo deck all by himself. 《Phlage》 is in fact pretty bad in game one, and a card that you’d actively want to avoid drawing.
As always though, post-board dynamics change and 《Phlage》 seems to me like the most logical way to follow up your pile of 《Stony Silence》 and 《Orim’s Chant》 stopping their combo.
Orzhov Ketramose VS. Breach
Orzhov was already on the rise before Aetherdrift, but 《Ketramose, the New Dawn》 seems like an extremely powerful card-drawing engine that entirely changes the archetype. The deck is very new, so a stock list is volatile and expected to change a lot – but based on the theory we discussed, how does the typical decklist match against Breach?
Orzhov Ketramose by _Tia93_ Modern Challenge 2nd Place
《Ketramose, the New Dawn》 synergizes so well with 《Relic of Progenitus》 that it incentivizes players to run three or four in the maindeck. Again, those can’t be your main hope, but if we are essentially freerolling them, it seems like we’d be off to a good start!
An indestructible card-drawing God is pretty hard to answer for Breach, so we can use 《Ketramose, the New Dawn》 as our inevitability and win condition. 《Relic of Progenitus》 and 《Thoughtseize》 are decent enough to let us interact a little bit in game one.
Looking at the sideboard, 《Wrath of the Skies》 is a card that has legs against Breach, as blowing up all their Moxen and 《Urza’s Saga》 for (relatively) cheap can be backbreaking. But if we reference back to the template for a successful Breach plan – a decklist like this lacks some instant speed interaction to really seal the deal. Wrath plays into the sorcery speed strength of the Orzov deck even harder, while at least against Breach we have more important issues to address.
If we consider that 《Ketramose, the New Dawn》 lets the deck draw an obscene amount of cards, having access to at least a few copies of cheap instants that significantly increase our odds of living another turn becomes even more valuable.
《Aven Interrupter》 is very conveniently both a creature and an instant speed card – you can find it with 《Overlord of the Balemurk》 – but at three mana, it’s quite expensive. 《March of Otherworldly Light》, 《Erase》, and once again, 《Orim’s Chant》 are my favorite options. Two or three copies of such an effect should go a long way.
Will Breach be the strongest available option until March 31st? Perhaps, but if you still plan on playing Modern tournaments with different decks – I hope this article has helped you refine your sideboard plans as you fight the deck!
