Hello and welcome.

My name is Michael Bonde and this is my first of many articles for Hareruya.

The GP’s during the upcoming weekend are both Modern GP’s, so I thought why not try and talk a bit about that? What am I playing, why, and what should you consider playing?

Modern is a fun format, where you get the opportunity to play pretty much anything. Whether it is a Tribal deck (Merfolk, Elves), a control deck (UWR, Grixis, Jund) or a more explosive combo (Ad nauseam, RG scapeshift), you always have a chance to win, and every deck has some good matchups.

There are a lot of decks in Modern with complex diversity, that being said it is not completely random that I mentioned those specific decks above – I will talk a bit more about those in a second.

But first, I would like to address what I think is the “boogeyman” of the format; DREDGE.

Going into this weekend, I expect dredge to be very popular – not only because the deck has such raw power on its own, but unlike formats like Legacy and Vintage, the deck is new, and people don’t have space in their sideboard or they simply haven’t adapted to the new dredge meta.

How do we kill this well tuned dredge engine? It’s actually kind of easy! Dredge is somewhat of a glass-cannon, it has a very solid game plan, but often with decks like this, they lose very hard to their countermeasures, which in this case are cards like 《Rest in Peace》, 《Relic of Progenitus》, 《Nihil Spellbomb》 and 《Grafdigger's Cage》. They can only play so many non-combo pieces for different matchups, which will most likely be 3 of 《Nature's Claim》 or similar cards that are cheap and kills both artifact and enchantments.

So my #1 advice for the upcoming events – play Dredge or have sideboard cards ready to interact with your opponent’s graveyard.

So now back to what I was talking about earlier, what deck to play and what is great, because there is a whole lot of decks that are great.

The latest major Modern tournaments have been won by Elves, Dredge, Bant Eldrazi and Jund and this is not a coincidence in my opinion.

Bant Eldrazi is considered to be one of the best decks at the moment, only losing to super unfair strategies – because of its relatively fair game plan, beating with creatures and disrupting through counterspells – one of the main attributes of this deck is that it completely crushes 《Death's Shadow》 Zoo, which was the deck to beat 2-3 weeks ago and has been dominating the Magic Online meta.

As the meta changed, Dredge all of a sudden popped up – and started crushing – for the 2 reasons as stated above. The problem with a deck like this appearing with a strategy that is not dealt with by other sideboard slots, is that you will become weaker to some of the tier 1 decks in the meta.

This is why Jund all of a sudden is 9.5% of [the current metagame on Magic Online] – it simply has the answers to all of the decks, roughly at 50/50 against the field. It plays a mix between discard and removal, and isn’t dependant on the sideboard to change the matchups radically and the meta can’t really board hate against this deck. So while the meta is fighting one another, Jund is finding itself in a perfect spot right now.

This leads me to my last conclusion about the metagame – Elves. While Affinity is a deck that swarms, there haven’t really been a tier 1/1.5 deck that does it in a same way, and most players have 《Stony Silence》, 《Shatterstorm》 etc. to wreck that matchup – so the recent Elves list swarms as well, but in a way that goes around the “known” removal for such decks, exploiting the lack of boardwipe effects in the sideboards.

So to finish this off, I would like to give my advice #2 and #3 and tell you what I would like to play:

#2 Do not pick up a deck on the day – it is better to minimize the mistakes on your side of the table first. Knowing when to mulligan, how to board and your role in the different matchups is crucial and will give you an huge edge.

#3 Don’t overthink the meta – I wrote that Jund is 9.5% of the Meta, so roughly you will play against it every 10 matches – this is off course a bit more complex issue but, I am just trying to say that you will play against a lot of different decks during the course of 15 rounds.

Last but not least, I am gonna play either 《Death's Shadow》 Zoo, Jund or Bant Eldrazi during this weekend, Bant pretty much having been locked in at this point.

That being said I think that all of them have a good game plan and fights the meta quite well. I can also see these decks as being solid choices :

Merfolk
Affinity
RG Scapeshift
Dredge

Merfolk as a solid beatdown machine, and the other 3 putting a lot of pressure on your opponent to draw answers.

That was it for now, I hope you find the article useful, and if you have any questions, you are more then welcome to send me a message or tag me on twitter @lampalot

Have fun in your tournaments

Michael

Michael Bonde
Top 4 at Grand Prix Strassbourg 2013 & Grand Prix Madrid 2015. Followed by a 5th place with the Bonde-Saito-Thiago Team at Grand Prix Sao Paolo 2016. A veteran of the magic pro scene aiming ever higher.

His strengths lie in his ability to reach complicated game states where he is able to grind out a win.

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