By Shin Tomizawa
The 2014 World Championships heavily impacted deck selection for the Modern portion of this year’s event to be sure. Because of the ballooning variety of archetypes, if you want to have a breakthrough, you’ll have to decipher the perplexing Modern metagame enigma.
■ Burn – 21 players
Burn was out in the largest force, but by a narrow margin, thanks to the concerted effort of its Mono-Red incarnation, the style splashing just Treasure Cruise, and the version winking white for Boros Charm. Easily one of the strongest cards in Modern, Lightning Bolt is of course a four-of standard-issue weapon. And the card seems to have solidified its deck as truly format-defining.
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■ Abzan/Junk – 20 players
Khans of Tarkir bestowed Seige Rhino upon White-Black-Green, but the impact was considerably greater than just that because there was no more than a single purely Green-Black player.
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■ Pod – 18 players
Melira, Sylvok Outcast or Archangel of Thune and Spike Feeder enable infinite combos, but opinions are divided on whether or not to even include the engine. And in addition to Kitchen Finks, Siege Rhino of course only further enhances the deck. It would seem this deck is perfectly suited to match up against decks in the current era of haymakers.
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■ Temur (RUG) Delver – 17 players
These fire-fueled decks have adopted Tarmogoyf, a creature that comes built in with an almost biological resistance to fire itself. This of course speaks to strong creatures resistant to cheap burn spells like Lightning Bolt. This was also the deck altogether selected by the Platinum Japanese pros heading into the 2014 World Championships, and it seems to have been the weapon of choice for many of the more well-known players at this event, too.
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■ Blue Red Delver – 9 players
The purely two-color version of the Delver deck split a wide gulf from and below its blood brother, the RUG version. This deck may have been generally avoided just as a preemptive countermeasure against the field.
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■ Affinity – 9 players
Even in the current Modern environment of Treasure Cruise rowing rampant, this deck’s sheer power is alive and well. To be sure, this is a deck easily influenced by the metagame, but what kind of wind blows for it this time around–headwind or tailwind?
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■ Splinter Twin – 8 players
TarmoTwin, TempoTwin, and JeskaiTwin, are some of the flavors this deck is available in. And though there are four possible, and only one twin is needed to win, perhaps this only adds up to a Tier 1.5 deck now.
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■ Scapeshift – 7 players
Treasure Cruise along with Dig Through Time have had a ground-shaking impact on Modern, and giving combo decks in particular access to these cards is just brutal. Where once combo decks were plagued by eventually exhausting all of their resources and then being at the mercy of a depleted hand, they now seem to have been granted a powerful windfall to pull them through their formerly weakest hour.
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■ Jeskai Control – 6 players
Similar to Scapeshift, however this deck prioritizes Dig Through Time over Treasure Cruise. It dispenses with early fisticuffs in the form of light touches of Sphinx’s Revelation and then takes over from there with Celestial Colonnade as its main muscle, which invariably enables the deck to end the game much faster than it would appear.
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■ Black-White Tokens – 6 players
Before Khans of Tarkir, this deck could be considered mostly outside of the metagame, but as a result of the environment leaning towards more singular threats slugging it out, perhaps that is why its presence may be on the rise.
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■ UrzaTron – 5 players
Pyroclasm hoses Delver of Secrets and Young Pyromancer, just as Relic of Progenitus sticks it to Delve spells, but it can’t be said that this archetype’s only significant advantage is just as the original fast, cheap counter deck positioned to punish weak decks. It is now expected to be able to foil decks like Pod or Abzan by simply going over the top against them.
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■ Merfolk – 5 players
Previous environments recall this deck emerging as the metagame’s standard-bearer against Black-Green decks, but Khans of Tarkir has been quite a boon to a large proportion of other decks in the metagame. So if the rise of White-Black-Green has been epidemic, this archetype’s consent may be complicit. A powerful tribe loaded up with powerful spells for backup is more than capable of overcoming even this high-powered haymaker environment.
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■ Other – 35 players
They said Jeskai Ascendency Combo would “destroy” the environment, but whether or not those claims are true, only one person brought the alleged menace to battle. Even then, it was not the new version featuring Fatestitcher, but the typical version utilizing mana creatures. The unearthly deck was one of the 2014 World Championship’s impactful decks, but it was quite unexpected that not a single player showed up with it.
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With the overall lower number of combo decks present, there is a feeling in the air that Delver of Secrets seems to have just been pushed out a bit. And even among Hexproof Auras, Soul Sisters, Storm, and other combo/synergy-heavy archetypes, there was not necessarily any one particular breakout list that swept through the field. In fact, the only deck that managed to go undefeated through Day 1 was Wary Sisters [Norin Sisters].
