Much Abrew: Mono-Blue Upheaval (Modern)
Hello, everyone! Welcome to another episode of Much Abrew About Nothing. This week we heading to Modern to play a deck built around one of my all time favorite cards: Upheaval! We played Upheaval right after it entered the format for Against the Odds in a three-color shell, but today's build is a bit different: Mono-Blue Upheaval. The idea of the deck is to flood the board with cheap artifacts with the help of cards like Sai, Master Thopterist and then use Urza, Lord High Artificer to make oodles of mana, allowing us to cast Upheaval to bounce everything and (hopefully) immediately rebuild our board. When things go well we can potentially even pick up a flawless victory, ending the game with our opponent at zero permanents! Is it time for Upheaval to shine in Modern in a Mono-Blue artifact-based shell? Let's get to the video and find out on today's Much Abrew About Nothing!
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Much Abrew: Mono-Blue Upheaval
Discussion
- Record wise we ended up 4-1 with Mono-Blue Upheaval. Even better we managed to Upheaval our way past a couple of our most hated Modern decks in Tron and Bogles!
- If you're not familiar with Upheaval, it's one of those cards that isn't obviously powerful at a quick glance, especially to a newer player. Since Upheaval bounces all of everyone's permanents it looks like it just restarts the game, which isn't all that valuable, but there's a really easy trick to breaking Upheaval's symmetry: making a ton of mana. If we can make ten or twelve mana before we Upheaval we can float all of our mana, Upheaval all of the permanents back to hands and then immediately rebuild our board with the floating mana. Meanwhile, our poor opponent won't have the option to float their mana and replay their board, which means they will likely spend their first post-Upheaval turn making a land drop and sadly discarding a ton of cards to hand size, assuming they don't just scoop to the Upheaval itself.
- So how do we make oodles of mana? Mostly with Urza, Lord High Artificer. Out deck is overloaded with cheap artifacts and cards like Sai, Master Thopterist which are great at flooding the board with cheap artifacts, which lets us fill the board with artifacts, play Urza so we can tap all of our random artifacts mana and then hopefully win the game with a massive Upheaval.
- The backup plan of the deck is to mostly play like a Mono-Blue Artifact deck. We can sometimes win by making a bunch of Thopters with Sai, or some huge Karnstructs with Urza, Lord High Artificer and Urza's Saga. While our best and most exciting wins come as a result of Upheaval, we don't necessarily need it to win the game.
- So should you play Mono-Blue Upheaval in Modern? I think the answer is yes! The deck is super fun to play, has the potential to pick up flawless victories and felt surprisingly competitive. Oh yeah, and when everything comes together we even get some salty comments and scoops from opponents! If you like making opponents miserable, drawing tons of cards and leaving your opponent without any permanents, Mono-Blue Upheaval is probably the perfect Modern deck for you!
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions and suggestions in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive, or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
