Much Abrew: Turbo Lands (Modern)
Hello, everyone! Welcome to another episode of Much Abrew About Nothing. This week, rather than playing an Instant Deck Tech deck, we're having a special episode featuring the newly legal in Modern Jace, the Mind Sculptor. While lots of people are playing Jace at the moment, with most simply jamming the planeswalker into various control shells, today's Turbo Lands deck is one of the spiciest Jace, the Mind Sculptor shells we've seen so far. This list is actually one that Todd Stevens submitted for the Team Modern Super League this week, but we didn't get a chance to play it thanks to UW Miracles cruising through the opponents' decks.
The deck itself is pretty strange. Rather than having an actual win condition (other than Jace, the Mind Sculptor, of course) the primary plan is to simply overwhelm the opponent with value until our brute force card advantage eventually adds up to the win. Can Turbo Lands work in Modern now that Jace, the Mind Sculptor is unbanned? Let's get to the videos and find out, and then we'll have some thoughts on the deck.
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Much Abrew: Turbo Lands (Modern)
Discussion
- This is one of the weirdest leagues we've every played. It felt like we were losing just about every match, but then we ended up winning nearly all of our matches, eventually ending up with a 4-1 record in our competitive league, which is great!
- One of the first questions everyone asks about Turbo Lands is how the deck wins, and the answer is pure card advantage. One of the strange parts of the deck is that, apart from Jace, the Mind Sculptor, we don't actually have a true win condition. Instead, we are looking to draw two or three (or even more) cards a turn with the combination of Jace, the Mind Sculptor, Oracle of Mul Daya, and Tireless Tracker and trust that sooner or later, this card advantage will lead to the win. This being said, the most common way we actually kill the opponent is by attacking with huge Tireless Trackers while taking several turns in a row thanks to Temporal Mastery.
- One of the nice aspects of Turbo Lands is that it's a really good Jace, the Mind Sculptor deck, not only turning the Brainstorm ability into Ancestral Recall (since we can play the lands we put back on top of our deck with Oracle of Mul Daya and Courser of Kruphix, while also gaining some life along the way) but also being able to cast Jace, the Mind Sculptor as early as Turn 2 with the help of Arbor Elf and Utopia Sprawl.
- Temporal Mastery is great in our deck. The most obvious synergy is that we can Brainstorm it back to the top of our deck with Jace, the Mind Sculptor and then cast it as a Time Walk for its miracle cost, but our deck makes so much mana that it's pretty easy to hard cast it for seven mana as well.
- In some ways, Temporal Mastery is our best finisher. While we need a Jace, the Mind Sculptor or Tireless Tracker for it to actually finish the game, in the late game, we can often set up a big combo turn(s) where we cast multiple Temporal Mastery, bounce some creatures with Jace, the Mind Sculptor, and win by attacking with our motley crew of creatures.
- Probably the most interesting aspect of the deck is how good it makes our fetch lands. If you've never played with Jace, the Mind Sculptor before, it's easy to think of fetch lands as just good mana fixing, but with the Jace Brainstorm, they are actually a source of card advantage, allowing us to shuffle away bad cards from our hand for fresh cards. However, Turbo Lands takes the value of fetches one step further because with Oracle of Mul Daya and Courser of Kruphix, they are card selection as well. In a sort of reverse Lantern Control situation, we can see the top of our library and use our fetch lands to shuffle away cards we don't want to draw to dig for our finishers, Temporal Mastery and Jace, the Mind Sculptors. All this is to say that you should value your fetch lands highly in this deck. Play non-fetch lands first and slow roll your fetch lands for as long as possible because in Turbo Lands, fetches aren't just mana fixing—they are card advantage and card selection as well.
- As far as the main deck, I'm not really sure what changes I'd make. The deck feels weird. Be warned: if you pick up the deck, you'll have a lot of games where it feels like you are flooding out and losing, but actually the deck is working exactly the way it's supposed to and you're favored to win. This being said, I'm pretty sure this is exactly how the deck is supposed to work and feel.
- As for the sideboard, I really think the deck should have at least one and maybe two more copies of Blood Moon. Even though we only had a single copy, Blood Moon was responsible for a lot of our wins. Having it consistently in matchups where it is good seems important, and one copy—even with all of our card filtering and draw—just isn't enough to make sure we always have a Blood Moon. It's also worth mentioning that the sideboard in general was designed for the Team Modern Super League meta (where we were about 100% sure that Sam Black would be playing Lantern Control), which means it probably can be improved for the wide meta (for example, unless Affinity becomes more popular thanks to Jace, the Mind Sculptor being legal, three copies of Ancient Grudge is probably overkill).
- So, should you play Turbo Lands in Modern? I think the answer is maybe. The deck felt competitive, and it seems like you should be able to win a lot of games with it, but it's really hard to recommend any Modern deck at the moment, considering the format is undergoing its biggest shakeup ever. Could Turbo Land emerge as a legitimate deck? Yes. Could it be that the decks that come out on top are really good against Turbo Lands and make the deck unplayable? Also yes. It's just really hard to make sense of what's happening in Modern at the moment with the unbannings. The good news is the deck is super unique and fun to play, so if you're looking for a spicy way to take advantage of Jace, the Mind Sculptor (and already have copies of Jace, the Mind Sculptor; if you don't, I'd wait until Masters 25 to get them because prices are absurd at the moment), give Turbo Lands a shot!
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. Don't forget to vote for next week's deck by liking, commenting on, and subscribing to Instant Deck Tech videos! 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.
