Modern Mayhem: Living Dominance (Modern, Magic Online)
Ravnica Allegiance brought us a new card to try out in Modern this week...
Gameplan
We already know how Living End works and we've seen it before with the older Jund variant that was all about using Street Wraith and other cyclers to fill our graveyard up with a ton of beefy creatures until we hit a critical mass of bodies, Cascade into Living End at the end of their turn, and go for the kill. But these days we've shifted to using blue!
As Foretold is a huge enabler and it used to be the lone enabler to cast Living End but now we've Electrodominance to be enabler piece five through eight. The deck is still on the same game plan of cycling big beefy creatures but switching to blue and red gives us the ability to play permission spells and to control the pace of the game for a little bit until we're able to hit our pieces and go off. Electrodominance is such a big player in this deck as it goes around the Sorcery speed issue and casts the spell right then and there meaning we can mid-combat cast Living End which is huge. We also get to cast Ancestral Vision without waiting for 4 turns!
Things of Note
We play a singleton Tormod's Crypt as a tutor target for our Tolaria West in the event our opponent's graveyard is stacked. This way the next Living End won't bite us back in the behind! Speaking of Tolaria West, this card is a beautiful utility land as it can help us grab our Living End, albeit at sorcery speed. If only we could do it at instant speed.
Graveyard hate is in the maindeck of a ton of decks right now. It's unfortunate, but that just means we've got to hardcast a bunch of vanilla 4/4s and 6/4s, which can get there because As Foretold helps us with the casting costs so it's not completely over...unless they're also hyper aggressive. A card I've seen brought in against Living End decks is Grafdigger's Cage, which doesn't actually have any kind of effect on Living End as all of our threats are coming from Exile.
Conclusion
The deck was a lot of fun but it felt like it wasn't explosive as the other graveyard synergies like Dredge or any of the Phoenix decks. It's fun to cast card's like Ancestral Vision off of Electrodominance though. I also loved making Fulminator Mage return against Tron! There may be a deck in the future that can really abuse Electrodominance but for right now, I'd probably steer towards other graveyard strategies as we still feel a tad bit slower than a chunk of the format. Also Surgical Extraction is a huge feel bad moment when it happens.
See you at the next one!
-TheAsianAvenger
