Much Abrew: Ephemerate-amentals (Modern)
Hello, everyone! Welcome to another episode of Much Abrew About Nothing. This week, we're heading to Modern to play one of my favorite tribes: Elementals! While we've seen Elemental decks have some success in Modern in the past, today's build is a bit different, being built around the new evoke Elementals from Modern Horizons 2, like Fury, Endurance, and Solitude, Risen Reef, and Ephemerate. Together, they can keep the opponent's board clear while also generating an absurd amount of card advantage—to the point where, if we aren't careful, we could end up drawing our entire deck over the course of a few turns! How good are the new evoke Elementals with Risen Reef in Modern? Let's find out on this week's Much Abrew About Nothing!
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Much Abrew: Ephemerate-amentals
Discussion
- Record-wise, Ephemerate-amentals was solid. We went 4-1 in our league, with our one loss coming to Temur Cascade where our opponent simply managed to overwhelm us with Rhinos from Crashing Footfalls.
- As I mentioned in the intro, Risen Reef is the key card of the deck. While it's a solid card-advantage engine for an Elemental deck in general, it's especially crazy with the evoke elementals Fury, Solitude, and Endurance. Normally, having to exile a card from hand to evoke cards like Fury and Solitude is pretty painful because we essentially 2-for-1 ourselves. But with a Risen Reef on the battlefield, we'll draw a card when the evoked Elemental enters the battlefield, which mostly negates the card-disadvantage drawback.
- Things get even crazier once Ephemerate enters the fray. Not only does the instant allow us to blink things like Risen Reef to draw more cards or save our stuff from removal, but it also makes cards like Fury and Solitude even more devastating since we can cast them for free with their evoke cost, Ephemerate them with their sacrifice trigger on the stack, and keep them around permanently. Plus, getting multiple enters-the-battlefield triggers out of Fury and Solitude is especially devastating against creature decks, allowing us to kill multiple creatures on the cheap and keep our opponent's board clean.
- The other sweet Risen Reef synergy in the deck is with Flamekin Harbinger. Normally, Flamekin Harbinger tutors an Elemental to the top of our deck (making it a good way to find things like Fury or Solitude for the next turn), but if we have Risen Reef on the battlefield, we can stack things so that Flamekin Harbinger resolves first and then Risen Reef resolves, immediately drawing us whatever we tutored for!
- Our last Elemental is Omnath, Locus of Creation, which does two important things in our deck. First, combined with all of the lands that Risen Reef can put into play, it's one of our fastest ways to close out the game, often offering four direct damage a turn along with a solid 4/4 body. Second, as a four-color card, Omnath, Locus of Creation is one of our best cards to exile to evoke our other Elementals since we can exile it to cast Solitude, Fury, Endurance, or our sideboard copy of Subtlety, helping to ensure that no matter what Elemental we want to evoke, we have the right color card in hand to make it happen.
- I have to say: I absolutely loved this deck. We played some really long, interesting, grindy games; drew tons of cards; and found a bunch of cool synergies. It's on my shortlist of favorite new Modern decks to come out of Modern Horizons 2. It's an absolute blast to play!
- So, should you play Ephemerate-amentals in Modern? I think the answer is yes, with one big asterisk: the deck is absurdly expensive, coming in at 1,350 tix on Magic Online and over $1,800 in paper, which might make it the most expensive Modern deck we've ever played. The good news is that even though the price is high, the deck is really unique and fun to play, and it felt quite competitive. If you like drawing cards and sweet evoke synergies, you'll have a ton of fun with the deck...if you can afford it.
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.
