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Much Abrew: Modern Lands (Modern, Magic Online)


Hello, everyone! Welcome to another episode of Much Abrew About Nothing. Last week during our Instant Deck Techs, we looked at a spicy Fishbowl Thursday deck looking to repeatedly throw lands at the opponent with Molten Vortex and Seismic Assault to (hopefully) pick up the victory. Well, we're going to give Modern Lands a shot today and see if the deck can actually compete in the format! The idea of the deck is to stick one of our enchantments and then use cards like Faithless Looting to dig through our deck until we have Life from the Loam to keep returning lands from our graveyard to our hand. Finally, we finish our opponent off with the help of The Flame of Keld boosting the damage from Molten Vortex and Seismic Assault when it hits the third lore counter. Is throwing lands at our opponent's face a legitimate plan in Modern? Let's get to the video and find out; then, we can talk more about the deck!

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Much Abrew: Modern Lands (Modern)

Discussion

  • As for our record, we technically finished our league with a 2-3, but we played (and lost to) Burn twice, so I replaced the second Burn matchup with another game that happened to be a win. 
  • Modern Lands is weird. From our matches, it felt like we had some great matchups (against random creature decks like Death and Taxes) and some horrible matchups (against any sort of fast combo or even aggro deck). The upside of Modern Lands is that, apart from running into graveyard hate, it has a ton of inevitability—throwing lands at our opponent's face is eventually going to win the game. The downside is that the plan is pretty slow, even with the rituals and Simian Spirit Guide to theoretically speed things up a bit.
  • The deck does offer a surprising amount of damage in some situations—so surprising, in fact, that we lost a game we should have won against Burn because we underestimated just how much damage we cold do with the third lore counter on The Flame of Keld. If we can actually live long enough to ultimate the Saga, it's fairly easy to 20 our opponent with the help of our other damage-dealing enchantments.
  • One of the spiciest cards in the deck is Burning Vengeance, but I'm not 100% sure it's the right call for the deck. While the amount of damage Burning Vengeance can deal with the help of Flame Jab and The Flame of Keld is impressive, the problem we ran into a few times is that Burning Vengeance doesn't deal any damage right away. Against creature decks, we often want to play something like Seismic Assault and immediately discard lands to kill our opponent's creatures and stay alive. This isn't possible with Burning Vengeance, since casting cards from our graveyard costs mana. While a couple of copies is probably fine because there's a lot of upside for the late game, playing four Seismic Assaults and one or two Burning Vengeance would probably make the deck more competitive.
  • I'm also a bit confused by the rituals. While playing our enchantments quicker is nice, both Seismic Assault and Molten Vortex require lands to do damage, so ritualing them out early isn't always that helpful. Playing some sweepers like Anger of the Gods instead could be a good idea—Modern Lands tends to struggle with really big creatures and also go-wide creature decks that can overwhelm our ability to shoot down our opponent's board with Seismic Assault and Molten Vortex
  • The other issue with the deck is that it picks up on a lot of fringe hate. It seems like almost every deck in Modern is playing Surgical Extraction and / or graveyard hate like Relic of Progenitus, Rest in Peace, or Leyline of the Void. All of these cards make it really difficult to win, since it's hard to actually deal 20 damage if we can't get lands back from our graveyard with Life from the Loam. While we do have a lot of ways to destroy graveyard hate in our sideboard, it seems like Modern Lands is in a tough spot in the metagame at the moment as a graveyard deck that can't realistically win by Turn 3 or 4. 
  • All in all, Modern Lands was fun, but it's a bit too slow and easy to hate out to really be competitive in the current meta. 
  • So, should you play Modern Lands? I think the answer is not right now. Obviously, you can play it for fun and win some games with it in the right matchup, but there's so much graveyard hate in Modern at the moment (and so many fast combo decks, which are tough matchups for our slow but inevitable plan) that it's hard to imagine Modern Lands consistently winning. If things shift in the future and people start playing more creature decks like Death and Taxes or Modern Humans and less graveyard hate, it might be time to update Modern Lands a bit and give it another shot. For now, it's a unique and fun option, but it just doesn't line up that well with the metagame.

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.



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