Much Abrew: Mono-White Legends (w/ special guest Mana Tithe) | Modern
Hello, everyone! Welcome to another episode of Much Abrew About Nothing. One thing you might not know about Much Abrew is that there actually are a bunch of unwritten rules guiding the series. One of the big ones is that if someone manages a finish in Modern with a Mana Tithe deck, we have to play it, because there is very little better in Magic than getting someone with a Mana Tithe. As such, we're playing Mono-White Legends today (with special guest, Mana Tithe)! Even apart from Mana Tithe, the deck is pretty interesting. While it essentially is a mono-white aggro deck, it's heavily built around legends, which in turn allow us to use Mox Amber to get off to some extremely fast starts. The plan is to dump our hand as quickly as possible, use Mana Tithe to disrupt our opponent a little bit, and hopefully pick up some fast wins by beating down with janky legends. Can it work? How many Mana Tithes can we resolve? Let's get to the video and find out!
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Much Abrew: Mono-White Legends (with special guest, Mana Tithe)
Discussion
- Record-wise, we ended up going 4-1 with Mono-White Legend, with our one loss coming to GB Elves, which is a deck I'm pretty sure we'll never beat. (It's probably theoretically possible if we draw a bunch of fliers and Force of Virtue, but Elves are so good at building a board of random 1/1s and 2/2s that it's almost impossible for us to kill an Elves player on the ground.) Elves aside, the deck actually felt quite solid, being fast enough to keep up with aggro and resilient enough to fight through the removal of midrange and control.
- At a glance, Mono-White Legends looks weird. We're playing a lot of cards that typically don't show up in Modern, specifically because they are legends and turn on Mox Amber. Speaking of Mox Amber, it's an extremely high-variance card. At its best, it allows us to get off to some almost unbeatable fast starts where we can play two one-drops like Isamaru, Hound of Konda, Kytheon, Hero of Akros, and Toolcraft Exemplar on Turn 1 into a three-drop on Turn 2. At its worst, it's a dead draw because we don't have a legend on the battlefield. Across our matches, we had some games where it felt like Mox Amber was our best card and essentially won us the game, while in other games, we drew multiples without finding a legend, and it basically lost us the game. There isn't much middle ground with Mox Amber. It's never merely good—it's either absurd or horrible.
- As far as Mana Tithe, it's really strong in the deck. No one expects your mono-white deck to counter their spell, so no one plays around it. The aggressiveness of our deck further powers up the instant. The biggest drawback of Mana Tithe is that it is usually pretty bad in the late game since our opponent will likely have the mana to pay the tithe. Thanks to all of our aggressive one-drops, Mono-White Legends is pretty good at shortening the game, making it more likely that Mana Tithe will be a hard counter. Being able to flood the board with creatures and then counter an Anger of the Gods or Damnation is a huge game-winning swing.
- The other card in the deck that over-performed was Force of Virtue. In general, we end up casting it for free by exiling a white card from our hand, which would normally be painful (essentially two-for-one-ing ourselves), but because our deck is built around legends, we often had an extra copy of something like Thalia, Guardian of Thraben, Kytheon, Hero of Akros, or Isamaru, Hound of Konda that we couldn't cast anyway because of the legend rule to pitch to Force of Virtue, which mostly solves the two-for-one problem.
- The one card in the deck that I'm really unsure of is Mishra's Bauble. Other than helping to grow Toolcraft Exemplar, it doesn't really have any synergy in our deck. It's just a weird, slow, free cantrip. It seems like the slot might be better spent on something like Thraben Inspector, which still lets us draw a card and add an artifact to the battlefield for Toolcraft Exemplar but also gives us another white card for Force of Virtue and another body on the battlefield for attacking.
- So, should you play Mono-White Legends (with special guest, Mana Tithe) in Modern? I think the answer is yes. The deck felt solid and explosive, although it can be a bit inconsistent at times thanks to the legend rule. While it isn't quite in our budget range (mostly because Mox Amber costs $30 a copy), it is fairly inexpensive for a Modern deck and felt like it had the power to win quite a few games!
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.
