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Much Abrew: Semblance Eggs (Modern, Magic Online)


Hello, everyone! Welcome to another episode of Much Abrew About Nothing. Last week, during our Instant Deck Techs, I made the mistake of telling the YouTubes that they shouldn't make me play the new Krark-Clan Ironworks-less Eggs deck Semblance Eggs in Modern, which of course means that the YouTubes wanted me to play the deck. As such, we're heading to Modern today to see if this new build of Eggs, using a combination of Grinding Station and Semblance Anvil to sort of build its own version of Krark-Clan Ironworks, is actually competitive in the format. The main idea of the deck is to get down a Semblance Anvil to make all of our artifacts cheap (with most being free) and then use Grinding Station to mill our opponent out of the game, with the help of cards like Scrap Trawler and Myr Retriever to keep looping artifacts from our graveyard. Can a deck that looks suspiciously like KCI work with its namesake Krark-Clan Ironworks being banned? Let's get to the video and find out; then, we can talk more about the deck!

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Much Abrew: Semblance Eggs

Discussion

  • We played a competitive league with Semblance Eggs and ended up 2-3. I've never been happier to post a bad record with a deck—it seems unlikely that Semblance Eggs really is the second coming of Krark-Clan Ironworks. Instead, the deck feels at most like a semi-playable third-tier option.
  • That said, the deck is really difficult to play reasonably, let alone well, so it's likely that an experienced KCI player would have eked out another win or two with the deck (although most of our losses were blowouts where our opponent drew a bunch of hate cards that kept our deck from doing anything meaningful).
  • One thing that I should have done more aggressively in some matchups was mill ourselves to fill our graveyard, in the hopes of finding Myr Retrievers and Scrap Trawlers. The main combo of the deck is two copies of Myr Retriever with Semblance Anvil (exiling an artifact) and Grinding Station, which gives us an infinite mill loop where we can keep sacrificing and returning Myr Retrievers until we empty our opponent's library with Grinding Station. In the early game, it's almost always better to mill ourselves and then wait until we have a chance to mill our opponent's entire library in one turn before turning our Grinding Station on our opponent.
  • Perhaps the biggest problem with the deck is that it's much worse against hate cards than the old Krark-Clan Ironworks Eggs deck. Part of what made KCI so good was that Krark-Clan Ironworks could sacrifice artifacts at instant speed, which allows for tricks like Scrap Trawler or Myr Retriever returning a card about to be exiled with Surgical Extraction to fizzle the exile. Semblance Anvil makes the combo sorcery speed, since we can't really use it to add mana with a card on the stack, which makes hate cards much more effective against this build of Eggs.
  • Even beyond Surgical Extraction, it seems like the format is very prepared for this style of deck. Stony Silence and other artifact hate are popular thanks to Tron and Hardened Scales, while graveyard hate like Rest in Peace and Leyline of the Void is essential for beating decks like Dredge and Izzet Phoenix. The old builds of KCI didn't especially care, but at least based on our experience, Semblance Eggs has a much more difficult time beating the powerful hate cards that almost every deck in Modern is playing.
  • On the other hand, Sai, Master Thopterist is pretty awesome. Rather than going for a degenerate combo, playing this deck made me want to build some sort of semi-fair Sai deck to take advantage of the three-drop's power. 
  • All in all, Semblance Eggs felt around the right power level for Eggs combo in Modern. While I'm sure it would be better in the hands of a serious KCI pilot, Semblance Eggs felt more like a semi-competitive combo deck than a deck that has a spot in the top tier of the format. The combo itself is less consistent, since it needs more pieces (Grinding Station and Semblance Anvil, rather than just Krark-Clan Ironworks), Semblance Anvil is much worse than Krark-Clan Ironworks in general, and hate cards are a lot more effective. While I could see someone like Matt Nass taking a tournament by surprise with this watered-down build of KCI, in general, I'm not sure we have anything to fear from Semblance Eggs. It doesn't feel consistent or resilient enough for the average player to win with on a consistent basis.

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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