Much Abrew: Yggdrasil, Rebirth Engine (Modern)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Much Abrew About Nothing! Lately, I've been a little bit obsessed with Modern, and when today's deck came across my Twitter, I knew we had to give it a try. While the deck is an Eldrazi deck looking to cheat Emrakul, the Aeons Torn into play, the way it goes about it is super unique, with the Assassin's Creed artifact Yggdrasil, Rebirth Engine and Bloomburrow's Portent of Calamity! Are these cards actually good enough for Modern? Let's find out on today's Much Abrew!
Much Abrew: Yggdrasil, Rebirth Engine
Wrap-Up
Record-wise, Yggdrasil was solid. We ended up 4-1 in our league, with our one loss coming to Domain, which ran us over with Ragavan and a bunch of quick Territorial Kavus. As for the deck itself, we know that the Eldrazi plan is relatively strong in Modern—we've seen Eldrazi do pretty well since the release of Modern Horizons 3. So, rather than delving into the entire archetype, let's talk about the three cards that are most unique.
First, we have Sire of Seven Deaths, a card that I wasn't sure would be good enough for Modern. Sure, it has a ton of keywords, but it doesn't have haste, which made me question its strength in Modern. Well, it turns out that Sire of Seven Deaths was great, at least in this deck! While not game-ending like Emrakul, it's a solid option to cheat into play with Yggdrasil or Portent of Calamity. More importantly, it was good played fairly. We picked up a couple of wins just by hard-casting Sire of Seven Deaths and finding out that our opponent simply couldn't deal with the 7/7! While I'm still not sure that Sire of Seven Deaths is a Modern staple, it impressed me overall.
The other two interesting cards are our ways of cheating massive creatures into play in Yggdrasil, Rebirth Engine and Portent of Calamity. Honestly, I'm still not sure how good either of these cards really are. We had some matches where they were insane and others where they felt pretty medium.
The biggest upside of Yggdrasil is its speed. When things go well, we can be cheating an Emrakul into play with haste on Turn 3, which is wild and almost always going to be enough to end the game. On the other hand, we also had games where we played Yggdrasil, tapped it a few times to exile cards, and never hit a big Eldrazi, essentially wasting our mana.
Portent of Calamity is a bit different. The biggest upside of Portent is that it actually allowed us to cast a card for free, meaning that, unlike Yggdrasil, we'll get Emrakul, the Aeons Torn's or Nulldrifter's cast triggers if we hit them with Portent of Calamity, which is nice. The downside of Portent of Calamity is that we need a lot of mana to have decent odds of casting something for free, and even then, it's still possible for it to fail. Needing to hit at least four different card types among the cards it reveals to cast something for free means that for five, six, or seven mana, we need to get pretty lucky to end up with a free Emrakul. On the other hand, it becomes much easier if we can get up to 10+ mana (perhaps with the help of Kozilek's Command). The good news is that we'll still draw some cards even if it whiffs. Casting Portent of Calamity with X = 3 or 4 isn't the end of the world since it will still generate some card advantage.
So, should you play Yggdrasil Eldrazi in Modern? Based on our record today, I think the answer is yes! The deck can do some super-powerful things, although it did feel somewhat high variance where the deck feels almost unbeatable if you run well with Yggdrasil, Rebirth Engine and Portent of Calamity, but things can go wrong in a hurry when you run poorly. If you are a fan of Eldrazi or smashing your opponents with massive monsters on the cheap, give it a try! It looks a bit weird but works surprisingly well!
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.
