Thoroughly Modern Magic

So standing at the tram stop waiting for the tram is possibly not the best place to start the Friday blog. Today I wanted to look at modern, I remember when they were calling it super-extended before wizards revealed its true name of modern.

Goyf - as big a pain in Modern as it is in Legacy...

The premise of modern is very simple - cards printed in the "modern" card frame from eighth edition onwards are valid in the format. There is quite a large banned list which I feel needs to be listed in full:

The following cards are banned in Modern tournaments:

• Ancestral Vision
• Ancient Den
• Bitterblossom
• Blazing Shoal
• Chrome Mox
• Cloudpost
• Dark Depths
• Dread Return
• Glimpse of Nature
• Golgari Grave-Troll
• Great Furnace
• Green Sun's Zenith
• Hypergenesis
• Jace, the Mind Sculptor
• Mental Misstep
• Ponder
• Preordain
• Punishing Fire
• Rite of Flame
• Seat of the Synod
• Sensei's Divining Top
• Stoneforge Mystic
• Skullclamp
• Sword of the Meek
• Tree of Tales
• Umezawa's Jitte
• Vault of Whispers
• Wild Nacatl

The idea of the banned list is to stop some of the more massively broken deck archetypes from being played. Having said that they continue to tweak the banned list and have recently lifted the ban on Valakut, the molten pinnacle.

So you played lands and won the game...great, that took some skill...

This I feel is a massive mistake as Valakut is a very negative play experience for people and is likely to see more people rage quit than it is to bring new players into the format.

This card says "go stick your Valakut where the sun don't shine..."

Valakut aside, I thought we would look at some of the prime cards in modern and the decks they are played in.

The lovely Liliana of the Veil is a big part of Modern Jund (BRG).  Her ultimate can spell disaster for decks that require the urza lands to ramp into huge things like Karn and Eldrazi.  Dark Confident is another major player in this deck giving massive card draw to an already strong deck.



Another broken artifact from the Mirrodin block.  Combined with something that plays lots of Islands (like Merfolk) this card means that all of your opponent's best guys are now yours.

+

The Urza's lands (Mine, Powerplant and Tower) allow you to ramp very effectively into the Eldrazi and the old adage of "Play Emrakul - win" was never more apt, there is a reason my twitter account is called @Emrakulftw ...

Even though Golgari Grave Troll is banned and Lion's Eye Diamond is an older card Dredge is still a possible deck to face in the format.  As mentioned previously dredge is just not playing magic in the accepted way of things.



Storming out and playing a million spells is always fun and a sneaky threat in Modern.  Actually doesn't see that much play but the threat of it is enough to have those sideboards twitching...

There is still many things I would like to say about Modern but this blog seems to be dragging on a bit so I will turn this one into a two parter I think and reserve the second part for next Friday.  Don't forget that tonight is Standard in both FNMs and this Sunday is Steel City.  See you all on Monday with the list for my first RtR pauper deck.