Modern Musings: Even More Sleeper Cards in Modern

Hey everyone, and welcome to another Modern Musings! This week we are going to be talking about sleeper cards in Modern.  If that sounds familiar, its because I’ve done this before.  Today I am going to be doing things much the same as I did last time, but instead I’m going to go a little more in depth and instead talk about just 3 cards.

#1 Untaidake, the Cloud Keeper

First up is Untaidake, the Cloud Keeper, a card that has recently gained a lot of playability due to the planeswalker rule change.  Note that the wording on this particularly states that you use the mana to play legendary spells instead of just creatures.  This means that this land produces mana for planeswalkers, as well as enchantments, etc.  Time and time again, it has been shown that fast mana is just too good in modern.  Eye of Ugin, Summer Bloom, and Cloudpost are all prime examples of this.  Eldrazi Temple remains unbanned, but no one doubts its ability to churn out some really unfair plays.  With Untaidake though, because you can only use its mana on legendary spells, it puts some pretty hefty deckbuilding restrictions on any deck you put it in.  It means that the majority of spells in the deck have to be legendary, which can be a pretty tall order.  On top of that it only produces colorless mana, which restricts the cards you can use even further.  The 2 life is not negligible either, as anyone who has played with Ancient Tomb will tell you.

Ultimately though, this card will be playable at some point, there just have to be enough good legendary cards to abuse it.  Interestingly, Untaidake is not the only card that produces lots of mana when dealing with legendary permanents.  Check out Honor-Worn Shaku:

While sadly not legendary itself it really starts to produce a lot of mana once you have even 2 legendary permanents on board.  It could really fit in well with this theoretical legendary deck synergizing with cards like Oath of Nissa or Oath of Ajani in some kind of planeswalker deck.  I’m not exactly sure how good this actually is, but it seems kind of sweet in theory.

#2  Heartless Summoning

Let me reiterate this: fast mana is too good in modern.  It’s only a matter of time before someone figures out some broken configuration of this deck, or wizards prints a creature that is really powerful when discounted.  There is a version of the Eldrazi deck that utilizes Heartless Summoning, and while its pretty good it’s missing just a little something to make the deck tier 1 (it sits somewhere mid-tier 2 right now I think).  I think this is the version that most likely would be pushed over the edge if something were printed for the deck.  The deck currently has a few strong interactions going for it, like being able to turn 4 Conduit of Ruin into World Breaker or Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger on turn 5 depending on how many Eldrazi Temples you have.  Another cool interaction with this deck is running the Eternal Scourge + Relic of Progenitus package for infinite cheap blockers.  I think that it would probably take another printing of Eldrazi to break this deck, something that I imagine we won’t be getting very soon since we just had two recent blocks that were both about Eldrazi.

#3 Scrap Trawler

Right when this card was printed I immediately thought that it might make eggs KCI (Krark-Clan Ironworks) decks top tier again.  Thankfully I was proven wrong (sort of, they definitely got a boost and are probably tier 1.5 now), but I think it remains one of the more dangerous cards in modern.  I’m not exactly sure what card or cards Wizards will need to print to make this broken, but most likely it will be another Egg-Style card or a Myr Retriever effect.  I kind of doubt that another Second Sunrise would be printed given that they had to ban it the first time, but that would also throw the deck onto the top of tier 1.

Anyway, that is all for this week. Those are my picks for the cards that will most likely break Modern at some point, so let me know what you think in the comments.  Are there any other cards you think are on the cusp of breaking out in Modern?  Or do you think none of my picks have any chance of ever making waves? Join me next week when we talk about the future of Modern.