Modern Musings: A Reason to Believe in Miracles

Hey everybody! Welcome to another Modern Musings!  This week we are going to continue to look into the viability of cards from Hour of Devastation in modern.  More specifically, we are going to be looking at two decks, both featuring Reason // Believe.  One deck is a more controlling shell reminiscent of old legacy miracles, while the other focuses on playing a huge creature off the top of your deck.

Why Reason // Believe?

Wizards has mostly decided that most cheap library manipulation is too good for modern, thus why Ponder, Preordain, and Sensei’s Divining Top are all banned.  It’s possible that the printing of Reason // Believe might make library manipulation good enough to abuse again.  While Reason is not quite as good as Serum Visions, it does allow us to have some redundancy in manipulating the top of our deck, which might be just enough manipulation to matter.  While it won’t let us abuse something like Counterbalance, it should help us abuse the miracle mechanic.  You read that right, miracles are coming to modern!  However before we jump the gun, a card like this already exists in modern, its called Mystic Speculation and when people tried to make miracles work with that card, which is better than Reason // Believe at manipulating the top of the library, it was mediocre.  So if we throw Reason // Believe in the deck, then it stands that both sides of the card need to be used.

The Miracles

As far as I can tell miracles are probably the most effective way to abuse library manipulation in modern.  So what do we have to work with?  Here are all of our options:

Right away we can eliminate the green miracles as we probably won’t have too many creatures.  There’s a case to be made to have red in our deck, but we already know we are going to be U/G and white has all the best miracles.  Four colours is doable, but I’d prefer to stay three colours if possible, so that leaves us with Bant (WUG) colours.

Library Manipulation

As was said before, you need a lot of library manipulation for miracles to work so lets look at the library manipulation available to us.

Scry is key to what we are doing, we need to be able to stack the top of our deck as needed.  Mystic Speculation in particular allows a repeatable source of library manipulation and will be necessary for getting all the right pieces on top of our deck.

Abusing Miracles

Unlike in the former legacy version, we don’t have Sensei’s Divining Top, Mystical Tutor, or Brainstorm to abuse miracles.  Unfortunately, those cards are fairly unique and don’t really have redundant effects that we can replace them with.  So we need to go on a slightly different plan to deal with the problems that these cards solve.

First up we have Sensei’s Divining Top, while we can’t replace the first half of the card, drawing at instant speed is definitely something we can fix.

I love cards that serve dual purposes, and cycling is a perfect example of what we want from our instant speed draw.  Meanwhile Horizon Canopy  and Think Twice do similar things sitting on the board or in the graveyard.

Next up we have Mystical Tutor, while we can’t tutor a miracle from our deck, we can tutor them up from our graveyard:

Noxious Revival allows us to both reuse any miracles we’ve already cast as well as get any miracles that we may have discarded over the course of the game.

This gets us to Brainstorm, a card that allowed legacy miracles to stack their deck, draw at instant speed, and get any pesky miracles out of their hand.  We can only manage a poor imitation:

Ideas Unbound does the job of getting pesky miracles drawn at inopportune times our of our hand and into our graveyard where they can be reset to the top of our deck by Noxious Revival at our leisure.  Jace does much the same thing, but also allows us to cast miracles at instant speed.

Abusing Reason // Believe

So far we’ve set up our deck to allow us to stack our deck, discard unwanted cards, and put cards from our graveyard on top of our library.  Next we should figure out what creature or creatures we should be cheating into play.  The classic choices of course would be Emrakul, the Aeons Torn and/or Griselbrand.  The trouble with Emrakul, the Aeons Torn is that she shuffles your graveyard back into your deck if she ever goes there, which is a non-bo with our Reason // Believe and Noxious Revival plans.  This could create a situation where she sits in your hand and you can’t do anything with her.  So what are some other creatures besides we could use (besides Griselbrand)?  Terastodon, Iona, Shield of Emeria, and Jin-Gitaxias, Core Augur all spring to mind, but none quite have the power or inevitability that Emrakul or Griselbrand provides.  And despite the non-bo I think it still might be worth it to run a singleton copy of Emrakul just to see if we can make it work.

The Deck

This is the version of the deck I ended up with and it seems to function reasonably well.  This is by no means a polished version of the deck, as it definitely still feels a little clunky at times.

Bonus: Aggressively Believing

Thats all for this week guys, don’t forget to tune in next week, and as always tell me what you think in the comments.