Modern Musings: Decks to Play for GP Vegas

Hey everyone! Welcome to another Modern Musings!  Today we are going to talk about what decks I think you should play walking into the Modern portion of GP Vegas.

The State of Modern

Modern has seen some pretty significant changes over the past year.  We’ve seen the emergence of not one, but two dominant decks, and the unbannings of both Jace, the Mind Sculptor and Bloodbraid Elf.  Both cards that were once considered too good for Modern play.  After seeing very little to no play, Jace is finally showing up in some U/W control decks alongside the new and powerful Teferi, Hero of Dominaria.  Meanwhile, the cascading elf has seen quite a bit play in multiple decks, most notably Jund and Ponza.  As for the dominant decks, I am of course talking about Humans and B/R Hollow One.  These two decks have shown themselves to be absolute powerhouses over the past couple of months, posting more than a few wins.  In case you aren’t Familiar with the lists here they are:

Humans is a truly terrifying deck to play against, as they can apply pressure to your life total while disrupting your gameplan with all-stars Kitesail Freebooter and Meddling Mage.  This deck has very few bad matchups, with G/R Tron being the worst.  Damping Sphere made this matchup a little less bad, but Tron has too many cards that deal with the Humans matchup effectively.  Ponza and Mono-Red Prison can be tough matchups too with their early Blood Moon plays, which without AEther Vial or Noble Hierarch in play usually leads to a loss for the Humans deck.  That all being said, Humans is a crazy strong choice for most of the meta, as it pretty much destroys most other matchups.

Now let’s take a look at the other dominant deck, B/R Hollow One:

At first glance this deck looks kind of janky with high variance, including 4 copies of Burning Inquiry and Goblin Lore.  However, the deck is considerably lower variance than most assume because of the fact that so many of your cards work from the graveyard.  This strongly mitigates the “discard at random” factor, and in the case of Burning Inquiry, effects your opponent considerably more than you.  A turn one Burning Inquiry on the play can (and often does) turn your opponent’s reasonable keep into a terrible one with the right discards, as their deck is probably less suited to discarding cards this way.

I think that if you plan to be competitive at GP Vegas these two decks are the ones to look at practicing the most.  However, despite the dominance of these two decks, they aren’t the end all be all of the format.  There are some other reasonable choices.

The Reasonable Choices

So let’s say you don’t want to play either of the decks mentioned above, what do you play?

G/R or Mono Green Tron: As mentioned before it has a good matchup against Humans, is extremely consistent and an overall solid choice.  As a bonus, it seems that U/W control has been having a bit of resurgence recently, and historically Tron has been very good against those decks.

G/R Land Destruction aka Ponza:  Blood Moon is always a powerful card, and this deck is probably the best shell for that card.  This deck has a reasonable matchup against most decks, with a chance for explosive starts on Arbor Elf and Utopia Sprawl.

Krark-Clan Ironworks Combo: KCI combo is the combo deck of choice right now, however, I say that with the caveat that I can only recommend playing it if you have extensive experience with the deck.  The deck can be technically challenging at times and requires a fair amount of focus to execute perfectly.  Personally, I tend to steer clear of decks like this, mostly because GPs tend to be lengthy and exhausting ventures, which can lead to lots of simple mistakes when playing such decks.

Affinity: Affinity is a deck that has been good in competitive Modern for a long time, and continues to have a strong presence in the format.  Affinity is faster than most decks in Modern, and has a surprising amount of resiliency to disruption.  With a lot of hate focused on Humans and Hollow One, it’s possible that hate for everyone’s favorite artifact deck might be on the lighter side.  On top of that there have been a number of lists that have been playing with Karn, Scion of Urza and The Antiquities War, both giving the deck a potentially powerful late game finisher that it was previously lacking.  If you’re a practiced Affinity player, then it’s a solid choice for this GP.

Anyway, that’s all for this week guys. Don’t forget to let me know what you’re bringing to GP Vegas!  I hope to see you there!