Modern Musings: Dominaria Spoilers Part 2

Hey everyone and welcome to another Modern Musings! This week we are going to return to spoilers and take a look at all the new goodies Dominaria might have for Modern.  So far the set looks great has quite a lot of powerful for competitive Magic players and Commander players alike, which is not an easy thing to pull off.

Before we get too much into it, I want to make a little addendum to Damping Sphere.  First off, how insane is it that this card is an uncommon?!  I’m pretty sure we all expected this to be a rare, especially since it was pre-ordering for $10.  If there was ever a set to pick up a common/uncommon playset of it would be this one.  Secondly, there have been people saying that this will lock people out of the game with Heartbeat of Spring, however I don’t believe this to be the case since Heartbeat is a triggered ability making it the enchantment adding the mana instead of your land.  I could be wrong about this and if I am then Modern might have a sweet new prison combo.

Torgaar, Famine Incarnate

The first card I want to talk about this week is Torgaar, Famine Incarnate, and he is an interesting one.  I’m always interested in cards that can be played for much cheaper than they should be, and this guy fits the bill perfectly.  We’ve seen how powerful cost reduction mechanics can be in cards like Tasigur, the Golden Fang and Gurmag Angler.  Unlike those cards though you actually have to sacrifice some board presence to cast this guy.  To maximize his value, you need to sacrifice 3 creatures to make him cost BB, which for a 7/6 that sets your opponent’s life total to 10 seems like a pretty good rate.  Torgaar actually reminds me a lot of Salvage Titan, a card that unfortunately doesn’t see any play.  The difference between this and Salvage titan is that even if they remove this card, it’s already done a heap of damage to your opponent.  It seems to me that while it’s possible to cast this on turn two with things like Ornithopter and Memnite, I feel like its more likely it might be played in a deck where your creatures want to die, like with Tukatongue Thallid or Blisterpod.

Skirk Prospector

This card goes a long way towards making some kind of goblin combo deck viable in Modern.  Skirk Prospector has terrified Commander players for years, so it should be interesting to see what he can do in Modern.  Combined with cards like Krenko’s Command, you can power out cards like Inferno Titan on turn 3.  Truly, this guy can be a sick mana engine in the right deck, and could birth a new goblin-y style free-win red deck.  Typically any card that has the ability to generate a ton of mana in the early turns is worth looking into, and I look forward to brewing with this guy.

Merfolk Trickster

Merfolk seem to be getting a lot of love recently, and this guy is no joke, he is actually preferable to Harbinger of the Tides in some cases, like against affinity or infect.  Against infect, you can either prevent them from attacking with their Blighted Agent or wait for them to attack with it, flash this guy in targeting the agent, then block and kill it.  Same goes with affinity, you can use this to block things like Vault Skirge or Signal Pest.  It can even tap down an Emrakul, the Aeons Torn before it attacks, avoiding that pesky annihilator trigger.  Now there are still plenty of cases where Harbinger is probably better, but Trickster definitely gives it a run for its money.

Mox Amber

Moxen are never something to be written off without first testing, and while this one looks to be easily the worst of all the moxen, that still might make it very good.  The first thing that I noticed about this Mox is that it only counts your legendary creatures and planeswalkers, so no Oath of Nissa shenanigans.  So to really abuse this we need to probably be looking at 1-drop legendary creatures.  As it so happens there are 10 legendary creatures with a CMC of 1 in Modern and 4 of them are white.  Kytheon, Hero of Akros // Gideon, Battle-Forged and Isamaru, Hound of Konda are the best by far.  The main problem that I see with a deck like this is that it suffers from the dichotomy of wanting a bunch of redundant cheap legendary creatures, but also not wanting to draw a bunch of the same of one legend.  Frank Karsten thinks that maybe this will be good in some kind of Erayo, Soratami Ascendant shell.  We’ll have to see if there is a solution to this, but we might see the very first bad mox.  Or not.

Anyway, that’s all for this week, let me know what you think in the comments, and I’ll see you next time!