Modern Musings: Esper Superfriends in Modern

Hey everyone!  Welcome to another Modern Musings!  Today we are going to take a look at what I think is a super fun deck post War of the Spark: Esper Superfriends.

Obviously we got a lot of new planeswalkers in War of the Spark, most of which are quite powerful.  White, Black, and Blue received the best ones though it seems.  Among the most powerful being Ashiok, Dream Render, Narset, Parter of Veils,  Teferi, Time Raveler, and Dovin, Hand of Control.  All of these planeswalkers have powerful static abilities in Modern.  Ashiok and Narset in particular are rather nasty.  An early Narset neuters Faithless Looting and other such effects, while an early Ashiok stops all tutoring effects.  Dovin taxes your opponent, while Teferi stops your opponent from reacting to anything during your turn.  All of these effects are super powerful in Modern.  That being said, there are a number of matchups where Ashiok and Dovin are somewhat dead cards, so they are relegated to the sideboard unfortunately.

I have played a couple versions of this deck over the past couple weeks and after looking around at what other people have done I think this is probably either the best or close to the best configuration:

This list feels incredibly tight and very good.  There are a lot of little things going on in this deck so I thought I’d break down a few of the more satisfying interactions that I’ve managed to pull off with Teferi Timebender:

• With any discard effect, if your opponent is low on cards, you can lock them out of their draw step and effectively Time Walk your opponent.
• Blocking with Shambling Vent, then casting Collective Brutality to give -2/-2 to their Monastery Swiftspear and taking a Lightning Bolt from their hand that they forgot they couldn’t cast in response.
• Bouncing my own Wall of Omens for maximum value (so good).
• Casting Supreme Verdict on my opponent’s combat step.

Teferi feels so dumb in so many situations, he really does a good job of breaking the norm on interacting with what your opponent is doing.

Kaya, Orzhov Usurper continues to over-perform in every deck I put her in, gaining me life in the aggro matchups, and randomly exiling random important 1 drops my opponent was playing such as AEther Vial and Amulet of Vigor.

Ultimately, I feel that if you want to play a control deck in modern, Esper Superfriends is a great choice for you.  Anyway, that’s all for this week!  Tune in next week for those Modern Horizons Spoiler review.