Hey everyone! Today on Modern Musings we are going to look at some potential new brews with the sweet new legends from Dominaria.  Specifically I want to try to utilize the power of Mox Amber.  Even though this card looks bad, a mox is still a mox and it still has the potential to be powerful.  Today I want to talk about a deck that I designed to specifically use the power of Mox Amber to its fullest.

Mox Amber is the most restrictive mox to date, but this isn’t to say it isn’t still powerful.  I’ve said it over and over again, almost every time Wizards prints fast mana, it ends up being broken and then subsequently banned in Modern.  Eye of Ugin, Summer Bloom, and Chrome Mox are all prime examples of how getting too much mana too early can lead to really unfair games of Magic.  Granted, Mox Amber is significantly weaker than those cards, but I still think it might have a place in a strong tempo/aggro deck.  The advantage that this deck would have over it’s more traditional burn counterpart is that it gets to play more expensive, powerful creatures while also having recursion for the removal-heavy matchups.

Turning on Mox Amber

Choosing our colors correctly is absolutely essential in optimizing Mox Amber.  The key to this, as I’m sure you are all aware, is the density of one-drop legendary creatures.  Because of this, we are pretty much locked into white as you can see here:

Number of Legendary One-Drops by Color:

White: 3

Blue: 0

Black: 0

Red: 2

Green: 2

White wins at three, and I think has actual best selection of creatures as well:

Though Rhys is tempting to build around, we don’t have any other token producers, so we are leaving him out of our build.  Having two different one-drop legends is pretty good in one deck, but we really need a third to help improve consistency, and Zurgo Bellstriker is really perfect for this type of deck.  This makes things kind of awkward for us, because Mox Amber only produces colors according to what legends are in play, which means if you lead off with say Isamaru, Hound of Konda, that means you won’t have red mana off of your mox for a Zurgo Bellstriker.  Okay, this is more than a little awkward.  A good compromise is playing a card like Figure of Destiny; while he’s not a legendary, he can be played with either red or white mana, thus making an otherwise awkward draw a little more tolerable.

Enough about our 1-drops, though. What about the rest of our creatures?

The Disruption

The Thalias are both fine additions to the deck, Guardian of Thraben protects us from unfair decks like storm while also slowing down our opponent.  Heretic Cathar allows our creatures safe passage to our opponents life total through things like Tarmogoyfs and Death’s Shadows.  Having our opponent’s lands come into play tapped is pretty nice too.

The Filler

Smuggler’s Copter allows us to discard potentially useless duplicate legendaries for a fresh new card.  Selfless Spirit is a must-include in a deck like this against effects like Anger of the Gods.  Kari Zev, Skyship Raider is just a nice hard-to-block beater.

The Recursion

These two serve at the core of the deck’s ability to grind out games.  Teshar, Ancestor’s Apostle takes advantage of the fact our deck has mostly creature spells that are CMC three or less.  In fact, most of our deck triggers Teshar’s ability, most notably: Mox Amber.  This is what makes Teshar so good, because you can play her with four mana, then immediately cast a Mox Amber triggering its ability for value.  Alesha, Who Smiles at Death is a little more awkward than Teshar, but recurs most of our deck all the same.  The bonus here is that Alesha can actually return Teshar to the field for maximum value.

The Cherry on Top

Ohhh yeah, like a Dust Buster, Hokori cleans up games nice and quick.  Kidding aside, Hokori, Dust Drinker actually works really well with what our deck is trying to do.  It grinds our opponent to a screeching halt, is legendary, and can be recurred with Alesha.  In addition to all of that, we break the symmetry very well with Mox Amber, allowing us to still cast 1-2 mana spells every turn while our opponent struggles.

The Deck

The numbers probably need some turning, having so many legendaries in one deck makes it difficult to gauge how many duplicates you’re actually supposed to have.

Anyway, that’s all for this week. I hope you enjoyed the article! Next week we are going to brew with even more legendaries, this time utilizing the normally terrible, but intriguing, Untaidake, the Cloud Keeper.