Modern Musings: Modern Pro Tour Predictions

Hey everyone!  Welcome to another Modern Musings!  This week we are going to talk about what I think are the most likely decks to take home the Pro Tour Trophy. Despite my misgivings about having a modern Pro Tour, I must admit that this is the first Pro Tour in a while that has made me excited.  Finally, though I’m writing this before the Pro Tour, there is a chance it won’t get published until after the tournament is finished.  If that happens you can look through my predictions and laugh at all the stuff I get wrong.

The Favorites

Modern is a pretty diverse field, with a ton of viable decks.  That being said, however, some decks are still better than others.  I think that Eldrazi Tron, G/R Tron, Lantern, Death’s Shadow, Affinity, and Storm all have a good chance at taking home the prize. I can go even further though, and rank these from most likely to win down to least likely to win.

#1) Affinity

This deck pulls out a lot of free wins and rewards good play, making a very attractive choice for many pros.  It also helps that many of them have piloted a version of the deck at one point or another, so they probably will feel very comfortable in choosing it. I would be very surprised if we don’t see a copy or two of this deck in the top 8.

#2) Lantern Control:

Kaladesh and Aether Revolt made this deck a lot better, but it can be tricky to play, as well as mentally taxing for a tournament like the Pro Tour. The main problem with this deck is that you have to have a thorough matchup knowledge as well as dodge the Tron matchups.

#3) Storm:

A generally solid choice in the current metagame, this deck can be very hard to deal with and is now extremely consistent with Gifts Ungiven as well as the 7-8 spell cost reducers. Because of the deck’s graveyard interactions, discard spells are a little less effective here than they would be otherwise, especially since Inquisition of Kozilek can’t even hit Gifts Ungiven, making Storm more resilient than most other combo decks in the meta.

#4) Eldrazi Tron:

While this is my personal favorite deck, I do think it has dropped a little in viability, mostly due to the prevalence of humans decks.  However, I suspect that humans won’t do very well at because of affinity.  If this is the case, Eldrazi Tron’s stock goes up considerably as it tends to not do well against decks that go wide. This deck does well when Chalice of the Void is good and struggles when it’s bad.  If the meta is filled with spells that cost 0 and 1, then this deck will win the day.  Otherwise, I still expect to see a strong performance, but more a copy or 2 in the top 16/32.

#5) G/R Tron:

A generally solid choice, especially if you expect to see a lot of Lantern Control.  It’s possible that this deck might be higher up on the list because of the printing of Blood Sun, but it’s hard to say since this will be the first big tournament since its printing.  Classically though, this solves the deck’s manland problem as often times you could wipe the board with Oblivion Stone but then still die to things like Mutavault or Inkmoth Nexus if you couldn’t find a Karn Liberated.  More recently people have opted to use things like Ghost Quarter and Field of Ruin to buy enough time to win against Tron. Now, with Blood Sun you can hate out your opponent’s land without harming your own, which really could be what Tron was missing, but we’ll have to see.

#6) Grixis Death’s Shadow:

The midrange deck of choice for this Pro Tour, it pushes out a lot of the jankier decks that don’t function quite as smoothly.  I don’t think that this would be the best deck to choose for a couple reasons, mostly that I think it doesn’t have great matchups against most of the rest of this list.

The Rogue Factor

With Modern, because the format is so diverse and the card pool is so large, you can never discount the fact that there might be an unknown deck that comes out of nowhere to win the day.  This could also be a factor with lesser known decks like Bloomless Amulet, a deck that despite the banning of Summer Bloom, has remained competitively viable.  While it is possible that this happens, I do regard it as a rather unlikely event.

Hope vs. Reality

As a brewer, I really hope that one of the teams discovers some kind of sweet brew that annihilates the competition, but the realist in me suspects the top tables will be filled with Affinity, Tron, and Storm.

That’s all for this week guys. Join me next week when I look do a post Pro Tour analysis and check how close my predictions were to reality.  Until then, enjoy the Pro Tour coverage and don’t forget to tell me what you think might win!  (Also bonus points if you know what card the art is from that I used at the top of the article. Hint: It’s relevant to the title!)