Modern Musings: The Watch List

Hey everyone and welcome to another Modern Musings, this week we are going to be looking at cards in modern that I think are just waiting to be broken.  These are cards to look back to every time a set comes out to see if they are broken somehow,  usually these cards have pretty unique effects, or are in an existing deck that needs one more piece of redundancy to push it over the top.  This is what I call “the watch list”, a list which contains a bunch of cards that could become broken if the right card is printed.  Some of the cards are ones that you’ve probably heard of or seen, others may be a little bit more obscure.

The Watch List

#1

First up we have a card that most of you are probably familiar with:

If it was broken once it can be again, Amulet of Vigor is a card that was very broken in the Amulet Bloom decks about a year ago before a key piece of the deck, summer’s bloom got banned.  If Wizards prints another card that allows for multiple land plays in a turn, or a land that is broken when it can come into play untapped the the turn you play it, expect this card to rocket back to the top of the tier list.

#2

This is a card that many thought was going to be broken with the printing of pack rat, but alas, it wasn’t so.  A big problem with the deck is consistency, the same problem that many of the training grounds + izzet guildmage decks faced.  All it needs though is just 1 creature with a powerful activated ability to push it over the top.

#3

Artificer’s Intuition is a toned down Survival of the Fittest for artifacts.  And while the restriction of only being able to tutor artifacts with cmc 1 or less is hefty, there is an infinite (albeit extremely convoluted) combo with this card.  Locket of Yesterdays is key when trying to combo off with this card, as it makes any card you discard free to cast.  The downside is that modern doesn’t have lotus petal or lion’s eye diamond.  So really this card is looking for cheap mana rocks or a cheap artifact that provides value somehow.

#4

Burning Wish was one of magic’s most powerful cards at one point, and still remains a powerful card in legacy storm.  Glittering wish is quite a bit more narrow as it only fetches multicolored cards, but unlike the other wishes, you can choose a card of any type as long as it’s multicolored.  One place that I can see this is in some sort of creature toolbox deck with a murderous redcap infinite loop kill combo.  Glittering Wish did see some play when the Jeskai Ascendancy combo deck was still around before the ban of Treasure Cruise.

#5

These two cards are pretty similar to one another in that they both have the potential to do broken things.  The ability to tutor up specific artifacts, like Lotus Bloom directly into play is quite strong as you can bypass its cast restrictions.  I think it would take them printing either a powerful artifact to tutor up or a cheap artifact to provide mana for searching up some existing powerful artifact.  Or maybe some deck utilizing these cards has yet to be discovered, maybe such a deck would utilize Paradox Engine, who knows?

Anyway that’s all for this week, join me next week when I get back to brewing some spicy new decks for modern.