Modern Musings: What Should You be Playing Right Now?

Hey everyone! Welcome to another Modern Musings!  This week I’m going to talk about what deck I think you should be playing right now.  Before that, though, we have to kind of preface with what the modern metagame is looking like post Guilds of Ravnica.  Right now there are a ton of Assassin’s Trophys and a little more surprisingly, Runaway Steam-Kins floating around Modern right now.  But what if you were to go to a Modern GP this weekend?  What should you play?  I have three different decks that I think would all be positioned very well in the current metagame.

Deck #3: Burn

Burn is a classic choice in any unknown or rapidly shifting metagame.  As well as being solid when you’re against an unknown field, burn should also perform well against Jund and B/G/x decks, as most will have Dark Confidant mainboard, a card any burn player is happy to see.  The downside is that they tend to run Collective Brutality as well, which is really good against you.  The B/G matchup aside, you can effectively race most combo decks and other aggro decks, so there aren’t too many straight-up bad matchups.  One of the biggest upsides of burn, though, is that the deck is really simple to play and it’s fairly difficult to make too many play mistakes. The downside of burn is that with the printing of Knight of Autumn a lot of decks just got some nice mainboard lifegain.  If you haven’t touched burn in a while, here is a list that recently placed 4th at the SCG Classic:

Deck #2: Humans

Humans continues to be a solid choice rolling into the new metagame, as its fast clock and disruptive elements are more than most decks can handle.  Meddling Mage is a beast and really does well against linear combo decks like Ad Nauseam or Storm.  I think that Humans remains one of the best, if not the best deck in Modern, and should be on your radar as a matchup to be prepared for. This is actually the only reason that the deck isn’t number one on my list, that I think people are prepared for it.  Here’s the most recent first-place list (with a spicy 1-of Tajic, Legion’s Edge):

Deck #1: Bant Spirits

This may seem like kind of an odd choice, but I honestly think that Bant Spirits is one of the best decks in Modern right now.  Supreme Phantom has done wonders for the deck, making it easier for the deck to get out of range of traditional 3-damage sweepers.  Now that the deck is playing with both AEther Vials and Collected Company, their board position is all but guaranteed to get out of hand very quickly.  Traditional creature removal doesn’t work very well against them because of Drogskol Captain and Rattlechains.  Finally, Mausoleum Wanderer and Spell Queller do a good job of disrupting what our opponents are doing.  One of the other big upsides is that there are a good number of control decks that just cannot beat a turn-2 Geist of Saint Traft, which thanks to the power of Noble Hierarch, is pretty easy to pull off. There are a couple downsides to playing spirits though, with the biggest being that it cannot beat a resolved Ensnaring Bridge game 1, and it doesn’t have great answers to cards like Ugin, the Spirit Dragon until after sideboard.  This means that the Tron matchup is somewhat suspect game 1.  However, with cards like Assassin’s Trophy running around, Tron will hopefully be weeded out a bit, increasing the viability of Spirits.  Here’s a recent list from that same SCG classic.

That’s all for this week! As always let me know what you think, and I’ll see you next time!