New Year, Same Old Artificers
What’s happening everyone, MoxAmethyst here back to talk some Modern. I hope everyone had a fantastic time during the festive season. I know posts have been a little sporadic recently but I intend to start posting more regularly in the new year, hopefully giving you guys a new post each and every Monday so hopefully, you all look forward to that!
A few weeks ago, me and my local team traveled to Manchester to participate in Team Trios where we got to play 3 different formats across 5 rounds of swiss. In the Standard seat, we settled on Friendly Fires, a control deck built around Fires of Invention and a collection of some of the most powerful Planeswalkers available in the format. The deck performed well and my teammate Abe had a personal finish of 3-1-1 in the swiss rounds. For Pioneer we chose a Grixis shell looking to capitalize on the power of Young Pyromancer and Dreadhorde Arcanist, alongside powerful interaction like Thoughtseize and Fatal Push. Whilst the deck was good in testing, Rickey was unable to pick up more than 1 win throughout the day. Finally, in the Modern seat, I piloted Sultai Urza to a 4-0-1 finish in the Swiss. Unfortunately based on how these results spread throughout the day we just missed out on the top cut, but today I wanted to talk about my most recent version of Urza, and discuss in some detail one of the cards that impressed me more than I expected; Archmage’s Charm!
This is the list I have settled on after a (quite frankly, worrying) amount of testing during the festive period. If you can’t see the image clearly don’t worry, there will be a list further down with my Sideboard plans for this build.
So for the most part the shell hasn’t changed a great deal in the last few weeks, but as I said before we have a huge addition in Archmage’s Charm. I was very skeptical about this card when we first started discussing it but honestly, I don’t think I would play the deck without at least 2 copies going forward. If we break down the 3 modes, we have a slightly harder to cast Cancel to begin. This isn’t the most exciting ability in the world, however, with the Mana advantage we get from our Urza it’s certainly not unreasonable. The next mode is an Instant speed Divination effect. This is again not the most exciting at its base, however, this combined with Mystic Sanctuary solves some of the issues I have experienced with running out of gas in the more attrition based matchup, and it is a model that you will use fairly often, even when not planning to re-buy with the Sanctuary. Finally, we have a more interesting ability, ‘Gain control of target nonland permanent with converted Mana cost 1 or less.’ This is a huge game in some of our more difficult matchups, most obviously against the Death’s Shadow decks that have been picking up more steam as a way to combat the rise of the midrange Urza builds. Outside of Shadow this mode also allows you to steal opposing Construct tokens in the Mirror, as well as Amulets and Scouts from the Titan decks. There are a tonne of other applications but these would be the ones I would expect to come up the most often if you decide to pick up this version of the deck.
Outside of Charm, I have also moved to Aether Spellbomb as a piece of interaction in the Main that provides some really interesting synergy. Aside from rarely being dead due to the Cycling ability, Aether Spellbomb can also be used to bounce your own Urza to protect it from a removal spell, or just to gain more Construct tokens to help turn the corner that little bit quicker. Spellbomb being another Artifact to help improve your early Mox Opal starts, or allow more Mana generation from Urza is also not something to scoff at.
Aside from that the rest of the list is reasonable stock, I’ve gone down to 3 Emry mostly as a way to make room for some of this interaction that we have discussed, and I have decided to remove the non-island lands from the deck, having found them to be more of a hindrance than a help on a number of occasions. In the new year I will be trying some more spicy lists with Ice-Fang Coatl in place of the Emry, which has seen some play in the Modern Leagues, so make sure to keep an eye out for that. I’ll leave you with the sideboard guide that I have been using whilst testing with this build. Bear in mind this is just a guide and you should assess your sideboarding decisions dynamically based on what you see out of your opponents during the game.
And that’s it for this week. I hope everyone has a fantastic New Year, and I’ll be back in full force for 2020! Don’t forget to check out our Facebook and Twitter Pages, and if you want to see what I’m up to you can follow my Instagram page. And if you’re looking to spend your Christmas money on some sweet new Magic cards you can get all the bits you need over at TCGPlayer and help support the website at the same time! Till next time, MoxAmethyst Tapping Out.