You’ve Got Me Loched In!

What’s up everyone MoxAmethyst here, and I think it’s time we talk about the newest Modern menace to take the limelight; Emry, Lurker of the Loch!

Before we jump into it I’d love it if you could take a second out to check out our Facebook and/or Twitter. Give us a like and a follow to keep up to date on all of our content. If you want to keep up to date with my personal Magic-related endeavors you can check out my Instagram.

So, modern has changed a lot in the last few months. We’ve gone from a format where the only real deck was a Graveyard based combo deck all the way back to a format where people are playing fair strategies like Jund, UWx Control and various Stoneforge lists, and we’ve even seen a resurgence of Death’s Shadow as an efficient way to keep all of the fair Magic players on their toes. With so much ebbing and flowing in the Modern Metagame, I don’t think anyone would have posited that a 3 mana 1/2 from the most recent Standard expansion would make quite as large an impact on the Eternal Format as Emry has. So let’s take a look at the 2 decks that Emry has pushed into firm Tier 1 position.

First up let’s take a look at the “first draft” version of the Emry decks, built around Vintage powerhouse Paradoxical Outcome.

Now people started trying to combine Paradoxical Outcome with Urza, Lord High Artificer prior to the release of Throne of Eldraine. The deck has really sprung to life with the addition of not just Emry, but also the rather innocuous looking Witching Well. Witching Well plays kind of like Astrolabe 5-7, and what I mean by this is that it allows you to set up your draws, helps dig you in to your engine cards Paradoxical Outcome and Urza, or helps you find the lands you need to make it to your combo turn on time. Obviously the real powerhouse and the point of today’s article is Emry, Lurker of the Loch. Emry does a few things in this shell. Firstly she is almost always a 1 mana Creature, which means that she does a very good job of turning on Mox Amber. Being able to turn the Mox on consistently means that we get to play 3-4 copies in the deck, which lets us play fewer lands and helps accelerate us towards our powerful 4 drops. The second reason why Emry is so powerful is that she lets you play a very good grindy game. With her ability to let you keep re-buying Baubles, Moxen or Astrolabes that have entered your graveyard through her ETB or by sacrificing to the effect of Sai, Master Thopterist it’s completely feasible to play an attrition game until you can confidently stick one of your 3 mana threats or 4 mana engine pieces and start going off. Finally, Emry has the ETB ability of milling 4 cards. this may not seem important but it actually plays a huge role in this deck during the combo turn, by allowing you to thin and even selectively mill cards in combination with Witching Well. This allows you to keep churning through your deck to find the 1-of copy of Nexus of Fate and win the game with a ludicrously large amount of 1/1 tokens. This is the version of the deck that I personally have been a big fan of, mostly due to how resilient it is against most forms of hate, and the sheer consistency of playing all of these cantripping Artifacts that contribute to your overall game plan.

Now the second list is one that showed up in somewhat higher numbers over this past weekend at the Modern Open, looking to Abuse the interaction between Emry and an old combo favourite, Jeskai Ascendancy. Let’s take a look at the list:

A quick glance over the list should make it clear to most that the core elements of the deck are the same, which isn’t too surprising given the powerful interactions that we’ve just established. What this deck does differently, however, is choosing to cut down slightly on some of the consistency by trimming some of the Artifacts to make room for 4 copies of Jeskai Ascendancy. For those of you unfamiliar, with an Emry that can tap for her ability, a Jeskai Ascendancy, and either a single Mishra’s Bauble or a matching pair of Moxen, you get to win the game pretty much on the spot. Let’s use Bauble to explain. You sacrifice Bauble for its ability, and once that has resolved tap Emry targeting the Bauble. Cast the Bauble and put your Ascendancy Triggers on the stack. You get to loot, untap Emry, and give her a +1/+1 counter. Now you get to do it again, and again. Eventually, you can find a pair of Mox Opal or Amber and continue the same trick, sacrificing them to the Legend rule after making mana to create an Infinite amount of mana and then you can use Urzas’ Mind’s Desire ability to find a Sai or Saheeli to make an arbitrarily large amount of Tokens and use Nexus like before, or you can find a Mirrodin Besieged on Phyrexian to win the game in your end step. So why play this version over the more consistent Paradoxical Emry Deck? Because you can do this on turn 2. The sheer speed of this combo is what makes many players drawn towards it. And don’t be fooled into thinking that the addition of Ascendancy affects this deck’s ability to play a grindy Outcome game. Whilst your Outcomes will on average be less powerful due to the lower number of Artifacts in the deck, this list still fully has the potential to play that gameplan.

I think both decks definitely have their merits, and I honestly don’t believe that there is a right or wrong answer here. For me I will continue playing a list similar to the first one shown here, and my reasoning for that is that through my testing the none-Ascendancy list is better at grinding through matchups such as U/W Stoneblade, Jund and Death’s Shadow, all of which have been showing up in reasonable quantities over the past few weeks. Moving forward I expect people to be looking into Chalice of the Void as a way to beat this style of deck, and in that case I will be moving into the Ascendancy version, as it is possible to make some unusual combos with Emry and Ascendancy using a zero-mana Artifact that gets continuously countered and recast from your graveyard. In either case, this deck has been very reminiscent of KCI in how it plays, and as KCI was probably my favourite deck I’ve played, I don’t imagine I’ll be putting Emry down for a long while!

Thanks for taking the time out of your day to give this a read! if you haven’t picked up your Emry’s yet don’t forget you can find Throne of Eldraine singles and Sealed Product, as well as anything else you might need over at TCGPlayer, and if you buy through one of our links it goes a long way towards helping us keep the site growing and adding more content more regularly! Thanks again guys, MoxAmethyst Tapping Out.