| Emrakul, the Promised End is our new lord and savior! I remember the day when Emrakul, the Promised End was revealed. Many were disappointed by the newest take on the queen of the Eldrazi, but there was a very quiet minority singing its praises. The reason? That little number 13 in the top right-hand corner. Because that number, my friends, is a lie! That number is actually an eight, and in some extreme cases, a seven. We should not be allowed to have a 13/13 flying, trampling, Mindslaver for seven mana! But that's exactly what many used to great success at Pro Tour Eldritch Moon. I know that Lukas Blohon won #PTEMN with B/W Control—a control deck with no copies of Emrakul—but make no mistake about it, the real winner of this Pro Tour was the queen of the Eldrazi. Professional teams everywhere did their best to cast the intruder of Innistrad as quickly as possible and most of them succeeded. And that, ladies and gentlemen, makes me excited. I love when a flavor plan comes together and Wizards of the Coast knocked this one out of the park! Should we expect to see more of Emrakul at #SCGNY? It seems unlikely given the main event is Modern, but stranger things have happened in The Heart of New York. Matthias Hunt, Ryan Overturf, Nick Miller, and the rest of the SCGLive crew will be bringing you all the Modern action you can handle, as we prepare for the final Open weekend of Season Two of the SCG Tour. With the New Jersey Invitational only one weekend away, this weekend's Open in Syracuse is incredibly important for those looking for some more SCG Points to get one step closer to the StarCityGames.com Players' Championship. If you can't make it out to #SCGNY this weekend, be sure to watch all the action at twitch.tv/scglive! — Cedric Phillips, Media Manager @CedricAPhillips |  |  | Fact Or Fiction: The Great Pro Tour Debate! With Pro Tour Eldritch Moon in the books, there's a lot to discuss. Is Bant Company still the most dangerous deck in the format? Is B/W Control back to being a top deck? And is Emerge as broken as it looked? Tom Ross and Ross Merriam are here to answer those questions and more! |  | Video: Temur Emerge In Standard! There were many breakout decks at Pro Tour Eldritch Moon, but the most interesting one was Owen Turtenwald's take on Temur Emerge. Gerry Thompson takes the runner-up deck that looks to cast Emrakul, the Promised End ahead of schedule for a spin on Magic Online to see how good it really is. |  | Missing In Sydney, Australia Sam Black went to Pro Tour Eldritch Moon with an incredibly innovative U/B Madness deck that preyed on Bant Company. The problem? Bant Company wasn't as big of a portion of the metagame as Sam expected. So can U/B Madness still compete when Bant Company isn't everywhere? | | | #SCGNY will showcase Modern for the first time since June! Check out this Best Of SCGLive where Adam Bowman put the power of Slivers on display. |  | | After an entire month without a Modern Open on the SCG Tour, it's finally time to get everything ready for Eldritch Moon's debut under the limelight at #SCGNY! Different cards are warping the way we build older decks and Modern won't be left the same. | | First on the menu is our Player of the Year leader, Jeff Hoogland, with his update to the Kiki-Chord archetype that he took all the way to the semifinals of the Modern Classic at #SCGBALT. Hoogland has been known to try out all kinds of different tweaks to the Kiki-Chord archetype, being the champion of the deck for over a year now, but this variant has a lot of great stuff going on. Eldritch Evolution pushes Hoogland a bit further toward playing the value-based side of Kiki-Chord than the variant that tries to combo a bit more aggressively via Deceiver Exarch. There are more creatures in this deck that tend to gain value when they enter the battlefield or die; this way Eldritch Evolution's power is really pushed to the max. One of the nice things about this version of Kiki-Chord compare to Jeff's other takes on the deck is that it also has better mana than his previous lists. Most Kiki-Chord decks splash black for cards like Orzhov Pontiff and Sin Collector or blue for Glen Elendra Archmage and Unified Will. One question to ask in this instance is if Hoogland will be changing very much up for #SCGNY. Hoogland has done a good bit of live playtesting with the archetype in order to tweak the numbers within the list, so it's hard to imagine him straying too far from what he's coined "Darwin Chord." If anything, his Facebook may have the most telling bit of information in saying "Get your Evolutions now. This is the floor." to reference their potential as a future staple of the format. | | Dredge was one of the decks that received a recent bump in technology from Shadows over Innistrad, and the evolution of the archetype keeps getting pushed further and further. Nathaniel Snyder ended up taking down a Modern Invitational Qualifier with the following Dredge list that has some really great stuff going on. Collective Brutality is quite exciting here. Unmask isn't legal in Modern as a free discard spell, but Brutality provides a way to discard multiple cards from the caster's hand (thus enabling the Dredge deck's synergies) while also interacting with the opponent in a favorable way. The spell having the ability to pick apart any pieces of graveyard-hate that the opponent may have in their hand or pick off the pesky little creatures that tend to pop up in Modern. For anyone new to the archetype, be sure not to discard Bridge from Below to Collective Brutality when killing an opponent's creature. This will result in the copy of Bridge being exiled after the creature dies without any real benefit. Anything that allows a spell's caster to cheat on mana upfront is going to be worth exploring in an eternal format, where speed and efficiency tend to be the name of the game. | | The deck I would be most likely to play this weekend is one that hasn't been getting too much love lately: Bant Retreat. The issue in the deck receiving little coverage may be related to people being tired of Bant Company in Standard—which, unfortunately, affects players' willingness to pick up this archetype. At a glance this looks like a pile of Modern's most efficient creatures for three or less mana, but upon further inspection, the deck is actually a pile of creatures that are all reasonable at playing a fair game of Magic. Lloyd Kurth is no stranger to tournament Magic and wouldn't be playing this deck if there weren't something there. The scrying from Retreat to Coralhelm is actually quite valuable in making Collected Company even more powerful than it normally is. Despite not looking like much up front, Retreat Coralhelm provides the deck with a healthy amount of selection in addition to a combo kill with Knight of the Reliquary as follows: • Tap Knight of the Reliquary to sacrifice a Plains or Forest. • Search for a fetchland and untap Knight of the Reliquary with Retreat to Coralhelm's ability. • Sacrifice the fetch land for a Forest of Plains (or a shock-land with one of the corresponding land types) and tap an opposing creature that can block. • Rinse and repeat until Knight of the Reliquary is a lethal attacker. Standard may have impressed an idea that Spell Queller is the be-all/end-all of Collected Company decks, but Queller is more of a Chord of Calling silver bullet in this archetype than a lynchpin of the strategy. If there's anything to be excited about in this deck, it is the inclusion of Thalia, Heretic Cathar in a deck full of mana dorks. One of the biggest issues with Thalia is that turn three is a bit too late for her to be hitting the battlefield, as players can generally cast their spells if they get the first two turns of their mana online. Having a Noble Hierarch followed by a Thalia, Heretic Cathar on the play, on the other hand, can be back breaking. In a kingdom of fetch lands and non-basic manabases, Thalia, Heretic Cathar holds the keys to the castle. — Emma Handy, @Em_TeeGee | | #SCGRegionals are in the books and Season Two of the SCG Tour has two events remaining! With the #SCGNY Open weekend in Syracuse and the #SCGINVI in New Jersey the next two weekends, four more qualifications to the Players' Championship will be determined by the middle of August. Two players in the Top 16 of the Player of the Year leaderboard scored wins in Regionals while a handful of players in the Top 32 made some moves on the board with notable finishes over the weekend. Kevin Jones, of Team MetaGameGurus.com, took down the Albany Regionals with Bant Company, getting 20 SCG Points to jump to No. 7 in the Player of the Year race. More importantly, Jones took over the lead in Season Two, surpassing Tom Ross, who had a tough showing in the Raleigh Regionals. With three Players' Championship qualifications going to the top three players of Season Two, Jones, Ross, and Andrew Jessup currently hold those spots with 105, 100, and 94 SCG Points, respectively. Todd Stevens is right behind those three with 90 points after a Top-16 finish in the Plano Regionals. |  | | Harlan Firer won the Raleigh Regionals with Bant Company, moving up to No. 10 in the Player of the Year race and keeping him comfortably in two-bye territory for Opens for the foreseeable future. Bradley Carpenter made the Top 8 in Orlando to move up to No. 13 while Aaron Sorrells took second, which puts him just outside the Top 32 in 34th place with 66 SCG Points. In Milwaukee, Matt Hoey, Andrew Tenjum, and Jessy Hefner all played Bant Company and finished first, second, and fourth, respectively. While Hoey is still outside the Top 32, Tenjum tied Ross for No. 2 in the POY race while Hefner reached the Top 32, moving into 29th place, good for one bye in Syracuse this weekend. This weekend marks the last Open of Season Two, as the best and brightest of the SCG Tour come to battle Modern at #SCGNY. Follow along with all the action in the Player of the Year race, along with the Season Two race, at twitch.tv/SCGLive. |  |   If you would like to unsubscribe and stop receiving these emails please click here. |
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