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Newsletter
Thursday, November 2nd |
| There's nothing quite like a Pro Tour weekend, is there? The Standard format this weekend will pave the way for what we find at Grand Prix Atlanta, which is all well and good, but what about the players who aren't qualified for the PT? What are they up to? The StarCityGames.com Season Two Regional Championships, that's what! We're about to get a huge swath of new Modern lists. Many may be the result of following the excellent guide to the format Ari Lax provided this week. Some may be direct ports of the Humans deck popularized by SCG's newest staff writer, Collins Mullen. As if that wasn't enough, Shaun McLaren is hard at work on solving the Search for Azcanta in both his article and his newest video. Regardless of whether you're on Standard for the Pro Tour or Modern at SCG Regionals, there's plenty of Magic to go around this weekend! Good luck and have fun! — Danny West, Content Coordinator |
Washington, DC Open Weekend Winners
Updating The Guide To Every Matchup In Modern
By Ari Lax   Similarly to Creature Combo, Aggro has been having a bit of a rough time this calendar year. The brief shining moments were when the deck blurred the lines with other archetypes: W/G Hatebears bridging with Prison, Bant Humanfall bleeding into Toolbox. No matter what Cedric Phillips tried to tell you, there was no hope for Reckless Bushwhacker. Unlike Creature Combo, Aggro's resurgence at #SCGCIN was not due to a brief metagame gap. Ixalan brought large gains for both Humans and Merfolk. Aggro is now an archetype of raw creature quantity, not a mix of quantity and quality. Ultimately, this doesn't mean a lot in terms of matchups. Aggro is still only loosely interactive, moderately fast, and soft to dense removal suites and big opposing threats. It just means that the exact cards you use to fight Aggro are a bit different. Lightning Helix is less important than in the Wild Nacatl days, Anger of the Gods and Supreme Verdict more so. In fact, this might be an all-time low point for Lightning Helix, which would point towards good times for Burn whenever the 30 other unbeatable cards like Collective Brutality also die down.  |
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I Won SCG Cincinnati With Humans.
I Didn't Lose A Match.
By Collins Mullen Unclaimed Territory gives us access to 12 lands in our deck that tap for any color of mana when casting Humans. This allows us to select literally any Modern-legal Human to put in this deck without worrying about its color requirements. Because the card pool of Modern is so large now, we have access to a ton of very powerful Humans. Based on the Humans that we ended up with, if we draw at least one of those rainbow lands and another land that taps for white, we can cast any of our two-drop Humans. Any third land then unlocks most of our three-drops. Where previous lists had to make concessions via Mana Confluence or a fetch-heavy manabase, the current list has one of the cleanest, most pain-free manabases in the format. The printing of Kitesail Freebooter unlocked a strong, disruptive gameplan that simply wasn't available to older lists. The main reason I believe this deck to be so powerful is because it has the perfect balance of disruption and aggression. The deck is very capable of killing someone on Turn 4, disrupting them with Thalia, Kitesail Freebooter, and Meddling Mage along the way. |
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Humans Crushing Modern? It's Jeskai Time! Also, Eldrazi Humans?!
By Shaun McLaren Surprise, surprise, I try to find a reason to play Jeskai Control. I wrote about Jeskai Control playing Search for Azcanta before, but having finally tried it in Jeskai, I think I can officially bump it up from the rank of harebrained idea to quite promising. Todd Anderson and Ari Lax were both skeptical about it even being mentioned in Modern, and with good reason. The thing is, you probably can afford to do nothing Turn 2 in Modern if that card is Rampant Growth, Crystal Ball, and your win condition. Search for Azcanta is mainly your win condition in Jeskai Control, and anything else it does is pure gravy. It is mostly just to be an attrition war winner by finding Lightning Bolt, Lightning Helix, Cryptic Command, or Sphinx's Revelation. |
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