PT Seattle In Hindsight

Adam Koska

About Adam Koska

Adam is an experienced player from the Czech Republic who has a number of high-profile finishes under his belt:

• 9th at Worlds 2009
• 9th at Pro Tour Kyoto 2009
• 45 Lifetime Pro Points
• Top 32 GP Vienna 2008
• Top 64 GP Krakow 2007
• Three times Czech Nationals Top 8

PT Seattle in Hindsight

Hey everyone! The first Pro Tour of the season has flown by this past weekend and what that means, apart from the fact that we have a brand new Czech Pro Tour champion (big congrats to Standa Cifka again!), is that there is a ton of new data to work with in Modern. Most of the highest finishing decks have already been highlighted in the official coverage and if you’re interested in some of them, I recommend having a look at the deck tech videos or just browsing the „top modern decklists“ section. The information is aplenty and in today’s article, I would like to put all these numbers and card names into perspective, see what the modern format looks like and also mention some of the original decks that did well but didn’t quite make it into the spotlight, mostly because the players who piloted them didn’t fare well in the draft portion.

So – what was this Pro Tour about? What is the Modern metagame about right now? The metagame breakdown feature speaks clearly: right now, Modern has a very clearly defined top deck, which is about three times more popular than the next most numerous archetype (at least in the PT meta, that is). Jund is the king of the hill again, taking an astonishing 30% share of the whole field, which is really impressive, since the pros are usually known for their tendencies to innovate and not play the „deck to beat“. This time around, most of the innovation came in the form of finding some new tools for the Jund deck, namely Deathrite Shaman and Abrupt Decay. Apart from these new cards, it was mostly the good old Jund that we’ve known for quite a while and that Yuuya Watanabe used to win the Players Championship with not that long ago.

Versions:
Return to Ravnica (Foil)

The abundance of Jund, which could have hardly come as a surprise to any of the competitors, meant that Zoo was pushed back dramatically. Even though Zoo had been pretty popular in Modern for a long time and it was even the most represented deck at the Players Championship, this time around, there were only four Zoo decks in the whole field (!), which represents a mere one percent of all the decks in the tournament. The Pro Tour metagame usually adjusts really well to the expected numbers of decks and nobody is going to play a deck that flat out loses to the number one archetype. This process is usually much slower in local metagames around the world, where players often stick to decks they have, instead of playing what they would like to play, so don’t expect Zoo decks to disappear completely from your local Modern tournaments, but I think that it’s reasonable to say that Zoo is likely not going to be a very popular deck in the coming weeks and months, solely due to the high numbers of Jund, which it has pretty hard time beating.

With Zoo out of the picture, the No. 2 slot at Pro Tour Return to Ravnica was taken by Affinity (or „robots“, call it whatever you like). Interestingly, Affinity had a bigger share of the field on day two than it did on day one, meaning that it was well positioned in the field and a good choice for this tournament. Most of the Jund decks came prepared with a number of Ancient Grudges or even Shatterstorms in the sideboards, so don’t expect the Jund matchup to be a walk in the park when you’re playing Affinity, but all in all, the Robots are clearly one of the better decks you can pick against the red-green-black menace. Quick clock, combined with a way to disrupt the opponent’s mana (Blood Moon from the board) is a sound approach. Also, many of the Affinity decks played Welding Jar, a card that provides you with a huge tempo boost against Jund, because they’re bound to aim removal spells at your creatures and you can trade your zero-mana spell for their two or even three-mana removal, which often translates in at least half a turn of action. Overall, Affinity seems to have a solid position in Modern right now.

The third most popular deck of PT Seattle has been U/W control. While this deck definitely plays a fair share of countermagic, which is probably where the “control” label comes from, don’t expect anything like a draw-go style deck. The current form of U/W tends to be quite aggressive and can often steal games on the back of a quick Geist of Saint Traft, Vendillion Clique, Restoration Angel or even Snapcaster Mage / Kitchen Finks beatdown. The deck hasn’t really changed that much with the release of Return to Ravnica, although you can sometimes see a couple of Azorius Charms (or even splashed Izzet Charms) in the main and some copies of Rest in Peace in the board.

After U/W control, with a share of little more than 8% of the field, there are four decks with almost exactly the same numbers, hovering around 4,5% of the metagame. These four archetypes are Birthing Pod, U/W/R Delver, U/G Scapeshift and U/R Storm. The Birthing Pod deck, although still keeping its namesake card and sometimes also including a couple Chord of Calling, has gone a long way since the times of the Melira combo. In the current version, played – among others – by some of the best Japanese players, you won’t even find a single copy of Melira, Sylvok Outcast and instead, the deck adopted a completely different combo. Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker is now the centerpiece of the deck and most combos revolve around this five-mana goblin. Kiki-Jiki can go off with Deceiver Exarch, Restoration Angel and Zealous Conscripts, so once you get him into play, winning should be just a formality. I like the Pod deck because of how many possibilities it offers – there are so many different cards in the deck that you usually have a ton of options and can craft a good plan in almost every situation. Because of how many search engines the deck has, it’s also easy to adjust it perfectly to the field you are expecting. However, playing Birthing Pod is by no means easy, so having loads of practice games is necessary, if you don’t want to kick yourself for the mistakes you make.

The second of the four „tier 1,5“ decks is U/W/R Delver and I think that you can easily lump this category together with U/G/R Delver decks and U/R Delver (and bump the percentage up by another 1% or so). Again, you won’t find too many Return to Ravnica cards in the Delver lists, apart from a couple of Izzet Charms here and there. Even though Delver is a solid deck, right now, its numbers are held down by the sheer popularity of Jund. Delver is traditionally best against control and combo decks, where deploying a quick threat backed up by countermagic and burn to finish the opponent off is a good plan. However, if your opponent can reliably deal with your quick threat, like Jund can, with its million removal spells, the Delver plan falls into pieces. The deck is still ok, since it certainly can put up a fight against any deck (flying Nacatls with counter backup are obviously still a potent game plan), but as long as the Jund numbers stay high, I don’t think it’s really tier 1.

The third of the four decks tied at roughly 5% of the field is R/U/G Scapeshift. Again, we can lump the numbers of the R/U/G version with other builds to get somewhere close to 8% of the field, even though this time, the R/U/G variant does have a slightly different gameplan, so it is perhaps best to distinguish between the two categories. The biggest difference is that the blue versions run library manipulation and countermagic to protect their namesake card and make sure that you can resolve Scapeshift every time you draw it, while the other versions tend to be more like the Primeval Titan decks from the Standard format of two years ago, playing more ramp and trying to bury the opponent in a flurry of highly flammable Mountains. A good example of the first type of the deck is Lee Shi Tian’s top8 list and the most successful list from the second category is probably David Quaglia’s R/G/B Valakut that he used to post a 8-2 record with.

(two cards are missing from the sideboard)

The last deck that posted numbers higher than 3% was U/R Storm and I’m sure that if you’ve been paying attention to what Jon Finkel was playing, you couldn’t miss that. The deck gained a ton of value from Goblin Electromancer and even though he’s the only creature in the deck and thus bound to find himself on the receiving end of some redundant removal spells, he is so good that his presence in the deck is fully justified. All your rituals are instants anyway, so when you wait with the Electromancer until the turn when you’re planning to go off, you can respond to your opponent’s removal by playing all your Seething Songs, Manamorphoses (a ritual with „draw a card“!), Desperate and Pyretic Rituals and then thank your opponent for increasing your storm count with his Terminate / Abrupt Decay / whatever removal spell they had. Desperate Ravings is another card that gets a huge boost when Goblin Electromancer is in play and it can sift through your deck at an amazing pace (and with Past in Flames in the deck, you don’t even care about discarding your good spells). Desperate Ravings is also a very good way how to fight discard, since it can refill your hand quickly, after you were hit by a Thoughtseize or two. Overall, I think that U/R Storm is another very good metagame choice in a field full of Jund. The numbers of Storm did improve a bit between day 1 and day 2, which either proves that it’s a good deck or just means that great players like Jon Finkel and Reid Duke played it (or both).

Despite Jund being the oppressor that it is, Modern is still quite a diverse format and many rogue strategies were played in Seattle. Tron and Infect are without a doubt part of the format, as is Dredgevine, W/B Tokens, Burn, Second Breakfast and many more. You will find many of these oddball strategies in the „top Modern decklists“ feature. Some of them make it quite clear that they focus on some particular weakness of the current meta and try to exploit it – if you’re sure about what the others will be playing, this is very much a viable strategy (as Standa Cifka has shown, after all). One particular deck that I really like and which uses this strategy of pinpointing a weak point of the metagame and then takes advantage of it, is this little gem that Ken Yukuhiro piloted to a 7-3 record:

Four Blood Moons in the main make it very clear what Mr. Yukihiro had in mind when designing this deck and judging by his 7-3 record, he was quite right in his assumptions. If your local metagame has a lot of decks using nonbasic lands and / or lot of decks vulnerable to counterspells, this might be the right deck to play.

Well, that’s all from me for today. I hope that you enjoyed the article and see you next time!

Adam Koska