Modern Masters 2015 is upon us and I’ll be headed to Grand Prix Las Vegas in a few hours. The format is exciting and tricky, and much more open-ended than the first Modern Masters, where R&D provided a clear raod map for building deck archetypes. The new format looks much more adaptable to the powerful cards you can pick up, with plenty of overlap between archetypes. That’s the sort of limited I love!
On Friday night I hit up local store Black Gold for my first Modern Masters 2015 draft. It was $45, keep what you open, earn a pack of MM15 for each match win. Let’s just say I got my money’s worth:
Convoking for Value
Now obviously I hit the jackpot on rares, but I think this deck represents the sort of deck you want to build: powerful cards that fit into one of the defined archetypes, with a moderate amount of synergy to supplement your best cards. This is a green-white tokens deck, but the tokens strategy is only one way for the deck to win. I won as many games by attacking often with cheap fliers finishing off with Banefire as I did with an army of tokens plus Overwhelm. This deck went a comfortable 3-0 and felt like exactly what I want to be doing in the format.
Flexibility is important for Modern Masters 2015 decks. If you commit to a rigid archetype, you become vulnerable to powerful hate cards and smart opponents who can maximize their deck to beat yours after sideboard. If people are main-decking Smash to Smithereens (and they are) then you might not want to go all-in on artifacts. Two reasons. First, when you play a known archetype with clear answers baked into the set, you make it easier for your opponent to plan an effective strategy to beat you. Second, the fact that artifacts are common-enough in decks that people will put Smash to Smithereens in their main deck suggests that artifact cards will be overdrafted and you will have to fight for the best cards. You never want to be fighting for the most popular archetype in a draft, and you are going to have to pick important cards early without much hope of picking up niche cards late.
Modern Masters 2015 is a format where removal is important and not widely available. Because people will focus both on strong individual cards and on assembling complex synergies, removal spells are key to thwarting your opponent’s plans. The removal is not amazing, and nowhere near the quality of the first Modern Masters. Sure, you can get Dismember, Lightning Bolt, and Oblivion Ring at uncommon, but the rest of the removal resembles the mediocre fare we’ve adapted to using in recent limited sets. And because all the cards predate Innistrad, we don’t get strong green fight cards that didn’t exist yet.
The first rule is, you don’t talk about green’s lack of removal.
Looking at where the removal falls, you really have to play a deck that includes white, black, or red. Green has no removal other than Plummet and blue is quite lacking as usual. A blue-green tempo deck is possible, where Remand, Mana Leak, and Vapor Snag can function as hard removal. But I don’t think a controlling blue-green proliferate deck will be able to survive long enough to take over the game against other powerful decks.
Yet despite the lack of removal, green is one of the strongest colors in the format. It has some of the only large creatures along with mana fixing/ramp, plus great token makers that can clog the ground and act as pseudoremoval. Playing green is good, but you must pair it with a color that has answers. Splashing a couple removal spells is easy in green, where Rampant Growth and Sylvan Bounty make a third color almost free. My deck pairs green with white, a color with strong removal. Arrest and Sunlance are both common and very powerful. I expect most white decks to pick up at least one copy of each, and be disappointed if they don’t.
Green also looks like it pairs well with black, especially since Nest Invader and Bone Splinters are best friends. That pairing seems more like a bonus for being those colors rather than a reason to go into the archetype. Green-black tokens is a thing, but mostly because the set is full of powerful green and black token makers, complete with busted bomb rares like Bitterblossom and Ant Queen. Drooling Groodion, by contrast, seems a little slow to be a good first plan, but it can take over a board if you force the game to go long.
Will my initial views on the format hold true after this weekend? Tune in and find out. Maybe you’ll even see me on camera!
Carrie O’Hara is Editor-in-Chief of Hipsters of the Coast.