Ben Meine: Turn Four is Alive
Extra! Extra! Tron wins!
G/W Tron, Tom Ross
1st Place, SCG Tour Open, Columbus
That’s right, ladies and gentlemen. In a format where the fear
of dying from a Blighted Agent or an army of Prized Amalgams early on is all too real, how does the honest ramp deck come out on top? Because it’s not as honest as it may seem.
Prepared Jund decks may have been the deck for the weekend. Discard, cheap threats, and barrels full of removal are a great recipe for defeating decks like Infect, Burn, Dredge, and Affinity. Luckily, the more difficult matchups like Bant Eldrazi, Jeskai Nahiri, and *cough* Tron were not as well positioned against the hyper-aggressive decks in the room. However, when it comes to Tron, Tom Ross showed up with the tools to clean up the bad matchups while still being the degenerate “cast my big thing” deck that it has always been.
Here’s the way this panned out:
Category A: Big-mana decks such as G/R Tron and Scapeshift;
Category B: Hyper-aggro decks such as Infect, Affinity, and Dredge;
Category C: Control/Slower decks such as Jund, Abzan, and now Grixis Control, which have good matchups against category “B” decks.
Deck C usually has a good win percentage against Deck B, Deck B usually has a good win percentage against Deck A, and Deck A has the advantage over Deck C.
Tl;DR: A>C>B; B>A>C; C>B>A
Yes, it is basically a glorified “Rock, Paper, Scissors” in this example, but that is how I would like to portray it. Say that we implement tools in our Deck A to beat Deck B. These are the Rest in Peaces and Blessed Alliances that we added to Tron. Now we have plenty of effective tools to shore up some bad matchups. This is what happened that allowed Tom Ross to destroy this tournament. Instead of playing a game of 33 percent match-ups, he decided to solve the game instead and go undefeated on Day 1 while only losing once on Day 2.
A>C>B
Of course, Modern is a large format. There are a few decks that do not fall into these categories. Outliers, we will call them. Storm, Ad Nauseam, Elves, and the like. Usually, Deck C can give a hard time to these strategies. However, dedicated combo decks can be a problem for Tron if they happen to cross paths. I wouldn’t worry about it too much, though, because sometimes Tron can be as degenerate. Casting Karn on Turn 3 is a quite real thing that happens.
Before, the way to combat the aggro decks was to hope that you weren’t dead before reaching eight mana, whether that be for Ugin or Oblivion Stone plus the mana to immediately crack it. The G/R versions of the deck relies on conditional board sweepers such as Pyroclasm or Kozilek’s Return to clean up little guys. It just turns out that there are way too many copies of Prized Amalgam and Inkmoth Nexus to laugh at those spells. Now there’s clean main deck removal in Path to Exile in addition to the best sideboard color in Modern. Blessed Alliance adds the support for the Infect and Burn matchups that the deck was really looking for. Rest in Peace does exactly what one would ever want it to do while, at the same time, not being as cute as Ravenous Trap. Ad Nauseam is still an abysmal matchup, but you can’t win them all.
Where does this deck go moving forward? Well, I am sure that Tom was not expecting to play many mirror matches in Columbus, which is why there really is not that much in the 75 for it. However, now that the deck is on the map again, there should be more precautions taken if you take this deck to your next large tournament. You can either roll the dice in the matchup where you just race to Tron and be one of the two ships passing in the night, or you can interact. Ghost Quarter is nice, but you don’t further your board in the process. The answer may be to play another copy or two of this card:
Deploying a large threat while stripping your opponent a turn off of Tron can make or break the game.
Sideboarding can be a little harder against the G/R Tron deck because they have free cuts in their version, such as Lightning Bolt and Pyroclasm/Kozilek’s Return. Cutting the Wurmcoil Engines will be fine in the mirror since they are cleanly answered by World Breaker, Karn Liberated, and Path to Exile (if you’re playing against G/W). If I were to play this deck I would cut the Ravenous Trap in the sideboard for another copy of World Breaker.
In Columbus, I tried sticking to my guns and running back Affinity, as that has been what I have been wielding for the past several months. I would highly advise avoiding the deck for now. Despite putting one copy into the top 8 at Columbus, Affinity is not fast enough for how fragile it is in the format right now. It almost feels too fair as I put my opponent to five, they they completely stabilize more often than I would like. The format is adapting to the hyper-aggression, as there are more maindeck copies of Anger of the Gods than there ever have been. If you still want to register some robo-cops, feel free to look at the list I played:
Affinity, Ben Meine
SCG Tour Open, Columbus
The part of my list that stands out from the traditional lists is four copies of Spell Pierce in the sideboard. This card alone will win you more post-board game than you’d expect. It dictates matches like Burn and Infect, snags Shatterstorms, and fights poorly timed one-for-one removal spells. The deck can still win games by being a redundant aggro deck, but it is not evolving in power level as much as the rest of the format.
Some players would respond to seeing winning results from slower decks like Tron by wanting to play hyper-aggressive strategies. However, these strategies didn’t place for a reason. They weren’t as well-positioned as the world thought. Turn 3 is not the name of the game right now. Modern is slowing down. In this metagame, the deck that took Grand Prix Indianapolis by storm may be one of the better options.
Bant Eldrazi, Dan Musser
5-8th Place, SCG Columbus
The way this format is shaping after this weekend, you can “smash” a tournament with this deck. Infect is on the decline and midrange decks are on the rise. Dodging Dredge may be the biggest obstacle if you were to pick up this deck. One of the beauties of Bant Eldrazi is that it is not weak to Ugin, the Spirit Dragon’s minus ability since all of your threats are colorless. In the face of Tron and Midrange coming to be the format’s next supreme leaders, Bant Eldrazi is easily one of the best options and I would have no problem at all sleeving up the giant monsterous, fish-like, spaghetti things.
I am taking this week off from the SCG Circuit. I will not be attending SCG Knoxville, but I will absolutely be in Atlanta for the SCG Tour Season Three Invitational. The formats are Standard and Modern. Odds are I play Bant Eldrazi or G/W Tron in Modern, but as for standard … my, oh my … I’ll just leave this here for future reference.
Until next time! See you in top 8.
Ben Meine is the newest member of Team NRG. Follow him on Twitter @BenMeine.
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