Alex Hamilton: Welcome to Modern, Jace
The return of the “greatest of them all”.
Hello true believers and welcome to my first article on the new Nerd Rage Gaming website. I wanted my first article on this shiny new website to be fresh and new and boy oh boy did I get something fun and new to write about…
Modern:
Jace, the Mind Sculptor is unbanned.
Bloodbraid Elf is unbanned.
Another writer on this fine site will be talking about Bloodbraid Elf, so I will not say much on that, but I’ve got some words on Jace, the Mind Sculptor. While I spent the first bit of my dip into competitive Magic playing Bloodbraid Elf, I learned how to win while playing Jace, The Mind Sculptor. I am very excited to see my old friend come back for a stroll in a format that I love to play.
So there were two questions in my mind when I saw this announcement:
“What are the winners and losers?” and “What is going to be the best Jace deck?”
What cards are winners?
People will be playing Jaces. So that means you have to kill some Jaces. So why not use the OG Jace killer Maelstrom Pulse and it’s slightly less versatile brother from another guild Dreadbore?
The real problem with cards that are good at killing Jace is they they’re are only good against the non-land permanents these decks play. They are pretty abysmal against things like Celestial Colonnade.
Jace decks will likely want to play a lot of cheap removal to be able to stall out the game and this Wizard loves flashing back cheap spells. I am sure there will be decks that will not want to play a full set of Snapcaster Mage, but Snapcaster and Jace are working towards the same goal.
What cards are losers?
Anything without an enters the battlefield ability:
Jace protects himself with an unsummon effect, so creatures without enters the battlefield abilities are going to be disadvantaged against the it. During his tenure in Standard, we called this the “Jace test”.
What is going to be the best Jace deck?
What will be the best Jace deck? I think this is only something time will tell. Considering people all over the world will be grinding Magic Online, I don’t think we will have to wait very long. I will warn you these decks are mostly theoretical and I have gotten in very few games with them.
UW Control
This is a port of the deck I used to win the July CT last year:
I have a feeling this deck gets really really good with Jace. It is possible that the best version of the deck is one that was played by the Brew Crew in Team Modern Super League Week 2: https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/magic-online/team-modern-super-league-decklists
I really look forward to see which one of these decks rises to the top.
Sultai Control
Three years ago, Gerard Fabiano played a very interesting Sultai Control deck to victory at an SCG open. I based the following deck on his list with Jace.
(Link to article http://www.starcitygames.com/article/30421_Sultai-In-Modern.html )
Goyf and Jace have long been friends. This deck has a lot of one-ofs and some cards that I would really like to try out in this new format.
In this article I focused on control decks, but Jace could fit in to any deck that wants a different axis of attack. It is very likely that we could see a resurgence of Faeries, as that deck gets another axis of attack with Jace. I am not really sure what this deck looks like, but it would be interesting to see if we start seeing people start doing well with the Fae.
I have no idea where this format is going and that seems awesome. I am really looking forward to playing in modern events in the future with Jace decks.
I have seen many people on the internet in articles and on Facebook saying Modern is dead. I just have one thing to say to all of these Chicken Littles: give it time. Modern is not dead, the sky is not falling, and the only planeswalker with a rap song written about him is back.
Happy Listening and Happy Spellslinging.
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