Mardu Pyromancer has emerged as the best discard-heavy midrange deck in
Modern and one of the best decks overall. It’s the deck that revealed to
the world that Faithless Looting was more than an enabler for
graveyard-based combo decks–a powerful card selection spell in fair decks
that can mitigate its card disadvantage in some way.
Mardu is great at answering creatures with its cheap removal and good at
beating up control decks with discard and hard to answer threats in Bedlam
Reveler and Lingering Souls, but as with other Thoughtseize decks it
struggles with decks that go over the top of it, namely Mono-Green Tron. It
doesn’t produce a fast enough clock to make its disruption in the matchup
meaningful, giving the Tron player time to find whatever pieces were
stripped from their hand early and cast a game-ending threat.
Today’s deck is a variant on the Mardu Pyromancer deck, even if it doesn’t
have the namesake card, or the color white at all. It maintains the core of
Faithless Looting, Bedlam Reveler, and cheap interaction, but supplements
it with aggressive creatures in Monastery Swiftspear and Kiln Fiend. With
the cheap spells and a full four copies of Manamorphose, it’s easy for
these creatures to deal huge chunks of damage by turn 4, at which point
burn spells can finish the opponent off.
The ability to play a non-interactive game and race Tron is excellent, and
there’s enough of the core in place to play a long game against creature
decks, especially when you side in the Kolaghan’s Commands and Engineered
Explosives for some of the aggressive elements. You’re mainly suffering
against control decks, though Hazoret the Fervent is a great card there so
long as you use your discard to clear out any pesky Path to Exiles. Also,
control is finally on the downswing in Modern after everyone finally
started listening to me, so that’s a fine hole to have since you have to
pick your poison somewhere in a diverse metagame.
I don’t see this deck replacing Mardu Pyromancer anytime soon since Mardu
is a significantly more powerful deck, but for players who have invested
into that deck and don’t have a backup option for when the metagame gets
too Tron and Scapeshift-heavy, I think this is a great change of pace to
keep winning until it comes time to grit and grind again.
Creatures (13)
Lands (21)
Spells (26)
