Sometimes a metagame gets warped enough that a deck built around extremely narrow cards to attack certain strategies can be successful. Today, I’m wondering if Modern has gotten to that point, and I’m playing a deck inspired by Zvi Mowshowitz’s Pro Tour Tokyo winning Invasion Block deck, “The Solution.” That deck used protection from red creatures to beat R/G beatdown decks. I’m going to use protection from red creatures that gain life to try to beat Burn decks. My thinking is that almost every deck uses red removal, so protection from red creatures are generally good, and in a deck based on drawing cards and killing creatures, all I care about is having any random creature in play, so I might as well play creatures that have a lot of upside in the most common matchups.
I’ll be playing the following list:
Creatures (16)
- 4 Auriok Champion
- 1 Baneslayer Angel
- 4 Kor Firewalker
- 3 Snapcaster Mage
- 2 Geist of Saint Traft
- 2 Restoration Angel
Lands (23)
Spells (21)
- 4 Lightning Bolt
- 2 Lightning Helix
- 1 Electrolyze
- 1 Negate
- 4 Path to Exile
- 4 Thought Scour
- 4 Treasure Cruise
- 1 Dig Through Time
Sideboard
Round 1
Round 2
Round 3
Round 4
I think the key takeaways for me are that Modern is still too open to play cards that aren’t generally good, and that Auriok Champion is very unimpressive against red unless you’re dedicated to making a lot of creatures. Kor Firewalker is a card that I think might still be worth experimenting with in maindecks, but this isn’t the right set of support cards, and simply including it in a deck won’t give you a favorable matchup against red; it needs to be part of a large strategy to beat them.