Video: Pyromancer Ascension / Ad Nauseam In Modern!

Sometimes, one deck just isn’t enough! With the $5,000 Premier IQ at #SCGPHILLY on the horizon, Pro Tour Champ Ari Lax shows you how to combo off whichever way you prefer!

By Ari Lax

January 8, 2015

These games might not be fully illustrative of the issue here, so I’m going to go a bit more in depth into the theory in text.

Obviously, going under Treasure Cruise has been something people have found works fairly well in Legacy (see: Storm at the Invitational). The same seems
like it would apply to Modern, but a couple of slight differences make that less optimal.

1. Modern combo decks don’t reliably kill on turn 3 as a result of the banned list.

2. There are a ton of Modern combo decks you have to fight against, and there aren’t a lot of good generic answers to them.

3. The cantrips in Modern are bad, and as a result, the Legacy style option of sifting through specific answers with Brainstorm and Ponder doesn’t work.

The more you look at it, the more it starts becoming reasonable to attack combo by just racing them like U/R Delver in Legacy. Delver in this format has
more or all of the same tools to do that, namely Monastery Swiftspear, Delver of Secrets, and Lightning Bolt, so you see a lot less decks likeBBD’s Jeskai Stoneblade deck and a lot more like Logan Mize’s Mutagenic Growth and Gut Shot Delver deck.

A deck like Storm, which is burdened by concepts like “having a critical mass of specific cards” and can’t afford much interaction, fumbles in the face of
this challenge. You could slot in Lighting Bolts, but then you lose Cruises and the edge you gained against attrition decks. The combo decks I expect to
see succeed in Modern as long as Cruise is legal will be those that accept they aren’t faster than Delver in a vacuum and adjust accordingly. Either they
are inherently disruptive like Ad Nauseam with Phyrexian Unlife or Living End, they are riding the line of fair and linear and can interact with Delver in
combat or play like G/W Hexproof and Birthing Pod, or they are basically control decks disguised as combo like Splinter Twin or Scapeshift.