Some sets are ensembles, while others have standouts stealing the show. Uro, Titan of Nature’s Wrath is a flagship mythic in a set that shook every Constructed format to its foundations. Though the Simic Ramp decks that seemed like its natural home in Theros Beyond Death Standard were quickly shoved off their throne, Uro is a backbone of the new Bant Ramp decks that took up that mantle and played a big part in Temur Reclamation’s dominance following the release of Theros Beyond Death. In Pioneer, Uro was a welcome inclusion in Five-Color Niv-Mizzet during its brief reign and is an integral part of the Sultai Delirium deck that Joel Larsson put on the map at Players Tour Brussels. Uro has even shown up in Legacy as an option for Green Sun’s Zenith.
What about Modern? Uro has taken a while to find its place in a format currently in the clutches of another 6/6 Titan. Despite the best efforts of many players, the traditional midrange or control plan of trading resources with your opponent and then replenishing your own has rarely been successful in Modern. Card advantage is a less useful concept when a single card or interaction can undo all your hard work and render many of your cards irrelevant. Underworld Breach is the newest and flashiest example, but Birthing Pod, Eye of Ugin, and many others have been thorns in the side of Thoughtseize and Tarmogoyf. Primeval Titan is the nemesis of anyone trying to “play fair” and Amulet Titan is the best deck in Modern.
Interactive decks must apply pressure to be successful. Jund and Abzan Midrange have always relied on this recipe: Tarmogoyf is often a scarier follow-up to Thoughtseize than a second Thoughtseize even against a combo deck aiming to assemble specific pairs of cards. The unbanning of Stoneforge Mystic was exciting news for Hallowed Fountain fans as it offered them a way to control the pacing of the game and give the opponent less time to play around counters. Grixis Death’s Shadow and Four-Color Death’s Shadow take this principle to the extreme, packing the most efficient threats and cheapest interaction into a compact mana curve. Unfortunately, these threats tend to be weak to the same interaction that those decks rely on – any Death’s Shadow player knows the frustration of losing your one threat and being stuck with a hand of useless discard spells and Stubborn Denials.
Uro has several inbuilt solutions to this issue. Opposing discard spells can’t remove Uro as a threat but do let you escape faster. Against a known removal spell, Uro can be cashed in for a card and parked in the graveyard until the coast is clear. Over a long game, the same Uro can come back multiple times if the opponent’s removal doesn’t exile it. While escape – like delve – rewards you for playing normal Magic, cards like Thought Scour can boost you towards that five-card threshold while also finding Uro, effectively increasing your deck’s threat density.
Uro isn’t just resilient, it’s large enough to tangle with any non-Death’s Shadow creature (including a larger Tarmogoyf since you can escape away unique card types) and notably pairs very well with Ashiok, Dream Render against Primeval Titan, as it can trade with the neutered 6/6 while Ashiok’s -1 is a recurring source of fuel for escape. If combat is relevant in the game, Uro is likely to win it.
Unfortunately, combat isn’t very relevant in today’s Modern. Traditional aggro has all but disappeared. Burn, a matchup where Healing Salve reliably trades for a card, has fallen out of favor, whereas Prowess can deal large chunks of damage that outpace Uro’s lifegain. Most other decks don’t care about incremental lifegain and many don’t fight over the battlefield at all. Uro does a lot, but how much of it matters to your deck or in actual games?
It’s also a clunky card for Modern, which has laughed off its initial mission statement of being a Turn 4 format – if you tap out for Uro on Turn 3, you may not get to untap. Though the extra land clause hints at using this new Titan to jump up to more expensive spells, keeping your curve as low as possible allows you to survive the first few turns, interact on the turn you cast Uro, and stock the graveyard for a quick escape.
One way of understanding Uro’s role is that, even when none of its many lines of text are directly useful, it allows you to fill your deck with cards that are more polarized in their effectiveness. The floor on Uro’s performance is high and this lets you take a risk on narrow anti-aggro or anti-control cards, as Uro is strong enough to make up for drawing a dead card and having a generally strong card in your deck makes it easier to swap these narrow cards out to present a cohesive post-sideboard configuration.
Alternatively, you can use Uro’s broad utility to depolarize your deck. For example, Temur Reclamation in Theros Beyond Death Standard is weak to aggro as reflected in its dismal record against Mono-Red Aggro at World Championship XXVI. Previously, you would have to take drastic measures to make those matchups tenable pre-sideboard and this would load you up with dead cards against the other blue decks. Now, Uro makes up enough ground that you can justify supporting it with contextually weaker but more widely useful cards like Scorching Dragonfire that can pick off a planeswalker against Azorius Control or other ramp decks.
The larger point is that, while Uro is a perfectly strong card on its own merits, it rewards thoughtful deckbuilding and has a sky-high ceiling. Consider this recent attempt to revive Simic Urza from last week’s Magic Online Modern Challenge:
Creatures (18)
- 3 Ice-Fang Coatl
- 4 Urza, Lord High Artificer
- 4 Gilded Goose
- 4 Emry, Lurker of the Loch
- 3 Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath
Lands (20)
Spells (22)
This is as bad a shell for Uro as you’ll find in Modern. The deck is full of nonland permanents that don’t place themselves in the graveyard as well as conditional or clunky reactive cards that can’t be played early and force a choice between holding them up or casting Uro. With only twenty lands you’ll rarely have one to put in with Uro’s trigger and there are few good one-drops to chain into with it. Emry is the only way to bloat the graveyard for escape and her efficiency relies on artifacts which, with the exception of Mishra’s Bauble, are also not touching the graveyard early. Despite all that, Uro gives the deck enough of a boost to have earned the attention of several prominent players.
Strategies that acknowledge and lean into Uro’s strengths are even more handsomely rewarded. Caring about land drops makes Uro more appealing and there are several decks in the market for a card that can be the ramp spell you need on Turn 3 and the threat that puts the game away on Turn 5. Amulet Titan is full of colorless lands and has difficulty filling its graveyard, so Uro is a poor fit there, but Simic Titan can gladly pick it up instead. Gerry Thompson and Sam Black have both explored the potential of ramp decks building towards a Mystic Sanctuary + Cryptic Command lock with Uro as an ideal finisher. Former Platinum pro and current Magic designer Andrew Brown took this one step further:
Creatures (12)
Planeswalkers (5)
Lands (27)
Spells (16)
Path to Exile is the cleanest removal spell in a world of Primeval Titan and Reality Smasher as well as valuable extra ramp with Ice-Fang Coatl or Snapcaster Mage. Between the manafixing of Dryad of the Ilysian Grove and the Arcum’s Astrolabe + Prismatic Vista manabase, the mana barely has to stretch to accommodate a fourth or even fifth colour.
All of the lists featured so far have focused on either Uro’s resilience as a recursive threat or its unique role as a ramp card. If we go deeper we can exploit both at once:
Creatures (16)
Lands (31)
- 2 Forest
- 2 Island
- 1 Polluted Delta
- 1 Flooded Strand
- 1 Tranquil Thicket
- 1 Lonely Sandbar
- 1 Snow-Covered Island
- 1 Snow-Covered Forest
- 1 Oboro, Palace in the Clouds
- 1 Breeding Pool
- 4 Ghost Quarter
- 1 Simic Growth Chamber
- 4 Misty Rainforest
- 1 Scalding Tarn
- 4 Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle
- 1 Waterlogged Grove
- 1 Prismatic Vista
- 2 Field of the Dead
- 1 Mystic Sanctuary
Spells (13)
Sideboard
Splendid Reclamation is an incredibly powerful card but decks built around it tend to be overly reliant on it and therefore weak to the usual discard and counters as well as graveyard hate. Dryad of the Ilysian Grove is the centerpiece of this version, promising Turn 3 or Turn 4 wins with Reclamation and a solid main plan that doesn’t use the graveyard. With four copies of both Dryad and Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle as well as Once Upon a Time and a backup Dryad in Prismatic Omen, this is as good a Valakut deck as one can be without any actual Mountains. Reclamation without this effect can still take over the battlefield with Field of the Dead, while Mystic Sanctuary plus fetchlands and Life from the Loam ensures that rebuying Reclamation is inevitable. Once Upon a Time shows off its full potential here, finding high-impact creatures for Turn 1 and beyond as well as specific utility lands.
This deck uses every part of Uro. Hedron Crab and Life from the Loam locate Uro quickly and allow it to escape as early as Turn 3, while Valakut and Field of the Dead appreciate the extra land drop and the draw to dig for more.
Creatures (3)
Planeswalkers (8)
Lands (26)
Spells (23)
In these uncertain times, it’s comforting to know that multiple GP Top 8 competitor Daniel Wong is at it again with his off-beat, quad-sleeved Taking Turns deck. This deck ends the game – or at least the opponent’s participation in it – quickly once it gets going but is prone to spinning its tires and can have trouble stabilizing games from behind. Uro gives an important life buffer, converts the card advantage from Wrenn and Six into a relevant battlefield presence, adds to the land count for Fires of Invention, and lets you gain traction when protecting a planeswalker is difficult.
Finally, an update to a 5-0 list by Magic Online user Nephtyz gives us the most unusual home for Uro:
Creatures (11)
Planeswalkers (3)
Lands (24)
Spells (22)
This is the first and last deck you’ll ever see that uses Gilded Goose as a lock piece and Uro is unsurprisingly a star in that role too. With a full pack of discard spells alongside Liliana of the Veil to clear the opponent’s hand, Zur’s Weirding ensures they will never draw another relevant card. Normally this lock has a natural expiration date as your life total dwindles, but Gilded Goose can sustain that payment indefinitely and Uro will eventually arrive no matter where it’s sent by Weirding.
Note how well the black discard and removal work with Uro. Inquisition of Kozilek and Thoughtseize can buy you a turn to take off for Uro, follow Uro on the same turn, and confirm an escaped Uro is safe. Unlike the Metallic Rebukes and Remands of earlier lists, you can – and gladly will – fire these off as soon as possible, and this gives Uro enough food if it’s urgently needed. Fatal Push fits into these play patterns just as seamlessly and even gets to benefit from Uro’s automatic revolt.
This is by no means the limit for Uro in Modern – the Five-Color Niv-Mizzet decks in this format would follow their Pioneer counterparts in adopting Uro and other graveyard synergies are surely possible too. Theros Beyond Death is a goldmine for creative deckbuilders and its wordiest card is the best example.