The early reviews of Bloomburrow are great – the vibes are immaculate – but if you’re a competitive player wondering how this set will shake up your format of choice, it’s hard to identify the beasts that will ravage the ecosystem. That’s especially true in Modern, which is still reeling from the impact of Modern Horizons 3 and marking time until the bannings on August 26 let us flex our creative muscles once more.
Kitsa, Otterball Elite
The newest, cutest Merfolk Looter in town stands out even in an ever-growing lodge. Rona, Herald of Invasion and Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy are uniquely strong in decks that can harness their power – and Ledger Shredder sets a high bar that cards like Duelist of the Mind wish they could clear – but Kitsa has the most generic appeal.
Which strategies actually want this effect, though? It’s not clear who wants ‘just’ a looter; if you want Prowess threats, there are many more focused options. Kitsa does a bit of everything, but that doesn’t add up to much for Modern.
The Izzet decks have mostly fallen out of favour, but Kitsa could compete for the Shredder slot there – it plays a bit better with your reactive cards and in longer games Forking a Lightning Bolt or Unholy Heat lets you clear the way for Kitsa to keep applying pressure.
Flame of Anor fans will be thrilled to see another strong Wizard. An Izzet deck with Tamiyo, Inquisitive Student and Kitsa can get full value from Flame without having to dig deep for more.
Having another pushed looter might make the others more playable by letting you build around them with rewards for drawing or discarding cards (my kingdom for a Currency Converter!). Inti, Seneschal of the Sun is a great start – and, with eight to twelve legendary looters, you can support Mox Amber or other incentives there. Maybe you push some graveyard synergies – you could build a very different Goryo’s Vengeance deck where the looters themselves are good targets or keep it simple with stuff like Unearth. Phlage and Kroxa both become a lot stronger when you can dump them in the graveyard and bypass having to cast them normally.
Combo by Kitsa
If this all sounds far too fair for you, let’s try something more dramatic:
Creatures (16)
- 4 Urza, Lord High Artificer
- 4 Emry, Lurker of the Loch
- 4 Tamiyo, Inquisitive Student
- 4 Kitsa, Otterball Elite
Lands (21)
Spells (23)
Kitsa also boasts its own deterministic combo. If you can generate three or more mana with nonland sources, you can put Dramatic Reversal on the stack and copy it with Kitsa, which untaps Kitsa and those mana sources to repeat and generate infinite mana. Urza, Lord High Artificer turns any artifact into Mox Sapphire for that purpose while giving you an infinite mana sink; The One Ring does its usual thing but also turns Dramatic Reversal into a fantastic card draw spell!
Thundertrap Trainer
We’ve come a long way since Augur of Bolas, but that class of cards was never taken seriously in Modern. Fallaji Archaeologist is much worse than Thundertrap Trainer overall and sees play begrudgingly in Esper Goryo’s Vengeance – but milling over your Vengeance targets is a crucial part of its role there. I want to Ephemerate Trainer too – but where?
Trainer can also be a much-needed additional enabler for Flare of Denial. You have to strike a careful balance there – enough creatures to make Flare a true ‘free’ spell, enough noncreatures to make Trainer a fine card in its own right, and enough room for whatever your main plan actually is.
The new batch of modal DFCs help there, padding the overall spell count and letting Trainer dig for lands to alleviate mana screw.
Trainer may prove essential if some combo deck emerges with a key spell that requires a creature as fodder. Coming up with a good historical comparison is tricky and shows how unlikely this is – someone in a parallel universe is putting a Splinter Twin on Trainer right now.
…or maybe you still just want another Wizard to keep that flame lit. How many good Wizards with “when this enters…” triggers do we need for Riptide Laboratory to make a return?
Keen-Eyed Curator
Keen-Eyed Curator is a very thoughtful design and one that I think is much more powerful than advertised.
The obvious comparison is with Scavenging Ooze – a workhorse that has slowly receded from Modern with the advent of the straight-to-Modern sets. A decade ago, Ooze loomed large in any fair fight. Even if the game didn’t directly revolve around the graveyard – and thus around Ooze for as long as it remained – its scaling size and incremental lifegain ensured it was a key player. The lifegain in particular was often highly relevant, with many games being won on a very thin margin at low life, but Ooze stabilizing the game relied on it being the biggest body around.
The problem came against linear decks or creatureless decks that didn’t use the graveyard, where Ooze was a glorified Runeclaw Bear. During Summer Bloom’s reign, Sam Black described how surreal it was to watch people get excited over casting Scavenging Ooze or Kolaghan’s Command when this superweapon was available instead. Keen-Eyed Curator gets big enough, fast enough to demand your respect – your combo deck won’t have much time to rebuild from that first wave of disruption before Curator finishes you off.
Curating the Graveyard
It sounds almost insulting to say that the graveyard hate card is good against graveyard combo decks, but this is actually where its position is shakiest. On the draw, tapping out for Curator or Ooze with no mana up leaves you vulnerable to a big Living End or Goryo’s Vengeance – you need cheaper hate and/or early disruption to buy more time for Curator to come online.
However, more and more decks – both fair and unfair – have incidental graveyard synergies that you’re keen to break up. When the Izzet decks had Unholy Heat as their main removal spell and Dragon’s Rage Channeler and Murktide Regent as key threats, graveyard hate threatened to disable them completely as long as you could contain Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer. Recent additions like Phlage and Nethergoyf continue that trend.
This symmetry of sorts helps Curator on both ends – it’s easier to lean into the cards that make it better (since they are helping your other threats too) and to justify doing that because most opponents are generously giving it cards to feast on. Maybe you didn’t run or didn’t draw your own Urza’s Saga, but if this opponent did, it will help make Curator much bigger much faster. There’s some tension between feeding Curator and keeping those cards in place to help your other threats, but this isn’t a deal-breaker.
If you want to turbocharge Curator – and any Nethergoyfs or Tarmogoyfs joining the squad – you can mix and match card types freely in Modern. Urza’s Saga for Haywire Mite is a common tactic that happens to be a self-contained delirium package, while Magic’s first multi-typed planeswalker in Grist can take over the game if you have enough fodder – that’s where Modern Horizons 3 all-star Springheart Nantuko (also two types, including the elusive enchantment) comes in!
A Curated Golgari List
I’ll leave this one to the people with years of experience casting Thoughtseize into Tarmogoyf, but here’s a quick sketch:
Creatures (17)
Lands (24)
Spells (19)
Into the Flood Maw
Before getting back to the flashy build-arounds, it’s worth highlighting a valuable pickup for combo decks across all formats. You want ways to free yourself from a hate card – Leyline of the Void, Drannith Magistrate, whatever it is – and ideally, those should be cheap and instant-speed so you can deal with a card that was just cast and still have all your mana on your own turn. All previous options were either cheap but conditional or more expensive; this one does the job for one mana, no questions asked.
Once you venture beyond the relatively safe shores of Modern, other mischief is possible too…
Rottenmouth Viper
The past few years gave us so many cheap creatures that bring trinkets with them that you can cast a one-mana Rottenmouth Viper on Turn 3 with little effort. Unfortunately, they also brought us the best interaction Modern has ever seen from Solitude and Leyline Binding to Unholy Heat and Galvanic Discharge, all ready to undo that investment with even less effort. Have your fun with this but don’t get your hopes up.
Ygra, Eater of All
Ygra, Eater of All has Cat lovers licking their chops in Pioneer – you can loop Cauldron Familiars by sacrificing one on the battlefield (that’s now a Food) to return the other, with no clear window to break this up, as any other actual Food or creature on the battlefield can be sacrificed in response to removal to start the loop again.
In Modern, the bar for any combo like this is much higher – being able to cast a five-drop is a stretch goal rather than an inevitability – but you also get the whole Food platter from Modern Horizons 2, including the Asmoranomardicadaistinaculdacar + The Underworld Cookbook package and Urza’s Saga. Is that enough?
The Samwise Food decks are already set up to exploit similar loops and Samwise Gamgee is much cheaper and more versatile. One selling point of the Food decks is that they get to keep their curve relatively low, which lets them make use of in-built mana sinks like Urza’s Saga (or Trail of Crumbs or just Samwise itself returning your payoffs). Shoving a five-drop into that when it costs twice as much as the next most expensive spell is hard to justify.
Lumra, Bellow of the Woods
I have higher hopes for another big beast.
Lumra, Bellow of the Woods was our first glimpse of Bloomburrow, and I fell in love at first sight. Aftermath Analyst flew under the radar for a while but soon emerged as one of the breakout stars of Murders at Karlov Manor. Lumra gives you all that but leaves around a body that will dominate the battlefield.
There’s a proven shell (and personal favourite, of course) that’s a natural home for Lumra and Analyst:
At the same mana cost, Lumra invites comparisons with Primeval Titan – if you could find and resolve Lumra, is that actually better than just committing to Titan instead? In a normal Amulet Titan list, the answer is no (though you may want to dabble with the first Analyst and/or Lumra to add a new angle of attack in the slot Cultivator Colossus usually fills). However, there are enough tools in Modern that you can commit to this as your primary plan – and then the sky’s the limit.
This does create a weakness to graveyard hate that has to be recognized in that tradeoff – but Titan itself is an excellent ‘backup’ threat, and Lumra is likely to get you lands back even through most hate (even if they use their Endurance or Soul-Guide Lantern in response to the trigger, you get any lands milled in the top four and any lands you can bin before it resolves).
Three Tree City
Three Tree City is a lock to be one of the most desired cards in the set and a shoo-in for any casual Kindred deck, whether you’re a Merfolk man or a Goblins girl (…or part of the Sliver Hive?). Lands that make multiple mana are inherently dangerous as long as they clear a modest bar – nobody has nightmares about Tarnation Vista – as Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx continues to remind us in Pioneer.
The Nykthos comparison is natural – they have the same input cost and both incentivize you to build a battlefield to unlock that mana boost, and they share the drawback of being legendary – and Nykthos’s failure to break through into Modern is illustrative here. You need four devotion (or four creatures of the chosen type here) to net mana, and getting enough material for that is hard against the amazing interaction in Modern. That’s especially true of these synergistic creature decks where your team is more than the sum of its parts – if you have four creatures, things are already going well – and Three Tree City doesn’t let you rig the count with the likes of Leyline of the Guildpact.
This is a stretch goal if each creature requires investing a card and mana, especially coloured mana – a colourless land clashes with cards like Lord of Atlantis or Meddling Mage. You need so many cheap creatures that you can go wide early while still having a use for the extra mana (Zombies is a surprising standout here) or a way to get several bodies from one card – token-heavy tribes like Goblins and Elves are well-suited to this.
Three Elf City?
Elves has a good mix of all this and already plays in the same space with big Heritage Druid or Priest of Titania turns – you can even find Nykthos or Three Tree City on demand with Elvish Reclaimer! – but its structural issues remain.
I expect we’ll see Three Tree City as a true legendary land – a one-of in the average tribal deck – rather than something you build your whole deck around like Nykthos (or Gaea’s Cradle in Legacy).
Bloomburrow is more cute than menacing for the most part, but I’m hopeful some of these hits can rise to the top of the food chain.
***
SCG CON is coming to Tampa, FL on September 6-8! The world’s premier trading card game convention features three full days of Magic: The Gathering, Flesh and Blood, Disney Lorcana, and Star Wars Unlimited action:
- Magic: The Gathering Modern $10Ks on Friday and Saturday; cEDH $5K; Super Sunday Regional Championship Qualifiers in Standard, Pioneer, and Modern; and Commander Celebration
- Flesh and Blood Rosetta World Premiere, Calling, and Battle Hardened events
- Disney Lorcana Core Constructed $2K and $1K events
- Star Wars Unlimited Premier Constructed $2K and $1K events
- Side events all weekend long
And so much more!
Plus, meet fan-favorite special guests and artists!
Best of all, SCG CON is free to attend!
Make your plans for SCG CON Tampa!
