Modern, Pioneer, Victory: What You Need To Know For SCG CON Indianapolis

There’s nothing quite like a team tournament. The highs are higher, the lows are lower, and the bad beat stories are even more extreme. My last big Magic tournament pre-COVID was a run to the Top 4 of a Team Open in Richmond; I’ve waited for two years for a chance to chase that high again. I went to extreme lengths to make sure I could attend SCG CON Indianapolis this weekend, and I can’t wait to battle. Say hi if you’re there!

Teams competing in the 25K Team Event will need to master all of Pioneer, Modern, and Legacy; players going solo can take their pick of those for the 5K events on Sunday. Pioneer and Modern are still reeling from the loss of Lurrus of the Dream-Den, and players who can predict where they will settle stand to gain a big edge. 

One appealing feature of both formats is that they are so broad that you can play – or play against! – almost anything, and it’s impossible to be fully prepared. My aim here is to highlight the decks you should expect to see most often and to suggest something that will appeal to you whatever your preferred play style. 

Pioneer

At first, I was going to team with Shaheen Soorani. By now I would have been tempted to plonk him in the Pioneer seat. Azorius Control has taken over post-Lurrus Pioneer on Magic Online and is a front-runner for this weekend. The control die-hards will be drawn to it no matter what, but players who just want to win the tournament should strongly consider it too.

The Lurrus ban made the aggro decks that leaned on it much more vulnerable to control staples like Supreme Verdict. These decks could always steal their share of games with early pressure, but the threat of Lurrus let them use this pressure to meddle with the pacing of the game. You could punish a control player for holding up mana by using your own to add Lurrus to your hand rather than playing into reactive cards. If they did have the necessary sweeper, you could immediately rebuild with Lurrus and force them to have another. Now, the first Verdict deals with the first wave and the second wave isn’t guaranteed. 

On top of these tricky in-game dynamics, Lurrus helped these aggro decks to put the classic squeeze on Azorius Control. You can tailor your control deck to beat any of aggro, combo, midrange, or the control mirrors, but keeping up with all of these at once is very difficult. Aggro becoming weaker and less popular makes it easier to target the other pillars of the metagame. 

Azorius Control also picked up a perfect bounty from Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty. March of Otherworldly Light is a gift for control decks across all formats: a flexible, instant-speed removal spell that can clean up stubborn artifacts and enchantments like Oni-Cult Anvil or Jeskai Ascendancy. Just a single copy of Farewell is enough to change the texture of many matchups. For decks like Four-Color Fires (Yorion) or Jund Sacrifice that try to out-grind control decks on the battlefield, the threat of Farewell looms over the game and warps how it must be played.

The Wandering Emperor has quickly become a multi-format all-star, and Pioneer is no exception. It joins a deep bench of instant-speed effects that make Azorius Control impossible to play against comfortably. Do you run your best threat into a possible Emperor, or hold back and give them more time to activate a Castle or cast Memory Deluge? Do you respect Censor now or a possible Absorb later? What if they have that Shark Typhoon?

The legendary lands from Neon Dynasty fill out this list and add to an amazing roster of utility lands. Between these, Hall of Storm Giants, Castles Ardenvale and Vantress, and Irrigated Farmland, Azorius Control has bulletproof flood insurance and an abundance of ways to use spare mana. 

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Izzet Phoenix is the best deck. It has more card filtering and card advantage – and thus more consistency, in one sense – than any other deck. Its density of cheap removal alongside Thing in the Ice (no longer a sacred cow in this archetype!) is a nightmare for anyone relying on small creatures. Against everyone else, your sideboard lets you pivot to a solid controlling strategy. 

The latest twist on Izzet Phoenix works a combo element into the deck too. It’s easy to imagine drawing six cards with Galvanic Iteration + Treasure Cruise, but the real dream is copying Temporal Trespass to let you take what will surely be the last turns of the game.

In a deck that already has Consider, Opt, Expressive Iteration, Chart a Course, and Pieces of the Puzzle, Treasure Cruise is often just more of the same. Temporal Trespass gives you a unique endgame to build towards and dig for with all of these cards. By itself, Trespass gives you another attack with a flock of Arclight Phoenixes. That’s usually enough to swing a race in your favour. Casting Thing in the Ice and Temporal Trespass in the same turn with a flurry of spells to flip Thing on the extra turn before the opponent can untap is a common play pattern too. 

Naya Winota is the most explosive deck in Pioneer. You can’t play with or against it if you can’t handle the swings. A quick look at the deck’s evolution shows how its philosophy has changed over time. 

The initial lists were all-in combo decks that used Eldritch Evolution to maximize their access to Winota, Joiner of Forces. This approach was highly vulnerable to disruption. Eldritch Evolution relied on you having a strong battlefield presence for the Winota it found to accomplish anything. 

The release of Esika’s Chariot allowed Naya Winota to play a much stronger fair game instead. Chariot lined up well against the type of interaction that was best against the deck’s namesake. Chariot into Winota was a terrifying curve that also took over Standard for a mercifully brief time. 

This made Naya Winota more stable overall, but Innistrad: Midnight Hunt was the real game-changer, allowing the deck to upgrade its Winota hits. Brutal Cathar is a removal spell that you could easily cast off your Turn 1 Elvish Mystic and, crucially, find with a Winota trigger to turn the tables against another creature deck. Tovolar’s Huntmaster lets you ditch the Angrath’s Marauders for another hard-hitting threat that you can realistically cast. Between Llanowar Elves and Elvish Mystic, Prosperous Innkeeper, and other options like Paradise Druid, just ramping into Tovolar’s Huntmaster on Turn 4 is a realistic and reasonable plan.

Naya Winota is exceptional against other linear decks or anything that lacks interaction. Unfortunately, it is structurally flawed against Izzet Phoenix. That makes it an inherently risky choice for any Pioneer tournament in the near future. I expect many players this weekend to embrace that gamble regardless. 

As always in Pioneer, Lotus Field Combo is a dangerous wildcard. In the big picture, Lotus Field lives or dies by the speed of the format; there’s a cap on how fast and thus how competitive it can be against aggro or other combo decks. When Pioneer starts moving at a slower pace – and a format headlined by Azorius Control and Izzet Phoenix fits that bill – Lotus Field is ready to strike. The Lurrus ban has no direct impact on Lotus Field Combo. The companion rarely came up in games against Lotus Field. Still, this blow to aggro decks like Boros Heroic or Azorius Ensoul that relied on Lurrus is great news for Lotus Field. 

The list of cards that directly interact with Lotus Field is very short. Only Alpine Moon and Damping Sphere do it reliably, but they are very good at their job. Blast Zone was an accessible answer to these, but finding Blast Zone and activating it (plus giving it another counter first in the case of Damping Sphere) took a lot of time, especially if you had already thrown away other lands to invest in a now-useless Lotus Field. 

The new legendary lands are a convenient fix. Boseiju is a cheap and effective answer to these hate cards and many others that can also double as disruption against some decks. The Four-Color Jeskai Ascendancy matchup used to be difficult, but being able to find a guaranteed answer to their pivotal enchantment with your Sylvan Scrying makes it much closer. 

Meanwhile, dedicated Lotus Field players have done good work streamlining the combo. Emergent Ultimatum is now a reliable one-card kill at a lower mana threshold than some of the convoluted sequences the deck was forced to follow in the past.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Pioneer. Players who sign up for a Modern tournament know to expect the unexpected. Anyone getting their first taste of Pioneer in a while (or at all!) will soon learn that lesson here, too.

Modern

Lurrus Is Banned. Welcome To The New Modern.

If you had asked me for recommendations two weeks ago, I would have given you the safe answers: Grixis Death’s Shadow (Lurrus), Orzhov Hammer (Lurrus), and Four-Color Control (Yorion). 

The (Lurrus) part is thankfully gone, but each of these decks is still a top contender in Modern. The early results post-Lurrus bear that out:

Grixis Death’s Shadow claimed the title in the gigantic Super Qualifier held on Magic Online (MTGO) this weekend. Street Wraith is a familiar option on the table again without Lurrus, but azax’s winning list eschews Wraith for Consider’s more controlled card selection and graveyard synergies – including Murktide Regent, the real star of this list. This deck plays as many pushed Modern Horizons 2 cards as possible. Murktide Regent is happy to contribute to that.

This change was spurred by the loss of Lurrus, but the result is a deck that is scarier in many ways. The Bridge from Below ban forced the Hogaak decks into a new form that may have been worse overall but had some structural advantages. Perhaps the same is occurring here?

Most Hammer decks leaned heavily on Lurrus, but Puresteel Paladin and friends aren’t going anywhere. Lifting Lurrus’s mana value restriction opens up a larger and more diverse range of Equipment to fill that void in longer games. Previous non-Lurrus lists usually ran a single Nettlecyst. This list from Canadian heartthrob Tyler Nightingale makes a bold statement in running three copies, putting a lot of faith in its ability to turn any mopey Ornithopter into a serious threat. 

In this context, the main strength of Lurrus was letting Hammer slog through interaction from decks like Grixis Death’s Shadow that are also likely to have Lurrus. As we saw this weekend, those decks have to adapt to this new reality too; replacing a guaranteed Lurrus with a possible Murktide Regent changes a lot about how you build and pilot your Grixis deck. From the other side, the risk assessment of whether you can move in on a big Colossus Hammer turn changes when you don’t have Lurrus on standby to threaten that again soon. Even if you have a lot of prior experience with the Hammer-Shadow matchup, don’t assume that those heuristics will hold up safely if both decks are substantially different now.

The other pillar of recent Modern lost nothing and is better than ever:

Four-Color Control (Yorion) gets to keep its companion, can leverage its removal more easily against opponents who can’t fall back on Lurrus, and even picks up some crucial tools from Neon Dynasty.

Boseiju, Who Endures doesn’t do anything totally irreplaceable – Four-Color Control enjoys a range of flexible interaction and can even neuter problematic lands with Spreading Seas – but it does give you more freedom to line up those answers effectively as you have more coverage against any individual problem. What makes this more important is that Boseiju turns Wrenn and Six from a generic card advantage engine (that can only find you mid-game action under certain circumstances) into a combo card that can lock the opponent out of the game remarkably quickly. The threat of Boseiju every turn is a massive issue for any deck reliant on one of those card types, from Hammer to Mono-Green Tron to Amulet Titan.

The Cascade combo decks had a great weekend and are poised for another if they aren’t shown enough respect. Living End was already seeing a resurgence before the Lurrus ban on the back of some Neon Dynasty additions, while Temur Crashcade has these surprising results often enough that perhaps they shouldn’t be surprising. 

Living End, Not Crashcade, Is Modern’s Best Cascade Deck

The debate over which Cascade deck deserves your custom hasn’t changed much since Modern Horizons 2. My sympathies lie with Living End, and it is one of my front-runners for this weekend. If you’re still unsure what to play in Modern at this stage, you can’t do much better. It’s a straightforward and consistent deck with a lot of raw power. 

I’d be remiss if I didn’t finish this segment with Amulet Titan. The big picture of Modern hasn’t changed, so neither has the outlook for Amulet Titan. If anything, the new Grixis decks with Murktide Regent may be even harder to beat than the previous lists! I’m actively excited to play against Hammer with the help of Boseiju, and less keen to face Four-Color Control now thanks to their copies of Boseiju. If you were already a skilled Amulet Titan player, it’s still a fine choice; if you weren’t, it’s not worth fumbling through the basics in the days before the tournament.

I could say much more about Modern – to say nothing at all of Legacy! – but I hope this gets you up to speed and helps you make some smart choices.