With the upcoming release of Modern Horizons 2, Gavin Verhey used today’s episode of Good Morning Magic to give a prerelease primer and break down the Limited archetypes.
First up, check with your local store to see what kind of prerelease is available, whether it be a return to in-store play or picking up a pack to play at home or online. Once you figure out how you are going to play, it’s time to bust open your prerelease pack.
As usual when building a Sealed deck, you’re going to want around 17 lands and 23 nonlands, varying between creatures and noncreature spells. Modern Horizons 2 Limited has a lot going on, so figuring out what archetype to play can be a bit daunting. Verhey breaks down the archetypes like so:
- Blue/White cares about having a bunch of artifacts and getting paid off for having them through cards with Affinity or cards that give you extra cards or get larger due to having more artifacts
- Blue/Black is focused around self discard or having certain cards in your graveyard. Many cards have rewards on them for just discarding a card in a turn.
- Black/Red is madness themed. Get enough enablers and cards with madness to get rewarded.
- Red/Green is storm. There are many new storm payoff cards in the set, so find a way to chain spells through suspend or fast mana and cash in with a combo payoff.
- Green/White cares about +1+1 counters. A common theme for Selesnya returns here and the set has all kinds of old mechanics that help give your creatures +1+1 counters, so have fun with the many different ways to build bigger creatures and get rewarded for doing so.
- White/Black is now a reanimator color pair with many new cards being introduced looking to boost the archetype in Modern. Find outlets to get big creatures into your graveyard and bring them back earlier than expected.
- Blue/Red cares about delirium with plenty of new creatures with awesome delirium abilities. Self mill will help fuel the archetype, but also just playing a game of Magic will eventually get you delirium.
- Black/Green combines tokens and the usual sacrifice theme. Green gives plenty of tokens with squirrel generators and black gives rewards for sacrificing them for the greater cause.
- Red/White is artifact-centric but more about modular and aggressive creatures to end games quickly unlike the Blue/White version of the deck.
- Blue/Green is token matters, combining all the crazy tokens available in the set and getting rewards for the variety. Clues, Food, Treasure, creature tokens all come together for an engine and plenty of value.
- Four or Five-Color Converge is an outlier archetype that can come together with plenty of mana fixing and all the powerful converge cards scaling up.