Three Modern Decks To Shut Down Underworld Breach At SCG Regionals

Pascal Maynard first broke the news on Twitter:

This is one of the best Modern decks Ive ever played (banned decks included).

Kills on turn 3 with 2.2 cards through creature removal, you have infy redundancy while not playing bad cards, you can play a long game, galv blast + dance gives an alt kill if main pieces run out. pic.twitter.com/vxGmrTMhcV

— Pascal Maynard (@PascalMaynard) February 25, 2020

Emma Handy wrote about the deck at length in her recent article last week, breaking down how it works and how unbelievably strong it is.

Underworld Breach Is About To Blow The Doors Off Modern

Now Modern is broken (yet again) and we need to fight back. Of course, one could always just suck it up and play the best deck, but Magic players are stubborn and want to beat the best deck.

So what is to be done? Modern hasn’t looked so prone to nonsense since, well, since the last big banning announcement. Or the one before that. Or the one before that. Honestly, Modern just stays broken these days, but Grinding Station and Underworld Breach have pushed things beyond the point of acceptable degeneracy.

There are, roughly speaking, five or six different legitimate options to fight back. The best of these are proactive strategies that also incorporate some elements of disruption, whether discard, countermagic, or lock pieces. And even the best of them are still only slight favorites over the busted Breach deck.

So before it gets banned, here are three of the best archetypes that combat another broken artifact deck while still being strong choices on their own.

1. Boaryo’s Vengeance

The first is a reimagining of the old Grishoalbrand decks. Without Faithless Looting, of course, the deck is significantly worse. However, the printing of Ilharg, the Raze-Boar and Once Upon a Time both brought a new angle to the archetype. There are a lot of ways to get a powerful creature on the battlefield quickly, and if you’re looking for something to goldfish against the Underworld Breach deck that can out-race it, this is your weapon.

Big thanks to Michael O’Connell for putting in an insane amount of behind-the-scenes work on this deck, because some of the choices are not particularly intuitive, yet the whole machine works itself out with a fairly low fail rate.

It’s pretty simple, really. You’re exploiting the London Mulligan and the nonsensical free card selection in Once Upon a Time to bend Modern to a breaking point in a different direction. You’d like to win the game on Turn 3 most of the time, and it often involves a Generator Servant on Turn 2 into an Ilharg on Turn 3. It can also be done with a Merchant of the Vale or Insolent Neonate on Turn 1 into a Turn 2 Goryo’s Vengeance on Ilharg that then puts in an Emrakul or what have you.

Compared to previous iterations of Goryo’s Vengeance decks, you’re decidedly non-reliant on the graveyard, making hate cards like Leyline of the Void fairly weak against you. After all, two-thirds of the ways you accelerate out a monster are five-mana spells that just plop them in from your hand! 

Once Upon a Time is particularly egregious here because it finds any of the components you need. If you’re looking for a looting effect, it can find a Merchant of the Vale or Insolent Neonate. If you need fast mana, it can find a Simian Spirit Guide or Generator Servant. If you need a payoff, Emrakul and Griselbrand are both creatures. And if you need a way to put your Emrakul on the battlefield, it can sometimes do that too, in Ilharg. It does it all!

It’s of critical importance to learn to mulligan aggressively with this deck, as five good cards are way better than a seven-card hand that’s missing a key piece. It also requires an exceptionally light touch with the sideboard, as you have few pieces that you can sideboard out if you want to maintain your tenuous grip on a consistent gameplan. You can really only ever trim combo pieces, with the exception of Gemstone Caverns, which can be cut on the play. I’ve rarely brought in more than four or five cards at all. One of the disadvantages of playing a deck as unpretentious as this is that there’s little room for trickery in the sideboard. Keep it simple!

That simplicity, however, is good enough to win against Grinding Station and friends. It’s not fun, it’s definitely not interactive, but it is able to keep pace on speed, and win enough to maintain a place at the fringe of the metagame.

2. Infect

But let’s say you want just a hint more control over your destiny. You’d like to keep pace with the other combo decks on speed, but you want some disruption, the ability to play a fair gameplan, and a real sideboard. Infect is the deck for you.

Don’t sideboard in Spellskite and Collector Ouphe simultaneously. Just don’t.

What’s the selling point of Infect in this Modern format, though? You’re playing a deck that goldfishes lightning-fast, with Turn 2 kills not out of the question in a world of Scale Up. You also get to play the busted green cards to great effect, with Once Upon a Time and Veil of Summer rocketing you to new levels of resilience and consistency. But now you can add in Collector Ouphe (which incidentally can be found with Once Upon a Time) as a single-card strategy to lock out the Jeskai Breach deck, and you’ve got boatloads of built-in protection for the creature with your plentiful copies of Blossoming Defense and Vines of Vastwood. 

With only Teferi, Time Raveler in the enemy deck as a way to actually break up a Collector Ouphe lock (since Galvanic Blast is obviously getting countered by one of the many protection spells), it cuts down the opponent to a very narrow set of cards to actually win the game. The bonus value against other artifact decks is just gravy. And yes, without Oko, Thief of Crowns, it’s demoralizing to lose the best card in Simic colors…ever, but now the artifact decks don’t have a way to immediately answer a Collector Ouphe and go on doing their broken thing. In a way, Oko’s banning was a good thing here.

Infect has been Modern’s go-to deck for ages when it comes to out-goldfishing the other combo decks. With the new toys it’s gotten in the last year, this is the time for Infect to come back out and dominate an Open or two while everyone else is scrambling. It’s strong against Amulet Titan, it’s strong against Jeskai Breach, and it’s going to bamboozle your average opponents who aren’t used to playing against it. It’s the perfect deck to pick up now if you fancy yourself a False Tempo aficionado.

3. Eldrazi Tron

There’s one more classic Modern deck, though, that genuinely boasts a solid matchup against the Jeskai Breach menace. It’s simple, it’s powerful, lots of players love playing it, and it can overpower Jeskai Breach with relative ease.

There’s a minor stigma about Eldrazi Tron in Modern, as it’s often maligned as a bad bastardization of normal Mono-Green Tron. However, Chalice of the Void and Karn, the Great Creator are incredible here, and all the Matter Reshaper jokes in the world won’t change the fact that Eldrazi Tron has a spot in this metagame for sharp players.

Turn 1 Chalice of the Void immediately puts the Grinding Station opponent in a tough spot. Now they need to get an Engineered Explosives on the battlefield with zero counters but with colorless mana used to pay for it. This is a tough one to make happen, though it’s doable with Everflowing Chalice or Hall of Heliod’s Generosity. They can also just get a Teferi, Time Raveler or Cryptic Command to bounce the Chalice, but it puts a massive crimp in the enemy gameplan at a very low cost and from the first turn of the game. Beyond that, though, Karn, the Great Creator, the centerpiece of Eldrazi Tron, always comes down and shuts off the engine the same way that Collector Ouphe does out of Infect.

In the meantime, a Thought-Knot Seer can come down and steal the Cryptic Command that might have been used to buy some breathing room, and a Reality Smasher comes down to clean up. The sequence is simple, it’s consistent, and it’s powerful. That’s all there is to it! 

Now, it’s not absolutely necessary to have all those pieces together to win the game. Often a simple sequence of Chalice of the Void into a couple of Thought-Knot Seers is more than sufficient. Or a Turn 3 Urzatron on the play into Karn into Grafdigger’s Cage, which puts the opponent in a very tight spot. There are so many combinations of cards that squeeze Grinding Breach between multiple lock pieces that it adds up to a favorable matchup. I’m strongly considering playing Eldrazi Tron at my own next Modern event, and I generally hate playing decks like it. That says a lot about the attractive power of this new take on an old archetype.

Of course, like the other two decks that can compete in this new format, Eldrazi Tron has also adopted Once Upon a Time as a consistency booster.

Speed Kills

They are all doing something powerful, they all need to assemble a specific mix of pieces in a short timeframe to make it happen, and they all want to put the game out of reach with their busted openings. The trend is crystal-clear.

Basically, every deck in Modern is starting to pick up Once Upon a Time as a must-have ingredient to ensure the highest possible probability of a high-power opening sequence. The deckbuilding cost is so low, and the consistency boost on Turn 1 so high, it’s almost a mistake not to include the card in most decks. It would not surprise me in the slightest if the next Banned and Restricted announcement knocks not only Underworld Breach, but also Once Upon a Time out of Modern. And good riddance!