For those of you who have followed Modern Monday for the past two or so years it’s been a thing, you might be familiar with the Takin’ Turns deck I piloted that was hugely popular. Well this week we’re looking at a deck that is incredibly similar, with some very noticeable differences.
The deck in question was piloted to a 5-0 finish by Magic Online user Lejay. Take a look.
4 Ancestral Vision
2 Day’s Undoing
4 Dictate of Kruphix
4 Exhaustion
4 Flooded Strand
2 Gigadrowse
9 Island
4 Lightning Bolt
1 Mikokoro, Center of the Sea
1 Minamo, School at Water’s Edge
1 Radiant Fountain
4 Remand
1 Scalding Tarn
4 Serum Visions
4 Snapcaster Mage
1 Steam Vents
4 Sulfur Falls
4 Temporal Mastery
4 Time Warp
Sideboard
2 Cryptic Command
2 Disrupting Shoal
1 Flame Slash
3 Hurkyl’s Recall
2 Pyroclasm
1 Spell Pierce
2 Thing in the Ice
1 Tormod’s Crypt
1 Vendilion Clique
One of the most noticeable differences you can see is that there are no copies of Walk the Aeons in the entire 75. This was one of the most integral “Time Walks” in the original deck, as it allowed us to chain multiple turns together with our excess lands.
Speaking of excess lands, another weird fact is that the deck has a low 22 lands and contains 62 cards in total. Both of these numbers are pretty unconventional, and 62 cards is practically unheard of. In fact I’m still not sure that wasn’t some sort of error.
I was also intrigued because the deck is running four copies of the newly unbanned Ancestral Vision, a card we previously didn’t have access to. We also have Thing in the Ice in the sideboard and a couple of Day’s Undoing in the main deck, which could prove very useful. Though there’s only one way to find out!
Truth be told, the Infect matchup was actually the first match we played. You can tell because it’s the match I struggled the most with and also the one where I criticize the deck the most. But after a few more matches with the deck, I felt like I definitely got the hang of it. I think the Bant Eldrazi match demonstrates this the most and it was also an incredibly tense match.
I don’t know, I started out extremely skeptical, then I realized that the deck definitely had legs and it was more of a control/combo deck than the dedicated combo deck I was expecting. I was initially concerned with our win conditions, assuming we would have to loop Lightning Bolts with shuffle effects until the opponent was dead. Turns out multiples Snapcaster Mages are pretty effective at taking an opponent from about 19 life to zero when they’re backed up with multiple turns and the occasional Lightning Bolt to the face.
Like I said, I was concerned with the lack of Walk the Aeons, but it turns out that Exhaustion is a pretty remarkable replacement. The deck also lacks any other card draw like Jace Beleren or Howling Mine, but we seemed to do quite well without them.
One thing you may have noticed is that the deck seems to struggle against more aggressive decks. Our losses came at the hands of both Goblins and Infect, two decks that we were unable to interact with in very meaningful ways. They were simply able to slip under our defenses, but I admit I might have piloted the deck pretty poorly against Infect. Either way, I could see this being the weakness of the deck and something to be mindful of. That being said, the deck was still awesome and a great evolution of the “Turns” archetype. I would gladly try it again and might even consider tweaking it in the future.
Thanks for reading, and I’ll catch you guys next week after the Pro Tour!
Frank Lepore
Facebook | Twitch | Twitter | YouTube
Freshly Brewed Podcast with Ali Aintrazi (available on iTunes and Stitcher Radio)
