How fast is modern mtg

The creatures here with evasion? Deadly Recluse and Capashen Knight are better defenders than they are attackers. Corpse Hauler and Goblin Shortcutter are the only two cards that are proud to be aggressors. That's not saying much. Let's look at some of the common two-drops from the notoriously fast Zendikar format for contrast:.

Click to see all of the common two-drops from Zendikar. Now that is a rag-tag bunch of misfits. Heck, most of them are terrible blockers and really good attackers, further prompting their owners to send them into the red zone over and over again.

Click to see all of the common three-drops from Magic These are a little more aggressive. Still, there isn't much that jumps off the page for the aggro strategy. Master of Diversion is the most clearly aggressive card, as it begs you to attack turn after turn. Click to see all of the common four-drops from Magic The five-drops are even less aggressive, with none of the commons registering more than a meager 3 power.

I decided to add up the power and toughness for the five-drops to illustrate where this format is:. Another thing I noticed: zero of the common five-drops have greater power than they do toughness.

I wouldn't say that the common creatures at these various spots on the curve bring any type of conclusion to the table, but reading between the lines is pretty simple. The signs are all pointing toward a slower format. Even if the common creatures aren't that aggressive, there is another side of the coin to examine before we can start coming to some reasonable conclusions.

Namely, the removal in the format. Removal seems to have gotten worse and worse recently, which in turn has made the sets better and better for Limited. It turns out that making removal more conditional, and more expensive, makes for some exciting games of Magic. If it were all just Doom Blade s now moved to uncommon , Lightning Bolt s, and Path to Exile s, the game would become simpler. In the world of Celestial Flare , Liturgy of Blood , and Shock , creatures are allowed to hang around a bit longer.

This means that they have more time to block, and to give their owner more time to set up a long-term game plan. If the removal was markedly better in this format than in other recent formats, that could change how the matches play out. The removal in this set ranges from quite good to passable, however. I think that the removal suite in Magic represents the new look for removal suites. With 33 hittable creatures in the deck, Collected Company will hit 1. These creatures are mainly included as silver bullets for Chord of Calling , but Razorverge Thicket helps cast them if you draw them.

Just seems better against Lava Spike and Primeval Titan , respectively. The following table provides game win percentages match win percentages are not yet available between the seven most popular decks.

All numbers in this table are based on at least 50 games, with some based on over games. Another lopsided matchup is Gr Tron vs. Junk, which greatly favors Gr Tron. All things considered, Modern is filled with a lot of viable decks and new ones are born with each new set. Skip to content. Buy This List. Anyway, let's talk about some broken decks! While there's always a risk of fizzling, if the deck can untap with a Puresteel Paladin or Sram, Senior Edificer on Turn 2, there's a reasonable chance it will win the game that turn by casting a bunch of zero-mana equipment and using Mox Opal to produce mana for Retract , which bounces all of the zero-mana equipment and allows the Puresteel Combo player to draw through literally their entire deck before finishing the game with Grapeshot with mana from multiple Mox Opal s.

While Puresteel Combo is one of the fastest decks in all Modern, it's also incredibly easy to disrupt with spot removal. The deck is horrible if you can kill the Puresteel Paladin or Sram, Senior Edificer , often left with just a bunch of useless equipment in hand.

The deck typically plays zero ways to protect its creatures in the main deck although Noxious Revival can put a dead Puresteel or Sram back on top of the deck to try again the next turn , which means if you have removal, it should resolve.

Stony Silence is also very strong, since it's difficult for Puresteel Combo to win without the extra mana produced by Mox Opal , but your primary plan should be to overload with all of the spot removal you possibly can and try to make sure a Sram, Senior Edificer or Puresteel Paladin never stick on the battlefield.

It's also worth mentioning that Puresteel Combo tends to lose to itself fairly often due to the Bogles problem having only a few threats , which leaves the Puresteel Combo player in a position where they often need to mulligan aggressively until they find a Puresteel or Sram, and sometimes they never find one. When we talk about the fast decks of Modern, most are looking to win or virtually win the game on Turn 3. Infect is one of the few exceptions that has a legitimate path to literally winning the game on Turn 2.

This being said, the Turn 2 kill doesn't happen all that often, in part because Glistener Elf is the only one-mana infect creature and in part because it's often correct to have some sort of protection like Blossoming Defense or Vines of Vastwood before going for the kill.

Turn 3 kills are even easier and can be backed up by protection, thanks to Blighted Agent and Noble Hierarch producing extra mana.

Infect's biggest flaw is that it doesn't have all that many threats roughly 12, counting Inkmoth Nexus , so if you can kill the first couple of Infect creatures, it can take a while for the Infect player to find another one. The main challenge of answering Infect is learning how to play against its threats. Normally in Magic , we're trained to wait and use our instant-speed removal spells at the last possible moment to gain more information, but this strategy often leads to disaster against Infect, since they have a bunch of cheap spells that can fizzle targeted removal Blossoming Defense , Vines of Vastwood , Apostle's Blessing.

Ideally, you'll be able to kill the Infect creature while your opponent is tapped out, but if your opponent plays carefully and leaves up mana, it's still often better to cast removal during your turn, since if the Infect player does have a Blossoming Defense or Vines of Vastwood , at least they won't be able to get in extra infect damage by using it to pump their threat. Apart from removal, Spellskite is a great option for fighting Infect, since you can use it to redirect all of your opponent's pump spells.

Meanwhile, Melira, Sylvok Outcast might be the single best answer to Infect, but it's hard to actually find room for it in your sideboard because it's a dead card in every other matchup. Assuming Dredge has a one-mana enabler Shriekhorn or Faithless Looting to get a dredger into the graveyard on Turn 1, Dredge has the potential to be one of the fastest decks in the Modern format.

While there is some amount of variance involved thanks to dredging itself being random, it's possible for Dredge to end its second turn with 10 or even 20 power on the battlefield, if it manages to mill enough copies of Narcomoeba , Bloodghast , and Prized Amalgam —all of which come back from the graveyard for free.

Throw in up to 12 free points of damage by milling Creeping Chill and a two-mana, seven-ish damage burn spell from the graveyard in Conflagrate , and it's possible that a lucky Dredge player can win the game on Turn 3, and even if they can't actually finish the game on Turn 3, there's an even higher likelihood that they can virtually win the game on Turn 3, since even if you manage to deal with their board, most of the creatures continue to come back from the graveyard for free, and they'll dredge into their reach sooner or later, in the form of Creeping Chill and Conflagrate.

While Dredge is among the fastest decks in Modern, it's also one of the easiest decks to hate out, assuming you're playing the right cards in your sideboard. The simplest answer is graveyard hate, with cards like Leyline of the Void , Rest in Peace , and Relic of Progenitus being among the best in the format at fighting Dredge and Surgical Extraction also offering a decent amount of value if you can get the timing right exiling Narcomoeba or Bloodghast makes it hard for Prized Amalgam to return to the battlefield, while getting rid of Creeping Chill with the "exile" trigger on the stack will fizzle the damage.

The second way to fight Dredge—although somewhat less effective against the more recent builds of Dredge, thanks to Creeping Chill —is with sweepers that remove creatures in a way that doesn't put them back into the graveyard, like Anger of the Gods or Terminus , or with normal sweepers like Supreme Verdict or Wrath of God combined with graveyard disruption.

Just be warned: Dredge expects you to bring in graveyard hate against them, so they'll be bringing in cards like Nature's Claim to counter your graveyard disruption, so sometimes just a single piece of graveyard hate isn't enough.

Likewise, if you don't find your graveyard hate early in the game, it's likely that the damage will already be done and the Dredge player will have a massive board you'll have to contend with to get back into the game. Their combo is assembling Tron as quickly as possible with the help of a ton of land tutors Expedition Map and Sylvan Scrying and cantrips Chromatic Sphere , Chromatic Star , and Ancient Stirrings and then having Karn Liberated and other big colorless cards provide the combo finish.

The fastest that Tron can execute its combo is Turn 3, and while Tron can't literally end the game on Turn 3, a Karn Liberated does essentially win the game in many matchups, and if Karn Liberated somehow isn't enough once Tron is assembled, there's always some big, horrible thing around the corner for the following turns.

One of the most common ways that people attempt to fight against Tron is with cards like Blood Moon , Damping Sphere , and Alpine Moon , which keep the Tron player from assembling Tron.

While this is a reasonable strategy, it also comes with a drawback: eventually, the Tron play will beat you by hard-casting their big finishers with normal mana or by using Oblivion Stone to blow up your hate cards, so you need to combine your hate with a fast clock of your own for it to be effective. Blowing up lands with Fulminator Mage or other land destruction is very powerful, although it can also be too slow if you are on the draw, since Karn Liberated may be on the battlefield before you get the three mana needed to blow up a Tron land.

Ghost Quarter and Field of Ruin offer solid ways of slowing down Tron, and they can be combined with Surgical Extraction to exile a Tron land and keep your Tron opponent off Tron forever. Along the same lines, Stony Silence is good at slowing down Tron by disabling mana off its cantrips and Oblivion Stone , although it doesn't do anything if the Tron player just happens to have natural Tron and a Karn Liberated in hand.

In theory, Storm can win on Turn 2, but it's exceedingly unlikely in practice. On the other hand, assuming Storm can cast a Baral, Chief of Compliance or Goblin Electromancer on Turn 2 and untap with it on Turn 3, its odds of winning the game by chaining a bunch of cantrips and rituals into a Past in Flames or by using Gifts Ungiven which, along with enough mana and a few cantrips, is close to a guaranteed win are pretty good.

It's also possible for Storm to win on Turn 3 even while spending two of its mana to cast a Baral, Chief of Compliance or Goblin Electromancer on the same turn, if it has enough rituals. On the other hand, without a Baral, Chief of Compliance or Goblin Electromancer , the deck is significantly slower and sometimes struggles to combo at all.

In the past, fighting Storm was pretty straightforward, as you'd take out all of your targeted removal and fight with counterspells and graveyard hate, but things are a bit more complicated today thanks to the power of Baral, Chief of Compliance and Goblin Electromancer , since having at least some ways to deal with creatures is necessary. While this puts more pressure on your sideboarding choices and leaves fewer slots for powerful hate cards, thankfully both graveyard hate and counterspells are still very strong against the strategy.

While it's possible for Storm to win through something like Leyline of the Void or Rest in Peace , it requires a lot more work, since Past in Flames can't double the storm count, mana, and cantrips, which often leaves Storm in a position where they have to try to Remand Grapeshot once or twice to actually win or attempt to win the game with Empty the Warrens.