Making room for Wrenn and Six: The Modern Horizons Update Discussion
Modern Horizons has brought a bunch of new toys for the Highball cube. Some provide great support for my existing archetypes, while others are going to be useful in enabling fringe strategies to become more playable.
Loam decks and Cycling decks gained the most from the set, but noncreature spells matter also gained a bit of traction.
The New Cards
I have acquired the following new cards I want to test after the prerelease:














This is still a good 14 cards. I also want to test
Putrid Goblin,
Undead Augur and
Splicer's Skill, but these cards seem either very narrow or a bit low on the power level side of things. I also want to add the
Horizon Lands, but I need to finish trading for the rest of the cycle first.
Wrenn and Six and the two Red Cards from MH1 are giving me the hardest time right now. The red cards both support my archetypes, yet they fall into red, the tightest colored section of the cube. They fit the power level just fine, but I just can't figure out for the life of me what I want to cut to make room for them.
Wrenn and Six is a multicolor Gruul card, meaning that it is fighting for another tight slot. Right now, I run
Xenagos, God of Revels,
Rhythm of the Wild, and
Domri, Chaos Bringer. All three support my primary Gruul "Riot Fires" archetype.
Wrenn and Six, on the other hand, is more of a value engine for
Life from the Loam strategies. I'm thinking
Domri, Chaos Bringer is probably the cut for Wrenn and Six, but I haven't yet decided. Addmitantly, neither of these planeswalkers fit perfectly within the confines of Gruul decks. However, I think they are around equally matched in terms of useful abilities. Each walker simply supports different types of decks.
The Artificer's Green Thumb
Recently, I wrote at length about finding ways to weave an Artifacts Matter archetype into Green. I want to implement at least some of my writings into my cube. I'm working on acquiring the rest of the cards I want to make the deck work. So far, I have the following:



I would like to get at least a copy of
Steel Overseer,
Scuttling Doom Engine, and
Hangarback Walker before doing anything drastic. I'm also considering whether or not
Kuldotha Forgemaster is a card I want to add into my format. My gut reaction is no. I will also need to implement a slightly different suite of artifacts to compensate for the more construct/sac oriented theme of the modular/counters cards. At least I'll finally have a good excuse to add
Syndicate Trafficker to the cube.
My, My, Miss Jeskai Pie
The three two-color combinations that add up to the Jeskai wedge have always felt a little bit un-focused compaired to the rest of the list. U/R is supposed to be artifacts. R/W is supposed to be Aggro with a Mentor and minor tokens subtheme. U/W is supposed to be a control build of sorts with a noncreature permanents (artifacts/enchantments) subtheme. Although these decks work on paper, they're not very focused in practice. I've seen both R/W and U/W builds in action, and they're good, but they end up playing like goodstuff decks more than synergy-specific decks.
For R/W, the goodstuff paradigm is partially due to the low number of mentor cards that are cubeable at my power level. I was only able to jam 4 cards with mentor into the cube, which just isn't enough for a full archetype. That said, those four cards have plenty of support, and are extremely good in practice, so there's no reason to cut them. However, they can't be my primary archetype for boros. Luckily, the Boros aggro deck shell works very well, so now all I need to do is add some texture to the archetype.
U/R and U/W also work quite well, but for different reasons. U/R and U/W are just decent color pairs filled with decent cards. The issue isn't so much that there aren't synergistic decks in those color pairs, just that the decks I was trying to support don't really have the correct pieces to always be enticing to the draft. U/W noncreature permanents decks require more specific saga cards or artifacts payoffs to function than I had originally
anticipated. U/R decks just don't need the artifacts subtheme to be good, and are often better played as a tempo deck with some artifact synergies.
Thanks to Modern Horizons, I think I have been able to come up with a solution to my Jeskai Pie problem without needing to completely redesign the format. I simply must re-shuffle the supported focuses of certain archetypes to better reflect what decks end up looking like in practice. The new breakdown is as follows:
U/W Noncreature Spells
U/R Spells Tempo
R/W Artifact Aggro
Of the three color pairs, U/R is changing the least. Even though the name of the archetype is changing almost entirely, in practice the decks themselves won't change all that much.
Whirler Rogue,
Pia and Kiran Nalaar,
Pia Nalaar, and
Saheeli, Sublime Artificer will still all be amazing cards in the deck. Red is not even going to have to change a single card to reflect this archetype update. The deck is just changing in name. The reason for this is simple: the pieces for U/R tempo are already in the cube. The pieces for artifacts work better elsewhere or under different contexts. U/R artifacts will still be a thing, but it's swapping places with Tempo as the major archetype.
U/W Noncreature Spells is also remaining fairly similar, but I am going to be making some major changes to white to help make the deck better. I want to keep my
Hannah, Ship's Navigator shells supported in U/W, just with a little extra help from other places. I want to encourage other strategies than just "cheat big artifacts and enchantments into play using a very minor selection of gold cards or else just play control." There are a couple ways I plan to acheive this. For one, I plan on including
Myth Realized in the list as an early play that can be used as a payoff. In addition, I will shift some major support for artifacts into white.
I am considering implementing an
Astral Drift deck into U/W. This might end up being a terrible idea, but I think if any color pair can trigger cycling enough, it will be U/W. This means that U/B decks would be fighting for the Cycling/Discard payoffs that it needs to function, but it also means that R/W decks can attack the discard angle in a new way (thanks
Tectonic Reformation!). I still don't know precisely what I'm doing in U/W yet, but I think this is the right track.
Finally, R/W will become an artifact aggro deck, not unlike the lists we see in the Penny Cubes. I already run cheap, efficient equipment in my cube as a means to pump the Mentor creatures. Now, I'm going to be including cards like
Toolcraft Exemplar,
Porcelain Legionnaire, and
Cogworker's Puzzleknot to support an artifact theme in white. I think this will give more options to R/W other than simply "Mono-Red Burn splashing white for
Boros Challenger."
Due to the changes in archetypes I wish to facilitate, including the hopeful addition of Green Artifacts, White is going to be getting the bulk of the changes in the next update. I can see myself adding at least some of the following:







Ok,
Myrsmith is probably below the power level I want to be at, although I find it to be an intriguing engine. I'm not sure what the critical mass of artifacts a deck would need to get enough triggers for Smith to be good, but I digress.
I think white could get a minor blink theme in the next update. I probably won't spread it in to other colors unless the white cards that blink are popular with my drafters. I think a couple of blink effects would be good with the Enter the Battlefield triggers I already have, plus with some of the new cards I wish to add.
Astral Drift is a blink engine, after all. To be clear: I don't want to make blink a major theme of the cube, just include a couple more blink cards in white, which is already home to some very powerful blink effects/targets.
I haven't sat down and given my White update a ton of thought outside of writing this post, so I'm really hoping for some advice.
Thanks for Reading!
-TGT