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Mono-Green Tron Guide
Tron in PT Barcelona
Hello everyone
By the time I am writing this article, I am sitting right across to Christian Calcano in Malaga enjoying our little celebration trip at the beach with seafood (we planned before Barcelona and things went well).
Yet I know you all want to know why we picked tron at the Pro Tour, so here I am breaking down the thought process of how the team got there.
Metagame breakdown
It all started from Scam aka Rakdos Evoke. While 4-color ring control made its appearance at Grand Open Qualifier Bologna, Scam is the deck making multiple copies in the top 8. Besides that, Mono Green Tron is the deck with best performance on day one with highest conversion rate to day two.
At this point, the core of the meta became three major sections: Scam, anti-Scam (mostly ring control) and anti-anti-Scam.
Scam
Scam is the aggressive deck of the format. The nature of double Thoughtseize opponents on turn one with a 4/3 menace body in play made it extremely hard to hate out. There is always a certain percentage of games the deck just nut out and the game ends before it starts. I believe the biggest argument for the deck is which is the three drops to play in the deck: Fable of the Mirror-Breaker or Seasoned Pyromancer. And the result is pretty clear in the hand of Jake Beardsley.
Anti-Scam
The Anti-Scam decks are trying to play more powerful stand alone cards where you do not rely on card synergies. Having a package of good removals for turn one Ragavan and Grief. We also saw the increase in the popularity of Subtlety maindeck with the help of Lorien Revealed.
The One Ring is one of the generic cards to recover from discard spells even though it gets hosed by Orcish Bowmasters badly.
4 Color Ring Control
Four-color Ring control is one of the representatives for this category. However, as the testing goes on, it comes pretty clear that 4c control is only built to beat Scam and nothing else. Control decks in modern have the same problem of you are not able to handle a polarized range of decks. If you managed to have a good matchup on Scam, you would probably need to give up the over the top strategy. We believe it is the reason 4c control did not perform in its outbreak weekend. With the same Wrenn and Six and Teferi, Time Raveler core package, four-color Creativity feels like a better choice in my mind.
Dimir Ring Control
The same goes to the Dimir Ring Control. Deck without a good character is generally bad. In Magic Online Leagues, maybe it is ok as your opponent could keep interactive hand coz of all the proactive decks in modern and cold to your better interactive cards. Yet in an open decklist tournament, your opponent knows what is going on and how to get past your control pieces, things are not as easy as it looks.
Rhinos
The last option for the Anti-Scam deck is Rhinos. Although the deck is not playing The One Ring, one cascade spell in the deck can recover from scam’s discards and stabilize the board. The addition of Lorien Revealed increased the number of cards that could be pitched to Force of Negation and Subtlety. This is a massive upgrade to the deck as it suffered from mana screws and floods a lot before. Lorien Revealed can also do the work of mana fixing which we see some strong performance with four-color rhinos in the Pro Tour as well.
Anti Anti-Scam
While the Anti-Scam decks are trying to play powerful stand alone cards, Anti Anti-Scam decks are about going all over the top with synergies. They are mostly combo decks like Yawgmoth , Samwise Food combo , Living End , Amulet Titan and last but not least, Tron.
Most of these Anti Anti-Scam decks have a problem of relying on a particular card. In game one it could be an easy win in game one. Yet once you move into sideboard games, if your opponent was prepared against your deck, it could be an uphill battle. However, there is one exception. Everyone’s favorite deck: Mono-Green Tron.
Deck Choice
The “combo piece” of Mono Green Tron are the tron lands. Think in this way, the deck starts to combo off turn one and once you get all the tron pieces in play, you start to go off. Lands is one of the hardest permanent to interact with in the format. It cannot be discarded or removed by general removals.There is Boseiju, Who Endures to set the tron backfoot a little bit but it also takes up mana to do so while Mono-Green Tron keep on progressing to four mana, the mana of Karn, the Great Creator and The One Ring. We used to have Karn, the Great Creator to fill up the gap between the high end and when your mana was interrupted. And now The One Ring doubled up the counts of similar roles and made the deck way more consistent and functional fighting against hate.
However, the deck is good in Christian Calcano’s hand and he reached the final of the Pro Tour and fell short to Scam at the final.
With such characters in the deck, we got lots of polarized matchups, highly favorite against interactive decks while unfavorite against non-interactive decks. I decided that it is a good position to gamble a little bit on the metagame hoping there will be around 15% Scam in the tournament and aiming at facing it twice at most in the tournament. Unfortunately, it ended up landing at 20% and I paired against scam four times and went 1-3 against it.
However, the deck is good in Christian Calcano’s hand and he reached the final of the Pro Tour and fell short to Scam at the final.
One Step Ahead
It is not surprising that Team Handshake reached the same conclusion as us. My former teammates Simon Nielsen and Javier Dominguez definitely got the ability of figuring out the format as much.
Their list is more focusing on beating Scam where I decided to give up the matchup instead as I worried about it might damage the deck itself. Obviously they did a very good job and fixed the Scam matchup well.
What I did instead is focusing more on the mirror match. Mono-Green Tron is a well known deck in the format and it took down the last Modern Pro Tour. There are a handful of skilled Tron players in the field and I strongly believe we will not be the only team figuring out Tron would be a good choice for the tournament. To get an edge in the mirror match, we are playing double Boseiju, Who Endures and double Karn Liberated (aka Boomer Karn) to liberate our tron opponent’s lands.
You could also see how prepared for tron at our team where we are playing Terastodon in our four-color Creativity sideboard and Obsidian Charmaw in our Temur Rhino sideboard. I also did the same trick playing Kor Firewalker in Boros Burn sideboard back in the old days. It is not a hard decision to make once you are able to identify the trend of the metagame flow.
Onward Adjustment and Card choices
Team Handshake made a very good tuning on the deck getting Urza’s Saga and the addition of multiple Dismember just blocked lots of game losing patterns like turn one Ragavan and Fury against Scam. I believe the mix of their and our list would be the way to go afterward. Here is the adjusted deck list:
$775/302.98 Tix
Maindeck (60)
| Creature [4] | ||
|---|---|---|
| 2 Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger | $29.99 | |
| 2 Wurmcoil Engine | $17.99 | |
| Artifact [19] | ||
|---|---|---|
| 4 Chromatic Sphere | $0.69 | |
| 2 Chromatic Star | $0.35 | |
| 4 Expedition Map | $2.99 | |
| 3 Oblivion Stone | $0.79 | |
| 3 Relic of Progenitus | $6.49 | |
| 3 The One Ring | $79.99 | |
| Instant [4] | ||
|---|---|---|
| 2 Dismember | $5.49 | |
| 2 Warping Wail | $0.79 | |
| Sorcery [7] | ||
|---|---|---|
| 4 Ancient Stirrings | $0.35 | |
| 3 Sylvan Scrying | $0.59 | |
| Enchantment [2] | ||
|---|---|---|
| 2 Urza's Saga | $42.99 | |
| Planeswalker [7] | ||
|---|---|---|
| 2 Karn Liberated | $8.49 | |
| 4 Karn, the Great Creator | $7.49 | |
| 1 Ugin, the Spirit Dragon | $32.99 | |
| Land [17] | ||
|---|---|---|
| 2 Boseiju, Who Endures | $47.99 | |
| 3 Forest | $0.01 | |
| 4 Urza's Mine | $0.79 | |
| 4 Urza's Power Plant | $0.79 | |
| 4 Urza's Tower | $0.79 | |
| Sideboard [15] | ||
|---|---|---|
| 1 Chalice of the Void | $54.99 | |
| 1 Cityscape Leveler | $14.99 | |
| 1 Engineered Explosives | $11.99 | |
| 1 Ensnaring Bridge | $15.99 | |
| 2 Haywire Mite | $3.99 | |
| 1 Liquimetal Coating | $0.35 | |
| 1 Oblivion Stone | $0.79 | |
| 1 Sundering Titan | $0.69 | |
| 1 The One Ring | $79.99 | |
| 1 The Stone Brain | $1.99 | |
| 1 Tormod's Crypt | $0.59 | |
| 1 Walking Ballista | $18.99 | |
| 1 Pithing Needle | $0.69 | |
| 1 Dismember | $5.49 | |
$302.98 Tix @cardhoarder
$7.57 / Week @cardhoarder
$674.58 @tcgplayer
$875.83 @cardkingdom
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Proxies
Archetype Analysis
Magic online format
Apprentice and MWS .dec
Matchup and sideboard plan
Scam
Racing to Tron is important in this matchup. They do not have out for Karn, the Great Creator into Ensnaring Bridge game one. You could also keep a hand with Dismember as it allows you to survive the most explosive pattern of their deck.
When mulliganing, try to put back Karn, the Great Creator, Karn Liberated and Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger. As they could stop your deck being functional via casting off Dauthi Voidwalker. You can rely on top of your deck once you complete tron.
After sideboarding, we cut all the high mana payoff in the fear of Blood Moon and Dauthi Voidwalker. We bring in more cheap cards and solutions.
4-Color Ring Control
Their main game plan against you is Wrenn and Six plus Boseiju, Who Endures. You can Karn for Tormod's Crypt to break the lock. Pithing Needle on Bosejiu could also stop that yet they could solve it with Teferi and Binding. Normally we lock up the game with Sundering Titan. They do not really have any threats in their deck.
In sideboard game, we bring in Haywire Mite to kill The One Ring and Blinding
4-Color Creativity
Try not to run into Spell Pierce Game one. The One Ring protects you from Archon of Cruelty. Oblivion Stone with open mana could stop Creativity. Warping Wail can counter Creativity. Karn for Engineered Explosive can also stop Creativity.
Normally they got the same Wrenn and Six plus Boseiju, Who Endures as four-color contron against us which is easy to get through. If they have Terastodon, things become trickier. You need to leave up mana like game one but they now got more answers for your set up. They could also go Silence lock you out with Wrenn and Six ultimate.
They normally won’t do Creativity for one, so Dismember is not as effective. We bring in cheaper answers for their tokens. Karn will also look for Explosive, so we bring the forth Oblivion Stone in.
Rhino
Try not to run into open mana hard cast Subtlety. Try to set up a double-spell turn and bait out their free spells with good sequencing. Take care of Blood Moon after sideboarding.
Tron
Race to land destruction and win. The first player to get a Karn out will win. Get ready for the mulligan war. One of the “most skillful” matchup in Modern.
Yawgmoth
In game one fetching Pithing Needle with Karn is normally enough to stabilize. We go mono sweeper and win with Ugin and Ulamog."Bear in mind that after sideboarding, our opponent could have a Damping Sphere in their sideboard."
Murktide
Game one we only lose to turn one Ragavan plus counterspell pattern. Resolving The One Ring is normally good enough to beat them on cards. Setting up double-spell turn is important against counterspell.
Living End
Game one is all about Relic and Warping Wail. Oblivion Stone could solve one wave of Living End.
Opponents will bring in artifact hate after sideboarding. If they have Grief in graveyard, I will prioritize putting Oblivion Stone into play first. Otherwise, I would rather keep it in hand to play around artifact removals.
UB Ring Control
The deck is extremely light on threats. Sheoldred and Murktide are their biggest threats to us, but they are slow and we are normally able to handle them with Oblivion Stone or Ulamog. They also do not have a good way to deal with planeswalkers. It is very easy to overwhelm them with threat after threat.
Final Thoughts
So here is what I got today. Now allow me to head back to the beach and enjoy some sunshine in Malaga.
Adios!
Lee Shi Tian
@leearson