I made the rare decision to play constructed yesterday. I drove down to Play or Draw in Avondale, AZ for their Monday Modern tournament. I sleeved up Robots and I’ll start with the decklist:
Artifacts (4):
4x Springleaf Drum
Artifact Creatures (27):
4x Arcbound Ravager
2x Etched Champion
3x Master of Etherium
2x Memnite
4x Ornithopter
4x Signal Pest
4x Steel Overseer
4x Vault Skirge
Artifact Equipment (4):
4x Cranial Plating
Lands (16):
4x Blinkmoth Nexus
4x Darksteel Citadel
3x Glimmervoid
4x Inkmoth Nexus
1x Island
Legendary Artifacts (4):
4x Mox Opal
Instants (4):
4x Galvanic Blast
Sorcery (1):
1x Thoughtcast
Sideboard (15):
3x Thoughtseize
2x Etched Champion
1x Spell Snare
3x Delay
1x Master of Etherium
1x Grafdigger’s Cage
4x Ethersworn Canonist
The deck won game 1 in all 5 matches. The deck does very well if there isn’t any hate, but everyone has something vs the Robots matchup it seems. Welcome to being the Dredge of Modern.
I have a love/hate relationship with Thoughtcast. It’s a card that is good, but it’s best in a slower version of the deck that tries to grind out the opponent. When the deck was played in Extended, I ended up with 1-2 Thoughtcast and usually boarded them out games 2-3 in order to keep my artifact count up. I think if you are going to play a longer game, you play a full playset. If you are going to go aggro, then they get dropped.
Inkmoth Nexus/Blinkmoth Nexus aren’t artifact lands. Not really. They can be artifacts and count toward your Master of Etherium/Cranial Plating count, but you need to keep them tapped. I like Inkmoth Nexus because it’s infect sometimes can bring games to a fast end with an Alpha strike. Blinkmoth Nexus is less exciting. I had a number of games where I had 2 CC artifacts, a Nexus land, and Mox Opal and sat there unable to do anything.
Master of Etherium was underwhelming. There just isn’t the hard artifact count to support him.
The deck feels less like Affinity of old and more like it’s trying to enable Metalcraft. This is especially true in the new Ensoul Artifact robot decks.
Moving on, the sideboard is a hot mess and was ad hoc and thus has a bunch of issues. Ethersworn Cannonist should be cut. The Master of Etherium should also be gone. I couldn’t find another Spell Snare and thus ended up running 3x Delay. I forgot to add the Spellskites (should have 2) and Relic of Progenitus. I also don’t have the singleton Torpor Orb or Whipflare that the deck needs.
My final thought is that the deck requires you to aggressively mulligan in most situations. Looking back, I kept hands that were all in on one win condition and didn’t have an alternate plan. I would say that Etched Champion, Cranial Plating, Arcbound Ravager and Steel Overseer are the win conditions for the deck. If you don’t have at least 2 and the ability to play them out turn 1/2, throw the hand away.