Introduction
After 4-4ing with Amulet Titan in Portland, my Grinding Stations finally showed up in the mail.
Played a couple of Modern leagues, did some goldfishing, printed out some tokens to help track game things. Specifically, I think that tracking floating mana via pen & paper for this deck is suboptimal, while manipulating a couple of tokens to represent floating mana is superior.
Tokens I made:
- Floating mana: colorless (Urza's Saga), blue, red, green
- Urza's Saga Ch. III trigger
- Grinding Station untap trigger + mill three cards ability
- Mishra's Bauble trigger reminders (several)
- backside of Tamiyo
- plus Eldrazi Spawn, Clue tokens, Construct tokens, Blood token (for SB Vampire's Vengeance), Swan Song bird token
- Copied Beenew's decklist from the previous weekend.
- Decklist is quite tight, basically card is powerful
- Stock Up is insane as card selection. My thesis is that the closer to eternal formats you get, the more powerful card selection/cantrips are, and Temur Breach is the most Legacy-like you can get in Modern right now.
Maybe UB wants it as well. - Two Breeding Pools, no Hedge Maze, no Stomping Ground, one Commercial District
- If I had to do it again, I'd probably switch those - 1 Breeding Pool, 1 Hedge Maze, 1 Stomping Ground. Sometimes you get into awkward mana situations, mostly when I wanted an untapped red source on later turns but didn't have the opportunity to tutor a R surveil land on earlier turns.
- Put a Surgical Extraction in to be cute, did nothing all day.
Swiss
- R1 Brandon Louie on Temur Breach WW (1-0)
G1 OTD, turn 2 win. Good start.
G2 We play a little more, he makes me play it out the combo and I'm ??? then he goes for the Consign to Memory replicate 2x on my untap trigger (I have access to Swan Song in the yard). Unfortunately for him my hand contains more artifacts that I am able to cast, untapping my Grinding Station and ggs - R2 Nate Rooyakkers on Domain Zoo WLW (2-0)
4 Doorkeeper Thrull in the maindeck but those are really speed bumps
G1 OTD T2 win hello okay
G2 I think he found like 4 pieces of hate and I died - R3 Tyler Fritz on Bw Necro w/ Ketramose WW (3-0)
I get T1 Thoughtseized both games but win anyways - R4 Evan Sonnenberg-Rhim on Temur Breach WLL (3-1)
G1 I win OTD T3
G2 He shows a slow start, I tap out on T2 for my Grinding Station with Swan Song in hand, he T3 kills me. - R5 Stephen Crumpton on Rw Hollow One WW (4-1)
G1 OTP T3 win
G2 he has an incredibly anemic draw, holding up a relatively obvious Wear // Tear but has no bodies to threaten me so I eventually play through - R6 Marquel Corrigan on Boros Energy LL (4-2)
I get clobbered? idk G2 I had to mull to 5 and he had multiple hate pieces - R7 Mark Bost on Amulet Titan WLW (4-3)
Solid gaming, G3 I lead with an Urza's Saga + Mox stuff. On turn 3ish I forget to first-main Emry an artifact, so my first swing with a Construct is only a 7/7. I Nature's Claimed him, putting him at 24 .... would have put him on an actual clock forcing blocks, instead he lives at 1 chumping with Collector Ouphe & another thing, then is able to bounceland-Boseiju multiple turns in a row to live. - R8 Anthony Alaimo on Amulet Titan WW (5-3)
This match was quite breezy compared to the prev, I guess he just kept less threatening hands? - R9 Zachary Medford on UB LL (5-4)
G1 he double-Thoughtseizes me cool
G2 I keep a 0 lander with double Mox double legend turn 1 that was sick
Unfortunately I lose because I start off my Breach turn by escaping a Malevolent Rumble with ~12 cards, then the 3 Grinding Stations were all in the bottom 5 cards of the deck. Should have looped Emry-Mox to dig properly & have usable mana, but I think my loose play would have been salvageable if the Grinding Stations were anywhere above the literal bottom 5 cards.
Conclusions
- Deck is dumb, format is dumb
- I started feeling sick (throat soreness Saturday morning) and didn't improve over the day
- Definitely started to feel the drain on hours 9 & 11, made game-losing, match-losing misplays both rounds
- 2-7 on die rolls for the day that was pretty unlucky
- Getting two T2 wins was nutty, the 0 land hand was great. It's insane that there's a deck where those things are possible
- Had a great match in a side event on Sunday vs a UW Affinity player shout out to Ryan G, where my win came from endstep-Otawara on his Mox Opal, taking him off Haywire Mite mana, then he only had the ability to cast one 3 mana counterspell vs my double Breach + 0 mana artifacts + Grinding Station hand. Some solid back and forth while playing interactive Magic.
Ban talk (2025-03-31 waiting room)
- Underworld Breach absolutely should be banned. Card is too good and only ever breaks things.
- There's a chance they ban Malevolent Rumble with the argument that it's an enabler and it goes into multiple decks like Eldrazi. This is nonsense because you're not dealing with the actual problem e.g. Faithless Looting getting banned then Hogaak coming out and being broken.
- Ugin's Labyrinth should be banned. Interacting with it isn't realistic, and banning fast mana was one of the defining format rules (see also: consistent turn 3 kills getting the ban-hammer) until they changed the format identity to being the format where you buy thousands of dollars of direct-to-modern cards + power creep.
- I don't think Mox Opal should be banned. I think it was dumb as hell to unban it without an accompanying reprint though.
- Shifting Woodland should go. It only ever goes in combo decks as a cheesy plan C ex. Nadu, Eldrazi, Breach. It enables the most nonsense thing in Amulet Titan.
- Unban: Fury. Shouldn't have been banned in the first place, keeps RW & other creature decks in check
