Mardu Myth
Welcome to your modern Mardu Myth Primer. Here you can expect to gain a detailed understanding of the archetype known as Mardu Myth, a new modern Smallpox Archetype. It is my goal to provide this primer as a source of continually-updated information on our Mardu Smallpox archetype. This is a modern deck designed to break the symmetry of
Smallpox
and win the game of attrition after sufficiently taxing our opponent's resources.
Our goal with this deck is to mimic the strength of the most disruptive card in MTG,
Pox
. While modern doesn't have access to such a powerful card, we do have access to two smaller effects in
Smallpox
and
Crack the Earth
. The beauty of playing symmetric disruption is that our deck is designed to mitigate the damage done to ourselves by these cards while maximizing the damage done to our opponents.
Myth Realized
is our biggest payoff once we have shunted our opponent's plan. It dodges each of our sacrifice effects while slowly becoming a large threat.
Playing Smallpox is a lot like sieging castle. Choke your opponent on resources, and only once their people are dying of famine and disease do we bring in our threats. When playing this deck, this is our philosophy. Attack your advisory's lands early, clean up the creatures, and once they are unable to fight back favorably, start applying pressure back.
Landbase
One of the most important part of building any deck is the manabase. Building a manabase in modern is more complicated than in either Standard or Legacy, due to its sheer volume of sub-optimal choices. Here I use the term sub-optimal to emphasize that Legacy has the far superior land options. This deck has a high requirement for colored mana in order to cast our spells, and therefore its extremely important to have the correct landbase for the deck. Generally, our color priority looks like: red > black > white. However, we want to construct our mana in such a way to have Myth Realized on turn one, and follow that with either Crack the Earth, Inquisition of Kozilek , or Smallpox turn two.
Bloodstained Mire
: This is the deck's fetchland of choice. Fetches both of our non-basics and grants access to all of our shock lands. Absolutely four copies. No Exceptions.
Blood Crypt
: Contains both of our desired turn two colors.
Godless Shrine
: Sets us up for an early Myth Realized into our turn two disruption.
Sacred Foundry
: Naturally, having a shock which combines red with white makes sense.
Sunbaked Canyon
: Sunbaked Canopy is a new toy for multicolored decks. Here I cut one Sacred Foundry for the added top-deck utility this provides. However it comes at the cost of being unfetchable. I think a one of in either Sunbaked Canyon or Silent Clearing is correct.
Flagstones of Trokair
: The graveyard trigger is the most important part of this card. The legend rule won't matter too much here since we get to search for a plains when it's destroyed. We almost always run four of this card because staying ahead on lands after a Smallpox or Crack the Earth is an amazing tempo swing.
Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
: Makes flagstones into a swamp, which enables turn two Smallpox. We don't need to run as many as the BW Smallpox lists as we split our turn two threats into both Smallpox and Crack the earth.
Shambling Vent
: This is our deck's man-land of choice. It allows us to both fix our mana and once we have our opponent locked out of the game, it becomes one of our win conditions.
Snow-Covered Mountain
&
Snow-Covered Swamp
&
Snow-Covered Plains
: Every deck needs some number of basics to play around Blood Moon. We choose to play one basic Mountain to help play around
Path to Exile
, as our deck has many red spells that we would like to keep access to.
Threats
The Mardu Myth deck will run creature threats that have a natural way to dance around the sacrifice effects of Crack the Earth and Smallpox, and/or threats that are meant to be resolved as finishers following a Crack/Smallpox (or can provide recurable creatures to "bite the bullet" in their stead).
Myth Realized
: The deck's namesake and win condition. It just so happens that all of the spells trigger it, and all of them happen to be cheap. We can get this thing to a nice size quickly, and is a nice way to wrap the game up once we have locked out opponent out of resources and cards. Plus, once they start passing the turn back and start the "draw-go" phase of the game, we can charge it up manually.
Young Pyromancer
: This is an interesting value piece in this deck rather than the deck's main goal. Once we play either Smallpox or Crack the Earth, the Pyromancer's ability goes on the stack meaning that the token will come into play before we have to sacrifice a creature or permanent respectively. This creates a neat way of breaking the symmetry of these powerful spells.
Necroplasm
: This helps fight our deck's weakness: many, small drop creatures. While this card does remove itself after attacking for four, it is also a recursive threat that we can either discard early or not mind sacrificing to a Smallpox or Crack the Earth.
Tombstalker
&
Gurmag Angler
: These delve creatures can come down fast and hard after Smallpox and Crack the Earth fill our graveyards. They may be an option for lists that are having trouble turning the corner with only Myth. Playing one of these delvers also open's up our deck to playing more creatures with Nether Spirit.
Support
Mardu Myth utilizes one of the best and most efficient removals and disruption spells available, Smallpox. The spells that follow are crucial to the deck and therefore, for some spells, there is no flexibility possible as their power-level will always be great in the modern format and helps executing the main strategy of the deck.
Smallpox
: This is our deck's main engine. Our goal with this deck is to grind the game to a halt attacking each player's resources. Our deck is designed to mitigate the damage of the symmetry of this card.
Crack the Earth
: Once we start getting our opponent down to a 1-2 lands, it's another Stone Rain effect. We can sacrifice our Flagstones to negate its effect and fix mana, sac Chromatic Star and Spellbomb to draw cards. This serves as another Pox-like effect in our deck and the main incentive to dip into red.
Akki Blizzard-Herder
: Playing this card in our deck moves the deck into the range of 13-17 guaranteed land destruction spells in our main board. While this is isn't technically guaranteed (do to the likes of Path to Exile and similar effects), it is likely that we will sacrifice it before our opponent's get a chance to react to it favorably.
Inquisition of Kozilek
: While Thoughtseize may be another option for this slot, remember that our goal is to tax our opponent's board-state and keep them running on a low land count. Our LD spells keep them low on resources and this pulls the spells they might cast on those low resources out of their hand.
Lightning Bolt
: Burn, removal, and a one mana spell that helps our Myth grow.
Oust
: While this may seem like a strange inclusion, having our opponent's gaining life in our deck with slow win-cons, it is actually a very niche piece of removal for this deck. Know that our goal is to deny our adversaries lands. If they top deck lands, they will slowly work their way out of our lock. Oust, for the low price of one mana, also makes one of our opponent's draws dead in the match-up.
Stone Rain
: Pox decks in legacy have Sinkhole, so Stone Rain will have to fill that slot in our deck. Used to attack mana and further deny lands from opponents trying to escape from under losing resources.
Pillage
: As above, but gives our deck outs to problem artifacts in the mainboard like Chalice of the Void or Aether Vials.
Kolaghan's Command
: The power of this card should be understood as modular. While non of the modes themselves are insanely powerful, the fact that this allows us to: discard an early Gurmag Angler or Young Pyromancer knowing we can get it back, get back Akki Blizzard-Herder to give us another Land Destruction effect, force our opponent to discard during their draw step, and so on.
Sweltering Suns
: Where this deck falters is go-wide strategies. Having a few of these in the main board will help shore up this weakness.
