Leyline of Sanctity: Turn zero Leyline puts a pounding on a wide range of Modern strategies. The Eldrazi lose their invaluable Thought-Knot Seer interaction. Burn loses all its targeted damage. For BGx, its the discard suite of Thoughtseize and Inquisition of Kozilek. Although there are certainly strategies which will ignore Leyline completely (Affinity, Infect, and Merfolk are the big three here), youre still generating Nykthos devotion and Sphere tax off a Leyline, and you can easily board them out for Games 2-3. When Leyline is good, however, its gamebreaking. Eldrazi loses a high degree of security without the benefit of its turn 2-3 Thought-Knot, and Leyline sets up all the enchanted goodness to follow.
Runed Halo: At the risk of contributing to another spike, Runed Halo is one of the most undervalued cards in Modern. Our present metagame is packed with decks you can identify based on their turn one play. This means you can almost always name a relevant card for Halo to shutdown. If youre a Legacy player or old Extended veteran, youll enjoy the Halo challenge as much as you love a good Cabal Therapy session: choose wisely and it negates something in every single matchup. Eldrazi, Infect, Affinity, Burn, and Merfolk (i.e., most of Moderns format) are heavy on playsets for Halo to answer, and often over-commit to a few damage sources. See Infect pledging to the turn two Blighted Agent or Affinity deploying a Master of Etherium. Moreover, none of these decks have reliable outs to an active Halo (short of the slow Ratchet Bomb pair in Eldrazi). Halo was horrible in an Abrupt Decay metagame. Know whats horrible against Eldrazi? Abrupt Decay. These factors all contribute to Halo being a deck and format all-star. Added bonus: in open linear metagames, Halo almost always turns off a win condition without the enemys maindeck having an out.
Ghostly Prison / Sphere of Safety: Many of Moderns top decks are threat-dense but mana source-light. Sure, they can power out clocks in a hurry, but its often through a combination of cheap mana costs, cost reductions, and mana tricks like Aether Vial or Simian Spirit Guide. These same decks rely on constant pressure via additional threats and nonstop attacks to win the game. Prison and Sphere stop this approach cold. If youre trying to go wide, the turn three Prison funnels aggressors through a virtual Crawlspace as you try to pay the attacker tax. If youre hoping to maintain pressure, the Propaganda replacement forces you to choose between board development or damage. If youre thinking about manlands (Eldrazi, Affinity, and Infect generally are), Prison effectively doubles your mana requirements for each manland attack. And thats just a lone Prison! By the time you get multiples out, or big-daddy Sphere, its a virtual Blazing Archon in a field that doesnt have the maindeck removal to get it off the board.
Suppression Field: Inkmoth Nexus, Ghost Quarter, Eye of Ugin, Mutavault, Blinkmoth Nexus, Spellskite, Cranial Plating, Arcbound Ravager, Ratchet Bomb. Field is a single card that stymies or outright neutralizes hallmark staples in about 50% of the formats top decks, just looking at Eldrazi and Affinity alone. Add fetchlands, Aether Vials, Viscera Seer activations, and Oblivion Stone/Karn Liberated abilities (for those still living #DatTronLife), and Field has never been better. Like Halo, this is another card which greatly benefits from the absence of Abrupt Decay.
Nevermore: Quoth the Idealist, Nevermore! If you arent making Edgar Allan Poe jests whenever playing the card, youre doing it wrong. Similar to the almighty Halo, Nevermore gets a lot better in metagames full of known decks with playsets of cards and established play-trees. Its much worse when metagames are wide open and packing strange singletons. Guess which one were in today? Eldrazi may be taking on many color iterations, but the decks core remains relatively stable. Affinity is, well, Affinity. Thats about 50% of the MTGO field and 35% of the paper field where Nevermore has obvious targets even if you dont know a thing about how your opponent has tuned their particular build. The card gets significantly better against players you know, whether in a Top 8 where lists are published or a local event where youre familiar with your opposition. Im only on a single copy because its a bit passive and is not something you want to see when youre behind, but a grindier metagame could justify going up to two or even three.
Greater Auramancy: If anyone is still playing Decay, Auramancy gives you a maindeck answer. Its also important against Chord of Calling and Collected Company players, who often tote lone enchantment destruction bullets in their decks (and the Eternal Witnesses to recur them). Dont forget World Breaker too! A pair of Auramancies renders your entire enchantment board immune to all this removal. Privileged Position gives more devotion with the same effect, but I prefer lower-cost enchantments to curve into bigger Nykthos plays on turn four or five.
Enduring Ideal veterans will note the absence of Ensnaring Bridge. I love my Stronghold Bridge playset, but am not crazy about it in this deck. With 25 lands, a bunch of expensive spells, and a weighty curve, we rarely have an empty hand. Thats fine against Eldrazis enormous beefcakes but a major problem against Affinitys, Infects, Burns, and Zoos soldiers: remember, contrary to Reddit and forum opinion, the metagame isnt literally 100% Eldrazi. Bridge also doesnt contribute to either our Nykthos devotion or Sphere of Safety, which further pushes me away from the prison staple.
Whether youve been an Enduring Idealist since Saviors of Kamigawa, a Stasis fan since forever, or have been bullied by Eldrazi into exploring prison strategies like Lantern Control and 8Rack, the deck offers you a powerful angle to attack our new Modern. I want to unpack the decks main interactions and important cards, analyzing this not only with regard to the rest of the strategy but also with respect to the broader metagame context of an Eldrazi and Affinity-packed Modern.