For a creature-based deck, there aren’t many things that are more annoying than facing down a Pillowfort effect. Potentially, your entire deck can get shut down for just a few mana. Despite this, cards like Ghostly Prison and Propaganda generally don’t see play outside of Commander.
Bizarrely, one of these classic Commander enchantments recently broke out in competitive Magic. Propaganda saw play in multiple successful decks across this weekend’s Modern Regional Championships. In fact, I personally managed a top 16 finish at the Canadian Regional Championship with two Propagandas in the sideboard.
Propaganda MTG
For three mana, Propaganda puts a restriction on your opponent that is particularly strong at hindering decks that want to go wide. When you need to pay two mana for each attacking creature, it suddenly becomes extremely difficult to attack with even one creature. Deciding whether to develop your board state or attack with your creatures can be a decision that players cannot afford to make, especially in a format as fast as Modern.
Interestingly, in addition to its newfound appearance in Modern, Propaganda is also seeing some Premodern play. The card commonly appears in the sideboards of slower blue strategies, ruining the tempo created by the popular red decks in the format. The card otherwise sees some cEDH play, but is rather rare there.
Propaganda in Modern
While Propaganda largely broke out in Modern this past weekend, it has been seeing niche play in Simic Ritual over the past month before appearing en masse at the Canadian Regional Championship. Designed to take advantage of Birthing Ritual and free spells, Simic Ritual wants to play a slower game that is capable of grinding out every other deck in Modern, granting the deck incredibly strong matchups against Blink and Amulet Titan decks. The problem with this approach is that Simic Ritual struggles to keep up with faster strategies. This is where Propaganda comes in.
Simic can rarely make relevant plays before turn two, which gives faster strategies like Boros Energy, Izzet Prowess, and Izzet Affinity a chance to pressure the board before Simic can get its engines going properly. Since time is exactly what Simic needs to come back, Propaganda plays the important role of slowing down faster decks.
All three of Modern’s aggressively slanted decks have a tendency to go wide as a core part of their game plan. Ocelot Pride makes tons of small tokens to attack with, while Cori-Steel Cutter makes a series of Prowess Monks to take over the game. Pinnacle Emissary is perhaps the biggest offender among these, vomiting out a ton of Drones as early as turn one. These decks get completely shut down by Propaganda since, most of the time, your opponents will only be able to afford attacking with two creatures. This is particularly nasty against Izzet Prowess since, not only do you need to cast other spells to deal damage with your attackers, but Prowess decks going into the weekend had no cards that could even remove the enchantment.
All of that said, Propaganda’s best finish this weekend was in the offbeat Izzet Affinity deck that I piloted to a top 16 of the Canadian Regional Championship. That said, this isn’t really a reflection of a larger evolution of the archetype, since my list was built in an atypical way. Exchanging explosive power for a toolbox to deal with combo matchups, Propaganda helped shore up a bad Prowess matchup that got even worse for my variant. While normal Affinity decks could consider playing the card, the deck doesn’t grind too well into the late game, meaning the Prowess might be able to kill you anyway.
Propaganda’s Future
Propaganda proved to be a strong strategy against Prowess, Energy, and Affinity this past weekend for Simic Ritual players, but that might change soon. Prowess is ironically beginning to pick up Into the Flood Maw now, which is the perfect answer to Propaganda for the deck. Simic does have the tools to protect Propaganda from effects like this, but Izzet only needs one small window with Propaganda off the board to close the game out completely. Considering how bad the Izzet matchup is for Simic, players might keep running the card anyway, hoping to cheese some games with it.
This means that, while Simic Ritual players may continue experimenting with Propaganda, it probably won’t see play elsewhere. Simic has tons of free interaction to stop attempts of destroying Propaganda, but without that, the card is too big a liability.
Regardless, Propaganda is exactly the type of quirky card that can catch many MTG players unawares. Consider trying the enchantment out in your competitive decks to slow down the competition.