It’s been nearly two months since Marvel Super Heroes released, and players are still finding ways to maximize the new tools. In fact, just yesterday, a deck built around an eight-mana Marvel bomb unexpectedly got second place in a Magic Online Modern Challenge. If you’re into unique control shells with a combo finish, look no further.
The Ten Rings for the Win
The main goal behind this archetype is to cheat a copy of The Ten Rings into play and overwhelm your opponent with card advantage. This is made possible by Shape Anew, a cool Polymorph variant for artifacts. Because The Ten Rings is the only artifact card in the deck, a resolved Shape Anew is guaranteed to hit the game-breaking bomb.
To help set up Shape Anew, this deck incorporates a multitude of efficient artifact token producers. Tamiyo, Inquisitive Student is certainly the strongest of the bunch on its own, but Deduce and Prismari Command also do the trick. On top of enabling Shape Anew, these instants also dig deeper for your combo pieces and can help flip Tamiyo.
While The Ten Rings doesn’t win the game immediately, it gives you a great chance to find countermagic, keeping the opponent off-balance. Free counterspells like Disrupting Shoal and Force of Negation are particularly important to this deck’s success, since they let you tap out for Shape Anew with no fear. The Ten Rings also easily mitigates the downside of these pitch cards by refueling your hand every end step.
Eventually, you should have no problem finding and jamming Murktide Regent with counterspell backup. As a massive creature that outsizes nearly any flying blocker your opponent could land, this is the perfect threat to close games.
Surprisingly Resilient
Part of what makes Izzet Shape Anew such an interesting strategy is that it’s surprisingly difficult to disrupt. Because Deduce and Prismari Command can make artifacts on your opponent’s end step, sorcery speed answers like Wistfulness and Foundation Breaker are ineffective versus the combo. Plus, many of the format’s top pieces of interaction to artifact decks, like Wrath of the Skies or Collector Ouphe, aren’t reliable answers to The Ten Rings.
Once in play, The Ten Rings singlehandedly undoes any damage from discard spells like Thoughtseize. This makes your matchup against slower decks like Mono-Black Midrange quite strong. Yet, at the same time, your plethora of counterspells makes your matchup against Ruby Storm, Neoforom, and other spell-based combo decks elite.
Unfortunately, what this deck does lack is creature removal. Thanks to this, fast starts from Boros Energy pose a real threat, especially when backed up by Voice of Victory. A resolved Orcish Bowmasters out of Dimir Midrange is also quite problematic, as your entire deck is reliant on drawing tons of extra cards.
Nonetheless, even though this deck is far from perfect, it still has a lot of promise in the current metagame. A second-place Challenge finish is nothing to scoff at, and we look forward to seeing if this deck continues to pick up steam.
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