A major ban announcement took place yesterday, and players are already looking ahead towards the future of the Modern format. With Violent Outburst out of the picture, lots of people are hopeful that Cascade shells will die down a bit. After all, both Crashing Footfalls and Living End decks have made up a huge chunk of the Modern metagame over the past few months.
The thing is, even with Violent Outburst gone for good, it’s hard to imagine Cascade variants, especially Crashing Footfalls decks, faltering too much. Obviously, what made Violent Outburst so strong was the ability to get your Rhino tokens at Instant speed. In conjunction with Force of Negation, the opponent would often need multiple pieces of interaction on their own turn to stop Crashing Footfalls from taking over.
That being said, there are other three-mana Cascade cards in Modern that can fill the void quite nicely. One of them, in the span of just a few hours, rose in price significantly. Players are already having success with it, so for those wishing Cascade decks would ultimately die off, you may be out of luck.
Ardent Plea Price Spike
The card that rose in price a ton, unsurprisingly, is Ardent Plea. Ardent Plea is an Enchantment with a minor effect on the game while in play, but still successfully fills the void that Violent Outburst left. Players were seemingly quick to identify that it would be a much stronger replacement than Demonic Dread in Crashing Footfalls shells. As such, almost immediately after the ban announcement, sales for Ardent Plea on TCGPlayer began to rise tremendously.
Within a couple hours, players began pointing out that the card was likely bought out on TCGPlayer. According to TCGPlayer market price history, the Alara Reborn version of the card has sat between $2 and $4 throughout 2024 until we neared the announcement. Soon after the official announcement, the card was consistently on sale for $20+. We’ve now had over 24 hours for the prices to adjust, but according to TCGPlayer market price, the card still holds a hefty price tag of just over $15.
This is close to a 500% price increase on an uncommon. It’s certainly worth monitoring any price variations over the next few days, as well as the overall metagame share that the new versions of Modern Cascade decks represent. One thing’s for sure, though: Cascade is far from dead, and players are invested in making the necessary adjustments.
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Adjusting to Change
Speaking of making requisite changes to Cascade archetypes, right off the bat, a Crashing Footfalls deck went undefeated in a Magic Online Modern Preliminary event post-ban. As expected, a playset of Ardent Plea makes an appearance. We also get to see the combination of Leyline of the Guildpact and Scion of Draco continue to make waves in the format.
While it’s clearly still early in this “reborn” format’s existence, one noticeable trend is that players seem to be focusing more heavily on Crashing Footfalls shells than Living End. This makes a lot of sense early on, especially given the manabases of the two decks. The manabase has changed a little to better support Ardent Plea, but the Domain Rhinos decks were already utilizing white mana for Leyline Binding.
Living End decks, on the other hand, were base-Temur. The presence of Violent Outburst as another green card in addition to Shardless Agent and Generous Ent made it much easier to enable Endurance and Force of Vigor out of the sideboard. In this sense, switching to Ardent Plea comes at a more significant cost than for Crashing Footfalls decks.
In fact, even though Violent Outburst being an Instant was quite important, Ardent Plea does have some areas in its favor. Having another card that pitches to Force of Negation and Subtlety certainly helps make them more consistent. The Exalted ability that Ardent Plea provides isn’t worth nothing, especially alongside Scion of Draco. Furthermore, Teferi, Time Raveler can bounce Ardent Plea back to your hand to either recast or pitch to Force or Subtlety. All things considered, Crashing Footfalls decks still seem reasonably well-positioned.
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Another Relevant Price Spike
Another thing to note with regards to the ban announcement was that other top-tier strategies like Esper Goryo’s Vengeance decks and Golgari Yawgmoth, Thran Physician combo decks remain fully intact. Yawgmoth seems like a big winner from the ban, but there’s also no denying how strong of a weekend Esper Goryo’s Vengeance decks had overall.
Over the weekend, Esper emerged victorious at the Regional Championship in China. Additionally, it put multiple players into the top eight of Sunday’s Regional Championship Qualifier $5k at SCGCon Philadelphia. As such, it doesn’t come as a big surprise that Goryo’s Vengeance saw a bit of a price spike recently, too. Goryo’s Vengeance rose from just over $5.50 in its cheapest traditional form at the end of February to just over $8 on March 9.
This isn’t a huge change, but it certainly signifies that the Esper Goryo’s Vengeance archetype may be getting a bit more respect. It’ll be interesting to see if the Modern metagame actually changes much over the course of the next few weeks. Cascade is alive and well, and for those that were quick to snatch up copies of Ardent Plea, you get to reap the rewards.
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