What exactly constitutes ‘fun’ in Magic: The Gathering has always been highly subjective. Some players enjoy close-fought battles of wits, others enjoy turning everything sideways and ending the game by turn three. Still others enjoy watching the lights in their opponents’ eyes slowly burn out as they pass turn after turn of inaction. For those players, Lantern Control in Modern is one of the best decks the game has produced.
Luckily for most, this strategy has been niche at best for most of its life so far. The Modern meta has typically been fast enough, or interactive enough, to shut down its nonsense. With the unbanning of Mox Opal on Monday, however, things have changed significantly. Now, god help us all, Lantern Control may be a real force in the format.
Lantern Control In Modern
If you haven’t had the misfortune of crossing paths with Modern Lantern Control before, let me get you up to speed. This is a Control deck in the purest sense of the word, in that it essentially aims to stop your opponent from playing the game at all. It doesn’t rely on removal, board wipes and counterspells like most of its Control kin, however. Instead, it relies on a suite of cheap artifacts.
Most important among these is the titular Lantern of Insight. With this one mana trinket in play, you get constant knowledge of the top card of your opponent’s deck. A minor advantage in isolation, but deadly in this deck. With mill artifacts like Codex Shredder, Ghoulcaller’s Bell, and Pyxis of Pandemonium, it becomes a way to deny your opponent useful draws for the rest of the game.
With Lantern and a couple of these artifacts out, you can consider every card your opponent might draw and get rid of it if it would help them at all. Lantern Control doesn’t play any creatures, outside of Urza’s Saga Construct Tokens, so you can let lands, removal spells, and board wipes through. This frees up your mills for creatures and game-winning combo pieces. With enough of these cards in play you can lock your opponent out of the game, eventually winning through mill.
This is a potent strategy, but surviving long enough to set it up can be tricky. This is where the deck’s hand attack suite comes in. Thoughtseize and Inquisition of Kozilek let you pick off key cards early on. The deck also runs Ensnaring Bridge, which makes any creatures your opponent does manage to stick largely useless. Since your deck is mostly cheap artifacts, you’ll have an empty hand a lot of the time.
The Mox In The Mix
That’s the gist of Lantern Control’s strategy. You set up your suite of artifacts, and try to mill every useful card before your opponent draws it. This is never a hard lock, but it can very nearly become one with enough pieces out. Urza’s Saga is a huge boon here, letting you tutor up any of your key cards free of charge. That speed issue I mentioned earlier is a thorny one, however. It’s easy for Lantern Control to get overwhelmed by one of the speedier decks in Modern before it gets off the ground.
That’s where Mox Opal comes in. Since the unban, the card has been giving multiple artifact decks in the format a full turn’s advantage. Lantern Control is, above all else, an artifact deck. In the 5-0 list from Grymn above, 28 of the 60 cards are artifacts, in fact. Not just any artifacts, either, but mostly one or zero-mana artifacts. This makes it very easy to get Opal’s extra mana online early, possibly even on the first turn of the game. With that extra mana in the mix, speed becomes a lot less of an issue for the deck.
In an ideal scenario, you can spend your Opal mana on getting another lock piece out. The beauty of the card lies in its flexibility, however. Since it produces mana of every color, you can use it to cast Ancient Stirrings or one of your discard spells. Possibly even an Assassin’s Trophy, if your opponent managed to sneak a creature out. It also lets you get Ensnaring Bridge down on turn two, or get some Karnstructs out of Urza’s Saga without compromising your other plays. It’s a great addition to the deck, and it’s no surprise players like Grymn are netting early 5-0 results with it.
Outnumbered And Outgunned?
Before you get down on your knees to welcome our new Lantern Control overlords, it’s worth looking at the wider Modern landscape first. In an interesting twist, many players are finding Mox Opal, and the decks it supports, less of an issue than anticipated.
“Super early impression of new Modern is that Faithless Looting is more broken than I expected and Mox Opal is less broken than I thought (mostly because the hate is legitimately strong, so many Meltdowns).”
SaffronOlive
This is an extremely valid point. The addition of Meltdown to the format in Modern Horizons 3 gives Modern players access to a Legacy-level piece of artifact hate. For just a single red, Meltdown can wipe all Mox Opals off the board. For two mana, it can clear pretty much everything that Lantern Control is doing.
A ton of decks are running this card in the sideboard now too, so it’s rare that a player won’t have access to an ‘I win’ button against Lantern Control. To say nothing of the other great artifact hate cards in the format, Untimely Malfunction and Force of Vigor to name a couple. Though Mox Opal seemed like a wild unban, it turns out there are actually plenty of safeguards against it.
There’s also another issue here, which ties into the first part of SaffronOlive’s tweet above. Specifically, the raw power of Faithless Looting and graveyard decks. Lantern Control largely wins by milling cards into your opponent’s graveyard, but that’s much less effective against decks that can use their graveyard as a resource. With how good those decks are right now, the list may struggle in some key matchups.
Monday’s Modern changes are incredibly interesting. They’ve injected a lot of power into the format seemingly without unbalancing it. We’ll see how things pan out soon, of course, but a format that can support Lantern Control alongside a suite of counters and alternatives sounds pretty healthy to me.
