Monday, November 10, 2014

I Tron, U Tron...

I've found myself writing at length about the Modern Mono-Blue Urzatron deck lately on reddit, which seemed to suggest I should probably get all my thoughts written down somewhere so I could stop repeating myself and just link to this. I'm not in much of a rhetorical mood today, so I'm just gonna lay out some information about the deck without my usual pomp and circumstance. I'll be starting to stream it soon on my Twitch channel, so look out for that.

Okay, so... yeah.


A Mono-U Tron Primer

I guess people generally start with the "why" of a deck when they explain it. You might be attracted to U Tron for a couple of reasons. The shallowest of which is how incredibly cheap it is without being some boring aggro nonsense. This isn't Burn; you get to play very interactive skill-testing games for like, 150 MTGO tickets (about $200 paper). That's always good.

So, there's that. Another appeal to the deck is the sheer power level of the spells you get to cast. Sundering Titan is a pretty good Magic card. I don't know if you guys have ever Mindslaver'd a Storm opponent and then played out their deck and made them Grapeshot himself for 20, but... it's a pretty good feeling. Don't have removal? Hey look, a Platinum Angel.

I guess if you want to talk about the competitive side of things, the actual reason why Blue Tron can be the "correct" deck choice is your top-notch inevitability. Your one weakness is man-lands, which you need Dismember or Tec Edge/Ghost Quarter for. That aside you have the best Inevitability in the format. In other words, when the game starts to go long, your win percentage skyrockets. Not only do you have Sundering Titan, Mindslaver locks, and occasionally Platinum Angel to win the game on the spot, you have a LOT of countermagic to land those as well as Spell Burst to hard-lock your opponent out of the game.