Metagame: Aetherdrift in Japan, US RC, and the Breach Decks Dilemma

The Aetherdrift season is here!

While the United States Regional Championship did not allow the use of Aetherdrift cards, as the event took place during prerelease week, the tournament, which had over a thousand players, showed a worrying outlook for Modern: Underworld Breach decks grew in popularity and, despite a target on their backs, achieved the best conversion of Top 32 and Top 16 finishes, raising debates about a possible ban on March 31.

On the other side of the world, the Japan Standard Cup, with 477 competitors, showed the first results of Aetherdrift in the Standard format, with cards like Afterburner Expert and Oildeep Gearhulk standing out in consolidated lists.

Check out this article for the main news from this weekend's Magic events. In this edition, we will focus only on Standard and Modern, since they were the formats with the biggest events outside of Challenges, which we will not cover this week.

The first major tournament with Aetherdrift took place this weekend in Japan: the Japan Standard Cup had 477 players and presented the first ideas and competitive Standard lists with the new cards from the expansion.

The event was won by Matsumoto Tatsunori with a list of Azorius Oculus using two cards from the set: the much-needed reprint of Spell Pierce and also Bounce Off as complementary protection and bounce copies for creatures.

The highlight of the event was finalist Daisuke Iwabuchi, who mixed the Gruul Delirium list that has been growing in the Metagame in recent weeks with a new mechanic around the combination of Afterburner Expert and Draconautics Engineer, both excellent creatures on their own, but enable very explosive turns when many copies of Afterburner Expert are in the graveyard.

Another notable new card in the list was Dredger’s Insight, an enchantment that feeds Delirium while granting more chances to put copies of Afterburner Expert in the graveyard.

Oildeep Gearhulk was in one of the Dimir Midrange lists as a complete set. While testing is still needed to determine whether it will be a future staple, its cost, body, abilities and ETB effect make it a complete card in several circumstances of the current Metagame, in addition to dodging Go for the Throat, Nowhere to Run, Cut Down and Anoint with Affliction while being a punishing card for Bounce decks.

Another relevant Standard event over the weekend was the SCGCon RCQ that took place alongside the Portland Regional Championship in the United States, where the great news that this tournament brought was the adaptation of Bounce decks to include Momentum Breaker, Spell Pierce and Grim Bauble.

The Speed ​​Demon also made an appearance in the Top 32 in a list of Rakdos Demons, where the new creature interacts with Unholy Annex while its drawback is offset by Sheoldred, the Apocalypse.

Modern was the stage for the US Regional Championship, held this weekend in Portland, with 1028 players. The Metagame can be seen in the images below.

And the Top 8 included the following decks and players.

There are two decks that stand out from this event. The first is the tournament winner, Amulet Titan.

Amulet Titan's resilience in Modern is admirable. No matter how many waves of power creep the format faces, it always finds a way to come back - Titan is perhaps the deck that has best embraced the cards of Modern Horizons without breaking the format in half on any occasion.

But we need to talk about the elephant in the room:

Underworld Breach variants were widely anticipated at the US Regional Championship, and even with a target on its back, it was the most played deck alongside Boros Energy, had a higher conversion rate than its main competitor, and even placed three players in the Top 8, eight players in the Top 16, and earned sixteen places in the Top 32.

It was the archetype with the highest win rate in the tournament, with 54.4%, as shown by Reddit user m0ist_cactus in the image below, or in the spreadsheet that can be seen here.

The question that hangs over the Modern community right now is whether Breach is a broken deck, and all signs point to yes. Its results in RC have all the hallmarks of a problematic archetype: it's expected, it shrugs off the hate, it has the highest win rate and the highest Top 32 conversion rate in a tournament with over a thousand players.

Breach was already showing good results after the ban of Nadu, Winged Wisdom and was one of the archetypes that remained competitively relevant during the period of Boros Energy's dominance. Part of this was attributed to its speed, and another part to the fact that it had a win condition that bypassed The One Ring with Thassa's Oracle - and there is no doubt that the unbanning of Mox Opal took the combo to a new level in competitive Modern.

Can we say that Wizards made a mistake in unbanning Mox Opal? Theoretically, yes. Free mana is always a problem, cards like Simian Spirit Guide and Mox Opal itself were banned for this reason and the company took a risk by unbanning this artifact in the expectation that it would appear in decks like Affinity. Times have changed, stronger cards have come out, including one that shouldn't be legal in Modern now that we've reached this point.

There's a reason why Underworld Breach is banned in Pioneer and Legacy - it's easy to break a two-mana Yawgmoth's Will and what this card offers is the effect of one of the most powerful cards in Magic with an additional cost that is easy to bypass for several archetypes: in Pioneer, you could just use Tome Scour to mill your own deck and win with Thassa's Oracle. In Legacy, Brain Freeze even made it onto Delver of Secrets lists to give Legacy's best archetype a combo-kill it didn't need.

Now, after a few years of being a valuable mechanic in Prowess decks, Underworld Breach has reached the dreaded threshold of potentially broken in Modern.

Should we expect bans in Modern?

The next Magic Banned and Restricted update is on March 31st, enough time for the Modern Metagame to try to adjust, respond to Breach, succeed, fail, try again, and stay in this cycle until this issue is resolved or Wizards needs to take action - in which case, I expect Underworld Breach to leave the format.

Mox Opal is a dangerous card. Free mana, as mentioned before, is always a risk. However, what other archetypes have taken advantage of the unbanned card besides Breach and achieved consistent results?

Archetypes like Hammer Time or Broodscale Combo are some of the strategies that use the artifact to speed up their turns, just as some versions of Affinity also use it for the same purpose, not to mention the Urza, Lord High Artificer lists - and we cannot neglect the possibility that Breach is overshadowing the space of these decks, but the problem we have today in Modern only exists because Underworld Breach is a broken card, with or without Mox Opal.

Is it worth, therefore, running the risk of Mox Opal breaking another deck if Underworld Breach is banned? I think the card deserves the benefit of doubt: Faithless Looting, Green Sun’s Zenith and Splinter Twin were unbanned with it and had relatively healthy impacts on Modern and helped diversify the Metagame, so Mox Opal may have a chance to bring benefits to Modern without being reused over and over with Yawgmoth’s Will at home.

That’s all for today!

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment!

Thanks for reading!