Foreword

Welcome to my first primer here on Mystical Teachings, in which I’ll try to familiarise you with ins and outs of Modern UR to the best of my ability! First of all, let’s talk briefly about what characterises UR as a deck for those uninitiated in Modern: UR is an interactive blue deck (some would call it a tempo deck, but more on that, once against, later on) that’s looking to leverage efficient threats in Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer, Ledger Shredder and Murktide Regent backed up by the best interactive spells in the format – Counterspell and Unholy Heat. If the opponent came to the table wielding proper tools to withstand those creatures, a robust card advantage package of Expressive Iteration, Archmage’s Charm and Jace, the Mind Sculptor can brawl in the long game with everything short of Caverned Primeval Titans and active Valakuts (only in game one obviously, as a well-designed sideboard takes care of those few decks that have clear inevitability over UR). The rest of the cast are by no means slackers – from the iconic Lightning Bolt and my old friend Snapcaster Mage, to some efficient cantrips in Consider and Mishra’s Bauble, with a clean, relatively pain-free manabase, it’s clear to me that UR is the best deck in the format, largely on the back of its consistency.

Why UR isn’t (or shouldn’t be) a tempo deck

Ever since UR became one of the most popular decks in the format shortly after Modern Horizons 2 got released, the vast majority of people almost automatically likened it to the Legacy Delver decks. This comparison definitely has some legs – both decks share the same colours and play cheap interaction, efficient beaters and a bunch of cantrips, but I wouldn’t just blindly trust in this analogy – Modern (thankfully) lacks tools like Daze and Wasteland to allow UR to play a true tempo game, and with how efficient everything got over the past year, as well as with the addition of a truly massive threat in form of Ledger Shredder, I firmly believe, even more than before, that treating UR as a strictly tempo deck is a mistake. In my opinion UR is a midrange deck capable of having tempo draws. This one fairly short and seemingly simple statement is the foundation of every subsequent decision, be it deckbuilding, sideboarding or navigating the game. This is the main reason why I dislike Dragon’s Rage Channeler in the deck – even with all its other flaws (that I will write about in-depth a bit later), it’s still one of the best tempo threats of all time. But if I’m playing a midrange deck, not a tempo deck, then the value of a tempo creature drops drastically, since it doesn’t mesh as well with the rest of the deck as it would otherwise – there’s a reason people haven’t been playing Wild Nacatls in Jund, even at its prime – it’s simply not a midrange card, just like Channeler. The second biggest consequence of this approach is the realisation that you can keep a hand with no threats in it (as a general rule and in the dark of course, as it still varies from matchup to matchup but it’s still not nearly as important as in “classic” UR – the only matchups where you really want a threat in your opener is combo and big mana imo). This also alleviates the pressure to protect your creatures with your precious countermagic – sure, sometimes it’ll be the correct play, but not having (or at least being heavily inclined) to do so is a godsend when it comes to playing most interactive matchups in which UR traditionally is the aggressor (mostly 4c and UW, which are matchup that are widely regarded as tough-ish for UR but my experience was pretty different when it comes to 4c (basically a coin flip) and wildly different with UW (it’s pretty hard to lose against them IMO)). Overall, I’d likened UR much more to Faeries than Delver – sometimes you have your Bitterblossom (Ragavan) draws and you steamroll whoever comes in your way, and sometimes you’re playing the Jace/Cryptic Command (or in this case Counterspell) game to grind your opponent to dust.

(Somewhat) controversial card choices I make

First and foremost, let’s talk about Dragon’s Rage Channeler. These are some statements from my last guide: “I’ve been known for not including Darcy in my decks for months at this point, and while I think it was an important addition to Murktide decks in the Lurrus era, right now it’s time to cut it. I’ve already highlighted the most important reason to do so in the introduction: in my opinion giving up on a bit of efficiency in order to gain more muscle is the correct thing to do, and Channeler always was the most expendable threat in the deck“ and “Of course, you lose some aggressive potential with only Ragavans as your one drops, but I think that this trade off is well worth it right now”. As much as I still agree with both of these quotes, I think the second one isn’t even that relevant anymore with Ledger Shredder around – you don’t really need 15 or so creatures to be sufficiently proactive when needed, and Shredder is just a better card than Channeler (at least in Modern) in my opinion – it lines up better against common interaction (Bolt, Wrennski, early Heat), and offers a much more impactful card selection tool (Connive is miles better than Surveil (quite obvious, I know), even though Darcy can technically Surveil unlimited number of times each turn). The last significant upside of the Bird Lawyer is that it blocks really well, which is something that UR wasn’t that great at before, which makes the deck even more versatile and midrange-like. Sure, it also costs two mana rather than one, which is a big, big deal in Magic, but its power is so much higher than Darcy’s that I think this choice isn’t even particularly close.

But enough already about cards I’m not running, how about some of the inclusions that are raising more than a few eyebrows? I’m obviously talking about Snapcaster Mage and Jace, the Mind Sculptor. Let’s start with our pal Tiago: SCM has been a mainstay of many constructed formats for years at this point, and even though many people would call it a “bommer card”, I still think it belongs to this deck in small amounts. It’s not a secret that the true power of Snapcaster lies in its versatility – it’s an extra removal against a creature deck, another counterspell when facing a combo opponent, and a cantrip when you need it to be. I have always valued this multidimensionality highly, but there’s another aspect of it that’s not talked about very often – saving on deck space. The most constraining factor in deckbuilding is how many slots you have available – while technically you can play more than sixty cards in the maindeck, you don’t really want to do that (and for a good reason), and you physically can’t run more than fifteen cards in the sideboard. Snapcaster helps condensing those slots by being a removal/countermagic splitcard, similarly to what Eladamri’s Call has been doing in Four Colour to a good effect, and that’s the main reason why I include it in my decks in 2022 Modern. 

Jace’s strengths, unlike Tiago’s, aren’t as subtle – as we all know, JTMS is better than all, and while a lot has changed over the last ten years, it’s still one of the most menacing threats you can deploy, and it ends the game swiftly if you manage to untap with it. I’ll talk about it more later on in the cards section, but the most important thing to note while talking about this maindeck inclusion is that clunky but powerful one-ofs (or, in this case, two-ofs) in your cantrip Ledger Shredder deck are very strong (shoutout to Lukas261997 for coming up with this very concise and on-point way to sum up why Jace is good).

Potential splashes

For a while back in April and May, I’ve been advocating for a white splash in the deck since I thought Teferi, Time Raveler was very well-positioned at that time. While I don’t think that’s the case right now, I think exploring possible splashes is worthwhile, at least as an exercise in theorycrafting. 

 As a rule of thumb, I try to avoid splashing if I have a chance, especially in decks that are heavy on cheap and colour-intensive cards like this one is. I tend to value stable mana extremely highly, and one of the biggest advantages of UR over other top decks in Modern is how small its fail rate is. Nonetheless, sometimes the format is in such a state that splashes are not only justified, but actively increasing your percentage against the field (such as the aforementioned Teferi example). I don’t think that any of them are warranted right now (the closest one in my opinion is black for some unconditional removal against Shredder/Murktide and Kolaghan’s Command against Unlicensed Hearse), but if you want to try them out yourselves, here is a non-exhaustive list of cards you can splash, grouped into two categories: cards that are the reason you want to splash and cards that you can consider including once you’ve already committed to another colour.