Howdy, and welcome to the second part of my UR guide. This time I’m gonna go over all my maindeck card choices – if you haven’t read the first part, I highly recommend doing so before diving into this one. You can find the first part right here. All caught up? Great, let’s waste no more time and jump right into it!

For the most part, UR lists in Modern are fairly agreed upon – even if we take the DRC – no DRC discussion into the account, we’re still looking at roughly fifty or so same maindeck cards in the vast majority of cases. The most common variations, other than (not) running DRC, are cheap countermagic, Archmage’s Charms, fourth Lightning Bolt and some number of clunky/situational, but powerful cards like Jace, Dress Down or Snapcaster Mage. Here’s the list that I like right now:

I’ve decided to divide the maindeck into five parts: Creatures, Planeswalkers, Interaction, Cantrips & Card Advantage and Manabase. Below you can find my reasoning for including all of these cards in the deck.

Creatures

Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer

I don’t think that Ragavan needs any introduction at this point – it truly is one of the best one drops in the history of Magic, and if you want to play fair in Modern right now, you better have a really good reason to not include the omnipresent monkey in your deck (hint: there aren’t many good reasons). Ragavan pulls even more heavy duty in this deck than it does normally – it’s also responsible for fixing your mana, especially post board with some sort of Blood Moon effect in play. I always thought that Ragavan and planeswalkers are such a natural pairing: playable walkers are inherently undercosted, and if you manage to cast them even a turn ahead of schedule, the impact they have is usually backbreaking. I haven’t been able to enjoy all those early Jaces in the past, largely because Lurrus was even more ridiculously powerful, but right now I’m ready to utilise Modern’s best creature to its full potential.

Snapcaster Mage

If you know me at all, you definitely are aware that Snapcaster Mage is one of my favourite cards of all-time and my goal in Modern is to play the best Snapcaster deck available. I agree, putting such restrictions on myself will harm my winrate from time to time, but Magic is meant to be enjoyable first and foremost, and few things in the game give me a similar amount of joy as flashing back some spells and poking my opponents for two each turn. I’d really like to find space for more copies of Tiago in my deck, but it’s just too packed to really cut anything. Snapcaster also makes any cheap instant and sorcery you include in your deck so much more impactful, and it’s especially deadly when coupled with really efficient sideboard cards – cards like Flusterstorm or Mystical Dispute are even more valuable with a bunch of Snapcasters bringing them back for another go.

Ledger Shredder

Back in the day, blue players were notoriously splashing green basically just to play Tarmogoyf as a beatstick. That hasn’t been the case for a while now with a bunch of blue threats being printed over the years, but Shredder is the first one that actually feels to me like a (better) blue Goyf – it doesn’t need too much setup other than just playing the game, and it trades a bit of its early stats (by early I mean shortly after resolving, not early in the game) for the ability to potentially scale even better than the most famous Lhurgoyf while filtering your hand in the process. It grows deceptively fast, as it can trigger up to four times during each turn cycle (which doesn’t happen that often, but two triggers happen all the time and three are quite common as well). It also lessens the negative impact of your situational cards, making clunky but powerful stuff like Snapcaster Mage and Jace even better and allows you to board in some high variance cards (mostly Blood Moon against decks where it’s hit or miss most of the time). Ledger Shredder truly is the peak blue midrange creature and will see play in many formats for many years to come.

Murktide Regent

How good is a “slightly” bigger and cheaper blue Tombstalker? Turns out it’s pretty insane. Having a cheap-but-not-really finisher of this size lets you dodge the most common removal spells in the format, and makes soft countermagic that much more effective. There really isn’t much more else to say about Murktide – Delve is a silly mechanic and Regent is another one in line of insanely pushed blue cards with that keyword.

Planeswalkers

Jace, the Mind Sculptor

What can I say: Jace is just better than all. I already mentioned how well Ragavan plays with walkers, and it’s even more pronounced in case of Jace. The Sculptor, while being immensely powerful, is also quite fragile, so playing it early, having some other distractions or just being ahead on the board can greatly increase its chances of surviving till you untap, and then the game gets pretty hard to lose. Jace’s unsummon ability also shines the most when used offensively to remove blockers. Overall, it’s a great curve topper for this kind of control deck with a tempo slant, and provides you exactly with the right kind of punch to outmuscle other fair decks when needed.

Interaction

Unholy Heat

People are often mentioning Urza’s Saga and Ragavan when it comes to the most impactful additions to the format from MH2, but I think that Heat might actually be that card – not the best or most powerful one, but the most impactful. For years we’ve been measuring creatures in two main dimensions – does it dodge Lightning Bolt and does it dodge Fatal Push. All of that changed after Unholy Heat entered the conversation – now the most important quality is to either dodge Heat entirely or trade profitably/on par with it. But it goes even further than just creatures – planeswalkers such as Jace, the Mind Sculptor and Teferi, Hero of Dominaria used to walk through Modern streets with impunity, and now, to my dismay, they largely cower in fear of the one mana Hero’s Downfall. Sure, they’re still being played, but they’re far from their former glory and untouchability (seriously, when I used to play Teferi Hero it almost felt like it had hexproof). It can get awkward without Delirium, but barring that (which won’t happen all that often unless some sort of graveyard hate is present) its only relevant weakness is Murktide Regent (or a really large Tarmogoyf).   

Lightning Bolt

A few years ago, a Twitter account called “The Magic Bracket” hosted a contest to determine the greatest Magic card of all time. It was a community-driven voting competition, in which every single black bordered card printed from Alpha up to November 1st, 2016 was paired against another card in an enormous bracket and subjected to a fan vote for the title of, well, the greatest Magic card of all time, whatever the voters meant by that. After two years of voting, the one victor emerged – Lightning Bolt. This quote, taken from the Magic Bracket tumblr page, describes Bolt perfectly: “An early frontrunner with strong results across all fourteen rounds, Bolt is a perfectly balanced, flexible, iconic, flavourful, and beautifully-illustrated card.  I could not be happier with our winner”. It’s astonishing how simple yet elegant of the design it is, and there’s truly no card that I would rather choose as the one poster child for the game. I was also supposed to say something about its actually applications, so you know, it deals three damage to anything, which is good when they have a 3/3 or are at three life (or six if you have Snapcaster Mage in hand).

Counterspell

It’s nearly impossible to get as iconic as Lightning Bolt, but Counterspell comes quite close in my opinion, and for a good reason. People have been clamouring for this reprint basically ever since Modern was launched more than ten years ago, and when WotC finally announced that Counterspell will be reprinted in MH2, there were as many opinions on its hypothetical playability as there were people talking, ranging from “OMG IT’S BROKEN AF WTF” to “Meh” and anything in between. I personally was quite convinced that it’ll be a significant upgrade over Mana Leak, but not something format warping. I think I might’ve underestimated Counterspell a bit, as it’s probably one of the most influential cards in the format right now, and countering anything for a mere two mana no questions asked is definitely a step up from the previous, more expensive hard counters we used to run in Modern.

Archmage’s Charm

I absolutely adore Archmage’s Charm, and I used to say that it was one of the Top 5 cards in Modern on power level when Uro was legal – every mode was relevant and it was a great way to get ahead in blue mirrors then, especially with Mystic Sanctuary still being legal (R.I.P., but not really). It got a bit worse after the February 2021 wave of bans, but it’s still an excellent tool for any blue deck, and together with Counterspell it creates an extremely solid core of stack interaction – Counterspell is great at what it does, and Archmage’s Charm supports it with its versatility – just like when we were escaping the blue-green giant round the clock last year, all three modes of Charm are great right now as well. People have slept on it for a while when it was printed in MH1, but I’m glad that it got all the praise it truly deserved later on.

Spell Pierce

Cheap interaction is key in formats as efficient as Modern, and Spell Pierce is the embodiment of this paradigm – vast majority of stuff that can’t be dealt with via Heat or Ending can be tagged by Spell Pierce for the low price of one blue mana. With so many cheap Planeswalkers and Cascade decks running around, Spell Pierce is as good as it’s ever been in Modern, and I wouldn’t leave home with at least a couple copies.

Cantrips and card advantage

Mishra’s Bauble

I don’t know how it’s still possible after all these years, but many people were cutting Bauble from their decks after Lurrus was axed and asked why am I still playing it in my decks. In case it’s not obvious, here’s the answer: Mishra’s Bauble is just a really, really good card, and if you have any incentive whatsoever to run it, be it Delirium, artifact synergies or anything else, then it should be in your deck. Between the various scry tricks with fetchlands and so on (all of those will be explained in the tips and tricks section later on), fueling Murktide, putting artifact in the graveyard for Delirium and helping to churn through the deck, Bauble is a crucial part of the deck and I can’t imagine cutting even a single copy.

Consider

Cantrips have been the cornerstone of blue decks ever since Alan Comer came up with the theorem known to this day as “Turbo Xerox Rule”. As Michael Flores put it years after the initial idea was introduced: “The principle of the original Xerox deck is that for every four 1-2 mana cantrips, you can remove two lands. Therefore, even though Alan played only 17 actual Islands, the Foreshadows, Impulses, and Portents raised his effective count considerably. In the early game, Alan would have to use his cantrips to find land, but in the late game, he could use them to always have a counter in hand.”. What it basically means is that you can use cantrips to lower your land count and flood less later on, since cantrips will help you find lands in the early stages and send away unwanted lands later on. We can’t follow this rule too closely 25 years later, as the opportunity cost of cantripping went up significantly (you can really spend your second turn casting an Impulse), and the flood prevention mechanisms are much more potent (such as Planeswalkers, Companions and cards like Expressive Iteration), but we can still build on this theorem, and while we don’t have as potent cantrips in Modern as we do in Legacy, there are still some decent options and Consider is the best of the bunch if you’re interested in filling your graveyard. There are few tricks that you should be aware of with Consider, and they’ll be covered later on in the Gameplay section under “Tips and tricks”. Overall, I’ve been pleased with running 4 Baubles, 4 Considers and 19 lands, and I wouldn’t mess with those proportions too much.

Expressive Iteration

I’ve been known for playing two Iterations and four Charms in this deck before, but with the addition of Ledger Shredder I’ve decided to swap those around. The main reason to do so is that Iteration works better with the bird lawyer, both since it’s cheaper and it incentivises playing on your own turn, and because it’s hard to trigger Shredder while holding up three mana for Charm. So far I’ve been liking this configuration, but I can see going back to more Charms should the deck and/or format evolving in a direction when playing more of a flash game is profitable. As far as timing your Iteration goes, you usually want to get two cards out of it, so the earliest you can cast it is on turn 3, and it gets better later on (my “comfortable” spot for it is on turn 4 with a land in hand, so I can choose to exile either land or a spell that costs up to two mana with it). There are some matchups and spots where you want to fire it off on turn 2, but they’re few and far between (it mostly comes up against stuff like Tron when you’re searching for a specific card and card quantity doesn’t matter as much).

Manabase

If that’s the first piece of my content that you’ve ever stumbled upon, you may not know that I’m somewhat of a Karsten-tables-purist when it comes to building manabases. In my opinion a vast majority of manabases in Modern are misbuilt, and people for some reason don’t want to be able to consistently cast their spells on curve. Sure, sometimes you’ll take some additional damage from this 8th fetchland, or your fastland will come into play tapped, but overall it’s much more important to be able to cast your early spells on curve than having a less painless (I’m looking at you, UW lists with 4 fetchlands and 8 ways to cast turn 1 Prismatic Ending) manabase. Obviously, you don’t want to just shove 12 fetchlands in your deck and call it a day, but I do think that people are extremely lazy when it comes to designing manabases and there are certain groups of lands (fastlands in slower decks, pathways in general, River of Tears) that are criminally underutilised mostly because for some reason people either want to play 0 or 4 of them, and can’t understand how good it is to have a spread between different types of lands. Overall, the most egregious mistakes that people make are mostly in the two following categories: 1) enough turn one sources and 2) enough blue sources (or too many non-blue sources to be precise) in their Archmage’s Charm/Counterspell decks. As far as problem number one goes, my recommendation is to have at least 13 (and preferably 14) sources of colour for your turn 1 requirements. Regarding blue count, I’d recommend against having more than 1 non-blue source in your Charm/Counterspell deck unless you’re running filter lands. Then, I’m fine with adding another non-blue source for each filter land I’m running, up to 3. I’d also warn you about overcorrecting in the second direction and running zero non-blue sources, especially if you’re playing a three colour deck with Prismatic Ending – it’s usually better to have a Plains to fetch either on one to save some damage or preemptively against Blood Moon decks. Also, both of those issues are often related because most of the time when people overcorrect on blue sources it comes at the expense of turn 1 sources for their removal spells. Overall, I’d say that the only deck in which I’m comfortable with running zero non-blue sources is Murktide. Okay, enough of this maths-related jammering, let’s get into the actual cards.

Fetchlands

Probably the best lands ever printed, fetchlands form the backbone of most multicolor manabases in Modern and I don’t really have to explain why. Some non-universal advantages that they provide in this deck are fueling both Delirium/Delve and being able to perform “the scry trick” with Bauble. I think nine is the right number of those, as long as you’re splashing, since they’re effectively three colour lands in your hand and you need them to tie the room together. If you’re running only two colours, feel free to run six or seven fetchlands and swap the rest of them for different lands, as having nine fetchlands and seven fetchables is not an ideal situation by any means, even if it’s necessary.

Shocklands

The Pippen to fetchlands’s Jordan, shocklands are what makes those fetch heavy manabases work in Modern. Three copies of Steam Vents have been fairly stock for a while now, and I’m not really planning on changing it up unless the deck becomes much more red (in which case I’d cut a third basic for a fourth Vents, but it’s really unlikely).

Basics

I’m a huge proponent of basics, and I’m trying to fit as many of them in my decks as possible. As a rule of thumb, I like to be able to at least cast all of my cards under Blood Moon/after getting Fielded/Ghost Quartered once or twice, and that’s about how many of those you can afford to play. Because of the extremely stringent mana requirements that Archmage’s Charm imposes, you can’t really run any nonblue lands in the deck, so basic Mountain is out of question. It’s not as problematic in this deck as it usually is, since the splash is pretty minor and Ragavan can fix the mana under the Blood Moon.

Fastlands

Spirebluff Canal = Volcanic Island more or less nine out of ten times, so play four. 

Utility lands

UR doesn’t really need utility lands since its curve is quite low and it’s a pretty mana hungry deck, so your land count isn’t super high and your lands are usually utilised every turn, but the first copy of Otawara, Soaring City is just too free to not include in my opinion. Other than that, the first copy of Fiery Islet is pretty good but I wouldn’t recommend adding another one.