With the recent B&R Announcement, Magic: The Gathering Modern has been completely turned on its head. Faithless Looting and Hogaak are finally gone, and graveyard decks are mostly gone or in the process of being redesigned. Now that those fast decks are no more, slower fair decks will be able to thrive once again. One of the things helping those fair decks is none other than Stoneforge Mystic herself, finally off the ban list! Let’s check out some of these new lists popping up.
Deadguy Ale
Deadguy Ale is the old-school Legacy name for what is essentially an Orzhov-colored Stoneforge deck. It’s midrange and grindy, with up to 8 targeted discard spells, sometimes Lingering Souls, and the full Stoneforge package. The idea of the deck is to disrupt your opponent via discard and land destruction while also applying pressure with Batterskull or one of the Swords. If you want to see this list in action, Caleb D went 5-0 with it on his stream.
UW Control
In Modern, UW Control traditionally finishes games with Celestial Colonnade beats. However, Stoneforge Mystic can now also be a game-ender! Her ability can be activated at any time, so UW Control can hold up countermagic or Path to Exile and then activate Stoneforge Mystic at the end of your turn for a quick start to Batterskull beatdown city. Batterskull can be played over and over every time the germ token it makes gets killed due to its bounce ability, so UW Control is now able to ride into the late game with a recurring 4/4 lifelink vigilance beatstick.
Whirza
Whirza has been a pretty strong contender in the Modern meta since Modern Horizons dropped. It uses the old tried and true Thopter-Sword combo, but now with Urza to form a truly infinite engine for life and thopter tokens. Before the Stoneforge Mystic unbanning, they were running Goblin Engineer to find Sword of the Meek and put it in their graveyard so that the combo could go off as soon as they found Thopter Foundry. Now, Stoneforge Mystic fills that role and also allows Whirza to run Batterskull to stabilize against aggressive decks.
Death and Taxes
An archetype that fell off long ago, Death and Taxes is the Modern version of a Legacy deck with the same name. In Legacy, the deck has better cards. This allows the deck to really be a disruptive, policing force in the Legacy meta. In Modern… well, the deck hasn’t been very hot. We’ve seen different variants of it over the years, but none besides BW Eldrazi and Taxes really stuck around. However, one of the cards that makes Legacy Death and Taxes so good is Stoneforge Mystic! So, with her being in Modern, the deck has some new life coming into it.
Conclusion
While there are probably a lot of other decks out there fitting Stoneforge Mystic in, these are some of the more obvious and generally powerful decks floating around. This is an all-new Modern format, so keep tuned to our MTG page as new decks come out!
