All About Amulet Titan

I’m Dom Harvey and I’m an Amulet addict. Back in the day I qualified for my first Pro Tour with Amulet Bloom, which took me to Canada and the US for the first time. When I moved to Canada, I won a SCG Open in Worcester with an offbeat build of Amulet to start a year on the grind and ended it by winning SCG Regionals with Amulet.

More recently, I qualified for the ManaTraders Invitational with Amulet and then won the whole thing playing it in the Modern portion. I also won NRG’s Modern $10k in Minneapolis to qualify for their 2024 end-of-year Invitational.

A few months after publishing the first edition of this guide, I made the Top 4 of Pro Tour: Lord of the Rings in Barcelona going 8-2 in Modern with Amulet! After unceremoniously falling off the PT, I clawed my way back from the underworld by Top 8ing RC Ottawa with old faithful.

I have been immersed in Magic as a columnist, commentator, and podcaster for years (now independently on Patreon too) and am always keen to share my love of Magic with people. I offer coaching, not just for Amulet but to help people achieve whatever their Magic goals are - get in touch on Discord or via the links below!

Discord: domhrv

twitter.com/dominharvia

linktr.ee/domhrv

mtggoldfish.com/player/capriccioso

Who is this for?

This is a love letter to my favourite deck in almost 20 years of playing Magic. I hope that everyone from people picking up the deck for the first time to my fellow grizzled Amulet one-tricks can find something to learn and enjoy here.

This guide is free and will remain free - I want this to be the definitive written guide to Amulet and I want that guide to be a public resource. If you would have paid $ for it and want to show your appreciation anyway, you can do so here or send me tix on MTGO (Capriccioso).

This doesn’t have a constantly updated list or sideboard guide - the goal is to show you how to craft that for yourself given your priorities and expectations, and those are dynamic enough that a fixed list/guide won’t help there. On my Patreon you can find regular updates with my current lists, SB guides, and thoughts - for Amulet and for other decks across various formats.

Why you should play Amulet

Amulet has the richest history of any deck that’s still around in Modern. After bursting onto the scene as a bizarre gimmick a decade ago, it took one Pro Tour by storm and then proved so powerful that the guillotine fell before it could do it again. A small band of devotees did their best to prove the Summer Bloom ban was just a flesh wound and by 2018 the deck was back on the map. After the turbulence of 2019, Amulet was back on top once again only for the ban of Once Upon a Time to send it back into the wilderness. Modern Horizons 2 marked a hard reset for the format that also gave Amulet a new lease on life; three years later, Modern Horizons 3 did that again. A few decks have Amulet beat for sheer longevity but none can boast Amulet’s mix of history and variety. Amulet Bloom, the lists I played on the SCG Tour in 2019-2020, post-MH2(/LOTR) Amulet, and Amulet today all look very different and all have a special place in my heart.

That variety extends to the games themselves. The Amulet nut draws are an amazing rush and feel like a well-earned reward for solving the intricate puzzles where you plan out your Primeval Titan endgame over many turns with your whole deck at your fingertips. With most combo decks you’re done once you assemble A + B - here, that’s just the easy part. Amulet constantly presents you with unique decisions and there are always new corner cases to consider.

You also have unrivalled flexibility in how you build the deck. You have a lot of flex slots to work with and so many different toolboxes that play off each other that changing one card in the maindeck or sideboard has a big impact on your games. You get to enjoy a special excitement during spoiler season as these toolboxes care about broad categories - any promising new land or green creature deserves serious examination. Amulet was the perfect home for broadly broken cards like Field of the Dead, Urza’s Saga, and Once Upon a Time but also made stars out of cards like Cultivator Colossus that other decks ignored.

There’s no consensus even among experienced Amulet players on how to approach certain matchups, what your sideboard should accomplish, or which cards you should play given a particular goal. You have room to take radical approaches to fix bad matchups and the shell is powerful enough to support a lot of wacky experiments. Amulet streamers have a lot of fun trying cards that are probably just great memes for the content but could be flashes of genius.

If you’re looking to pick one Modern deck to invest your time and money in, it’s hard to beat a recurring best deck that also has more replayability and variety than almost anything else. If you want to pick a Modern deck to fall in love with, my entirely biased opinion is that Amulet is the best deck for that too!

Why you shouldn’t play Amulet!

The same things that make Amulet unique make it a bigger commitment. The cards you buy for Amulet have little use elsewhere and the skills you develop playing Amulet are mostly unique to the deck itself (or weird combo decks as a class). If you want to become a well-rounded Magic player, maining Energy or Murktide will serve you much better than the psychedelic Amulet experience.

You also sign up for the swings that come with playing a linear deck in a format with strong hate cards for linear decks. You will lose a lot of games to Blood Moon and Harbinger of the Seas where you feel totally helpless and you will wonder how Force of Vigor ever got printed. If Amulet ever gets back to best deck territory, the format can and will adjust. Even during peacetime, many game store gremlins have a disproportionate hate for Amulet and some of them will figure out how to beat you.

You also run into polarized matchups against other linear decks - for every game you bludgeon Tron on Turn 3, you’re just a coin flip away from Storming out of the tournament. Cards like Boseiju give you some back-and-forth but you will feel that lack of interaction keenly sometimes.

It’s easy (fun, too!) to laugh at this infamous copypasta but it hints at a valuable point. I don’t agree that Amulet was a top tier deck during all of those times, precisely because many of these versions of Modern were so warped that any deck that existed before had to justify its existence. When you have Hogaak, Valki, or Nadu upending everything, you can’t just rock up with the Modern deck you’ve played for years - something has to change (my initial MH3 update was just going to be “play Nadu instead”). In more sane times, Amulet’s raw power and flexibility make it a strong choice most of the time and a fine default. More generally, Modern’s broad base of popularity relies on this being the case - you need to be able to tweak a few cards in your deck of choice to combat some new menace without it feeling hopeless. If I’m playing a Modern tournament, it probably makes sense for me to play Amulet; if I’m not playing it at a Modern tournament that matters, there are much bigger problems.

What is Amulet Titan?

The brief summary is that Amulet is a ramp/combo deck using the unique mana engine of Amulet of Vigor with Ravnica bouncelands (like Simic Growth Chamber) and extra land drop effects to power out a fast Primeval Titan, whose land toolbox makes it the most flexible and powerful finisher in Modern.

It’s easy to see Amulet as a pure combo deck and it’s common for people playing with or against it to fixate on the flashy Turn 2 kills powered by double Amulet - but these are actually just a small part of the Amulet experience. Amulet doesn’t fit the simple Card A + Card B combo deck model but isn’t an ‘engine’ combo deck like Elves or Storm either. If it is a pure combo deck, it’s not a great one - you don’t have the raw speed of the fastest combo decks and your best draws require enough moving parts that you can’t expect them often. Elsewhere on the spectrum you have combo-control decks that can play a fair, interactive game before flipping the script with a combo finish - that doesn’t describe Amulet either.

Amulet gets grouped in with other ‘big mana’ decks sometimes but it doesn’t feel like Tron and uses ramp to further its goals very differently from Titanshift in Modern or the familiar ramp decks from smaller formats. ‘Combo ramp’ like the late Mono-Green Devotion in Pioneer is a decent approximation and its Karn toolbox that makes combo lines possible while giving you options in fair games is a good example of what Amulet does on a much larger scale.

Urza’s Saga (+ Expedition Map), Tolaria West, Summoner’s Pact (/Green Sun’s Zenith), and Primeval Titan each grant access to a deep toolbox and they link up with each other given enough time and mana (Titan finds Tolaria West -> Pact -> another Titan etc). The Titan chain gives you an endgame that goes over the top of almost anything unless the opponent can break the chain while dealing with Titan or fundamentally changing what the game is about. In longer, grindy games you benefit from the in-built card advantage attached to the bouncelands in your deck. With the Aftermath Analyst package you also have a deterministic loop that ignores or overwhelms anything else with the right setup. Your deck is thrilled to fight a ‘big’ game and well-equipped to make that happen.

At the other extreme, the blazing fast Amulet draws that terrify people give you the free wins that are the hallmark of a strong deck - when you have enough draws that beat anything, there’s a limit on how bad any matchup can be. With the return of Storm and Nadu’s reign of terror, Amulet isn’t always the fastest combo deck around - but you’re still fast enough that you have a good chance of racing anything on the play.

These two extremes enable each other. Your goals in the slow, big games and the fast, small games are the same - amass resources and cast Primeval Titan (or something even more powerful). This lets you transition from one plan to the other. If your fast draw loses the Amulet or ramp spell that was meant to power it, you can keep making land drops and play a more normal game - or your slow, resilient draw picks up an Amulet and can suddenly pop off. Compare that to a classic combo deck where you need Card A and Card B together to accomplish anything and extending the game only helps insofar as it buys you more draw steps to do that. For the opponent, the cards and draws that line up well against the fast draws and slow draws may look quite different - and they don’t know which they will have to play at the time they have to decide.

This conceptual shift took some time and some new cards to come together. When Matthias Hunt registered Amulet Bloom for Pro Tour Born of the Gods, he predicted that it “will continue to be a force in Modern as long as Thoughtseize is on the decline” - a natural summary for a combo deck trying to connect many moving parts in a specific time frame. A year later, Sam Black and Justin Cohen put Amulet on the map at Pro Tour Fate Reforged, where Abzan Midrange and its Thoughtseizes made up almost a third of the room. A timely revelation about Amulet’s flexibility in shifting roles helped Black to see the deck in a new light:

“People have this perception that Amulet Bloom is a glass cannon turn 2 combo deck, but that's far from the reality. I think of the deck more like a Tron deck with a turn 2 kill. Abzan needs a perfect draw to beat you. If they don't have discard, you can always race them, and if they don't have pressure, you can always rebuild

…

Once you have enough lands in play, you don't need to find Amulet of Vigor and Summer Bloom: you can just cast powerful green creatures that trump their creatures. It feels like playing every other Primeval Titan ramp deck in history against a midrange creature deck--Primeval Titan beats midrange creature decks.

…

Basically every way that people have to disrupt you functions on a one-for-one basis, but the nature of your deck is such that Simic Growth Chamber is basically a real two-for-one and resolving a single Primeval Titan wins almost all attrition wars. If your opponent has the wrong ways to disrupt you, they usually just die. If they have the right ways, you sideboard into a much stronger attrition deck where you have more threats that demand more answers each and just bury them.”

A lot about Amulet and the format at large has changed in the decade+ since that piece but the broad argument remains intact.

Quick Maths

It’s worth memorizing the basic Amulet + bounceland math so you don’t have to figure this out on the fly every time.

With an Amulet, a bounceland = +2 mana (and N Amulets = +2N mana for each land drop you have). If you have three mana from your lands and an Amulet, playing a bounceland as your land drop only gets you to five. Jumping up to six or more will often involve casting your ramp spells on that turn - this handy chart from another guide shows how much net mana you gain from each of these.

Lotus Field messes with that math but is mostly a one-shot effect that’s easy to adjust for - Grazer in a Lotus nets +2 mana with one Amulet or +5 mana with two Amulets etc. Sometimes these extra land drops can reup on Lotus if you have Vesuva/Echoing Deeps or can chain Lotus (leaving it in play) -> bounceland -> Lotus (this line lets exactly Azusa net +2 mana with one Amulet for example).

Titan Decision Trees

You resolved Primeval Titan! What now?

Let’s start with some non-Amulet cases.

(assume here a stock-ish post-MH3 list with Hanweir Battlements as your haste land of choice)

No Amulet

Boseiju/Otawara + bounceland

You can directly interact with [thing]! It’s usually clear when you want these against something on-board but tutoring for these is a common hedge against possible concerns (or preemptively shield Titan from removal like Static Prison or Leyline Binding).

Valakut + Valakut

Valakut + Tolaria West (with bounceland in hand to pick up and transmute -> Pact -> Dryad)

Valakut + Vesuva (as bounceland -> replay as bounceland or 2nd Valakut)

Valakut + fetchland

With Dryad in play, Valakut is often an easy route to an immediate win. Without Dryad, the first Titan may need to set up Dryad for next turn or later, especially if you had to Pact for that Titan and will be constrained on mana next turn.

Urza’s Saga + Urza’s Saga

Urza’s Saga + X

Urza’s Saga lets you leave a lasting board presence via your lands alone once Titan is gone. Assuming you have no artifacts already and you always can and will make a Construct, your board builds like this (treating the Titan turn as Turn 0):

One Saga:

Turn 1: You have a 1/1

Turn 2: You have two 3/3s (one can attack) and have searched for one artifact

Two Sagas:

Turn 1: You have two 2/2s

Turn 2: You have four 6/6s (two can attack) and have searched for two artifacts

Just making a bunch of power isn’t impressive these days - the fair decks have ways to go over/through these, clean them all up at once, or buy at least a turn with Ring - but it’s a useful option (e.g. against some control deck where you found a window to stick Titan but once they untap they can exile Titan and can counter your follow-up so other routes to the next threat won’t work).

Tolaria West + bounceland

A default choice when you have no specific priority and want to have options or a redundant threat.

Shifting Woodland + X

With delirium, one Titan trigger now sets up the next Titan/threat without jumping through all the hoops of Tolaria West and with an extra land of your choice.

Haste land + X

If you expect the first Titan to die but have another in hand, this ensures that you can fetch your desired lands with the ETB trigger on the second Titan while still threatening an attack and another trigger.

Crumbling Vestige + X (often 2nd Vestige)

Lets you cast an immediate follow-up spell, such as Grazer to block an attacker or another flier (or, if X is a bounceland, to pick up and put back in a land with an ETB effect). At the Pro Tour a Titan -> double Vestige -> channel Boseiju line let me stabilize against Tron from far behind where no other (/pair of) lands would.

Forest + Forest

Forest + X

Insurance against Blood Moon, especially if you’re on the hook for a Summoner’s Pact trigger.

Bojuka Bog/Khalni Garden/Radiant Fountain/X

These lands let Titan have an immediate defensive impact. Khalni Garden shined against large ground threats like Death’s Shadow or Tarmogoyf that might force a chump from Titan otherwise. Today many of the key threats have evasion or trample and there are more ways to swat away a 0/1 blocker that don’t require a full card. Similarly, Radiant Fountain is worse at stabilizing when the threats are so big and fewer games are won or lost on small margins. Additionally, with Valakut in the mix and more single/double Amulet draws, you’re able to be more assertive with Titan in previously defensive positions.

Note that a spare bounceland in hand can often free up a slot in these land pairs - instead of Boseiju + bounceland you may be able to get Boseiju + Tolaria West or Boseiju + Urza’s Saga instead - reinforcing the argument for running lots of them.

One Amulet

Adding an Amulet opens up a whole new branch of the decision tree while enhancing these former options - your Boseiju/Tolaria West + bounceland lines can now Channel/Transmute right away even if you started with no spare mana.

That sets up a common fork in the road:

One Amulet, no spare mana/cards

Haste Titan + use Otawara

(General form: [Haste land + mana for it] -> attack trigger finds X + Y)

Titan ETB finds Battlements + Vestige (Vestige untapped) -> attack fetches bounceland + Otawara -> bounce something right away during declare attackers

This line is very common against a big Frog/Murktide, an opposing Saga about to reach Chapter 3, or really any immediate issue; the availability of this line was a big argument for Battlements over Stronghold even before Analyst considerations complicated that further.

Simic Growth Chamber + Tolaria West

If you know your Titan will live, fetching the haste pair lets you work in those lands and a big attack for free on top of the lands you really want. The main exception is that you can’t fetch SGC + Tolaria West with the attack trigger and Transmute immediately as you won’t have the mana from Tolaria West post-combat - if you start with no spare mana (and don’t have another Tolaria West in hand), you are forced to make this choice up-front and may have to find SGC + Tolaria West with the first trigger instead.

There are more ways to kill Titan cheaply or even for free than ever before, from Galvanic Discharge and Unholy Heat to Leyline Binding and Solitude. You will often have to weigh up whether to chase the bonus of the haste lands or fetch the lands you want right away in case Titan dies.

A few questions to inform that choice:

– The chance of them having that removal only increases as the game goes on, and not just via their draw step - the blue decks are seeing several cards per turn and ~everyone else can still double dip on that draw step via fetchlands for surveil lands. Why would you be less scared of it then than you are now?

– How bad is it if the first Titan dies? If the first Titan is the only Titan and you would be stranded without a threat, that risk is much more real than if you have the next one lined up and could afford to lose this one.

– Does playing around it actually play around it? If there’s a large enough difference between a Titan that gets to attack + fetch more lands and one that doesn’t, they may not need to use that removal spell at all.

– If you decide to play around it now and they don’t use it, how are you going to play around it next turn, or the turn after that? You shouldn’t commit to playing around it in future if the risk-reward calculation no longer points that way but try to anticipate that now if you can.

One Amulet, Pact in hand

Access to some cards makes this an effective or deterministic kill:

Dryad

Valakut + Battlements, haste Titan -> attack trigger finds bounceland + X (or Lotus Field + Valakut/Vesuva) -> Pact for Dryad, make land drop -> Valakut trigger(s)

Springheart Nantuko

Battlements + Vestige (Vestige untapped) -> attack trigger finds bounceland + fetchland -> Pact for Nantuko, bestow on Titan -> crack fetchland, use the G from this and the Vestige to pay for Nantuko landfall trigger -> loop assembled

Analyst/Lumra

Double Lotus Field, sac both + two other lands -> Pact for Analyst/Lumra, return those four lands + any milled land + any binned lands (wins immediately with Woodland/Mirrorpool respectively, bounceland + Tolaria West/Otawara, or Urza’s Cave)

One Amulet, working towards Analyst loop

A Primeval Titan with one Amulet can shortcut you to an Analyst loop over several turns but can get you there right away with certain combinations of lands in circulation and/or enough spare mana. Again, an exhaustive list is less efficient and useful than understanding the end state you need to reach and being able to quickly jump to the branch that arrives there - you want Lotus Field, another Field/Deeps, and Shifting Woodland, and can use Titan to fill in two gaps (if you can haste Titan but without needing to get both Battlements and an immediate R source, that opens up a third slot). Examples:

R/G spare + Analyst/Pact in hand:

– Titan ETB finds Battlements + Lotus, use spare R/G and Lotus to haste Titan and cast Analyst -> Titan Attack finds Woodland + Lotus

1 + R spare (separately) + Analyst in GY:

– Titan ETB finds Battlements + Lotus, use R to haste Titan (sac Battlements + X) -> Titan Attack finds Lotus + Woodland, float + sac both Lotus -> Woodland becomes Analyst and loops inside Declare Attackers (you have the infinite mana/recursion loop and so just need an ‘action’ land to complete it)

Woodland in play, G untapped (can be Woodland) + Analyst/Pact in hand:

– Titan ETB finds Vestige + Battlements, use R from Vestige to haste Titan and G + Vestige to cast Analyst -> Titan Attack finds Lotus + Lotus, loop

Battlements in play and untapped + Analyst/Pact in hand

– Titan ETB finds Woodland + Vestige, use R to haste Titan and G + Vestige to cast Analyst -> Titan Attack finds double Lotus

You can see the patterns here - if you have one piece of the puzzle already, similar methods can help you jump to the finish line.

One Amulet, spare mana

With one spare mana available as you attack:

Haste Titan + Copy Titan

Battlements + Vestige (Vestige untapped) -> Lotus Field + Mirrorpool, use Mirrorpool to copy Titan (now or later); can do this in response to Lotus’ sac trigger to sac lands you fetched with Copy Titan’s ETB

Hold Up Otawara

The standard Battlements + Vestige -> Otawara + bounceland line is nice to clear a blocker or an immediate threat but with just one spare mana you can hold up Otawara at instant speed for maximum flexibility.

Two spare mana (any):

Haste Titan + Copy Titan + Use Otawara

With two spare mana, you can perform the first line and still find + use Otawara right away with the copy.

Three spare mana:

Haste Titan + Copy Titan twice

Battlements + Vestige -> Titan Attack finds Lotus Field + Mirrorpool, copy (still Vestige + X untapped) -> Titan Copy ETB finds Lotus Field + Echoing Deeps (Mirrorpool) -> Titan Copy #2 ETB finds X + Y, sac four lands

One Amulet, specific lands in play (and/or spare mana):

Haste Titan + Transmute (various)

With specific combinations of lands and spare mana, you can haste Titan while also transmuting Tolaria West right away for a follow-up:

Battlements + U (find TWest + Gruul Turf)

Tolaria West + R (find Battlements + Simic Growth Chamber)

Copy Titan + Haste Titan + Use Otawara (Mirrorpool in play + untapped)

Vestige + Lotus Field, copy Titan -> Titan Copy ETB finds Vestige + Battlements -> Titan Copy Attack finds Otawara + bounceland

Copy Titan + Haste Titan + Use Otawara (Battlements in play + untapped)

Vestige + Mirrorpool, haste + leave both untapped -> Titan Attack finds Lotus Field + Otawara, use Mirrorpool -> Titan Copy ETB finds 2x bounceland -> bounce + use Otawara

Double Amulet

Double Amulet sets up a wide range of immediate lethal or quasi-lethal lines. The Analyst/Lumra kill is the best default now but first a quick tour of some older lines, with notes on what needs to be in your deck at the start:

Classic and/or Finite Lines

OG Boros Lands

Requirements: Boros Garrison, Slayers’ Stronghold, Sunhome/Mirrorpool

The oldest and cleanest double Amulet setup:

Garrison + Stronghold, use twice -> attack trigger finds Vesuva (Garrison) + Sunhome, double strike for 20 damage

Substituting Mirrorpool for Sunhome removes the need for Vesuva:

Bounceland + Mirrorpool, copy Titan -> Titan Copy ETB finds Garrison + Stronghold, use on both -> attack triggers find two bouncelands + Sunhome + X, double strike both for 32 damage

Battlements

The move to Battlements shifted the double Amulet kill package from (Garrison + Stronghold + kill land) to (Battlements + Mirrorpool + kill land):

Requirements: Battlements, Mirrorpool, Sunhome/Kessig Wolf Run/Oran-Rief

Bounceland + Mirrorpool, copy Titan -> Titan Copy ETB finds [red land] + Battlements, haste both -> attack triggers find two bouncelands + Sunhome + X (24 damage) OR two bouncelands + Kessig Wolf Run + X (21+ damage) OR Oran-Rief, the Vastwood + X -> Vesuva (Oran-Rief) + X (20 damage)

(note: with Battlements you have a fix for drawing Battlements via Titan finding TWest + Gruul Turf (UUGGRR) -> transmute for Pact -> Grazer, Grazer in Battlements with RR floating; with Azusa and a bounceland you have the same out to drawing Mirrorpool via TWest + bounceland -> transmute for Pact -> Azusa, play Pool (CC) and bounceland (XXGG) + activate)

Battlements - Going Deep(s)

It was then discovered that this kill land could be an Echoing Deeps with a few more steps/assumptions:

Requirements: Battlements, Mirrorpool, Echoing Deeps, Vesuva, 2nd Tolaria West

– Bounceland + Mirrorpool, copy Titan (bounceland returns itself)

– Titan Copy ETB finds Valakut + Battlements, haste both

– Titan Attack finds Vesuva (Valakut) + Deeps (Mirrorpool), tap both for mana and leave untapped after 2nd Amulet triggers (RC floating)

– Titan Copy Attack finds Simic Growth Chamber + Tolaria West, tap both for mana and leave untapped after 2nd Amulet triggers (UUGRC floating), bouncing TWest

– Use Deeps-Mirrorpool to copy Titan during Declare Attackers

– Titan Copy #2 ETB finds Simic Growth Chamber + TWest #2, bouncing a non-Valakut tapped land

(untapped: Vesuva-Valakut, 2 SGC, TWest)

– Transmute for Pact -> Dryad -> cast Dryad

– Use extra land drop to play SGC (UUGG, trigger 2 Valakuts, bouncing TWest #2), transmute for Pact -> Grazer -> put another land in, trigger 2 Valakuts again

– 12 combat damage + 4 Valakut triggers = 24 total damage

This requires more lands in the deck and in/out of specific zones and also requires routing through multiple Pacts and a Dryad so it’s much less clean but lets you avoid playing a more narrow kill land.

Battlements - Going Deeper

With the first Lotus Field in the deck, you remove the need for some marginal lands in the previous line by gaining an extra mana in the first step which lets you keep a land slot open later:

Requirements: Battlements, Mirrorpool, Echoing Deeps, Vesuva, Lotus Field

– Titan ETB finds Mirrorpool + Lotus Field, copy Titan (RR floating)

– Titan Copy ETB finds Valakut + Battlements, haste both with floating mana (Valakut untapped)

– Titan Attack finds Deeps (Mirrorpool) + Vesuva (Valakut), RC floating + both untapped

– Titan Copy Attack finds Simic Growth Chamber + Tolaria West, bouncing TWest (UUGRC floating)

– Copy Titan

– Titan Copy #2 ETB finds Simic Growth Chamber + X (this land doesn’t need to tap for mana now so we can ‘store’ a Urza’s Cave/fetchland here instead of another Tolaria West)

(untapped: Vesuva-Valakut, Valakut, 2 SGC)

– Transmute for Pact -> Dryad -> cast Dryad

– Use extra land drop to play X (2 Valakut triggers) + crack your fetch (2 Valakut triggers) OR play bounceland (2 Valakut triggers) + crack Cave for X (2 Valakut triggers; if X is a fetch, another (2 Valakut triggers)

Short Combat + Pass With Interaction

You can adapt the basic line here to hold up Otawara and/or Boseiju instead if the extra damage won’t be lethal this turn or you can’t complete the final steps for Dryad/Analyst etc

– Go through the steps to attack with Titan + a copy as before:

– Titan Attack finds Boseiju + Deeps (Mirrorpool), float GC

– Titan Copy Attack finds bounceland + Otawara, tap Otawara twice (UUGGC) and bounce it

– Copy Titan

– Titan Copy #2 ETB finds bounceland + bounceland, bounce Boseiju

You now have 3 untapped bouncelands and Boseiju + Otawara in hand

Alternatively, you can have the attack triggers find Deeps (Mirrorpool) + [Colourless Land] + two bouncelands to hold up an instant-speed Mirrorpool activation.

Pure Combat (Lotus/Deeps)

If you are going harder on Lotus Field and/or Echoing Deeps, another pure combat line is available:

Requirements: 2 Lotus, 2 Deeps, [3rd Lotus/Deeps or Deserted Temple or Sunken Citadel], Battlements, Mirrorpool

– Titan ETB finds Mirrorpool + Lotus Field (make GGGRRRC, Pool untapped), copy Titan (GG floating)

– Titan Copy ETB finds Echoing Deeps (Pool) + Lotus Field #2 (as above, net GG again - GGGG floating)

– Titan Copy #2 ETB finds Battlements + Deeps #2 (Pool), resolve Amulet triggers for Pool first -> tap Pool for C and then to copy again in response to Amulet triggers for Battlements)

– Titan Copy #3 ETB finds Vesuva (Battlements) + Lotus/Deeps/Citadel, resolve prior Amulet triggers for Battlements + new ones, haste all four Titans and swing for 24

Triple Titan Attack

Requirements: Urza’s Cave, Battlements, Mirrorpool, Deeps, 2 Lotus; no Spelunking in play

– Titan ETB finds Mirrorpool + Lotus Field, copy Titan (RR floating)

– Titan Copy ETB finds Deeps (Mirrorpool) + Lotus Field, copy Titan (RRRR floating)

– Titan Copy #2 ETB finds Battlements + Urza’s Cave, float C from each (RRRRCC)

– Use RCC to crack Cave for Vesuva (Battlements), use remaining RRR to haste all Titans

Post-Combat Plans

This formula can also set up big moves for post-combat if normal lethal is unavailable.

Requirements: Battlements, Mirrorpool, The Mycosynth Gardens, Deeps, (in hand/deck) Tolaria West/Otawara

Go through the steps to attack with Titan + a copy as before:

– Titan Attack finds Deeps (Mirrorpool) + Gardens, float C from each and copy Amulet

(Titan Copy Attack can find Vesuva (Deeps-Mirrorpool) and Urza’s Cave for another Titan + another land tutor here)

– Titan Copy Attack finds bounceland + Otawara, bouncing Otawara and leaving bounceland untapped after 3rd Amulet trigger (UUU + UUGG + C floating)

– Copy Titan

– Titan Copy #2 ETB finds bounceland + Urza’s Cave/fetchland, use floating mana on Otawara to bounce the real Titan

(untapped: 2 bouncelands + Cave/fetch)

– Crack fetch (or Cave for bounce/Lotus), cast Titan

– Titan ETB finds TWest + bounceland -> transmute for Pact -> whatever

Infinite Lines

Nantuko

Nantuko/Pact in hand makes a single Amulet lethal; with two Amulets, we just need it in the deck. This is very similar to the post-combat Dryad lines from earlier.

Requirements: Battlements, Mirrorpool, Deeps, fetch, (in hand/deck) Tolaria West

– Titan ETB finds bounceland + Mirrorpool

– Titan Copy ETB finds Battlements + [red land], haste both

– Titan Attack finds Tolaria West + fetch (UU)

– Titan Attack finds Deeps (Mirrorpool) + SGC (UUUGC), bouncing TWest; copy Titan

– Titan Copy ETB finds 2 SGC (or SGC + X if you have a fetchable shockland/surveil land)

(untapped: 2 SGC + SGC/X + fetch)

– Transmute for Pact -> Nantuko, bestow Nantuko on Titan (G or 0 floating), crack fetch for Forest or shock/surveil, loop assembled

From here you can easily transition into any Dryad or Analyst etc kill in the deck.

Arena of Glory (or Through the Breach) in wackier lists allows the loop with just a single Amulet and Nantuko in deck:

– Titan ETB finds SGC + TWest, bounce + transmute for Pact

– Titan Attack finds Lotus Field + fetchland

– Pact for Nantuko, bestow on Titan, crack fetch + loop

Analyst/Lumra

The Analyst(/Lumra) loop gives you a new default double Amulet kill - a fully deterministic win that ignores ~everything on board and bypasses combat.

Requirements: 2 Lotus, Deeps, Mirrorpool, TWest; a Woodland anywhere

– Titan ETB finds Lotus Field + Mirrorpool, copy before Lotus sac resolves (GG floating)

– Titan Copy ETB finds Lotus Field + Deeps (Mirrorpool), copy before Lotus sac resolves (UUGG floating)

– Titan Copy #2 ETB finds Tolaria West + bounceland, returning TWest (UUGG + UUGG + UU floating)

– Lotus sac triggers resolve, sac both Lotus + bounceland + X

– Transmute for Pact

(Pact for Lumra -> return 2 Lotus + Pool + Deeps etc and you have the Lumra loop)

– Pact for Analyst, play + sac it (UUGG floating)

– Return 2 Lotus + Deeps (Lotus) + Mirrorpool + TWest + bounceland, returning TWest (net 11-13+ mana here)

You can now Mirrorpool Titan -> Woodland + X (Saga to sac to Lotus if you need another type) for the Analyst loop or transmute -> Pact -> Titan for action lands to complete it (fetch/surveil, channel lands etc) in case they have removal for Titan (or Lumra, in that loop)

Analyst/Lumra (Pact-safe)

A safer, even more elaborate line is available if you have double Amulet without Spelunking and all of the combo lands left in the deck:

– Titan ETB finds Lotus Field + Mirrorpool, copy before Lotus sac resolves (RR floating)

– Titan Copy ETB finds Hanweir Battlements + Otawara, use the RR to haste both; sac Lotus + Battlements, leave Otawara untapped

– Titan Attack finds Deeps (Mirrorpool) + Vestige

– Titan Copy Attack finds Vesuva (as Deeps-Mirrorpool) + Saga

– Use a Mirrorpool to copy Titan again; Titan Copy #2 ETB finds Shifting Woodland + Simic Growth Chamber, bounce Otawara and use it to bounce the real OG Titan (untapped: Woodland, SGC, Vestige, Vesuva-Pool, Saga)

– In second main, use Vesuva-Pool to copy Titan; Titan Copy #3 ETB finds Lotus Field + Vestige (sac Lotus + Saga); 3 mana floating

– Recast the real Titan from hand; OG Titan ETB finds bounceland + Tolaria West, transmute for Pact -> Analyst

This lets you still threaten the Analyst loop while making the maximum progress (and minimum exposure to your own Pact) against a possible Endurance or similar.

Triple Amulet

All of these lines scale easily to triple Amulet and this is rare enough that it’s not worth adding or exploring specific triple Amulet lines. The only note is that with triple Amulet each Titan trigger can fetch bounceland + Tolaria West and generate enough mana to pay for Transmute for Pact + the next Titan, letting you chain as many Titans as you have Tolaria Wests (and Pacts) in your deck for free (with the last copy finding haste land + mana to give them all haste).

This doesn’t explicitly cover every scenario but almost any scenario you will encounter uses these building blocks in some way - once you master the basics, it becomes easier to add on the missing pieces in real time.

Aftermath Analyst - Why And How?

Aftermath Analyst

MKM brought an innocuous version of a familiar effect that broke out in Standard after some mad geniuses showed off its potential there; it’s natural to port it to larger formats with fetchlands and a deep pool of utility lands + combo enablers. It’s easy enough to push Analyst as a value card without the full overhaul required to embrace it as a combo card (though from either side the ability to use it in that other mode is a big part of its appeal, and once you start to make small changes for Analyst it’s easier to justify the full shift).

Fetchlands (and the surveil lands they find now) are already seen in small numbers; Boseiju/ Otawara and Tolaria West(/Urza’s Cave) bin themselves while doing their thing; Urza’s Saga sacrifices itself on its way out. The self-mill from the first Analyst also juices future Analysts, creating a further incentive to fully commit to this bit. Newer enablers like Malevolent Rumble stock your graveyard and older effects like this get another shot now that self-mill is a benefit (rather than at best neutral and at worst a nuisance if you milled a crucial land or Pact target).

Compared to prior and similar payoffs, Analyst enabling itself and being able to split its cost across several turns is a big deal - you’re shielded from some fail cases like having Cultivator Colossus with no lands or a hand full of six-drops without the lands to cast them. Four mana for the activation is a low bar that doesn’t require one or more ramp pieces to reach in many games and it’s easy for this to yield (far/) more than four mana to ramp towards another payoff itself. A ⅓ isn’t a big or safe blocker but you’ll run that out against Ragavan or Ocelot Pride in a pinch. The low upfront cost makes Analyst safer against some annoying disruption (notably Subtlety, Dress Down), the instant speed activation is a refreshing flexibility for a deck full of clunky sorcery-speed cards, and tying the payoff to an activated ability is useful vs specific hate like Consign to Memory.

The split cost also opens up a new category of fast combo draws with T1 Amulet or T1 Saga -> T2 Analyst setting up a big T3. Enhancing the T1 Saga draws in particular has always been an elusive goal (though from my own and others’ experiences with Analyst so far, the T1 Saga T2 Analyst draws are rare even if available).

As a combo card, Analyst rewards you with loops that let you ignore removal and most things in play completely. MH3 made this much easier with Shifting Woodland as a card that asks less to loop and is independently appealing. The basic loop goes like this:

Requirements:

Amulet (/Spelunking for the 1 Amulet line)

Lotus Field

2nd Amulet OR 2nd Lotus (/Echoing Deeps*)

Shifting Woodland + delirium

(*Note that Echoing Deeps can copy a land returning alongside it via Analyst etc; this is the opposite of the Titan -> Vesuva + X interaction but those outcomes stem from the same rules quirk - the land looks ahead to see what it will be when it enters before it actually gets to that zone, so when Deeps is doing that check it can see the other lands still in the GY but Vesuva can’t see a land that isn’t in play yet)

– Sacrifice Analyst, return + use all lands

– For Lotus Field triggers sacrifice Field(s) and other lands

– Turn Woodland into Analyst and sacrifice it

– Woodland, Lotus, and other lands come back from your GY

Each loop costs 5GGG (2GG for Woodland+ 3G for ‘Analyst’) so this nets mana with a second Amulet (Lotus adds 6, Woodland adds 2, + any other land) or a second Lotus (you return 2 Lotus + up to 2 other sacrificed lands + Woodland each time) for infinite mana. You can also add in various effects from your sacrificed lands with each loop to convert this into a win:

– Bounceland + channel land for infinite Boseiju/Otawara uses (Otawara + Spelunking/Ring can draw your deck here)

– Bounceland + Tolaria West to find Pact (for Titan etc for specific missing lands) or other lands

– Surveil land (or fetchland for it) lets you surveil away your deck and return all lands to play

– Mirrorpool looping Analyst instead of Woodland gives you Analyst’s ETB trigger to mill your deck

– Urza’s Cave can sacrifice each loop to find any of the above

Once you have milled ~most/all of your deck, you can also use Mirrorpool on your Analyst before sacrificing it each loop (or some other creature, or a spare Woodland as another creature) to make infinite attackers and then sacrifice/use Hanweir Battlements each loop to give them all haste. If you are postcombat, you can Boseiju/Otawara all eligible permanents, and/or gain life with Spelunking + Otawara using a bounceland to return a Cave, and pass with infinite attackers/blockers.

Six or Springheart Nantuko can each act as Pactable ways to loop Analyst on the cheap:

Six: One Amulet + Lotus + bounceland + any other land

Nantuko: One Amulet + Lotus (and 3+ mana from other lands*)

*The Nantuko case illustrates a key point - even if you don’t have all necessary lands in rotation right now, Analyst loops that give you the ETB trigger each time will converge towards that end state if you have spare mana.

MH3 also offered Sylvan Safekeeper joining Zuran Orb as tutorable ways to bin lands on demand for Analyst. So far the popular Analyst packages haven’t gone this far but a list with Analyst as its primary plan may enjoy that option.

Lumra, Bellow of the Woods

The big bear lets you do the basic Analyst dance while keeping a giant idiot around, trading the flexibility and cost splitting of Analyst for a real threat on top. Lumra is the preferred Pact target when you have some relevant lands in circulation but not enough to shove on a full Analyst loop or when you need both cards and board presence (in a way that Titan might not provide). Reach means Lumra can be a uniquely good blocker vs Guide of Souls or Murktide/Frog/Abhorrent Oculus etc.

Lumra doesn’t loop with Woodland but has its own loops:

One Amulet + Mirrorpool + Lotus + Crumbling Vestige (or another colourless land + mana that’s spare or from milled lands; or Mirrorpool + 2 Lotus + colourless land)

Two Amulets + Mirrorpool + Lotus (Mirrorpool can make the C for its own activation)

Amulet + Lotus + [Amulet/Lotus #2] + bounce + Otawara (bounce Lumra for 2U thanks to legendary discount + replay it)

(Nantuko also trivially loops with Lumra)

As you loop with Lumra you will mill the pieces to transition into the Woodland + Analyst loop that doesn’t mill you, in case you need to keep reusing a certain land but need to leave cards in your deck.

Titan -> Analyst

Titan can help to set up these loops manually - with one Amulet a Titan for double Lotus Field is mana-neutral (with double Amulet, +6 mana!) and a Titan for Lotus + Woodland etc lets you spend mana to find specific lands - and with double Amulet a Titan sets up the full loop if it avoids removal (repeating these lines from above):

– Titan finds Lotus Field + Mirrorpool, use Mirrorpool in response to Lotus sac triggers (net 2 mana)

– Titan Copy finds Tolaria West + Echoing Deeps as Mirrorpool, use Mirrorpool again (no mana floating now)

– Titan Copy #2 finds bounceland + Lotus Field (10 mana floating); can swap order of these two steps

– Pick up Tolaria West and clear stack of Lotus sac triggers (sac Lotus + others), transmute for Pact for Analyst/Lumra (7 mana floating)

– If Lumra, you now have Mirrorpool loop; if Analyst, sac it to return everything and Mirrorpool Titan again for Shifting Woodland + X (can be Urza’s Saga if you need another type for delirium)

Lotus Field

These loops require Lotus Field but to me they are an excuse to give Lotus the audition it deserved all along. I said in an older edition that Amulet + Lotus is one of the most underexplored synergies in Modern - aspiringspike did his best to prove me right with his Timeless Lotus deck while Matt Nass paired them together in a pioneering build of Twiddle Storm. Its appearance in ‘normal’ Amulet is long overdue.

Lotus has some unique benefits compared to bouncelands. Jumping up three mana instead of two makes it much easier to reach any vital threshold and removes the need for yet another Grazer or other ramp spell to bridge that final gap; with double Amulet, Lotus gets you to six right away. It makes enough of a colour to pay for any wonky costs (transmute Tolaria West, double G for ~everything). Hexproof means Lotus can’t be tagged by Boseiju in response to an Amulet trigger.

It has clear downsides too - it doesn’t have the in-built card advantage or reusability of bouncelands, and without Amulet or a payoff for its mana it can be a very awkward draw that doesn’t play well with your other utility lands. In the slower, more interactive postboard games where sticking Amulet is harder, any unnecessary Lotus Fields start to look like easy cuts.

The first copy of Lotus adds a unique upside to any Titan/Map/TWest and I’m coming around to the view that I should have played at least one all long. Additional copies don’t play well together - but they also incentivize building around it in specific ways to harness its formidable power. An all-in Analyst deck with 4 Lotus is plausible already and it wouldn’t shock me if the ‘stock’ Amulet list in a future generation has a full set.

What about graveyard hate?

These Analyst/Lumra loops make graveyard hate potentially relevant but you shouldn’t worry too much here. There isn’t much hard graveyard hate in maindecks and light hate like Agatha’s Soul Cauldron can be overpowered even if well-timed removal of some lands can shut off some full loops.

Postboard games will see heavier and harder hate but the beauty of splicing the Analyst package into a normal Amulet deck is that you can minimize the Analyst package in sideboarding and be a deck that doesn’t care about the graveyard otherwise. Who cares about Unlicensed Hearse or Endurance when you have Titan stampeding on Turn 3 alongside Urza’s Saga, Ring, Dryad, and/or whatever big green idiots you boarded in? If you do need the Analyst angle, most forms of GY hate will fold to the many Boseijus that you want in your manabase already.

Note that Lumra has another layer of protection against non-Leyline/RIP hate as the lands milled by its ETB trigger go directly into play (with no window for the opponent to snipe them). Lumra can force them to use their hate while bringing some lands back anyway - and being the biggest bear on the board.

Graveyard hate that isn’t face up is harder to play against and can punish you for greed (or just for a gamble gone wrong). Surgical Extraction is reasonably popular for Phlage, for example, and people love that card anyway; any mostly green deck can threaten Endurance. You may sometimes have to choose between a Titan line that does impressive things or a Analyst/Lumra line that is deterministic if it works but worse against hate; or how much to commit to a value Analyst while hedging against hate. Going off from a low base of resources with these lines often involves throwing everything into the maw of a Lotus Field where, if you don’t go off, you’re left with nothing - don’t snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by letting that Endurance be a blowout.

Is Analyst the future?

Since MH3 attention has focused on these new Analyst experiments, with many of the most vocal Amulet players jumping on board. Previous mainstays like Dryad have largely disappeared and these new lists are very different philosophically. Meanwhile, MH3 has overturned the foundations of Modern and changed the whole context the deck must operate in. Observers or players returning to the deck could be forgiven for thinking this is a strict upgrade. There are two points of contention - the strength of the Analyst package in its own right and how it coexists with/competes against the other packages vying for slots.

Analyst certainly makes a compelling case. You no longer have to thread the needle against Solitude or Unholy Heat/Galvanic Discharge in tight games when you have an endgame that shrugs off removal and overwhelms everything. You don’t have to clean up the board or hope it doesn’t balloon out of control - you can ignore anything that doesn’t directly affect you.

There are important tradeoffs, though. The current crop of Analyst lists are much more reliant on Amulet effects - the Analyst loops require them and the value Analysts are usually too slow/weak without that boost - and you get constant reminders of this in postboard games where Amulet is more vulnerable and Urza’s Saga is a risky bet. You have fewer backup plans - at a time when the in-built Saga beatdown plan is less realistic than ever - and the default route of ‘cast Primeval Titan’ is much weaker when it can’t have an immediate impact via Dryad etc. In turn, Grazer starts become worse as the T1 Grazer -> T2 3-drop -> T3 Titan starts become less likely (my Analyst lists have had a high # of MD Spelunking to address both this and the reliance on Amulet). Removal being less relevant cuts both ways - they know what they can shave for their best sideboard cards and they don’t have as many tough in-game choices about when/how to value removal.

(You can also just have it all - see this SCG DC 5k winning list from Pete Husisian that has a MD Dryad and then more SB Dryads as a pivot. There’s no inherent reason why you can’t support all of this stuff at once other than the space concerns created by a firm commitment to cards like Explore)

The Lotus Fields that support Analyst come with their own clear tradeoffs. Lotus plays awkwardly with the traditional infrastructure of the deck and is often a dead draw; it is also often the best possible draw and lets you go off at least a full turn sooner or where nothing else would. The scaffolding of the classic lists is built around bouncelands - Field does its own thing with quite polarized outcomes.

Scapeshift

Analyst was a compelling option in its own right but also offered a compact, low-effort (to set up, not to explain…) deterministic win for a classic combo card begging to be broken here: Ring-era lists began to dabble with one or two Scapeshifts but recent experiments in maximizing Shift have paid off; as of the most recent update, I think the Scapeshift OHKO is the single most powerful angle in the deck and is worth leaning into as hard as possible.

The most basic kill, assuming no other resources:

Requirements: One Amulet + 4 lands

– Shift for 2 Lotus, bounceland, Tolaria West (9 mana)

– Resolve the bounceland trigger first, picking up Tolaria West, then sac bounceland + 2 Lotus to the Lotus triggers

– Transmute for Pact -> Analyst/Lumra (1UU + 4GG, using all the mana you made before)

– Analyst/Lumra returns 2 Lotus + bounceland + Tolaria West + the four lands sacrificed initially (13+ mana); bounceland picks up Tolaria West again before the Lotus Fields eat each other + more

– Transmute for Pact -> Titan + cast it (4 mana)

– Titan ETB finds Woodland + X (Analyst) or Mirrorpool + X (Lumra); if you milled no other lands, X can be a Lotus Field for exactly enough to start the Analyst loop as above

– If Analyst loop: you have a full loop with Tolaria West bouncing + transmuting each time so you can find all lands from your deck and include channeling Boseiju/Otawara into each cycle

(Two Amulets + 3 lands does the same fetching one Lotus instead of two)

Four lands and four mana is a relatively low bar that you can meet naturally in most midgames without the gymnastics of making six mana in one turn for Titan. While Scapeshift is heavily dependent on Amulet/Spelunking, this lower cost hedges against the classic fail case of drawing too many payoffs without the resources to cast them.

This is the most important line to memorize and the baseline goal for Scapeshift in most games but a key selling point of Scapeshift as a payoff is its flexibility - as you adjust these initial conditions, you can find even faster wins or fight through counterplay.

For example, it’s easy to look at that loop and identify a weakness to graveyard hate - when Ketramose brought a new management philosophy and a full set of maindeck Relic of Progenitus to BW Blink, many assumed Scapeshift was no longer the best solution for that matchup. In reality, if you have more time/lands/mana, you can work a Boseiju (and another bounceland) into your Shift pile (bouncing + using it before Lotus triggers resolve) to swat away an on-board Relic (or Damping Sphere, Needle/Flute, and so on).

With other pieces available, Shift can fill in the gaps for even less (assume one Amulet here):

Two lands, Titan/Pact in hand

One land, double Amulet, Titan/Pact in hand

With just two lands (not uncommon if Saga fetched Amulet or you deployed a bounceland earlier etc),

Scapeshift for double Lotus vaults you to that crucial six-mana threshold. In a natural double Amulet hand, bounceland -> Shift for Lotus is yet another enabler for a T2 win. With three lands, you can use it as a less committal Ritual for Titan by fetching a mix of bouncelands + Vestiges

Three lands, Analyst/Pact(/Zenith) in hand

With a more direct route to Analyst, you can jump right to Lotus/bounceland/TWest or Lotus/Lotus/Woodland etc as needed

Three lands, Shift in hand, one spare mana (any)

Double Shift hands are more common with a full set in the deck and with some care they can play off each other:

– Shift 1: 3 Crumbling Vestige (or ideally Deeps as Vestige), 4GG (+1) floating

– Cast Shift 2 (3 floating)

– Shift 2: Lotus Field, bounceland, Tolaria West (you now have 3UGG + the floating 3 for the 9 mana needed to complete the usual TWest -> Pact -> Analyst loop)

No Amulet

Without Amulet, Scapeshift has to be a setup card: Saga for eventual Amulets, Shifting Woodland as a threat, Boseiju/Otawara + bounceland etc

Beating Consign to Memory

Consign poses a unique and complicated problem for Scapeshift lines. If you have Amulet rather than Spelunking, the untap triggers for Lotus Field etc are valid targets for Consign and it can choke your mana production while letting Lotus Field devour your lands; even with Spelunking, Consign can also counter those triggers or your bounceland triggers to stop you picking up Tolaria West or sacrificing lands to Field. Replicate means the threat posed by Consign scales with the mana they can hold up; Consign for U is easy enough to beat, Consign for 2U will melt your mind.

With a fifth land and a spare mana, a second bounceland (or Urza’s Cave threatening bounceland or Vesuva-as-Lotus) stops a single Consign from breaking this sequence.

With two Amulets, you can add a bounceland or Cave to the stock three land Shift pile (Lotus + bounceland + Tolaria West) for the same outcome.

Beating a ‘bigger’ Consign usually involves a misplay from the opponent or the ability to pivot into a fair Titan turn (if your Lotus is stranded in play).

Scapeshift is a common cut against heavy blue decks bringing in many Consigns as these all-in lines expose you to Force of Negation, Subtlety, and Consign (even Spell Snare if going through Analyst) all at once as well as the usual Counterspell issues. If you want to keep Shifts against these decks, have a small package of go-to setup lands that can set the stage for the next threat (Saga, Woodland, Cavern of Souls, a manland etc)

Card Notes - Core

Bouncelands

Bouncelands are the deck’s core engine piece. With Amulet and extra land drop effects, one bounceland can add an obscene amount of mana to power big turns; without Amulet, those same extra land drop effects can use bouncelands as fuel to manually ramp towards your payoffs.

You can think of bouncelands as lands that draw you another land - anyone who played in original Ravnica or other Limited formats with bouncelands can attest to the power of unlocking card advantage from your lands like this. Midrange and control decks in Standard then leaned heavily on bouncelands but delaying your development with a tapped land after Turn 1 was always a dicey proposition in older formats and would be unacceptable in Standard today as threats are more efficient and card advantage has to come with a board presence. You won’t find bouncelands in a cutthroat Vintage Cube today but they still dominate lower power Cubes or other formats slow enough for them to flourish in - and they were perennial Pauper staples.

You can also view bouncelands as fixed fast mana. Game designers know not to print Ancient Tomb and Gaea’s Cradle now so any land that adds multiple mana comes with necessary safety valves - entering tapped adds an short-term cost and prevents them being used as ramp while bouncing a land means you aren’t jumping ahead on mana. Amulet of Vigor erases the tapped clause and the extra land effects negate the bounce effect or flip it into an advantage with Amulet, letting you use the same bounceland repeatedly as a mana source. With utility lands like Boseiju or Tolaria West, your bounceland can ‘draw’ you a specific spell rather than yet another land.

How many bouncelands?

Every other engine piece has a natural limit on how many copies you can play - you have four Amulets and four Titans and have to work hard for artificial redundancy on those elsewhere.

Every other land in the deck has a narrow range of card counts - you know you can only have 4 Urza’s Saga and only want the first haste land, and most debate focuses on edge cases (2 or 3 Boseiju?) or broad principles (how many T1 G sources for Grazer?).

Bouncelands are the tricky exception - there’s effectively no cap on bouncelands but once you go over a perceived minimum any ‘excess’ bounceland faces stiff competition from all other marginal lands. There are many compelling reasons to err on the higher side:

– You want at least one bounceland in every single game and would much prefer to draw it naturally than to spend time or mana finding it. Watch any Amulet stream and you’ll lose track of how often you hear “this hand would be great with a bounceland” or “we just need to draw a bounceland here”.

– In Amulet games, you need a bounceland to go off and you want to be able to mulligan aggressively for a fast Amulet start in matchups that call for that while maximizing your odds of having the other pieces needed for that to work (and of having a functional draw if you fail to find/stick Amulet). You also want to be able to keep a hand that has all the other relevant pieces and just needs a bounceland.

– In non-Amulet games, you need at least one bounceland to realistically cast Primeval Titan. Arboreal Grazer and friends are not ramp spells by themselves the way that Sakura-Tribe Elder or Farseek are, they merely allow you to unload the lands you do have faster and you need to be able to count to six with those lands.

– Even in the Amulet games you are often incentivized to run out your first bounceland as part of your natural development (in part to not be wholly reliant on Amulet surviving) and the second copy is crucial for jumping up to Titan mana on the pivotal turn.

– Bouncelands enable smooth follow-ups to your first Titan - maybe Titan died but found Valakut and now bounceland pairs with Dryad + Valakut to lock up the game - and give you more freedom with your Titan choices (e.g. instead of having to find Tolaria West + bounceland you can find Tolaria West + X if you have a bounceland left in hand).

– While land destruction hitting a bounceland can be devastating, if you are trying to combo off through land destruction you need redundant bouncelands.

When you absolutely need to draw the first copy of a card, are usually happy to draw more, and can find a use for extras in almost all types of game, that makes a strong case for playing a lot of copies.

Notes:

– Knowing when to play out or hold back your only bounceland is a tricky contextual decision. Are you in a desperate position where you need to topdeck Amulet and holding the bounceland would let you go off if you hit? Do you still have a route to six mana for Titan if Azusa/Dryad dies (where holding bounceland would let you play it and replay an untapped land to get the sixth mana) or the Amulet you have is removed? Perhaps your actual route to victory is Dryad + Valakut and holding a bounceland will let you generate repeated triggers when that happens.

– Look for opportunities to ‘swap’ bouncelands in play and in hand. If you have Selesnya Sanctuary and draw Simic Growth Chamber, you would usually prefer to have the blue one in play in case you draw Tolaria West.

Amulet of Vigor

Amulet of Vigor is at once the most powerful and most misunderstood card in the deck. Throughout this guide I distinguish between the Amulet and non-Amulet games because they feel like you are playing different decks from separate formats. The Amulet wins are often easy (though they may create tricky problems to solve along the way), flashy, and memorable. Amulet is what makes the deck so strong and is worth building the whole deck around - but if the deck relied on Amulet to win, it would be just a flash in the pan. Learning how to fight the non-Amulet games is a key to success.

If newer Amulet players tend to lean too hard on Amulet, the player across the table is probably even more obsessed with it. Amulet fans used to joke that “the deck’s called Amulet!” because people would routinely overboard narrow answers that only hit Amulet - it was common to play against Burn, see a card rot in their hand, and not even cast a topdecked Amulet because that Smash to Smithereens was effectively face-up. This wasn’t necessarily wrong of them, especially if they were a linear deck that could race non-Amulet hands, but it shows how easy it is to focus on the deck’s namesake at the expense of other factors. These errors are more avoidable these days since there are fewer artifact-only removal spells and more flexible Disenchants that can also hit cards like Dryad of the Ilysian Grove or Urza’s Saga but the principle remains.

Your best draws revolve around Amulet and these are the draws you need when speed matters most. Here you can take the risk of aggressive mulligans to find Amulet because Amulet itself shifts the focus from card quantity to card quality, turning a deck that needs a lot of actual cards to function to one that just needs a few specific cards. Consider this five-card hand:

Amulet, Dryad, Titan, Forest, bounceland

With Amulet, this hand represents a dangerous Turn 3 Titan; replace Amulet with any other card in the deck and this hand is far from doing anything or doing it quickly.

Amulet pushes you to play bouncelands and extra land effects, leading to this greater variation in your draws. A bounceland represents in-built card advantage if you have the time to realize it; the extra land drop effects put you down a card to unload your other cards quickly. Compare this to traditional ramp like Sakura-Tribe Elder that just represents the exact resource it finds - the ‘other’ Primeval Titan deck in Titanshift played as many of these single-use, guaranteed ramp spells as possible to play the same game on the same schedule consistently. It can’t pop off on Turn 2 or Turn 3 the way Amulet can but is also less likely to fail dramatically.

It used to be common to sideboard out Amulet against grindy decks like Jund since they would have these narrow answers like Ancient Grudge and you could afford/aim to play a bigger game where you added more threats and shifted towards being a more consistent ramp deck rather than a combo deck where their discard and removal could punish inconsistencies. This approach fell out of favour as your Amulets survive more often, cards like Saga/Gardens give you more incentives to have one, and these slower games don’t inherently favour you because the grindy decks are better at applying pressure. This idea resurfaced for the Lurrus Grixis Shadow matchup, where they had so much good interaction from discard to Dress Down to Drown in the Loch to Unholy Heat that successfully ‘going off’ often felt like a pipe dream and a full transformation into a midrange/ramp deck (that also took up enough space that Amulet stood out as the most cuttable card due to its dependence on everything else) yielded the best results. More recently some players adopted the same approach to the Scam matchup, though this was more controversial. Today cutting Amulet is a sign of desperation, not a show of strength.

Notes:

– If you have time against decks with sorcery-speed removal like Static Prison or Prismatic Ending/Wrath of the Skies, consider holding Amulet until you can cast it + go off in one turn (especially if you have The Mycosynth Gardens waiting or a Saga ticking up to set up a double Amulet draw)

– Similarly, in post-sideboard games against decks that are likely to have interaction for Amulet, it’s often better to hold it until they take the shields down (which is more likely against a seemingly non-threatening non-Amulet draw) rather than letting them using their card/mana effectively. This was implied against cards like Spell Pierce (and there waiting would let you just pay sometimes) but is highly relevant now against Consign to Memory.

Arboreal Grazer

Initially a contextual replacement for Sakura-Tribe Scout in a world of Lava Dart and Wrenn and Six, Arboreal Grazer has established itself as an essential part of the deck. Stopping Ragavan in its tracks was part of that - it’s safe to say Grazer is actually the best monkey in Modern - but it’s also a core part of the ramp roster that makes the deck tick.

Without Amulet, Grazer is your easiest route to a fast Titan. Turn 1 Grazer -> Turn 2 Azusa/Dryad/Spelunking -> Turn 3 Titan is a relatively undemanding draw that gets you to your target on time without relying on Amulet. The Amulet draws are why the deck is so powerful but they don’t need the help and, as above, the card Amulet is often under pressure. Being able to produce a fast Titan in non-Amulet games is necessary for the deck’s consistency and Grazer is a good enough defensive tool that it also buys time for some slower hands. For this reason I don’t like skimping green sources for Turn 1 Grazer - the ‘Turn 1’ is just as important as the Grazer.

With Amulet, Grazer is your Rite of Flame equivalent that lets you jump up in mana on your big turn. With one Amulet, Grazer adds one mana; with two Amulets, Grazer adds three mana. Grazer costing a single mana helps the double Amulet draws raise the roof right away, including specific cases that wouldn’t be possible otherwise:

Turn 1: The Mycosynth Gardens, Amulet

Turn 2: Play a bounceland (CG), copy Amulet with Gardens (G), Grazer putting in bounceland (CCGG) -> use other ramp spells to go off

Turn 1: tapped land (Tolaria West/Valakut)

Turn 2: Amulet, bounceland (CG), Amulet #2 (G), Grazer putting in bounceland (CCGG) -> continue

Grazer is the cheapest way - or, if your land drops are exhausted, the only way - to get a specific land out of your hand, get another land into play (for Dryad/Valakut), or bounce + reuse a land. Titan -> Vestige + X -> Grazer (or, for defensive lands like Khalni Garden/Radiant Fountain, Titan -> Garden/Fountain + bounceland -> Grazer back in the Garden/Fountain) can let you stabilize in very tight games.

Turn 1 Grazer -> Saga lets you get partial or full value from Saga while still setting up a fast Turn 3 fuelled by Amulet if necessary.

Grazer’s reach is vital for stabilizing when a slow Titan or Construct tokens could only gum up the ground. Once this meant Murktide Regent/Ledger Shredder/Dragon’s Rage Channeler or a suddenly hammer-wielding Inkmoth Nexus/Ornithopter; now it means Guide of Souls and Psychic Frog.

Note that with Crumbling Vestige, Grazer can ‘pay for itself’ leading to sequences like Turn 1 Grazer -> Vestige (G), Grazer -> bounceland; this was another way to wear The One Ring on Turn 2.

Explore

Explore is a safe way to fill out remaining slots and helps you reach the right density of ramp in the deck without the diminishing returns of drawing too many Grazers/Dryads/Azusas with no lands for them or no payoff for that mana. In a deck that cares about both the quantity and quality of its cards, Explore keeps your card count the same and offers a redraw towards any missing piece.

The issue with Explore is that it doesn’t fill any of those roles well. When you care about speed Explore is the slowest ramp spell - Azusa/Dryad offer multiple extra land drops, Grazer gets you to those faster or acts as ramp with Amulet on the combo turn, Explore does neither (it breaks even on mana with one Amulet but nets two mana in the increasingly common double Amulet draws) and needs help to produce even a Turn 4 Titan. When you are constrained on some resource and hoping to use Explore’s unique selling point of finding more cards, all you get to do is draw a single random card. If your hand doesn’t have a Titan, Explore does little to fix that.

Explore is also surprisingly difficult to cast early unless you make sure you have a lot of green sources. If you have Amulet it’s easy as bouncelands fill that gap - but then most things are easy when you have Amulet. If you don’t, casting Explore on Turn 3 as your first play is unacceptable and the lack of green sources adds an element of risk to a card that brags about its consistency.

Explore shines when the opponent is attacking your resources and you want this ‘normalized’ form of ramp rather than the more swingy ramp spells that require extra resources to function. At the other end, it’s ideal against hard control decks like UW or slower variants of 4C where you aim to play a bigger game, especially if you are working towards Cultivator Colossus.

This generalist role makes Explore a common cut in sideboarding when you need to find room for specific tools but don’t want to mess with the deck’s core components. However, I’ve also flirted with counterintuitive SB Explores as they improve in the grindy games that are more likely to happen when both players board in more bespoke interaction.

Malevolent Rumble

Lists across the years have dabbled in common card selection like Serum Visions/Preordain or green’s imitations like Adventurous Impulse/Ancient Stirrings but the blue cards were too hard to cast early when needed and the green ones missed something big (Impulse could find most things but not the all-important Amulet; Stirrings could find Amulet/bounceland but not a threat). As the format became less forgiving and more good candidates were printed for these flex slots (including cheaper bridge cards like Spelunking/Ring), these effects were squeezed out.

Rumble is the most promising new card in that class with near-universal coverage and the Eldrazi Spawn as a partial rebate this turn or ’ramp’ for future turns. Rumble’s contextual strength and your general impression of it often hinges on how reliable that ramp is - if your sequencing relies on that Spawn surviving it might just let an otherwise weak Galvanic Discharge or Orcish Bowmasters set you back a turn. With more and more cards like Woodland/Deeps and Analyst turning the self-mill into an upside, Rumble can give extra value beyond directly finding one (hopefully ideal) card.

I’ve been impressed by Rumble’s ability to link up seemingly disjointed draws. Every Amulet player knows the feeling of fanning open a hand that has almost everything but needs a bounceland to pop off or is just missing a threat; Rumble gives you good odds of finding any one thing at a fine rate, easing some of the competition for slots between the marginal bounceland and marginal threat etc. Rumble gives some additional access to SB singletons for Saga or Pact - you won’t draw your one Vexing Bauble often but in some games you will just Rumble into it and pick up a new plan on the spot.

Rumble is often compared to and competing with Explore - they fill the same slot on the curve and both aid your early development - but they do this in their own ways and shine in different circumstances. “Should I play Explore or Rumble?” isn’t a useful question in the abstract and depends on your prior deckbuilding choices and philosophy (and this should make the decision obvious) - and the correct answer is often “neither”. If you have a higher density of more expensive ramp like Dryad/Azusa/Spelunking, Rumble can help to pair those with the lands they need and the payoffs later; if you don’t want a lot of more expensive ramp cards but still want a high density of ramp, Explore fills that gap well.

Azusa, Lost but Seeking

Azusa rescued the deck after the Summer Bloom ban and still enables some of your most explosive draws. At a baseline, Turn N Azusa with enough lands ensures Turn N+1 Titan with some room to spare (for example, if the Azusa turn leaves you with 5 mana but your next land is a bounceland, Azusa gives you the extra land drops to play the bounceland and replay an untapped land on the Titan turn).

Azusa is the perfect complement to Amulet. If drawn together:

Turn 1: Land, Amulet

Turn 2: Bounceland, Azusa, play two more lands

With another bounceland you can cast Titan on Turn 3 if either Amulet or Azusa is removed; if both live, that Titan has even more room to play.

Turn 1: Land, Amulet

Turn 2: Bounceland, Summoner’s Pact for Azusa, play two more lands

Turn 3: Pay for Pact on upkeep, each of your three total land drops plays the bounceland to reach 6 mana for Titan

This proactive Pact line is covered in the Summoner’s Pact section and relies on Azusa.

With one Amulet and a bounceland, Azusa (/Pact for Azusa) nets one mana the turn you cast it; with two Amulets, Azusa nets five (!!) mana. Azusa can be removed in response to the triggers from the first bounceland, making Pact for Azusa riskier than Pact for Grazer with a single Amulet if given that choice, but having multiple [Grazers + Pacts + the first Azusa] lets a single Amulet hand go from four mana with a bounceland to the critical number of six for Titan on Turn 3.

When Theros Beyond Death gave us Dryad of the Ilysian Grove, Amulet vaulted to the top of the format and the stock lists had 4 Scout/Grazer 4 Dryad 4 Azusa alongside 4 Once Upon a Time. Despite OUAT’s banworthy boost to consistency, these lists really felt the diminishing returns of running the full 12 extra land effects and would often have a surplus of these. Most Amulet players accepted this tradeoff because they had it so good and the key matchup was the mirror, where you had to optimize for speed over consistency. Even so, by the end of this era many prominent Amulet players had diversified the ramp suite with Explores over additional copies of Azusa. In today’s quite different and more open Modern, you never see the full set of Azusa other than in the lists that handle that tradeoff by cutting Dryad instead. The first Azusa was considered mandatory for a long time but even that is rarely seen today.

The ‘bigger’ ramp spells like Azusa, Dryad, and Spelunking compete with each other on the surface but can work together - Azusa lets a Dryad + Valakut hand rack up extra triggers quickly:

Grazer, Azusa, Dryad, Forest, Valakut, Boseiju, bounceland

This hand has no conventional payoff but - on top of the usual Pact/Titan outs - any two lands in our first three draws lets us trigger Valakut multiple times on Turn 3 and every turn after that.

Spelunking also compensates for Azusa’s reliance on an Amulet effect - drawing one lets you pop off with the other.

Notes:

– Playing a land is a special action that doesn’t use the stack and cannot be responded to. However, if a land entering the battlefield puts a trigger on the stack (self-generated or via Amulet), the opponent will have a chance to respond and kill Azusa. If possible, make sure you can use the first land drop in a way that guarantees the second.

– The game tracks extra land drops by comparing how many lands you have played this turn vs how many total lands you could play based on current effects. This means you cannot play a new Azusa replacing the old one to get more land drops (since this keeps you at the same total). Azusa’s ability only applies while it lives.

– Remember that Azusa unlocks the discount on Boseiju, Who Endures (/Otawara)!

Dryad of the Ilysian Grove

Dryad of the Ilysian Grove was a game-changer for Amulet that let it enjoy best deck status again and then keep a place near the top of the format as so much changed. Winning with Titan when you had Amulet was usually simple - but how effective was Titan in non-Amulet games? Titan fetching Khalni Garden and/or Radiant Fountain might stabilize in the more forgiving world of ~2018 Modern but that wouldn’t last forever as the competition improved. Field of the Dead was incredible but still left you powerless against linear decks that didn’t care about your board presence.

With Dryad, Primeval Titan isn’t just a Grave Titan - it’s the best Inferno Titan ever. With enough lands to start, Turn N Dryad into Turn N+1 Titan for double Valakut gives you 12 damage in increments of 3 - enough to clean up most realistic boards or just finish them off right now. This interaction is powerful enough that Titan often feels like the enabler for that rather than the payoff in its own right. Leaning into this angle even harder is one of many intriguing ways to build the deck - for most lists, it’s mostly an angle that enhances your main plan while giving you another win condition. With the Analyst experiments Dryad was cut from many lists entirely but others have kept a small Dryad package and classic lists lean on Dryad as much as ever.

Dryad’s unique weakness is being an enchantment, greatly increasing your exposure to Force of Vigor and Wear/Tear or all the various Disenchants people turn to against Amulet of Vigor. Dryad + Valakut lines are more vulnerable now that Boseiju can hit either half of the combo. Four years later, Shifting Woodland can flip this into a strength - if Dryad dies you’re already somewhat close to delirium so you can rebuild and keep exploding with Valakut.

Dryad has strange interactions with some common hate cards.

Blood Moon/Magus of the Moon/Harbinger of the Seas: Timestamps rule here. Your nonbasic lands tap for red only if Blood Moon was played more recently than Dryad or all colours if Dryad is more recent (they will lose their other abilities either way). Your basics will still tap for all colours either way.

Dress Down: The quirks of layers make Dryad one of your best tools against Dress Down - the type-setting ability still functions under Dress Down so you can trigger Valakut and tap your lands for any colour. Part of the appeal of a Valakut-heavy list is to have a plan that can shrug off Dress Down.

However, the extra land ability will NOT remain under Dress Down. Opponents will often wait until you put your threat on the stack to cast Dress Down, at which point you are stuck with just one land drop - playing around Dress Down may involve playing both lands first even though normal sequencing would suggest holding one (to get another trigger once you find Valakut or to pick up the Tolaria West you found with a bounceland, for example).

Spelunking

If you’re here for a rules FAQ, good news!

(from @adamwasmo)

An even simpler TL;DR: Look at the land you are asking about. Does it say on the printed text "[this] enters (the battlefield) tapped"? If not, you have an untapped land! If yes, you choose whether it enters "tapped" or "untapped". Whether that land comes in as a land drop or via Titan/Grazer/Colossus etc is irrelevant.

If you have either Amulet or Spelunking, it doesn't matter; if you have one Amulet and Spelunking, you effectively control one Amulet effect (with some Spelunking-specific upsides I'll come back to). The scenario that trips everyone up is double Amulet + Spelunking, where a land coming in untapped robs you of the second untap trigger from Amulet and the mana or activation that comes with it. This blocks some corner cases (using Grazer to put in an otherwise untapped land for two activations or for an extra mana) but the old example that's most relevant and highlights this difference is a Titan trigger fetching Boros Garrison + Slayer's Stronghold, where Garrison can enter tapped and thus untap twice but Stronghold can only enter untapped (and thus only be used once). This shut off the clean 20 damage via Stronghold + Sunhome line and the double Titan -> haste both lines that came up with double Amulet.

That clears up the rules confusion, but now the hard part. Why do we care about this at all?

Spelunking offers a close approximation of Amulet of Vigor's effect, which is already enough to pique your interest. At this price point you don't get the explosive starts that Amulet enables but you still make your bouncelands broken, power up your extra land drop effects, and light a fire under your Titan turns as Amulet always has.

You get some relevant upgrades too. Let's say you control Spelunking and your board is:

Tolaria West, Forest, Boseiju, Urza’s Saga

You can play a bounceland and tap it for two mana right away to cast Titan without needing to have an Amulet trigger resolve and give Villain a window to blow it up with a card like Boseiju or Field of Ruin. When that Titan resolves, you can fetch your haste land and a mana source of it untapped and activate it immediately without giving them that same chance to hit it and remove your access to haste.

That Amulet effect is so valuable but don't we have enough of those already? Between Amulet and Urza's Saga you can find the first Amulet often. This is clunky as the first Amulet and can't become or work with a second Amulet, which is also more realistic now thanks to The Mycosynth Gardens. Maybe this would be a bigger deal pre-MH2 or even pre-ONE but why now?

That's a natural question in Game 1 against the format at large, where many opponents have a hard time interacting with Amulet and you can take a fast and direct route to your big finish. Combo purists like kanister tried lists with 4 The Mycosynth Gardens reflecting this commitment to chasing the incredible potential of those double Amulet starts while those are easily available.

The exceptions to that rule in Game 1 and the increased resistance you face almost everywhere post-sideboard offer an answer. Opponents often fixate on removing Amulet and Urza's Saga is especially vulnerable to premium sideboard hate like Force of Vigor or Blood Moon. It's a broad truth across most formats that post-sideboard games get slower and scrappier when both players ideally get to exchange their worst or dead cards for more relevant ones and shoving on any one tactic becomes less reliable.

The usual Amulet highs get less likely and more risky - but no less important. Matchups like Yawgmoth and Rhinos felt very tricky when they have their own proactive plans that punish you for waiting around but also boast enough interaction to punish a fast but fragile hand.

Looking at the role of ramp more broadly, there are so many strong ramp options now that you can't play them all at once and each has its own pros and cons. The extra land drop cards like Grazer, Azusa, and Dryad have diminishing returns and require additional resources to ramp you; Amulet itself has the highest upside but also needs bouncelands to do anything. Explore replacing itself gives it the highest floor but its natural ceiling is low - it doesn't set up your fast draws and only ramps you once on its own.

Using sideboard slots to optimize that ramp suite for a given matchup is an underexplored tactic - just before LCI came out I suggested a plan of sideboarding Explore and Azusa allowing you to replace Arboreal Grazer when it wasn't relevant as a blocker and its single use ramp effect was a poor use of a card by itself (or to pack in even more ramp when you just needed to race).

Spelunking is the perfect way to bridge those gaps, giving the explosive potential of an Amulet and the resilient, manual ramp of an Explore in the same card. It also opens up a new type of fast Grazer draw where T1 Grazer T2 Spelunking leads to a powered-up T3 Titan without needing an Amulet.

Analyst has raised Spelunking stocks again as those loops need an Amulet effect but aren’t picky about the details. MD Spelunking is common as the bigger ramp spell of choice there.

The Cave sidequest is a fun and occasionally relevant distraction. Echoing Deeps is a core part of the Analyst package; Sunken Citadel hasn’t lived up to the early hype but is still seen sometimes; Urza’s Cave is a promising candidate from MH3; Pit of Offerings is a fine riff on Bojuka Bog if you want one of those. If you need Titan to gain life with a Spelunking in hand, Deeps + bounceland (or even Deeps as a bounceland that bounces itself) is an easy default set of targets.

Note the outcomes with Vesuva, Deeps, and both for the Cave check. Spelunking puts in:

Vesuva -> Deeps (no copy): YES

Vesuva -> Deeps -> X: YES

Deeps -> Vesuva (no copy): YES

Deeps -> Vesuva -> another Cave: YES

Deeps -> Vesuva -> non-Cave: NO

Devastatingly, Cavern of Souls and Gemstone Caverns are NOT Caves.

Summoner’s Pact

Summoner’s Pact is Primeval Titan copies 5+ but it’s so much more than that and understanding the layers of this card is key to levelling up and unlocking the deck’s full potential.

Pact being a valid choice for Tolaria West is the missing link between the land toolbox and the creature toolbox that lets you chain Titans or set up an elaborate route for the first one (Urza’s Saga -> Expedition Map -> Tolaria West -> Summoner’s Pact -> Primeval Titan). It offers redundancy not just on Titan but on the other cards that bridge you to Titan or make it better: it’s an extra Arboreal Grazer or Azusa as a ‘Ritual’ with Amulet, an extra Dryad to pair with Valakut, and gets you alternate threats (like Analyst!) when Titan doesn’t go big enough. With this focus on your main plan there isn’t a distinct ‘Pact toolbox’ in the maindeck but sideboards are often littered with alternate green threats that you can lean on with Pact or other situational answers like Endurance.

This redundancy relieves some of the need to play more copies of each type of card but also suggests an argument to do so anyway - because Pact is so flexible you don’t want to have to commit it to doing any particular thing and drawing a card that would do that thing instead maintains Pact’s ability to do anything else. That Pact could be a Titan but if you have a Titan already then Pact can be the Grazer that gets you there faster.

New Amulet players often miss opportunities to use Pact as a setup card:

Amulet, Pact, Titan, Forest, Boseiju, bounceland, bounceland #2

This hand has everything you want but is only on track to cast Titan on Turn 4 even with Pact for Grazer/Azusa as a ritual on the combo turn. Using Pact proactively shaves a turn off this:

Turn 1: Forest, Amulet

Turn 2: bounceland (bounce Forest), Pact for Azusa and cast it, play Forest + Boseiju

Turn 3: Pay for Pact on upkeep, each of your three total land drops plays the bounceland to reach 6 mana for Titan

Even if Azusa dies, you still get to Titan on Turn 4 while developing your lands faster in case Amulet is removed. Against a linear deck that won’t kill Azusa but will try to race you, saving a turn can swing that race.

Grazer, Pact, Titan, Forest, bounceland, bounceland (on 6)

This unexciting six gets to Titan too late unless you use Pact in advance: T1 Grazer T2 Pact for Dryad, T3 pay + make land drops sets up a Titan for Valakut line on T4 with Grazer as an early blocker.

MH2 and MH3 introduced a scary spread of blue reactive cards that punish a Pact turn (and the turn after that where you have to pay for it), from Counterspell and Dress Down to Subtlety and Flare of Denial (and Sink into Stupor, Consign to Memory etc). Against these blue decks you want to be able to shave Pacts without lowering your overall threat density or messing with your SB mapping.

Notes:

– Use a visual cue like a die or coin on your library to remind you to pay for your Pact. I don’t care that you’ve never missed a Pact trigger before or that you’d have to be stupid to lose a game that way - better players than you or I have lost that way before and will again, and a good player takes easy steps to avoid unnecessary losses so that they can focus on the more tricky spots.

– Summoner’s Pact tying up your mana next turn creates a strong incentive for the opponent to let Pact resolve and then counter its target. The threat of Cavern of Souls complicates this - if they let Pact resolve and you have Cavern as an unused land drop, they won’t be able to counter your threat. However, Pact being free makes countering it risky - if you have another Pact in hand, you now get to resolve that and then your threat while the shields are down. If you also have the Titan but no Cavern, you can even try to bait out the counter by leading on Pact and presenting this dilemma.

— Sometimes you don’t know if Pact will resolve and the answer will change your other sequencing (maybe you want to keep a new bounceland in play instead of picking it up) but Pacting first gives away information (maybe they are sitting on a Boseiju that they will fire off on your bounceland in response to Amulet triggers if they know this is your big turn). In those spots you can play the bounceland, resolve the Amulet trigger to ensure you get the mana, and then cast Pact in response to the bounce trigger. Similarly, you can Pact in response to the final chapter trigger from Urza’s Saga or Titan’s ETB/attack trigger if that outcome would change your choice.

– In games that will go long, look for chances to play Pact in advance and get the cost out of the way if you know you can’t go off next turn. This also lets you play around Force of Negation by Pacting on the opponent’s turn in advance and can be relevant against cards that would punish Pact being played before your Titan turn (such as triggering Ledger Shredder/Eidolon of the Great Revel or being taxed by Thalia).

Green Sun’s Zenith

Zenith and Amulet enjoyed a brief fling together in a very different context - the more ambitious builds of Cloudpost at the first ever Modern PT - but have been apart for more than a decade since Zenith's ban soon after. Many years later I had given up hope of ever getting to consider it for Amulet but I'm glad it's back in the mix.

Its release coincided with the Ring ban so it became an immediate frontrunner to fill those slots. The early returns suggest it's not that easy, though - Zenith needs extra support elsewhere. It promises to be both a ramp/setup spell and a payoff, straddling the divide that caps any ramp deck's consistency. T1 Zenith for Arbor is yet another way to jump to three mana on T2 for cards like Spelunking/Dryad/Azusa setting up a T3 combo - but Arbor is less reliable than ever when there are lots of incidental trumps like Orcish Bowmasters or Wrenn and Six while cheap threats like Ocelot Pride and Ragavan force any fair deck to be ready with removal.

At the other end, Zenith is inefficient in a role where every mana matters - a relevant 5-drop to Pact for is still near the top of the Titan wish list while Colossus showed just how big the gap between 6 and 7 mana is in practice - and can't even build your own Rite of Flame with Arboreal Grazer/Azusa the way Pact does unless you have double Amulet. Gamers who looked for any excuse to trim Pacts can't just swap them for Zeniths without damaging the deck's operations.

Zenith is more palatable as extra copies of everything - another threat when you have all mana and no action, and a two-mana Grazer or four-mana Dryad when you need to ramp. Ideally it isn't your first copy of any one effect but it's a welcome boost to your redundancy.

Zenith is much stronger than Pact against Moon/Harbinger, only requiring a single G to access an answer or threat with >1 G pips, and lets you preemptively play around these and other hosers in spots where Pact introduces lethal risks. Zenith is a more reliable payoff against the usual blue wall of reactive cards but also against the splash damage from other combo hate like Orim's Chant.

It can also be used early to set up combo lines over several turns (compared to the only example with Pact of T1 Amulet T2 Pact for Azusa as described earlier), extending Analyst's flexibility to your tutors:

T1 Amulet

T2 Vestige/bounceland, GSZ for Analyst

T3 2+ mana land, crack Analyst

Or, revisiting some old favourites:

T1 Amulet/Saga

T2 GSZ for Sakura-Tribe Scout

T3 bounceland + Scout in bounceland -> 6 mana for Titan

T2 GSZ for Elvish Reclaimer can set up lines like T3 Reclaimer for Saga in draw step to set up T4 crack Saga for Amulet or store a mana for your combo turn (as Reclaimer for Lotus Field nets one mana) - or just holding up Reclaimer for Bojuka Bog/Pit of Offerings against a GY combo deck etc

Keep the Zenith tax in mind when plotting out familiar lines if it's your only payoff - for example, if your hand is:

GSZ, GSZ, Saga, Mycosynth Gardens, bounceland

T1 Saga -> T2 Gardens -> T3 float + copy Amulet only lets you go off if you have Azusa in the deck (as GSZ for Grazer only gets you to 6 mana and the 2nd GSZ for Titan costs 7) but is trivial if either Zenith is a Grazer or a Pact/Titan.

With the overlap of Pact and Zenith you enjoy even more access to a bottomless toolbox of green creatures. This redundancy has obvious benefits - it's easier to fall back on Dryad + Valakut with even more copies of Dryad - but these tutors have conflicting incentives on the margins. Some cards need to be in certain zones (Zenith won't help if you want to channel Colossal Skyturtle, bestow Springheart Nantuko, or cycle Generous Ent) or have timing restrictions (Pact for Endurance is a lifeline against combo decks that don't care about sorcery-speed Endurance off Zenith). Pact is best used to set up one immediate play that swings the game to dodge the Pact tax next turn, so you can't use it for cheap creatures early and it's inefficient to Pact for them later; Pact for Collector Ouphe is unreliable while Zenith for Ouphe is a great threat you can unleash ASAP. Lots of ludicrous green creatures have been tried as backup threats for Pact but Zenith lets you extend that to cheaper cards like Hexdrinker or Elvish Reclaimer for the first time. Pact's limitations prevented you from going too wild with it as you can't have too many expensive cards - but Zenith encourages you to have options at every spot on the curve. Giving yourself enough tools to make Zenith flexible and help against common failure modes (having too many threats but low resources -> you want a cheap ramp or CA creature) without diluting your deck too much is a tricky balancing act.

Here is a non-exhaustive yet exhausting list of cards to mull over:

Threats/Enablers:

1 - Hexdrinker, Elvish Reclaimer, Sakura-Tribe Scout, Sylvan Safekeeper

2 - Keen-Eyed Curator, Springheart Nantuko, Fanatic of Rhonas, Lotus Cobra, Sakura-Tribe Elder, Floriferous Vinewall, Tarmogoyf

3 - Six, Grist, Courser of Kruphix, Glarb, Kutzil, Ramunap Excavator, Zimone, Slogurk

4 - Brightglass Gearhulk, Blossoming/Bedrock Tortoise

5 - Roxanne, Vorinclex, Titania, Fecund Greenshell, Gitrog

6 - Lumra, Bonny Pall, Dromoka

7 - Cultivator Colossus, Dragonlord Atarka, Atraxa

Answers:

1 - Insidious Fungus

2 - Collector Ouphe, Gaddock Teeg, Keen-Eyed Curator

3 - Endurance, Grist

4 - Yasharn, Altered Ego, Dewdrop Entrancer

If you play Zenith, do you have/get to play Dryad Arbor? Without the stack of fetchlands enjoyed by most Zenith decks you don't get much other upside just from registering it and drawing it is painful. It has some niche uses:

- Titan can buy a green card for FOV/Endurance by finding Arbor + bounceland

- Arbor can soak up an Edict from Archon of Cruelty or add a blocker ala Khalni Garden if you have Amulet

- Bestowing Nantuko on Arbor converts excess mana into a wide board as often seen in Nadu

- Zenith with X=0 for a land to trigger landfall or with Dryad + Valakut

This isn't nearly enough by itself - so it all comes down to Zenith. If you run 4, I think the upside of being able to jump from 1 to 3 is too tempting to pass up; if you just want ~2 copies to make up the numbers, going without it is fine. If you run it, make sure you have enough actual T1 G sources to support Zenith + Grazer - lists could just about get away with too few when it was just for Grazer (which was usually good on later turns too) but the difference between Zenith for Arbor on T1 vs T2 is stark. Feel free to SB it out if Villain can trivially remove it!

Each set brings a new batch of cards that don’t make the cut on their own but are interesting when you have an extra 4+ copies via Zenith. The Wandering Minstrel is a perfect example - an Amulet effect on a green creature has been a bucket list item forever but the card fell flat, largely because most people don’t want to fully commit to Zenith.

The One Ring

The One Ring’s reign of terror is over but I’ve kept this section here to show how essential Ring was and what has to change in its absence.

The removal of Ring - and its ripple effects for the rest of the format - and release of Zenith at the same time gives us more deckbuilding freedom than we have had in years. At a glance, approaches across the spectrum look appealing:

- "Classic" Titan: 4 Dryad with Zenith bolstering that plan too, no Analyst

- Full Analyst: Leaning hard into Analyst/Lumra/Lotus; at the extreme, you can be an Analyst deck first and a Titan deck second

- Flexible (similar to many pre-ban lists): Minimal Analyst and Dryad packages with easy access to either via maximizing tutors

- Zenith-pilled: Using the unique strengths of Zenith to explore new directions or revive old ones (e.g. the Reclaimer builds or trying Safekeeper + Titania)

A common thread between all approaches for now is a high # of MD Spelunking, which both lets you combo faster and sets you up for grindier games in Ring's absence.

Ring is an amazing tool for Amulet, addressing structural issues that plagued the deck for years. We always wanted another payoff but the options dry up fast and loading up on more expensive threats makes it easy to get flooded on those without the resources to cast any - if you can’t cast Primeval Titan, that extra Cultivator Colossus won’t save you. Ring isn’t a threat in its own right but it finds those threats and the cards to cast/exploit them.

“Harmonize but playable” was an Amulet wishlist item for a long time and cards like Escape to the Wilds came awfully close but Ring is in a class of its own. Effects that ‘just’ build resources suffer when you don’t have the time for them; Ring’s protection buys you that time too. Ring is the first reliable way to turn a low-resource game into a high-resource game.

The best selling point for Ring is that it.asks so little of you up front. Think about how many specific cards and how much actual cardboard you need for the nut draw or even the baseline goal of Turn 3 Titan - those draws can now do their thing more often with Ring acting as another payoff but you now have a whole new subset of Turn 3 Ring draws with trivial requirements. A single Grazer or an Amulet (or Turn 1 Saga -> Amulet) with a bounceland sets up Turn 3 Ring, as do the ‘small’ ramp spells like Explore or Malevolent Rumble. The Turn 1 Saga lines that stunt your development if you can’t jump up to Titan mana on the turn Saga fetches Amulet now have an easy goal to work towards (in longer games, having more artifacts in your deck to pump your Constructs from Saga helps too). Having this easy checkpoint means you can both keep more hands and mulligan more aggressively for the nuts knowing that you are more likely to have a functional hand if you miss.

As a colourless way to change the terms of the game, Ring is also the ideal response to the deck’s nemesis. Blood Moon backed by pressure will always be dangerous but the Moon decks are often priced in to keeping otherwise weak hands on the strength of Moon. If they land a Moon as their first relevant play and you respond with Ring, how confident can they really feel? Ring lets you tear through your deck in search of an answer and pop off as soon as you find it.

Ring is a vital tool against the blue wall. Being a spell, Ring still runs into Counterspell - but it beats some of the scariest, conditional cards like Subtlety (or the mercifully unpopular Dress Down) while its own weaknesses there (Force of Negation and Consign to Memory in particular) are less reliable against a 6/6.

In general, Ring shines in the more interactive games that tend to occur post-sideboard where both your enablers and your payoffs are more vulnerable. Being too reliant on that Amulet sticking around or getting to keep that one copy of Titan in hand is inherently more risky when the opponent gets to swap out dead cards for good cards. ‘Play a Ring and put them to the test’ is a strong plan to fall back on against all that.

As the automatic frontrunner for the former flex slots slots, Ring changes the context for other cards trying to join it there. It’s easier to embrace Explore when Turn 2 Explore sets up Turn 3 Ring so well - the tough part is finding room for it. Karn is great both with and against Ring. Ancient Stirrings (and now Rumble) gains another great hit. There are lots of lands that pair well with Ring, from Radiant Fountain and Mycosynth Gardens to Academy Ruins and Minamo, but competition for those slots is fierce too.

The addition of Ring should change your sideboard plans too. You want Ring against everything except other linear decks that can ignore the protection and/or card advantage (it’s relatively weak in the mirror, for example), which is a narrow slice of the format. This makes it even harder to cut spells (and the natural path of shaving the worst ramp spells is tougher when Ring pairs so well with cheap ramp), making the marginal sideboard spells tough to justify. Thankfully, one of Ring’s many virtues is that it lets you get away with a slightly lower land count because it takes less to get to 4 mana.

For people buying into or returning to Amulet, Ring is the biggest expense that isn’t essential. As pressure for a Ring ban grows, even Ring-bearers have a strategic interest in the deck’s fortunes post-Ring. I expect Amulet is and will be fine without it, even if it will take some time to adjust

Urza’s Saga

Urza’s Saga is one of the most bizarre and intriguing cards to enter Modern in years but it was an immediate hit for Amulet and remains a core part of the deck even if its role seems more narrow now.

Contextually, Urza’s Saga let Amulet keep up with the pushed interaction in the same set. It’s hard to be a combo deck with lots of moving parts in a world of Counterspell, Grief/Solitude/Subtlety, Unholy Heat, Prismatic Ending, and the like. Urza’s Saga generates several threats and digs up your namesake enabler while dodging most mainstream interaction. Later, Saga lets a Primeval Titan that’s dead on arrival leave behind a substantial board presence in a way that hasn’t been possible since the loss of Field of the Dead.

Beatdown Backup?

Your Constructs are not powerhouses by default as they were in artifact-heavy decks like Hammer - decks that rely on having the biggest beaters on the board can overpower your Constructs while other linear decks routinely ignore even those bigger attackers. Saga is primarily a threat of this sort against control decks that have to answer every threat presented eventually or decks like Murktide that use reactive tools to support their proactive threats. Here, Constructs can bleed answers intended for Primeval Titan or force the opponent to play at an awkward rhythm, opening up a window to sneak another threat in.

As the format’s power level keeps rising - especially with the other straight-to-Modern sets - the Construct plan looks more and more ambitious. LOTR made this painfully clear with The One Ring and Orcish Bowmasters and the pattern continued with MH3. Combo could still ignore your Constructs as ever but now control could beat them with Phlage and Wrath of the Skies while the aggro deck of choice goes off with Guide/Pride/Ajani/Phlage and the ramp decks go over or through them at their leisure. Against the tempo deck of choice the new threats are problems too - a single Frog can beat the board and Abhorrent Oculus or Murktide Regent invalidate your motley crew.

Combo Piece?

Even when it can’t offer a Plan B, Urza’s Saga lights a fire under your Plan A - you have more access to the first Amulet that makes everything tick and the second Amulet that lets you go totally berserk. A hand of Saga + Amulet with a bounceland and a Titan/Pact represents a Turn 3 kill with no additional ramp.

There’s a big difference between Turn 1 Amulet and a Turn 3 Amulet via Saga. Turn 1 Amulet allows Turn 2 setup plays like Dryad/Azusa or Zenith (for Analyst etc) as a bridge to Turn 3 combo while Turn 1 Saga means you start with 2 mana + Amulet on Turn 3 with a lot more needed to get anywhere - and, if you can’t assemble this, losing the mana source from Saga stunts your development for future turns. Finding ways to make Turn 1 Saga more reliable is a key, ongoing challenge - see the Need For Speed section.

Note that this deck has a minimal Urza’s Saga toolbox. There’s not the usual Shadowspear to juice up your Constructs and Haywire Mite isn’t automatic here as it is in every other green Saga deck. I used to play a maindeck Relic of Progenitus and would happily do so if graveyard-centric decks take over again but a SB Relic (or Soul-Guide Lantern, Ghost Vacuum etc) is more common. Expedition Map makes the cut because it addresses the common fail cases when you have Amulet (not having a bounceland/not having a mana sink like Tolaria West) and lets you chain Urza’s Sagas or grab utility lands like Boseiju/Cavern in a pinch. Vexing Bauble threatens to suddenly invalidate their free interaction (and/or key combo pieces like Lotus Bloom or Cascade cards).

In Modern at large, Urza’s Saga is partly kept in check by the blowout potential of the cards that do interact with it. Unlike Saga decks like Hammer that leaned into their low curve and could afford to lose a land drop, Amulet is a ramp deck that can’t stand being Sinkholed. Getting destroyed by a random Naturalize effect because you unnecessarily exposed a Saga early is an easy way to lose a winnable game. Weighing this risk vs reward question is a key to success especially in postboard games where hate like this is common.

With the Final Fantasy rules change to Sagas, Blood Moon and friends are no longer Saga’s worst nightmare. When Moon resolves Saga will not die instantly and is frozen in play with its current abilities - so, if your Saga had reached Chapter 2, you have a permanent Construct factory! As above, this doesn’t beat most opponents any more - but it gives you a glimmer of hope rather than an extra kick in the teeth. This means Saga is no longer an obvious candidate to cut against Harbinger of the Seas and can remain in your deck as a decent backup threat against reactive blue decks.

Know the timing rules with the final chapter.

– Once the final chapter trigger goes on the stack in your mainphase, you have priority. If you pass, the opponent can pass back and you won’t have a chance to float mana or make a Construct before the ability resolves. You may want to do this intentionally if you expect the opponent has a reason to respond to the trigger before it resolves and fetches Amulet and want to maintain the option of making another Construct if they do (or keeping your mana to go off with that Amulet if they don’t). Otherwise, be sure to float the mana/make the Construct before passing priority.

– You can respond to that trigger (waiting until it goes on the stack to guarantee it even if something happens to Saga) with Summoner’s Pact if Pact resolving would make a difference to whether you float mana vs making a Construct in response or fetching Amulet vs Map or something else when it resolves (for example, you have Cavern of Souls on Giant in play but you don’t have a Titan unless Pact goes through).

Sideboard Cut?

When to shave or cut Urza’s Saga in sideboarding is always a contentious question. Some useful heuristics:

– How easily can they answer Saga at a profit?
– How likely is the game to be more ‘fair’? How effective are average Constructs in those fair games?
– How good is Saga at helping me make a fast Titan in a race and is that what the game is about?
– How much worse does Saga become if I’m on the draw?

More so than most cards, the role and value of Urza’s Saga is likely to change post-SB and swings heavily on the play vs on the draw - it can be good ‘in the matchup’ in G1 and still be right to cut, or good enough OTP but not OTD. The play/draw difference often outweighs any assumptions/info I have about specific or incidental hate for Saga.

Vesuva

Vesuva is the ultimate ‘utility land’ - it doubles up on others when needed and rescues you when a unique land is already in play (e.g. your haste land is in play and tapped but you need to haste the Titan you just cast). The first copy is automatic and it’s easy to talk yourself into more (though ever harder as more tempting lands are printed, even though these present more good scenarios for Vesuva).

Vesuva tests timing/rules knowledge while expanding your tactical options.

– Vesuva can only copy a land already in play: if your Titan trigger finds Vesuva + X, Vesuva can’t copy X. Cultivator Colossus puts lands into play sequentially so Vesuva can copy a land that Colossus put into play earlier in the resolution of its trigger (you choose a land to copy before drawing a card and continuing this process).

– Playing a land is a special action that doesn’t use the stack. The choice of land to copy with Vesuva is made as Vesuva enters play and also doesn’t use the stack. If you have priority, Vesuva can enter play as the opponent’s fetchland without them having a chance to sacrifice it ‘in response’. With an extra land effect you can play a land and immediately play Vesuva as that land (assuming no trigger is put on the stack) before the first copy can be hit by something like Boseiju or Fulminator Mage.

– You can choose to copy nothing with Vesuva and have it enter play untapped. This most often comes up when you control Dryad and need an untapped land (which can still tap for any colour thanks to Dryad) or the opponent controls Urborg/Yavimaya. This also matters if you need to make extra land drops with Azusa/Dryad and want to avoid putting an Amulet trigger on the stack (or a self-generated trigger from a bounceland etc) that can be responded to with removal.

– Vesuva can also be a dummy land drop in a hand with no other non-bounceland lands.

– A Titan trigger can find Vesuva and have it copy a bounceland to return itself to your hand. This helps if you don’t know which land you want to double up on yet or need a more flexible, generic land drop.

Specifically, if you are aiming for a Valakut kill with Dryad and have spare land drops but no extra lands, finding double Valakut generates less triggers than finding Valakut + Vesuva (as bounceland), playing Vesuva-as-bounceland until you have one land drop, then playing Vesuva as Valakut.

Vesuva can also copy opposing lands - there’s a much smaller range of cool utility lands around post-MH3 but examples include:

– Urza’s Saga (any Saga deck)

– Arena of Glory (most red decks)

– Surveil lands (~any deck with fetches)

– On-colour fetchlands for your own surveil lands

– Lotus Field/Deserted Temple (Twiddle)

– Shifting Woodland (some green decks)

– anything in the mirror

After a rules change several years ago, Vesuva can no longer copy a land as it enters under Blood Moon - you will always get an untapped Mountain.

Echoing Deeps

Another highly flexible tool with specific combo applications. At first, this flexibiltiy was mostly illusory - it wasn’t clear which lands you would actually want to copy, your lands weren’t being blown up enough to want to hedge against that, and your relevant lands didn’t bin themselves. The discovery that it could be your double Amulet ‘kill land’ in Mirrorpool/Battlements builds opened the door; now, with more and more cards that fill your graveyard or interact with it, Deeps’ slot is secure.

Deeps shares a lot of Vesuva’s timing quirks but the outcomes are sometimes different - notably, when resolving Analyst/Lumra, Deeps can enter as a copy of another land that’s returning at the same time. This is because the game looks ahead to check what a card with these effects will enter as while it’s still in its current zone - so Vesuva is still in the library during this check (and so cannot copy the other land your Titan trigger finds) but Deeps and the land it wants to imitate are still in the graveyard. This makes the Analyst/Lumra loops much easier as Deeps can be your 2nd Lotus Field etc.

Vesuva + Deeps can yield various results: Deeps on Vesuva can copy a land in play; Vesuva on Deeps will copy the land you chose with Deeps unless you didn’t copy anything - here, Vesuva-Deeps can now copy a land in a graveyard. With Spelunking, you look at the final land (the Vesuva-copy or Deeps-copy, or naked Vesuva or Deeps) to determine if you have the choice of tapped/untapped

In a fetchland + surveil land format, Deeps can often copy an opposing fetch (any green fetch, or a fetch with the right secondary colour for your UG/RG/etc surveil land); even if you don’t have a(/nother) surveil land, this can be smart to find basic Forest and stock your graveyard for a later Analyst.

Boseiju, Who Endures

Boseiju was the ultimate wish list item for Amulet - if you offered it as an example of what you wanted, it would seem like an absurd fantasy. A flexible removal spell attached to a land that’s also an untapped green source is everything you could ask for and let Titan offer a clean answer to some problems for the first time.

Boseiju’s efficiency and versatility means that many decks run more than just the one ‘free’ copy you see in most green decks. 3-4 copies is common in Amulet and the ever-increasing competition for slots is the only reason not to run the full set.

It’s more difficult than you might think to have 1G spare and Boseiju ready to go early in the game, especially with many lists running increasingly few untapped G sources (and Boseiju accounting for many of those itself), unless you have Amulet. This self-corrects a little in the matchups where you board in as many Boseijus as you can but early access to Boseiju is another compelling reason to have more total G sources in your deck.

Common Boseiju targets among top decks include:

Energy: Static Prison, Blood Moon, SB hate cards

Domain Zoo: Scion of Draco, Leyline of the Guildpact, Leyline Binding

Ruby Storm: Ruby Medallion

Belcher: any land, Belcher, Lotus Bloom

Eldrazi/Tron: double mana lands, SB hate cards (exposed Stone Brain, Disruptor Flute etc)

Grinding Breach: Underworld Breach (/Station), Urza’s Saga

Boseiju’s legendary creature discount when you control Azusa is easy to miss but highly relevant in some common lines:

Turn 3: Play a land and cast Azusa, play bounceland returning Forest(/G source) and replay Forest, leaving exactly G up for Boseiju

Turn 3: Cast Azusa, make two more land drops (5 mana total)

Turn 4: Play a bounceland returning a land and replaying it to get to 6 mana, cast Titan finding two bouncelands returning Forest + Boseiju, replay Forest holding up Boseiju

Tolaria West

Tolaria West gives the deck another layer of flexibility but also the inevitability that makes it so powerful - the first Primeval Titan now unlocks the second (which unlocks the third via another Tolaria West or Shifting Woodland etc). Tolaria West finding Summoner’s Pact means that any effect that finds a land can find a creature, given enough time.

This comes at a cost - you are splashing a double blue card in a mostly mono-green deck with a bizarre manabase. Many of the more subtle sequencing decisions involve preparing to Transmute a Tolaria West you might not have yet in a few turns. Are you meant to play Tolaria West so that you have a second blue source and can pick it up with a bounceland, or hold it so that a second Amulet means you can make UU by playing Tolaria West and use another land drop to pick it up with a bounceland immediately?

Transmute finding any card that costs zero extends the toolbox further - other Pacts and Engineered Explosives show up largely because you can transmute for them, and thus find them with Primeval Titan.

I’ve played anywhere from one to four Tolaria West before - whenever I consider adding some tertiary threat just to up those numbers, I wonder why I’m not playing another Tolaria West instead.

Hanweir Battlements (and friends)

See previous editions for the details of the Slayers’ Stronghold vs Hanweir Battlements debates. Now there is a firm consensus around Battlements and a big part of that it its less demanding activation cost opening up more lines - it’s easier to have a spare red mana lying around (e.g. in games where you don’t have Amulet and can Titan for Battlements + bounceland -> replay Battlements + activate) or to get red mana when you already have Battlements (Titan can find Vestige and another utility land). In Dryad-heavy lists, Valakut + Battlements sets up Dryad well even if you don’t have Dryad or Titan dies before combat; Vestige + Battlements leaves you with more untapped mana for later phases (a common line is finding Otawara + bounceland with the attack trigger, with Vestige giving you exactly enough mana to channel now).

Crumbling Vestige

Crumbling Vestige is an unsung hero of the manabase that opens up unique lines in both low-resource and high-resource games. Without Amulet, it allows Primeval Titan (or Cultivator Colossus) to rebuy mana immediately to let you follow-up with another spell - say, Arboreal Grazer as another blocker or Dismember in post-SB games - or use Battlements/Tolaria West/Boseiju when you wouldn’t have the right amount or colours of mana otherwise. At the PT I stabilized from a slow start vs Tron where Titan -> double Vestige let me still channel Boseiju after casting Titan.

With Amulet, Crumbling Vestige jumps ahead on mana without requiring or committing a bounceland. Consider a hand like this:

Amulet, Azusa, Map, Titan, Vestige, Forest, Boseiju

This hand is missing a bounceland but Vestige lets you cast Azusa and then Map on T2, setting up for Map -> bounceland + cast Titan on T3.

Amulet, Dryad, Titan, Vestige, Forest, Mirrorpool, bounceland

With this hand you can go T1 Amulet, T2 Vestige -> Dryad and play Mirrorpool as your extra land drop, maximizing your development without the risk of stranding your bounceland in play and not having another one for next turn. If Dryad dies, you now have lots of redraws to a T3 Titan (Amulet/Grazer/Pact/Azusa).

With one Amulet, playing Vestige -> bounceland returning Vestige -> replay Vestige gets you the same amount of mana as playing the bounceland repeatedly while letting you keep this additional land in play - this sets up lines like T1 G source + Amulet, T2 Pact for Azusa -> 4 mana (Ring!) with enough to pay for Pact or gives you another land in play for Scapeshift.

Note that Vestige is the only land that ramps in this way under Damping Sphere.

Turn 1 Urza’s Saga + Amulet means T2 Vestige lets you activate Saga without a bounceland (that would have to return itself or the Saga for little gain).

In common mid-game positions where you have Amulet and several lands but need to draw a bounceland to jump up to Titan mana, Vestige can fill that gap and give you more outs.

As in the Grazer section, note that Grazer -> Vestige is mana-neutral even without Amulet.

Shifting Woodland

An integral part of the main Aftermath Analyst loops (see that section for details there) but Woodland was already an appealing card for classic Amulet lists. In broad strokes, Woodland shares Saga’s strength vs the interaction that is usually good against you and lets you stick the threats you have built your deck around. It lets half of a Titan trigger find the next Titan (or Dryad, Ring etc) without the heavier commitment of finding + picking up Tolaria West and transmuting for Pact (with all the risks/demands of that card) + paying for the next threat. Woodland is a useful form of redundancy against heavy discard and often the most important card against the blue decks and their wall of Counterspell/Force of Negation/Subtlety etc. When your Amulet effects are under attack, Woodland can eventually become an Amulet/Spelunking to power a big turn.

Amulet doesn’t have the suite of fetchlands + cheap cards + freebies like Mishra’s Bauble that power Unholy Heat and other delirium cards in other Modern decks so you don’t ~trivially get there just by playing Magic here - in the evergreen Explore vs Malevolent Rumble debates, Rumble finding and fueling Woodland was a big point in its favour. However, you can lurch towards delirium in other ways - Urza’s Saga is two types (including the normally elusive enchantment) and can find a third (Map or SB cards like Soul-Guide Lantern/Vexing Bauble; Haywire Mite gets you full yahtzee), Dryad (and Nantuko) gets you two, Summoner’s Pact suddenly gives you an instant, and so on. In the matchups where Woodland is at its best, the opponent does some of this work for you by countering or discarding cards like Ring.

Woodland can give another layer of resilience to some of your sideboard cards, becoming a Soulless Jailer they had to remove or a Lantern/Bauble that was already used. Working well with Woodland is a nice perk for potential silver bullets or backup threats - for example, Colossal Skyturtle is a Pactable way to get out from under Harbinger of the Seas for a turn and an enchantment creature that bins itself is a big jump towards delirium in a matchup where Woodland is likely pivotal.

Note some weird uses and interactions here:

– If you want to copy a Titan to attack with it or Ring to activate, Woodland must remain untapped; if you are copying most other things, you should tap Woodland for mana before it becomes something else

– If you copy Ring, Woodland keeps its burden counters so you still draw N+1 cards each time but never take damage (at the cost of using your mana each time)

– You can slowly build a permanent Urza’s Saga (activating in your draw step each turn you want to gain a counter; you start at 0 lore counters so it takes a while to gain the Construct ability, but once it has this it keeps it and your 'Saga' won't expire; you can also do this again and let it go off on Chapter 3 if you need that Amulet etc)

- Copies Dryad or Valakut to set up that combo; notably if your Dryad is removed with Valakut triggers on the stack you can then turn Woodland into Dryad and they will still go through

Urza’s Cave

Not just a literal Cave for Spelunking but an inherently promising effect in a land toolbox deck. Certain effects are much more valuable at instant speed (Bojuka Bog is unreliable against a lot of the GY decks but much better as an instant; Valakut triggers can shoot a wider range of things) and Cave can fetch a bounceland to save or pick up a land on demand. When you are resolving a Titan trigger but don't know what you’ll need, Cave lets you store part of that choice.

More generally, Cave gives you more access to other situational lands; you might want a Radiant Fountain in your deck somewhere and there will be spots where you want two or just need to find the first one but it's hard to spend a slot on another Fountain when you can make the same case for many lands. Sometimes you just need the first bounceland to achieve lift off but don't want to risk the excess bounceland draws in other games, and so on; in Analyst loops, Cave can find the first/next Lotus Field and also converts the full loop into a win.

If nothing much is happening, Cave can find Saga to start grinding; sometimes you want a Mycosynth Gardens to copy Amulet or a SB card etc

Specific lines include:

- With a Lotus Field in your deck (or Vesuva/Deeps for it), Cave is +2 mana with double Amulet

- On top of finding Valakut for Dryad, Cave can be a fetchland for another Valakut (Vesuva or a natural copy), an actual fetchland (Cave -> fetch -> other land, giving you 3 triggers for each for each Valakut), or extend that chain with more mana (Cave -> Deeps as Cave -> fetch -> land)

The Mycosynth Gardens

Gardens/TMG doesn’t find the first Amulet to get things going but it turns a single Amulet hand into a double Amulet hand. Bearing in mind that there is already a vast difference between hands with and without Amulet and that it makes sense for your deckbuilding choices to hedge for the games where you don’t have Amulet as these will be much harder, it might seem like TMG is win-more as it only upgrades hands that don’t need the help.

In practice, there is a world of difference between single and double Amulet hands too. Single Amulet hands that can produce one Titan that has to puzzle its way through interaction can now chain the first Titan into a second Titan and roll over any resistance. Hands without a natural Titan can transmute Tolaria West and cast Titan in one turn much more easily. Cultivator Colossus is easier to cast and has a much bigger impact. Hands with redundant threats and more ramp can present multiple threats in one turn to overwhelm the single Counterspell the opponent can hold up.

In the Urza’s Saga section I mentioned that TMG boosts a class of Saga hands that need the help but it also pairs well with Saga in slow games - TMG can’t copy the Constructs (it specifies nontoken artifacts) but it can copy the Amulet found by Saga, growing the Constructs into serious threats and letting you pop off with your multiple Amulets the moment you find the missing combo piece.

A common concern about TMG is that it makes you weaker still to Force of Vigor or other cards that go after Amulet. You can quickly see that this is flawed - you aren’t forced to use TMG so that added risk only exists if you choose to take it on - and in fact TMG offers a form of protection against artifact hate by threatening to copy Amulet in response to removal. Against likely artifact removal it may make sense to delay casting your Amulet until you have the shield of a TMG activation.

Strip away the text that makes it rare and TMG is a Shimmering Grotto. That’s better than it sounds here - it can be that second blue source for Tolaria West in the mid-game or the missing red/white mana to activate Slayers’ Stronghold or Sunhome. If you want to support a small sideboard splash, TMG offering fixing lets you have enough sources without mangling the rest of your manabase beyond repair.

The biggest change that TMG brought to Amulet is that it’s another potential 4-of land in a deck that already struggles to fit every land it wants despite running the highest land count of any mainstream Constructed deck. It makes sense to play 4 at first to see the card in action more often and test how good it is in multiples, and the early consensus has settled on the full set, but it wouldn’t surprise me if lists start to shave copies if even more good lands are printed or they want to try something experimental. Shaving copies in sideboarding also makes sense when you are moving away from Urza’s Saga or trying to become less reliant on explosive Amulet draws.

Expedition Map

The first copy is standard to connect Urza’s Saga to the other toolboxes. While you will most often fetch Amulet, there are many spots where you have as much mana as you could ask for but lack a use for it - Map finding Tolaria West is an expensive but important fallback there. Map also shines when you have Amulet but need the bounceland.

More generally, in matchups where Saga is a valid grindy threat, fetching Map which then finds the next Saga keeps that threat going. Boseiju, Cavern, and Valakut give you more lands that you will gladly Map for in longer games. Even in matchups where I cut all my Sagas, I tend to keep Map as a Sylvan Scrying (notably a colourless one that functions under Moon and helps assemble basic Forest + Boseiju to break the Moon lock). Map for Woodland (adding a rare type in the process) lets it become a threat even more often.

Cultivator Colossus

Cultivator Colossus was an exciting pickup that sparked renewed interest in the deck. Some of this was based on a misunderstanding of the card (no, it doesn’t go infinite with a bounceland!), some of it was based on the card’s skill at producing great Twitter screenshots and good brain chemicals. Many post-VOW lists leaned hard on Colossus, with 2 or even 3 copies and greater emphasis on other cards that worked well with it, but these days you tend to see just the first copy as an additional threat that can overwhelm interaction that might stop a single Titan.

Colossus loses value in post-sideboard games where you tend to shave lands in favour of spells, your resources are under more strain overall, you run into sideboard cards that line up well against Colossus (Consign to Memory, formerly Dress Down) or make it harder to cast, and it’s harder to protect the Amulet that makes it much easier to cast and benefit from Colossus.

The easiest way to understand the trigger is that each land already in your hand cascades into a spell and you get to put any lands revealed along the way into play.

With n lands in hand, m lands in your library, and k total cards in your library, the expected number of lands you will put into play with Colossus (assuming you put in all lands in hand and always continue the chain where possible) is as follows (via Julian Wellman):

E(n,m,k) = n + nm/(k-m+1)

Assessing the likely impact of Colossus starts with identifying how many remaining spells in your deck are ‘hits’ and the odds of hitting these (do you need to hit exactly Titan or Pact, and how many of these combined are left?) and the same for relevant lands (Tolaria West represents Pact for Titan). These can play off each other - Dryad and Valakut might be irrelevant individually but win the game if hit together. It’s tough to calculate these odds on the fly and weigh them against the different, implied risk of a Primeval Titan line that has a deterministic outcome but might fall prey to interaction.

My default vibes-based heuristic: one land in hand means Colossus is likely to fizzle, two lands is a fine gamble, and three lands is likely to ‘work’ (by generating at least one more threat).

Notes:

– Triggers generated as Colossus’ ability resolves go on the stack together after it finishes resolving - you choose the order these join the stack and resolve (for example, if you have double Amulet you want Saga’s first chapter trigger to be on the stack above the Amulet triggers so that Saga can tap for mana twice).

– Choices made as lands enter the battlefield (choosing a land to copy with Vesuva or a creature type for Cavern of Souls) are made immediately before you draw the card and keep going. The relevant wording here is “As X enters the battlefield…” (as opposed to “When X…” for triggers).

– If you control zero lands (which can happen in T1 Saga -> Amulet/Gardens lines), Colossus will die instantly - but you will still resolve the trigger and should be fine.

Card Notes - Alternative Spells/Lands

Springheart Nantuko

A quirky card in value games (though we have to work much harder for the multiple triggers that the fair fetchland decks have on tap) that opens up a range of unique infinites for us.

With one Amulet:

Grazer + bestow Nantuko + bounceland = infinite Grazers (infinite power iff access to Oran-Rief)

Dryad + bestow + bounceland = infinite Dryads

(Analyst + bestow sets up easy Analyst loops; other fringe options like Cultivator Colossus or Titania also trivially go infinite)

With two Amulets, the Grazer and Dryad lines also make infinite mana immediately; with two Nantukos (one bestowed, the other anywhere), the one Amulet lines also make infinite 1/1s.

Nantuko obviously goes infinite with Titan too but notably creates an immediate Titan infinite with Nantuko/Pact in hand with one Amulet:

– Titan ETB finds Vestige + Battlements, haste Titan (Vestige untapped)

– Titan Attack finds bounceland + fetchland

– Post-combat, bestow on Titan and crack fetchland, using the [Forest] + Vestige to pay 1G for landfall trigger

– Titan Copy finds any lands, pay for trigger; repeat

This easily transitions into a Dryad + Valakut kill or Analyst/Lumra kill via Tolaria West.

With two Amulets, Titan alone with a Nantuko in deck goes infinite:

– Titan ETB finds bounceland + Mirrorpool, copy Titan (bouncing whatever)

– Titan Copy ETB finds Battlements + [R land], haste both Titans

– Titan Attack finds bounceland + Deeps as Mirrorpool, float mana (2C)

– Titan Copy Attack finds Tolaria West + fetchland, tap TWest twice (2CUU)

– Use this floating mana on Deeps-Mirrorpool to copy Titan

– Titan Copy #2 ETB finds two bouncelands returning TWest + anything

– Postcombat, transmute for Pact -> Nantuko and bestow on Titan, then crack your fetch for a landfall trigger and start the chain

A Lotus Field simplifies this and doesn’t rely on the graveyard via Deeps:

– Titan ETB finds Lotus Field + Mirrorpool, copy Titan (floating RR)

– Titan Copy ETB finds Battlements + Tolaria West, haste both Titans

– Titan Attack and Titan Copy Attack find two bouncelands + fetchland + any , returning TWest

– Postcombat, transmute for Pact -> Nantuko and bestow on Titan, then crack your fetch for a landfall trigger and start the chain

At a glance, this is a lot of power contained in one slot and it’s tempting to lean harder on Nantuko to make these lines more common. In practice, the infinite Grazer blocker line doesn’t lock up the game even vs most current aggro decks (Boros/Mardu Energy easily win outside combat via Phlage/Goblin Bombardment) so only the Dryad (for lists with 3-4 Dryad) and Titan lines are realistic. A swarm of 1/1s rarely goes the distance in a format that has had to adapt or die vs Ocelot Pride.

Fetchland (/+ shockland/surveil land)

Many lists run a fetchland and some have a shockland to pair with it. This is the easiest way to support a proper splash but is also seen in effectively mono-green lists to support Tolaria West.

Fetchlands make Dryad + Valakut lines much more powerful (instant speed triggers, including on the opponent’s upkeep after The One Ring protection expires) and the first fetchland often makes the cut for that reason alone.

Like any land that enters tapped, a shockland (and thus a fetchland) nets mana with double Amulet. Some examples:

– T1 Saga + Amulet, T2 fetchland; on T3 you float C from Saga finding another Amulet, sacrifice fetchland for Breeding Pool (CUU), transmute Tolaria West for a missing bounceland

– Find a fetchland with a Titan trigger and sacrifice it for a tapped land on your upkeep to get two mana for Pact payments (whereas a bounceland returning a land previously means it wouldn’t net mana as required)

– An opposing Boseiju (on your one bounceland, for example) lets you find a tapped land to still net mana

Beware of playing a shockland tapped if this would put an Amulet trigger on the stack and give the opponent a window to kill Azusa/Dryad before it finishes its work. You can pay 2 life to have it enter untapped to avoid this.

Surveil lands

The MKM Surveil lands have transformed Modern, overperforming in every shell that can fit them. Amulet isn’t an obvious candidate for these - no fetchlands in most lists and surveil is meaningfully worse than scry when you have specific one-ofs you need to remain in the deck - but once you find your surveil land you can often bounce and replay/copy it several times per game. For a deck with a lot of lands and a lot of moving parts, getting card selection from your lands is a great upside - you just have to work a bit harder for it. The same fetchland + shockland incentives above apply here.

Surveil lands also boost Generous Ent and give you a nice consolation prize from an opposing Boseiju - Ent is less important now with no Living End and fewer Moons around but if you find yourself wanting multiple Ents the first Surveil land starts to look very appealing (and makes splashing that secondary colour even easier).

A surveil land (and thus a fetchland) is a ‘kill land’ for Analyst loops - you sacrifice and return the surveil land each time to mill your deck on demand. Pre-loop, fetch for surveil milling a land juices Analyst substantially by itself. With Analyst and Woodland wanting a packed graveyard, self-mill is an active benefit now.

Against decks full of fetchlands, Vesuva and Echoing Deeps can hijack those for more surveillance.

Castle Garenbrig

A self-contained form of acceleration on a land that jumps you to Titan mana is very useful - on Castle’s release, it went from an experimental 1-of or 2-of to a clear 4-of quickly and the manabase was totally overhauled to enable it. See the Need for Speed section on how Castle can speed you up by a full turn where yet another bounceland etc could not.

Gemstone Caverns

Gemstone Caverns operates on the same principle, increasing the quantity of acceleration without the diminishing returns of the ramp spells. In your opening hand Caverns acts almost like another Arboreal Grazer (though again you’d rather have Caverns + Grazer than double Grazer much of the time) and sets up its own unique lines:

T1: Caverns, Saga

T2: Land, activate Saga

T3: Activate Saga again if desired and/or go off

Accelerating Saga activations is highly appealing but only possible with untapped G source + Grazer otherwise.

T1: Caverns, The Mycosynth Gardens, Amulet

T2: Copy Amulet without having to use a land drop, letting you play bounceland -> Grazer/Explore/Azusa/Pact -> Titan

T1: Caverns, land

T2: Land, Azusa/Dryad, extra land

T3: More land drops, Titan

Gemstone Caverns only does its thing on the draw, making it an easy card to cut or leave on the bench otherwise, but this is when being able to ramp quickly is most important.

It’s hard to get many reps with a one-of that has to be in your opener and automatically leaves your deck on the play but I’ve been very impressed by Caverns and give it a strong endorsement.

Sunken Citadel

Sunken Citadel is a broken card that hasn’t been broken yet - it’s hard to believe that its career high is letting bad control decks use Field of Ruin faster.

It's easy to list appealing uses in Amulet - transmuting Tolaria West suddenly becomes cheap and easy, Boseiju and Otawara are even more of a freeroll, and activating Urza's Saga commits less of your turn. The steep costs of Shifting Woodland and Mirrorpool become easier. It’s excellent with Castle Garenbrig - some early post-LCI lists found room for a bunch of Castles + Citadels but this required big sacrifices.

Lists that don’t want a red splash or Dryad/Valakut but still need a red source for Battlements get to freeroll a Citadel as their go-to there.

Arena of Glory

Often dismissed immediately because people for some reason assume this is replacing the actual haste land but in reality this is another way to get an explosive Titan without Amulet. Not needing to find a way to give haste with the ETB trigger frees you up to get a utility land with that one and then Vesuva it with the attack trigger or get the full spread of threat lands (Saga etc) + bouncelands or whatever that you want. With an Amulet you get the OHKO from my Through the Breach Amulet days - Teetering Peaks + Vestige/Wx bounce -> Vesuva on Peaks + Sunhome. Arena is specifically very good with Roxanne or some other Pact bullets.

Ultimately it's hard to find room and you can't lean into these other lines unless you reliably have Arena so you have to play more Arenas (since you need to find it naturally) + requires a heavy red commitment so this is a tough sell.

Disciple of Freyalise

‘Pactable G source’ has been a wish list item forever but as experimental lists shave Pacts it starts to look like a poor use of a slot

Building your sideboard

Amulet generally doesn’t get to change a lot in sideboarding - your spells are all important and you need a certain density of each type of spell, and you need to maintain a high land count for your deck to function. Your tutors mean that you only need to use one or two slots for consistent access to a game-changing effect but with so many partially overlapping toolboxes it’s hard to know how to distribute those effects between them.

Take graveyard hate as an example. Bojuka Bog letting Primeval Titan exile graveyards is highly relevant when you care about that sort of thing. The first Endurance has disproportionate value because you can find it with Summoner’s Pact. Relic of Progenitus lets Urza’s Saga threaten graveyard hate; Tormod’s Crypt does too and is a target for Tolaria West as well as boasting a unique efficiency. If you earmark 4-5 slots for graveyard hate, your first instinct might be to start with a copy of each and build out from there.

The problem is that not all hate is created equal. Many of the matchups where you want graveyard hate these days are ones where Endurance having flash and good stats makes it a relevant threat that warps how the game is played where other hate would just be a nuisance - if your sideboard plan starts with a pile of Endurances, that doesn’t leave room for much more. Relic replacing itself makes it a fine card against decks with Wrenn and Six or other minor graveyard synergies where dedicating an entire card that doesn’t help your main plan is unacceptable. Bog is often the worst of the bunch but being a land gives it a high floor that lets you keep it in the deck when the others wouldn’t cut it. These cards are different enough that ‘just play the first copy of each’ isn’t a good default.

What about Naturalizes? Boseiju isn’t just a land, it’s a great land - any answer to awful artifacts has to justify itself over another Boseiju. The Reclamation Sage/Outland Liberator etc for Summoner’s Pact used to be automatic and now rarely makes the cut; other Urza’s Saga decks leapt on Haywire Mite but Amulet hasn’t. Force of Vigor is a superweapon when you really care about nuking several or specific targets (and is your best card in the mirror) but it’s either the best or worst card for the job with little room in between.

Some of these toolbox sideboard cards will be lands for Primeval Titan/Tolaria West/Expedition Map - and, when you can’t cut many spells, upgrading your lands is a good way to get mileage from your sideboard slots. You know you can bring in any SB Boseijus in many matchups, which is more than can be said for more narrow spells. Something like a SB Khalni Garden makes Titan more flexible but lets you maintain your desired land count while having an additional defensive tool early in a way that a spell could not. Against Counterspell decks you want more threats that are good against Counterspell but you also want more Cavern of Souls.

Abstractly, there are reasons to want a higher land count post-SB - the games are more grindy and with your enablers under more pressure you are more likely to fall back on making your land drops manually - and, contextually, the threat of land destruction or taxing effects might point the same way. This is informed by how your deck is designed - if you are heavy on extra land drop effects, you need a higher baseline land count. However, Urza’s Saga as a core part of the manabase complicates that if you are treating it as a partial land for that count - if you want your SB plans to allow you to shave/cut Saga OTD or against Moon effects etc, you also want some all-purpose lands to replace them with. Even if their abilities aren’t relevant, their effectiveness as a land is a key tiebreaker - you’d rather have Cavern of Souls than Bojuka Bog.

All this makes it hard to give a static sideboard guide even if I wanted to - shifting just one or two slots on tutorable effects can have a big impact on how a matchup plays out and if you want to commit lots of slots pivoting to a new plan that will inevitably shape how the rest of your sideboard looks. I hope these broad principles inform how you build your deck and sideboard for your expected metagame, whatever that looks like.

Building Amulet for Pro Tour LOTR

Building my Amulet list for the Pro Tour put these principles to the test. While it achieved great results for me and mostly succeeded in the goals I set for it, the misses there are educational too.

The spells in the maindeck were easy to fill out. I expected a lot of 4C Omnath/Ring variants so felt priced into the MD Colossus and I was wedded to the second Azusa.

The lands were much harder:

– Gemstone Caverns remained a tantalising piece of theorycrafting rather than a rigorously tested idea but I was even more confident in it given the value of any way to ramp into The One Ring.

– Cavern of Souls is the most surprising omission - I accurately predicted close to zero Murktide at the Pro Tour but more people bought into the Magic Online hype around UB Ring Control than I expected and I wished I had a Cavern of Souls somewhere for them.

– MD Otawara was the easiest hedge against Elesh Norn from 4C and welcome insurance against random stuff.

– The 2nd Crumbling Vestige raised a lot of eyebrows but I’ve always wanted as many as I could get away with and I felt I could sneak in another here. You could cut it for the Cavern of Souls or something but that is a substantial cost; having access to 2nd Vestige for Titan -> double Vestige won me a game that would have been tough otherwise and just drawing a Vestige was often great as expected.

– Bojuka Bog’s pitch for a MD slot fell flat in a world without Unholy Heat and Murktide Regent but stood out as a way to diversify my graveyard hate against Living End.

– Amulet classics in Khalni Garden and Radiant Fountain made a return as useful speedbumps against Scam in particular. Fountain helps stabilize in close games vs evasive attackers like Grief/Voidwalker and the usual Fountain -> bounceland -> replay Fountain lines give you a nice buffer and mitigate life loss from Ring. Khalni Garden is a little less reliable as a defensive tool vs Bowmasters but soaking up 8 damage from Fury or giving you a second blocker for Grief is great and it can stop T1 Ragavan running away with the game.

– Tear Asunder was part of my plan against 4C as an answer to Elesh Norn that can actually remove Ring (or free something from Binding in a pinch). This required a switch to Golgari Rot Farm as the secondary bounceland (though I wanted some of these already for matchups where I board in Dismember and saving life can be crucial).

– Pact of Negation is useful against control decks and can be part of the plan against Murktide - though cutting Cavern of Souls entirely is hard to justify if this is a big part of the argument for Pact, the control decks gaining steam before the PT loaded up on Subtlety which trumps Cavern and demands Pact. It’s also a strong tool against Cascade decks, from Rhino’s varied spread of instant-speed interaction (including their own Subtleties and new hit Flame of Anor) to Living End’s… well, Living End and any brave souls who stuck with Creativity.

– Swan Song isn’t an all-or-nothing card: as a known quantity in an open decklist tournament it’s nice to force the opponent to respect these high-impact one-ofs even if you don’t plan on boarding a bunch of them any more. This has a lot of overlap with Pact but could also hedge against hateful Yawgmoth lists, the mirror, or the unknown (some spell-based combo deck that seemed like a good response to 4C, for example).

– Tormod’s Crypt was my last addition to give more respect to Living End, which had faded from its peak just after LOTR’s release but might have a resurgence at the PT if a larger team decided it was the deck to play. I’ve liked having more diverse GY hate like Relic of Progenitus or Soul-Guide Lantern (which can be part of your SB plan vs Scam OTP to fizzle Feign Death etc) but here I mostly just cared about Living End, where Crypt can be found with Tolaria West and is free on either end for when that efficiency matters. This illustrates the principle I discussed above - this is less about wanting more graveyard hate and more about ensuring that within that I have the right hate cards and maximizing my access to those.

– Wurmcoil Engine is an additional threat against Scam and Murktide that can be cast under Moon at the same spot on the curve as Titan, stabilizes any close game, and is another source of lifegain for Ring. Given Ent’s overperformance I think turning this into another Ent would have been a smart move (and may have let me cut Crypt for something more versatile).

Note that, with very little Murktide expected, my approach of ‘figure out your plan there and then fill in the rest’ didn’t apply and I could start with a clean slate. As soon as two weeks later, with Preordain unbanned as an explicit nod to Murktide, I was playing a different list that used that usual structure.

I flirted with a lot of other builds too. With Karn being so good with/against Ring as well as 4C (and the Tron resurgence that I didn’t anticipate yet), I tried lists that paired those for maximum threat density. Once you have Karn and Ring, Ancient Stirrings can finally find a threat often on top of its other strengths - but fitting all of that in the same deck is very difficult. The 4 Stirrings 4 Saga 4 Mycosynth Gardens 4 Amulet 4 Karn 4 Ring core borrowed from the Spike Amulet deck is a great starting point but the rest of the usual Amulet fluff still seemed like the best way to fill that out.

The One Ring opens up a whole new plane of tempting lands. Academy Ruins can recur a discarded/countered Ring to ensure one sticks but also lets you loop Rings for endless protection (while still drawing a card with each new Ring to see new cards, unlike the Solitary Confinement play pattern). Minamo, School at Water’s Edge untaps Ring (or, if you have double Amulet and you Grazer/Titan it in, untaps it twice!).

Once you get that rush you can chase it in other ways. Twiddle effects and Hidden Strings work with your bouncelands (or Lotus Field…) too. I’ve occasionally wondered about Kiora, Behemoth Beckoner anyway - a ramp spell you can pay for in advance that rewards you for casting Titan and is excellent with Urza’s Saga.

Ultimately, I spent enough time considering other decks that I didn’t leave myself enough time to properly test these more radical approaches. If I had been honest with myself from the start and embraced my one-trick lifestyle, I could have put that work in and learned a lot + had fun in the process.

Going Fast

Most combo decks have a natural bottleneck around their key pieces that informs how you have to build around them - your Storm deck only has so many Pyretic/Desperate Rituals and the marginal Ral-esque enablers are much worse than Ral + Ruby Medallion but you can play as many Reckless Impulse/Wrenn’s Resolve effects as you want to stitch these together. Most games follow a similar script and these glue cards help you stick to it.

Amulet is unusual in that you can take several distinct paths to your big turn. The feared Turn 1 Amulet starts look quite different to the Grazer -> more ramp starts while Turn N Urza’s Saga setting up Turn N+2 Amulet sets the game to its own clear rhythm. In the slower games, a small ramp spell into Ring or a bigger ramp spell setting up a Turn 4 Titan by itself can be promising.

Let’s focus on making the fastest starts more consistent. The core components of these are locked in and unique - we already have 4 Amulet, 4 Grazer, 4 Saga - but there are interesting patterns to the support they each want.

T1 Grazer

Grazer wants to curve into a bigger ramp spell like Azusa/Dryad or Spelunking to set up T1 Grazer -> T2 [big ramp] -> T3 Titan. This needs at least one bounceland (ideally more, with Vestige as a substitute for extra copies if Spelunking is your big ramp) and a lot of T1 G sources (9-10 as the benchmark).

Dryad gives Titan a massive upgrade but lets removal disrupt this curve; Azusa is even more fragile but with the right lands can let you T3 Titan through that removal (though this Titan has no immediate impact); Spelunking acts as both an Amulet effect and a piece of ramp, letting any bounceland/Vestige represent a T3 Titan (or Lotus, with exactly Spelunking but not Dryad/Azusa).

Grazer hands want more resources to work with and suffer most from mulligans; the first bounceland is all-important here.

T1 Zenith -> Arbor

A classic configuration with 4 Zenith that is willing to play the Dryad Arbor gets the full 12 Turn 1 accelerants that can into T2 Spelunking/Dryad/Azusa -> T3 Titan. Arbor is fragile enough that you can’t rely on this except in specific, known matchups.

For other enablers, Zenith letting you put a down payment on specific cheap enablers adds a new wrinkle. Old favourite Sakura-Tribe Scout lets T1 Amulet or Saga into T2 Zenith set up a T3 Titan; T1 Amulet T2 Zenith for Analyst lets you try to high roll too. The glaring omission is with T1 Grazer - there’s no 2-drop you can find on T2 that sets you up for T3.

T1 Amulet

The ideal start but what do you do with that? Leaning too much into T1 Amulet offers help to the draws that need it least - but you want your best draws to realize their potential.

A second Amulet lets you raise the roof but they only let you run four. You can dig for it with Malevolent Rumble or Ancient Stirrings but the odds aren’t great (~20% for Rumble, ~25% for Stirrings - they are better at finding the bounceland or threat to complete the puzzle). The Mycosynth Gardens fills in but still requires another ramp spell to set up T3 Titan (unless you have Lotus). T1 Saga + Amulet gets you there with just a bounceland but you are maxed on both already.

T1 Amulet into T2 Dryad/Azusa (same removal caveats as above) is the classic curve to enable T3 Titan with minimal further effort. Spelunking doesn’t help as much here as in the T1 Grazer lines, acting as just an Explore (but without setting up the T2 Titan in double Amulet draws). Every Pact for Grazer/Azusa with a bounceland on your combo turn nets a mana; T1 Amulet T2 Pact for Azusa can set up T3 Titan with another bounceland if Azusa lives.

The T1 Amulet hands are both the hands you might have to mulligan for and the hands best able to function with fewer cards. You can’t inflate the Amulet count but having more copies of the less restricted pieces that Amulet needs (bouncelands, ramp, threats) makes those mulls a safer bet.

Trying to jump to 6 mana by T3 takes a lot of steps in between but threats like Aftermath Analyst that split the cost are less demanding: T1 Amulet -> T2 Analyst -> T3 crack it to ramp into another threat is a common line against other linear decks.

Similarly, Amulet lets Scapeshift function as ramp and/or threat - Scapeshift with 4 lands is lethal (see the Analyst/Shift section for details) while even just 2 lands lets you Shift to jump from 4 to 6 mana.

T1 Saga

These are the hardest hands to optimize - and the riskiest if they fail - but the biggest prize if you can figure it out. The Saga hands that also have Amulet speak for themselves but what do you need to feel confident that T1 Saga will translate into a T3 payoff? The T1 Amulet hands can use the boost from that on a T2 play that sets up their T3; Saga puts you on a deadline but doesn’t help you get there.

The two-drop bridge cards like Explore and Rumble can help - but not enough and not reliably (Rumble has the highest upside here if you spike the second Amulet etc). The three-drops can’t come down until Saga goes off - and then only Azusa nets mana on that turn. ‘Delayed’ ramp payoffs like old flame Sakura-Tribe Scout can set up T3s (and I had SB Scout during Nadu/Storm season for this reason) but those aren’t maindeckable either.

The Mycosynth Gardens can upgrade you to a double Amulet hand (and here you do need the help) - but you still need more ramp to make that leap. Lotus Field closes that gap in the double Amulet hands and relieves some pressure on the single Amulet hands; having a large number of total Grazer/Azusa + Pact + Zenith maximizes your odds of an immediate combo once Saga pops off.

Since it’s so hard to count to six, you can try to set your sights lower. Analyst’s staggered cost is ideal here and is actually what made me embrace it initially (though I rarely had the T1 Saga T2 Analyst T3 activate line in practice). Scapeshift just costs 4 - but Saga will leave you down a land before you get there which makes you want Vestige specifically (T1 Saga, T2 G source, T3 Vestige sets up Shift for double Lotus to jump to 6 if you have another threat).

Maxing on Pact for Grazer/Azusa helps you have enough ways to jump up on mana on the turn Saga pops off - but having to go through multiple Pacts (or even the first sometimes) means you are effectively all-in on winning that turn so you need a combination of threats to go off.

The most realistic ways to go off on T3 with a T1 Saga involve Amulet and Grazer - the other cards that can branch into T3 wins by themselves - so these aren’t separate draws that are enabled by T1 Saga. The Saga-specific helpers don’t boost the draws that lead on Amulet or Grazer instead. The one real exception is Gardens for the natural Amulet nut draws - but with more appealing lands than ever and a lower average land count, it’s hard to pack in a bunch of Gardens. Castle Garenbrig and Gemstone Caverns can boost Saga while also helping the T1 Grazer draws but they have the same space issues.

If these draws need more to come together - and you plan on shaving/cutting Saga OTD or always in many matchups - it’s tempting to give up on that goal and not plan on T1 Saga unless it comes together in a happy accident.

With Analyst entering the picture as a combo piece, the allure of T1 Saga T2 Analyst -> go off T3 (with Saga even binning itself to come right back) is strong but I haven’t found a list that can repay the full commitment this requires yet.

Other Shortcuts

Some lands don’t directly combo with Amulet/Grazer but help this goal in unique ways. Castle Garenbrig gives you a down-payment on ramp, reducing the goal to 2GG + Castle on the combo turn - the double green cost is still an issue but this makes some lines safer (T1 Grazer T2 Dryad can now T3 with Castle even if Dryad dies on sight) and others possible (T1 Saga T2 Castle, T3 Lotus is six by itself; T1 Saga/Amulet T2 Castle T3 Pact for Azusa -> double bounceland now gets you to six).

Gemstone Caverns moves your whole schedule forward by a turn - the manual T3 [big ramp] -> T4 Titan lines that are often too slow are now T3 Titans, you can T1 Rumble/Explore, any ramp sets up T2 Ring (an order of magnitude better than T3 Ring), and your T1 Saga hands can get some value from Saga or be one step closer to Titan.

So:

T1 Amulet - Azusa/Dryad, Gardens, Pact, Lotus

T1 Grazer - Azusa/Dryad, Spelunking, (Pact)

T1 Saga - Azusa, Gardens, Pact, Lotus

All - Castle, Caverns, (Explore/Rumble), bouncelands

Mulligans - Principles

Mulligans with Amulet are more of a pseudoscience than an art. There are competing pressures for card quantity and card quality and in the dark it’s hard to know how aggressively you should search for a nut draw.

Your goal is to present a Turn 3 Primeval Titan, ideally enhanced by Amulet/Spelunking (or Dryad etc). This benchmark has shifted over the years and so have the parameters for an acceptable average hand. In pre-WAR/MH1 Modern, a Turn 4 Titan on the play was usually fine if the hand had something else to recommend it; today, that’s a poor prospect against most decks. Dryad complicates that since Dryad into Titan translates into a virtual/actual kill but this is still too slow on the draw and you can expect better from the first mulligan on the play.

That baseline matters because a lot of your marginal hands produce a Turn 4 Titan and your mulligan strategy has to adapt if that’s unacceptable against the field at large. When Amulet was squeezed out of the format by faster decks, the problem wasn’t that its best draws weren’t good enough - it’s that these average draws no longer got it done. Against boomer Jund or UW Control (before it picked up any good cards) you could happily keep slow and land-heavy but resilient hands that wouldn’t cut it elsewhere; now, even the grindy matchups force you to participate in the game early.

The greater density of utility lands makes some of these slower hands keepable - if Boseiju or Cavern of Souls is especially important in a matchup, natural access to it in your opener is a big selling point. Urza’s Saga broadens this range of hands, enabling faster kills while also strengthening slower draws. A Dryad into Titan hand that also has Valakut is easier to justify unless speed matters most. High-impact sideboard cards like Force of Vigor can salvage a hand accordingly.

How keen should you be to chase the nut draw? The key principle here is that most hands are missing some ingredient of it - it’s hard to have Amulet(/Grazer), another ramp spell, a Titan/Pact, and a bounceland all at once. This is part of why the London Mulligan didn’t benefit Amulet as much as other linear decks that rely on a single card or package (Hammer) or multiple cards with a flat value (Tron - you need your three Urza lands but they are interchangeable beyond their names). You find your most important card more often but it still needs other pieces to work - and the non-Amulet hands care about card quantity as well as card quality.

You have to weigh up how essential that missing piece is, how much time you have to find it, and how easy it will be to find. You can group hands according to what they are missing:

No Amulet: If your hand needs exactly Amulet to improve (e.g. you have a land-light hand that can’t work towards Titan manually), your odds are poor - you have no way to find it, few copies (even counting Urza’s Saga as a valid Turn 1 draw), and Amulet can be time-sensitive in how it enables your fast draws.

Amulet but no other ramp: Many hands have Amulet and a bounceland but no other ramp to use with them to jump towards your threat. These hands tend to be safe keeps - with Amulet any of Azusa/Dryad/Grazer/Explore, a Pact for one of those creatures, another Amulet, or an immediately topdecked Saga/Gardens should get you to an enhanced Titan on time.

No bounceland: Hands that have Amulet but no bounceland can have polarized outcomes - you either flounder around doing nothing or find the bounceland and pop off. Improving your odds with these hands is a big reason to play a high bounceland count. In hands that have Saga + Amulet but no bounceland, Saga -> Expedition Map -> bounceland is a useful insurance policy that lets you benefit from drawing the bounceland or any of the outs in the ‘no other ramp’ category above.

No payoff: The threat count is one of the deck’s main bottlenecks but you only need the threat on the turn you ‘go off’ so you have several turns to find it and with enough time/mana you can add Tolaria West for Pact to that total. Urza’s Saga and Dryad + Valakut can each count as a threat in the right context but in the dark you can’t rely on this being one of those.

Let’s take an extreme example:

(courtesy of Bob49) G1 OTD, no matchup info

This hand literally can’t do anything yet - but any land that isn’t another bounceland (~22 outs) lets you threaten a kill (with redundancy on both Amulet and a payoff) within a turn or two, especially if it’s an untapped land (~18 outs) and you can probably afford to miss for a turn or even two. I’m very tempted to keep this on 7 and would certainly keep it on 6.

The One Ring makes it much easier to have a keepable hand that produces a high-impact play early enough from a low base of resources - Grazer into Turn 3 Ring is a fine hand against much of the format and asks a lot less of you than the usual Amulet Titan contraption.

Going Slow

When should you settle for the slower hands? This is harder here than with many other decks - but it’s a good problem to have. A key strength of Amulet from the start is that its slower hands do meaningfully develop before you pop off, unlike some pure combo decks that can’t accomplish anything until/unless they find their namesake card. I’ve devoted a section here to all the ways you can try to speed up your average draw when that matters but this involves hard tradeoffs and that’s not always the priority - thankfully, Amulet’s structural advantages in the slower games means those can mostly take care of themselves.

The most explosive hands can also be the most vulnerable as the nut draws require a lot of moving parts - a timely Thoughtseize on an enabler or Counterspell on your combo turn can leave you aimlessly spinning your wheels. Many less explosive hands have more room for redundancy on their pieces, making them more resilient. The best hands are a blend of both:

Forest, Saga, bounceland, Amulet, Pact, Ring, Grazer

Uninterrupted this hand has a clean Turn 3 kill but losing any one piece still leaves you with a hand that does something powerful early and a lot of outs to reassemble the nut draw.

Forest, Forest, bounceland, Amulet, Pact, Pact, Titan

By contrast, this hand has a clear pressure point - if you don’t stick Amulet, you aren’t on track to do much of anything. The risk there is heavily context-dependent - Thoughtseize is a much bigger concern on the draw, for example. You’ll still keep hands like this most of the time but the downside risk is clear.

Forest, Boseiju, Woodland, bounceland, Explore, Ring, Spelunking

This hand lacks explosive potential but is perfect for any grindy matchup.

The strength of individual SB cards can vary heavily - Force of Vigor is game-ending against some of your hands but useless against others - and at a higher level the cards and tactics that beat your most explosive draws can be much less effective against these slower, more normalized hands. Having the nut draws in your range complements the normal draws and vice versa.

Postboard, most matchups inherently become more grindy as the quantity and quality of relevant interaction in Villain’s deck both improve. Your range of acceptable hands gets much wider as the slower but more resilient hands become more appealing and you (hopefully!) add sideboard cards that can become their own incentive to keep a hand.

See Pete Husisian’s How To Keep Awful Titan Hands for another look at this dynamic.

Learning From Scams

When Scam was Modern’s supervillain, that matchup offered an extreme example of these principles. Scam had a lot of disruption that attacked from every angle - heavy discard via Thoughtseize and Grief, removal, Blood Moon/Magus of the Moon, and ways to blow up Amulet - as well as a fast clock. Any hand was weak to at least something and there was no way to know how well your hand would line up against theirs - but, if you chose to mulligan, your new hand would have the same problems with fewer cards to work with! There was no silver bullet for the matchup - and, even if there were, you couldn't mull for it as it would get sniped from your hand too often.

As a result, my mulligan strategy against Scam was to not focus on any one card in my deck and instead increase the density of relevant cards to maximize my odds of having/rebuilding a functional draw after their barrage of disruption. I would gladly keep hands that looked mediocre in the abstract and unable to keep up with the consensus best deck in the format - only to consistently beat strong hands in what looked like a stroke of luck.

This was a useful test of mental game too. Some hands would line up poorly against theirs; slow draws might die on Turn 3 to scammed Fury. Blood Moon still stole games on its own. Recovering from discard relied on overt variance - you could fill your deck with good hits and still miss. The games were swingy and often felt beyond your control but if you accepted that premise the battle was already lost.

Hand Assessment + Sequencing

Let’s work through some examples - these predate MH3 but the principles here still apply.

(Simic Growth Chamber, Golgari Rot Farm, Tolaria West, Boseiju, Amulet, Grazer, Titan)

This is a strong hand on course for a good Turn 4 Titan but we can speed that up:

Turn 1: Boseiju, Amulet

Turn 2: Untap and tap Tolaria West (U), cast Grazer putting in SGC (UUG), pick up and Transmute Tolaria West for Summoner’s Pact

Next turn playing a bounceland will get you to 5 mana and Pact can find another Grazer or Azusa to make that final jump to 6 for Titan.

We can reverse this (Turn 1 Grazer putting in TWest, Turn 2 use Boseiju to cast Amulet and play SGC -> Transmute) if you need Grazer as a Turn 1 blocker or are worried about Prismatic Ending etc hitting Amulet.

The key here is finding this way to Transmute early but this doesn’t have to be for Pact - against a Counterspell deck in a slower game you can find Cavern of Souls and use it to protect a Turn 4 Titan instead.

(Ravioli, a mischievous lil’ guy with a cute white tummy; Breeding Pool, Misty Rainforest, Tolaria West, Selesnya Sanctuary, Amulet, Azusa, Dryad)

This hand doesn’t have a threat yet but Azusa alone gives you enough mana to Transmute Tolaria West for Summoner’s Pact and cast Titan on Turn 3, with Dryad as a useful backup.

This is a much trickier one - you’re only missing a payoff but don’t even have an indirect route to that or another redeeming feature for the hand. In a matchup that’s just about speed I would keep this as you have the ability to kill quickly if you hit the threat but that is a real bottleneck here.

(Misty Rainforest, Boseiju, Selesnya Sanctuary, Simic Growth Chamber, Azusa, Dryad, Summoner’s Pact)

This is a Turn 4 Titan hand with little room to improve unless you draw Grazer/Amulet immediately (which makes the hand strong) and even in a matchup where Boseiju is crucial, the other lands in this hand make it hard to use it or hold it up while still developing your board. I’d mulligan this in the dark or against most known matchups.

(G1 OTD, no info)

(Forest, Tolaria West, Boseiju, Boros Garrison, Simic Growth Chamber, Explore, Dryad)

This hand lacks a threat and couldn’t deploy it quickly anyway - but you have good lands, an eventual route to a threat via transmute, and Explore as a wildcard. A hand like this illustrates my issue with Explore - it doesn’t make you meaningfully faster here, it’s hard to evaluate the strength of that wildcard, and a single ‘cycle’ doesn’t get you much closer to what you’re missing. I’m more inclined than most to keep hands like this on the play but this is a mulligan on the draw without confirmation that you’re against a slow deck.

(Urza’s Saga, 2 Valakut, Forest, Simic Growth Chamber, Arboreal Grazer, Summoner’s Pact)

With Turn 1 Saga (itself or via Grazer) finding Amulet, this hand is just one piece away from Turn 3 Titan - and Pact being the payoff means can be more flexible about what that piece is. Any Amulet/Azusa/Titan/Pact gets you over the line.

There are more options - Turn 1 Grazer -> Saga lets you activate Saga on Turn 2 + 3 if you find an untapped land, with Pact in the chamber for the right moment. A secret third thing appears when you see that this is a land-heavy hand with double Valakut where Dryad might represent a serious threat. Turn 1 Grazer -> Valakut, Turn 2 Pact for Dryad (assuming they can’t kill Dryad or after drawing a green source), lets you start triggering both Valakuts on T3 with any other land. As with many of these forward-looking lines you don’t have the resources to embrace this yet but it’s worth being aware of these options depending on what the opponent is doing and what you draw over time.

(Saga, Saga, Gardens, Forest, Boseiju, Growth Chamber, Azusa)

An odd hand that once again has everything except a threat. This hand will make enough mana that indirect threats like Tolaria West can add to the count and the first/second Saga can fetch Map to solve that problem if everything else is in place. A naturally drawn Amulet or Grazer would also improve the hand, giving you more than enough outs to roll the dice. If Saga is a relevant threat or Boseiju a relevant answer in the matchup, the hand becomes better still. It’s harder for the second Saga to have enough time to pop off on the draw but I’m keeping regardless.

(2 Saga, Gardens, Misty Rainforest, Selesnya Sanctuary, Dryad, Summoner’s Pact)

This is the exact hand that scared some away from Dryad entirely in the all-in lists: T1 Saga, T2 Gardens, T3 float + find Amulet + copy means that bounceland -> Dryad -> bounceland only gets you to five mana (whereas any other ramp spell from Grazer/Explore/Azusa would get you there). However, you have so many copies of those combined (and any Amulet/Pact/Titan works too) that this worry is overblown and doesn’t shake my faith in this otherwise outstanding hand at all. If the opponent can contain your explosive start, double Saga lets you happily sign up for a grindy game.

(Sunhome, Saga, Misty Rainforest, Selesnya Sanctuary, Expedition Map, Azusa, Summoner’s Pact)

This hand appears to fit the standards set out above - a baseline of T3 Azusa -> T4 Titan with some flexibility via Map, and T1 Saga can set up T3 Titan with any other ramp spell/Pact/Titan. This T1 Saga line has fewer outs than normal - drawing another Pact doesn’t work since we can’t pay for both in one turn and relying on Azusa here is dangerous in the face of removal - and as always these Saga lines are less appealing on the draw. I’d still keep this on the play but would agonize on the draw.

Puzzles

This document gives dozens of puzzles that cover common and uncommon situations to sink your teeth into. I’ll go through a worked example of my own here; send me more good puzzles if you have them!

We know Villain has a Boggart Harbinger that will make Snoop lethal if they untap (fetching Kiki-Jiki to let Snoop copy itself infinitely and then copying Harbinger to find Sling-Gang Lieutenant to sacrifice the tapped Snoops). We have to win or neutralize that threat this turn.

Try this for yourself first without reading further.

Let’s look at our mana and land drop constraints first. Gruul Turf as our land drop gets us to 4, each Grazer or Azusa gets us +1, so we can make 6 now. We can use Pact for another Grazer to get to 6 without tapping Stronghold if we decide that makes our eventual Titan choices better. So one approach:

– Land (4), Azusa (5), Grazer (6), Pact for Grazer (6 with untapped Stronghold), leaving Gruul Turf in play and picking up Forest

– Pact for Titan and cast it, get Valakut + Crumbling Vestige (make W). Activate Stronghold leaving Vestige untapped

– Attack trigger fetches two green sources (say bounceland + Forest bouncing Vestige)

– Cast Dryad postcombat, use its extra land drop to replay Forest and trigger Valakut killing Snoop

Board: Turf, Stronghold, Valakut, bounceland, 2 Forest, giving you 8 mana including quad G to pay for both Pacts even if Dryad dies

Alternatively:

– Land (4), Azusa (5), Grazer (6), leaving Gruul Turf in play and picking up Forest

– Pact for Titan and cast it, get Boros Garrison + Vesuva copying Stronghold, give Titan haste + bounce Vesuva

– Attack trigger gets Valakut + bounceland, bounce Stronghold

– Cast Dryad postcombat, use its extra land drop to replay Forest

– Pact for Grazer and put in Vesuva copying Valakut, getting two triggers and killing Snoop

This leaves you with an extra total mana, the same green mana coverage, and a second Valakut.

Can we do better? Blood Moon is unlikely given their plays so far (missed land drop and no non-Cavern lands, top card is known) but it would beat these lines and if we can play around it at no cost we should. A more unusual sequence gets us there:

– Land (4), Grazer (5), Pact for Grazer (6), leaving Gruul Turf in play and picking up Stronghold

– Pact for Titan and cast it, get Crumbling Vestige (make G) and Selesnya Sanctuary picking up Turf

– Use the G and Sanctuary to cast Azusa. Float C from Vestige and use the first extra land drop to play Turf, picking up Vestige

– Use Vestige’s mana and Turf to cast Dryad

– With Azusa’s remaining land drop and Dryad we have two land drops - we use these to play Vestige (make W, tap for R with Dryad) and Stronghold, giving Titan haste

– Attack trigger finds Valakut + Simic Growth Chamber, triggering Valakut twice and killing Snoop; pick up Vestige

– Postcombat, tap Valakut for U (with Dryad) and Chamber to transmute Tolaria West for Boseiju

Board: Turf, Sanctuary, Chamber, Valakut, Stronghold, Forest

Against Blood Moon you can Channel Boseiju for G (discounted by Azusa) in response to your Pact triggers and still have 4GGGG to pay for Pact.

And now a truly fiendish puzzle:

(You are resolving Scapeshift for 3 vs Boros Energy, with two Amulets and no mana floating. Your hand is 2 bouncelands, Lotus Field, Grazer; your library has 1 TWest, 1 Analyst/0 Lumra, 0 Cultivator Colossus. If their one card is blank you have the usual easy loop; can you beat a Thraben Charm?)

You will quickly run into obstacles if you pursue any conventional line - but there’s a glimmer of hope if you’re able to be truly creative. I did not see this while costreaming and definitely would not have seen this in a tournament setting but it’s a great puzzle to tackle as an exercise.

…

Scapeshift for 3 finds:

TWest, SGC, Mirrorpool bouncing TWest (UU + UUGG + C, leave Pool untapped)

Cast Grazer (UUUUGC), put in Lotus (4U 7G C) sacrificing Lotus + SGC

Transmute for Pact (U 7G C)

Cast Pact and copy with Pool (U 5G), find two Titans

Cast Titan 1 (none floating), find 2x Vestige (GG CCCC)

Cast Titan 2, find Lotus + Hanweir, haste both and leave Lotus untapped (sac two Vestiges)

IF: they Thraben Charm to kill a Titan pre-combat

Titan attacks, find Vesuva (Lotus) and Deeps (Pool); Lotus makes 6G, use 4G + C from Pool to copy Titan (GG floating, Lotus untapped, new Lotus sac trigger on stack)

Titan Copy ETB gets Woodland + SGC; delirium from Shift + Pact + land + dead Titan)

Respond to Amulet triggers for Woodland by copying Mirrorpool (GG + GGUU from SGC, Lotus untapped -> tap Woodland-Pool for C and then use it to copy Titan again, U floating); bounce + Lotus triggers on stack

Titan Copy 2 ETB gets Otawara + X; bounce Otawara + use it on Ajani, sac X + Hanweir

You have 2 Lotus + SGC in play next turn to pay for 2 Pacts

Titan attacking now + 2 Titans on defense, so probable lethal next turn + good blocks

You die to 2nd Ajani/Bombardment/most removal

Matchups

Boros Energy

‘Fast combo deck that doesn’t care about their removal’ is the ideal formula for a good Energy matchup and Amulet mostly lives up to that. The best Boros draws beat the board in any fair game and have enough removal/reach to punch through blockers and overwhelm efforts to stabilize. Guide of Souls makes big ground blockers even worse, and they can trivially go wide around any one thing. Buying time with classics like Khalni Garden/Radiant Fountain is still welcome but their best draws deal massive amounts of damage; Grazer is excellent as ever but only a temporary blocker. A naked Primeval Titan will die on sight just before you die too. Their damage output is usually face-up with a few variables (maybe an extra 3 from Phlage/Bolt or extra 2 from Guide of Souls etc) but Bombardment can win games in spots no other card would and a flipped Ajani can halve their clock.

The Analyst package (and now the Shift package too) shines here, beating any amount of cats and dogs and bolts as long as you have the pieces in place. In general, creature combo decks struggle against Energy while fast, spell-based combo decks shine and the Shift kill moves the deck in that direction. Dryad + Valakut can outpace their lifegain and clean up their board (though if you need several triggers for Phlage or a Guide of Souls that buffed itself you may struggle to do this often and early enough). Four toughness beats Bolt or Phlage but is still easy pickings for Ajani or a Discharge that they can safely save for it, making its output polarized and unpredictable.

Static Prison gives them cheap, all-purpose interaction that shares all the weaknesses of Leyline Binding but can stunt your development if you let it catch Amulet - consider holding Amulet until you can get an immediate return from it if your hand allows. Thraben Charm is a common 1-2 of MD and all modes can be lethal (see the last entry in the puzzle section!).

During and after Nadu summer, Blood Moon was a common maindeck card that was squeezed out as the mirror became the most important matchup. Now, maindeck Moon is rare unless that list explicitly targets Amulet and targeted land destruction like Molten Rain is the most common anti-ramp plan alongside cards like Obsidian Charmaw aimed squarely at Eldrazi. I’d still board in anti-Moon hedges like Force of Vigor in the dark as they can still find useful targets like Static Prison/Goblin Bombardment/Fable.

You will catch some splash damage from hate aimed at other combo (mostly Storm - Damping Sphere, Orim’s Chant) or big mana (also Damping Sphere, Charmaw/Phantom, Blood Moon). Expect some extra pressure on Amulet and Saga from stuff like Wear/Tear. Orim’s Chant in particular is brutal for all-in Pact or Scapeshift lines so baiting that or sniffing it out is key if your draw is reliant on those. Jeskai over Boros means Consign - if you see blue lands, react accordingly.

Boros builds a board with a bunch of small creatures that work well together so cheap mass removal can buy a lot of time. Your choice of Fire Magic/Pyroclasm/Firespout depends on how much you value instant speed, efficiency, and killing 3 toughness creatures (Voice of Victory or anything buffed by Guide of Souls)

More access to Boseiju (+ basic Forest via Generous Ent) is a nice hedge against Moon as well as Static Prison, Damping Sphere etc; Force of Vigor is the most reliable Moon answer and the most efficient answer to these cards under pressure (or the only answer when they have multiple hate cards).

UBx Frog

UB Frog has inherited UR Murktide’s role as the go-to blue tempo deck. It boasts the same spread of blue interaction that made the UR Murktide matchup so tricky for years as well as the best cheap threat from MH3 and the hated Magus of the Moon shifted into a colour that can defend it easily - a recipe for a nightmare matchup.

If you have struggled against UR Murktide for the last few years, there are some notable differences in this matchup - and not all negative!

– Ragavan/Dragon’s Rage Channeler let UR deploy a fast clock on the first turn and spend the next few turns backing it up; at two mana, Orcish Bowmasters is a more mopey threat and Psychic Frog is a bigger commitment on their turn. A Turn 2 Frog OTP is still a perfect start but OTD a Turn 2 Frog against a fast draw might require taking (some) shields down for our big turn.

– Winning on the board via Titan or Dryad was more important before Woodland and Analyst loops added a form of inevitability, and UR could beat that board more easily via Unholy Heat; Fatal Push is much worse vs Colossal Dreadmaw.

– The alternate threats with good stats were safer bets against UR because most were only trumped by Murktide; now, Frog beats the cards that cost 2x/3x as much mana with enough resources/time and they still have some mix of Murktide and Oculus to go over the top so trying to stabilize with some big ground blocker is pointless. Endurance’s GY hate is still sometimes useful against UB (especially the GY-heavy Unearth/Oculus lists) but the body is much worse.

– Bauble + surveil triggers from DRC + additional filtering allowed UR to find specific cards more quickly.

Many early UB lists had 3-4 MD Harbinger which felt like a hate crime; now it’s usually ‘just’ a SB card but that threat still looms over every game. There’s no equivalent of Roxanne vs Magus of the Moon (a generally strong threat that answers a specific problem) here and beating their main threats with your backup ones is hard so you have to find other solutions - and spells can run into the wall of Counterspell, Subtlety, and so on. Luckily, the existing toolbox has an out - Otawara lets you bounce Harbinger for a turn, and Tolaria West (/Expedition Map) finds Otawara, all without casting a spell. Many SBs feature an extra Otawara to give you this out more often naturally (and again if the first copy is gone in a longer game). Your other toolboxes require more exotic solutions - the Colossal Skyturtle in many SBs gives Summoner’s Pact this same flexibility, though Pacting for a threat is so risky against these blue decks that it’s the first cut there for most, Pact giving an indirect answer to your nemesis redeems it a little (and without that usual risk - they have to fight over Pact itself and if they do you haven’t wasted any mana now or later).

The now oft-maligned Green Sun’s Zenith shines as a payoff here that can be cast off a single Forest and doesn’t require the game-losing risk of Pact, Shift etc; if you SB in some cheap fair threats, Zenith can double down on those. Urza’s Saga is a tempting fallback plan against their wall of permission and is less risky against Harbinger now.

That wall of reactive cards has some holes. They can, as Garfield intended, counter target spell - but all of its backup stars come with terms and conditions. Spell Pierce, Spell Snare, Force of Negation, and Subtlety (and SB Consign) each only hit a subset of spells; Subtlety and Sink into Stupor are only temporary answers. A spread of threats that makes each of their answers live is often worse than redundancy on the same type of threat that can force through the gaps in a particular spread of cards.

People often suggest leaning hard on Cavern of Souls again or reviving cards like Veil of Summer against Frog but Cavern especially is surprisingly narrow - it doesn’t protect Pact/Zenith/Shift from anything and can’t protect Titan from Subtlety/Consign so it mostly just wins the exact Titan vs Counterspell matchup. Mistrise Village is more flexible but at a very steep cost - in the harder games, where you have to beat interaction while under pressure, a two mana tax is far too much. Defense Grid remains the best catch-all against their reactive cards (including Consign to Memory if Grid dodged it) but doesn’t address the Harbinger issue or the proactive disruption (Thoughtseize) + threats draws in general. I’ve liked Mystical Dispute in heavy blue lists as a way to contest the blue threats (including Harbinger!) that is also great at helping your threats in stack battles.

The Oculus variant (common before the Breach ban, now out of favour) goes hard on Oculus with Unearth and more cards like Thought Scour that fill the graveyard quickly. Unearth can force Harbinger through cards like Dispute/Dismember (or give more/faster access to it off self-mill) so you have to respect it more; Oculus is generally a less scary threat than Murktide as it’s harder to cast it while holding up expensive interaction; if Villain is doing nothing for a while, it’s possible their hand is one or more Oculus and reactive cards they can’t get out of their hand to reach that six card threshold. Creature removal in general is stronger against this version - Dismember usually won’t hit Frog but can tag Harbinger or stop Oculus getting out of control. Graveyard hate is much better here than against stock Frog but there’s a tradeoff between nuking their whole graveyard in a specific timing window that lets them rebuild quickly vs more surgical hate that can be overwhelmed manually by Oculus/Murktide.

Many desperate Titan players have turned to a whole menagerie of jolly green giants to fight fair, from Hexdrinker as a cheap but lethal Zenith target all the way up the curve to the usual big idiots. These all have their moments but be honest with yourself about how often any of these will actually win a fair game against Frog or Murktide/Oculus - ideally you want your backup threats to have fine stats in fair games but still contribute to your main plan, ala Lumra. The most convincing ‘plan’ I’ve seen is SB Six alongside repeatable bounce like Aether Spellbomb and Seal of Removal.

Some mix of the following cards/plans is reasonable:

Protection: Mystical Dispute, Veil of Summer, Defense Grid, Pact of Negation

Removal: Dismember, Otawara #2, Colossal Skyturtle, Aether Spellbomb/Seal of Removal

Threats: Hexdrinker, Keen-Eyed Curator, Six, Tireless Tracker, Endurance, Shifting Ceratops, Fecund Greenshell ; Ghost Vacuum, Shifting Woodland, Cavern of Souls, Dryad/Valakut, Analyst

Prowess

Prowess has fallen off since its post-Tarkir heyday but remains the best aggro deck after Energy. The initial lists were a very easy matchup but the mass adoption of 4 Mutagenic Growth + some # of Violent Urge lets them goldfish on Turn 3 with impressive consistency.

Game 1 is a pure race where your few decisions involve being comfortable with including the unknowns in your combat math - if they have Slickshot and one Growth but not two, if this DRC trigger mills a Lava Dart, and so on. Grazer is often your best card (to the extent that being able to Zenith for Grazer was a big argument for Zenith to me at Prowess’ peak) as soaking up at least 3 damage while ramping swings a lot of races and helps to break serve against their best draws (including the Slickshot or Violent Urge turns).

Post-SB games are harder because they have a lot of interaction if they want it - up to 4 Consign and some Unholy Heat and/or Spell Pierce - and it’s not obvious how highly they will value those in their SB mapping and gameplay. Their best cardflow tools like Expressive Iteration are slow here (and some of the natural cuts if they want to load up on these cards) and they have to spend cards to keep Prowess/Cutter triggers coming so they can’t afford to be overly reactive. Those cards are all as cheap as you can get but the whole point of Prowess is to maximize its small amount of mana every turn so holding up unused mana is a real cost - and a sign of what they might be holding.

The only sweeper I like here is Firespout is 3 damage is so much more than 2 against DRC (and any spell + Swiftspear or Cutter token). I think Dismember probably isn’t worth it unless you know they have a lot of Violent Urges. Lifegain is at its best here (Radiant Fountain/Adventurer’s Inn or extra Caves for Spelunking) and graveyard hate is surprisingly good vs DRC/Urge/Heat (narrow hate like Tormod’s Crypt is too marginal but cards like Bog/Pit/SGL are nice and Endurance is excellent). Reach and >3 toughness is a good combination - Six isn’t necessary for its grindy potential here but its stats + buying back Grazer (or a Consigned Amulet etc) can buy a lot of time.

Some light splashes are reasonably common - white for Prismatic Ending and Wear/Tear, black for Thoughtseize.

Eldrazi Ramp

A simple and pretty good matchup, especially pre-SB: their nut draws have a much lower ceiling and their main interaction (Kozilek’s Command, various Eldrazi triggers) misses most important pieces like Amulet. The green lists are remarkably good at casting Turn 4/5 Emrakul, the Promised End which ends the game on the spot so you are on a real deadline but your average draw is faster and stronger.

Eldrazi Tron was briefly back in vogue thanks to Ugin, Eye of the Storms but the broad strokes are familiar - Karn and Thought-Knot Seer are scary, Ugin generally isn’t unless you have to expose Spelunking or a slow Titan, Boseiju is premium.

A scarier trend is the RG list with Herigast to chain into Emrakul - less consistent and stable but with a higher ceiling and often SB Magus of the Moon.

Sowing Mycospawn usually represents +2 mana next turn but be aware of Bojuka Bog or (less often) Ghost Quarter.

If you want to buy equity against these decks, the single best card is Consign to Memory. Force of Vigor or similar effects can help vs versions that overload on SB artifacts; Collector Ouphe is strong against Tron and fine against the green lists between Talisman, Karn bullets, and SB Stone Brain.

Older MTGO lists had SB Force of Vigor which is terrifying but thankfully not popular atm; literal Stone Rain is common for mirrors and can punish slow bounceland starts or narrow Pact lines.

Broodscale

The Broodscale combo is fast and consistent against decks with ~no removal and that kind of creature combo is generally tough for Amulet but the saving grace here is that the Blade of the Bloodchief half (as well as a lot of the support cards like Urza’s Saga) is an artifact that you can tag with Boseiju G1 and hit with Collector Ouphe and Force of Vigor post-SB. Meanwhile they lack relevant interaction for your best draws (barring the one Haywire Mite that still shows up a lot via Saga and Stirrings/Rumble or a timely Kozilek’s Command against an Analyst line) so you will often win the pure races.

The adoption of Emrakul, the Promised End as an endgame means you can’t turtle up indefinitely behind a wall of Boseijus etc. Double Fleshraker can also deal lethal out of nowhere so even a high-ish life total isn’t necessarily safe.

Naturalizes and Dismember are nice pickups but you can remain focused on going off and going fast; the sweepers look tempting against Fleshraker and Eldrazi Spawn generally but again I think it’s hard to get more than a virtual one-for-one and at a steep price. Consign is excellent as you’d expect.

UBx Goryo

The Goryo recipe is very scary for Amulet - a fast combo backed up by proactive (Thoughtseize) and reactive (Consign, Subtlety and/or Solitude, Force of Negation) disruption. In practice they are mostly all-in on the combo here - a Frog on its own is unlikely to go the distance - and that combo has a lot of assembly required so you often have more time and equity than you ‘should’. Adjust their range accordingly - if they aren’t going off or aggressively churning through cards, their hand has to be something worth thinking about - but don’t be too pessimistic.

The current stock list from Goryo expert TrueHero is Grixis with Looting + Fable as extra enablers and Sin, Spira’s Punishment as a payoff; this take will combo more consistently (especially on T3 with one-mana Looting setting up Goryo’s Vengeance or an in-play Emperor of Bones) but often to less effect (you can shrug off Sin unless it’s bringing back an Atraxa/Griselbrand that would be a lethal Goryo’s hit anyway). Not having to care about Solitude lets you maximize your Titan turns but note MD Consign as the way to keep their legend around (or foil your plans if you walk into it).

Graveyard hate is the priority here. Bog/Pit is fine but there’s a big premium on instant-speed hate (which can include those lands via Urza’s Cave or Elvish Reclaimer). For your other toolboxes, Soul-Guide Lantern/Ghost Vacuum etc and Keen-Eyed Curator (if high on Zenith) are the best in class; Endurance is a natural fallback here but its weakness to both discard and Consign is a problem. Vexing Bauble is a useful tool especially against lists with Solitude/Ephemerate or a lot of Force + Subtlety.

As is often the case, I don’t like pure value cards like Tracker here but flexible value cards that also have combo applications like Six are worth it. I would shy away from fighting over the setup creatures with Dismember but similar effects with a buyout like Aether Spellbomb/Otawara or more flexibility like Into the Flood Maw (one of the few good Ashiok answers, if they pick that up) are fine. Counters are inherently hit-or-miss here but I’d bring in Dispute if I had it (expecting to burn it on a Tainted Indulgence or similar somewhat often).

Ruby Storm

Storm is back and more functional than ever! Back in the day Gifts Storm was the perfect example of a tough matchup on paper - a fast, redundant combo deck with key enablers you couldn’t kill and some interaction via Remand etc - but their deck misfired a lot and a timely Dismember for Baral or similar post-SB stole a lot of games. Ruby Storm implements that recipe for the Modern Horizons era with much greater consistency and is a nightmare matchup as a result.

Game 1 is a pure race - win the die roll and try to kill on Turn 3, and mulligan aggressively for a hand that can if you know the matchup. Most hands that ‘just’ make a fast Titan aren’t enough - without immediate kills via Dryad or a follow-up Analyst loop you can easily die anyway even if you can hold up Boseiju/Otawara. The quick Ring hands that are fine vs any non-combo decks fail here too - Ring does nothing (they will eventually Wish for a win con that beats it after seeing their whole deck) and is an easy cut in SBing.

All you can do is pick how much you want to care about Storm and choose your SB cards accordingly. Graveyard hate looks good as most of their big turns officially lock up a win with Past in Flames/Underworld Breach but with enough time they can simply go off through that (saving a Ritual in hand) and a flipped Ral ultimate beats it so treat this as a delaying tactic at best.

When all of the ‘Medallion effects’ were creatures, targeting those made sense. Now, Ral has a good chance of flipping with another spell in response to Dismember and the cards that might kill Ral won’t hit Ruby Medallion. We have some natural answers to Medallion via Boseiju but giving them a land with that means they can often just keep going (and you are dead to the next enabler); Force of Vigor is a more effective answer but that’s still spending two cards to kill an enabler half of the time and crossing your fingers that this is enough.

Permanent hate is effective to a point. Each Storm splash brings its own answers here - White has Static Prison, Green has Nature’s Claim, Blue has Into the Flood Maw (/Flame of Anor). The first two are exploitable - Claim with ‘other’ hate like Magebane Lizard, Prison with Boseiju/FOV - but blue bounce is always a problem. These hate cards vary widely in how they attack Storm, how easy they are to cast, and how useful they are elsewhere:

– Magebane Lizard is the most narrow but the hardest to remove - though if they have the right removal (and the life to spare) it does let them dig for it with Reckless Impulse/Glimpse the Impossible effects. Red is the secondary/tertiary colour already so it’s an easier splash card than others but needing that coloured mana is still a real cost.

– Soulless Jailer shuts off those as well as Ral’s ultimate and Past in Flames/Breach but does let them Wish for an answer; it also shuts off your Analyst loops but this tension is overrated; having two types makes it easier to ‘restore’ with Woodland in the weird long games that these hate cards can create; it has the most uses elsewhere (Cascade but also Goryo/Reanimator, some creature combo like Yawgmoth, some other graveyard-centric decks)

– Trinisphere was the go-to hate from various ramp decks in the early days of MH3 and has the biggest immediate effect on the game - they will struggle to function normally and find/cast answers, and even if they Wrenn’s Resolve into an answer that will take a lot to cast next turn - but requires ramp to be castable fast enough OTD.

– Deafening Silence is potent and cheap but requires a manabase overhaul to be castable at all (and even then it’s not reliable).

Don’t underrate the mana issues here - literal Silence is maybe the best option against Storm (as well as similar combo decks and some blue decks) but just costing W is a tough sell. There’s no card on this list that ticks all the boxes so the easiest path is to pretend Storm doesn’t exist or use the matchup as a tiebreaker for other cards you might want anyway - with Storm at a relatively low ebb for now, this is a fine gamble.

They *could* be a Blood Moon/Magus of the Moon deck too - stock lists don’t have them now but they have done before and will again; you have some complaint equity if you get Mooned by Storm but can’t be totally blindsided by it.

Blue Belcher

The combo deck of the hour and the natural outcome of the MH3 DFC cycles, Blue Belcher is a nightmare matchup. They are slow for a combo deck, averaging a consistent Turn 4 kill, but back it up with a royal sampler of free stack interaction and SB Harbinger of the Seas. Thankfully this is mostly an online phenomenon for now but *that guy* you know who plays exclusively combo is probably going gaga for it too.

Boseiju is Vindicate for 1G here - you will usually want to blow up a land to set them back (or save it for their upkeep if they pass with 3+ mana up so you can hit Lotus Bloom if they have Whir of Invention) but it’s also the best/only answer to a resolved Charbelcher if they don’t have Bloom. If they suspend Bloom on T1, assume you won’t get a window to kill Belcher and aggressively target their ‘lands’.

Keep track of which counters are in range - Flare of Denial becomes free with Fallaji Archaeologist/Thundertrap Trainer, Disrupting Shoal can consistently pitch counter a MV 2 or MV 3 spell but not much else (though hardcast Shoal can counter Pact for UU), UU means Jwari Disruption (or Counterspell in non-Tameshi lists), 1UU means Sink into Stupor and hardcast Flare. Post-SB, expect Consign to Memory and sometimes more Force of Negation/Subtlety.

Analyst and Woodland lines become better by default here as they are better against the various blue cards; with Woodland specifically, try to save a land drop if turning it into Titan against open mana so you can replay it post-combat if they have Sink into Stupor.

The blue SB cards like Mystical Dispute and Consign to Memory are solid here (note that Consign can counter the final Suspend trigger to strand Lotus Bloom in exile, preventing Tameshi from recurring it); Dispute is especially strong as a hedge vs Harbinger. Vexing Bauble is excellent against their wall of pitch spells as well as Lotus Bloom and lets Urza’s Saga represent a new threat - this is one of the few matchups where Constructs + interaction can beat a reactive hand.

Collector Ouphe is excellent here and Zenith widening access to Ouphe is a strong point in its favour if Belcher is popular.

Even when I don’t pack tools specifically for this matchup, I find myself bringing in more cards than against anything else - lots of your SB cards are strong and so many of your MD payoffs like Pact/Shift and enablers like Grazer are suspect.

Ux Opal Tamiyo

This is an increasingly broad umbrella - ‘Affinity’ ala the Spotlight Indy T8 decks but also the URx Cutter decks (with or without some flourish like Jeskai Ascendancy, Vivi etc). Grouping them together blurs things a bit but no one variant is popular or successful enough to focus on exclusively and more offshoots are likely to come - the Opal + Amber + Tamiyo/Emry core is appealing and flexible.

The common flaw of these decks is on display here - you did a lot of things but did you do anything? It’s easy to draw a bunch of cards but for most of them to be redundant legends and Moxen, more Mishra’s Baubles, and so on. Cutter can power some aggressive draws but the clock isn’t that fast overall and isn’t backed up by much interaction. A fast combo deck that makes you show up with specific cards and doesn’t give you time to find them puts your deck construction to the test.

Metallic Rebuke is a card to watch for vs both Affinity and UR - you can overpower a Mana Leak easily enough with time but it’s easy to get caught by it if desperate - and can be telegraphed by which trinkets/mana they don’t use on known options. Haywire Mite is the main Saga nuisance (or Soul-Guide Lantern vs Analyst) but be aware of the implications of e.g. Aether Spellbomb preventing lethal or Lavaspur Boots changing the clock/letting a new Emry recur the Mite you care about. Against Affinity and UWR Cutter, try not to expose Amulet to Portable Hole (NOT a Saga bullet!) before you have to.

You can expect the usual Consigns and Wear/Tears as well as hateful permanents like Harbinger/Ashiok; the trend of MD Harbinger to ‘combo’ with Saga immediately after that rules change has thankfully died down but these decks can more readily SB it now (or even Magus of the Moon in UR), making Dismember even more crucial. Note that flipped Tamiyo becomes a much bigger threat when it also has these strong reactive cards to buy back. As with Prowess, these cards carry more risk when the rest of your cards don’t reliably work on their own - you can work through a Consign or two if their hand is full of dead Mox Opals.

Various curvetoppers have come and gone from the Cutter lists - Jeskai Ascendancy; Narset, Jeskai Waymaster; Vivi Ornitier - but none have gained traction and all are covered by the cards you already want to bring in. If a new option does earn that slot it will improve this shell substantially and merit a dedicated response. From Affinity the big threat is Kappa Cannoneer, which is much easier to go over than answer even with cheaper options like Boseiju.

Collector Ouphe (and Zenith for it) is excellent against Affinity and strong (if vulnerable, especially to Flame of Anor) vs Cutter. Force of Vigor is fine but more as a ‘value’ card since there aren’t specific high-impact targets - you’ll bring it in but use it when you can and not toss a good green card to it if possible. Mystical Dispute shines again here even if you’ll rarely catch an early Tamiyo/Emry with it.

Amulet

The mirror is a crapshoot - go fast and pray for the best - but Boseiju adds a layer of interaction that was missing before. Amulet can be a necessary target but still a dangerous one as it gets them closer to natural Titan mana; replacing Saga or Gardens with a Forest leaves them with the same baseline amount of mana but stops them aiming higher. Sniping a bounceland is a high-risk line that can shut them down if they don’t have another. If they can start going off, hitting the right land at the right moment (sometimes Hanweir Battlements or Mirrorpool in a Titan line or the Tolaria West/Shifting Woodland that chains into the next step in a Scapeshift line) is often your only out.

The threat of Force of Vigor creates a weird dynamic in postboard games. Amulet’s best draws get hit hard by Force of Vigor and having Force is enough to justify an otherwise slow hand. If your opponent keeps seven, they could have a fast Amulet draw that will run you over and make you have an even faster draw or your own Force… or they could have a Force of Vigor. If they keep seven and don’t lead on Amulet/Saga, you should expect Force - if you can afford to play slower by a turn to minimize its impact, strongly consider it. This means the good Grazer -> ramp -> Titan draws can be more stable than a top of your range Amulet start.

Being on the play is an even bigger advantage than normal with this in mind. A good Turn 3 Titan hand is strong on the play and too slow against an identical hand on the draw. This gives the player going second an incentive to mulligan for the nuts or a Force of Vigor hand that can break serve, which in turn lets the player going first keep slightly slower but more stable hands.

BW/Esper Blink

The BW Vial deck powered by the Phelia + Overlord of the Balemurk combo was a surprising breakout star of the Modern RC season and the release of Ketramose + further iteration took the deck in a radically new direction. Pure BW lists are still floating around but the default list at this point is Esper featuring Psychic Frog, SB Consign, and only a minimal Blink package to maintain the Ketramose stuff.

There’s always something to be scared of here. Solitude is an ever-looming problem; Flickerwisp (and post-SB White Orchid Phantom) bully your bouncelands; Witch Enchanter tags your enablers. You can’t easily outgrind Overlord and Ketramose but shoving is risky when they can directly shut down your unfair nonsense. Add in Ephemerate tricks and annoying SB cards and you can see how people end up scared.

The Scapeshift angle gained a new following as the end to a hundred years of Solitude but reports of its demise thanks to Ketramose were greatly exaggerated; it’s still your single best tactic and their clock often isn’t fast enough to stop you finding the way to swat a Relic or some other nuisance away before your big turn (especially as a bigger Shift can incorporate Boseiju + bounceland). Cultivator Colossus is showing up again as a Scapeshift payoff that ignores the graveyard and Pact/Zenith target that plows through Solitude in high-resource games.

Game 1 is still straightforward especially with Shift and/or Colossus as an endgame to play towards but the post-SB games are quite tricky. Against all their disruption it’s tempting to pivot to value threats like Tireless Tracker but Blink is perhaps the best deck in Modern at winning these value games; be honest about whether you’re actually just fighting on their terms instead. Ashiok, Dream Render is their scariest SB card (and Overlord offers more access to it) so I would want to respect that.

Dismember is the best + cheapest answer to Phelia or Ephemerate; the red sweepers are mostly a trap in my view, being both hard to cast and too late to actually stop the stuff that matters. Consign to Memory is an innocuous all-star here - their best spells are really abilities attached to creatures (you care about the triggers of Phantom or Solitude etc much more than their bodies) and you can counter the delayed ‘return to play’ triggers from Phelia or Flickerwisp to strand their cards in exile.

UWx Control

Some form of control is always around and that crowd has a lot of options now even if none have gone fully mainstream. Jeskai Wizards with Tamiyo + Thundertrap Trainer fueling Flame of Anor alongside the usual counters + Phlage is the most popular approach as of mid-2025; one variant has a pseudo-Scam package with MD Consign to Memory and Dress Down to skip the costs on Phlage (and Nulldrifter). Seeing any of these non-Phlage cards in the MD is a strong sign you need to play around the others; Dress Down has dropped off the map in Modern but is as annoying as ever. There’s also a prison or combo-control take on UW that marries Narset + Day’s Undoing with up to 4 MD Orim’s Chant (!).

The specifics here inform a lot but the shared elements are the most immediate concern. Wrath of the Skies is the go-to control sweeper that wipes out all of your setup cards (including Saga and any of its spawn) at a low enough cost to hold up interaction for any attempt to rebuild. To play against Wrath you have to be able to handle the risks at both extremes. Some draws require flopping your hand on the table and losing to Wrath - because you might lose to Wrath anyway if you play slow, or playing around Wrath plays into so much else. Some draws can beat Wrath by staggering their development to defang Wrath and make it an expensive one-for-one removal spell at sorcery speed. Many of your setup cards are individually scary and can draw out a Wrath - do they really want to leave that one Amulet in play even if there’s a chance of catching more stuff if they wait? - and if you suspect they are sitting on Wrath you can try to save your Amulet for the turn you go off.

The Analyst combo is at its best here and Shifting Woodland has proved to be one of the best anti-blue tools in various decks so I’d lean harder into that angle if I was focused on control.

You have more freedom to pick your battles with your SB plans here than against UB etc. You can try to blank their reactive cards with Defense Grid (though between Wrath, Teferi, Prismatic Ending etc a Grid that’s exposed on their turn isn’t safe) or win stack fights with Mystical Dispute (my go-to as it also hits their problematic proactive cards against any variant - Tamiyo/Trainer/Flame, Dress Down, or Narset/Teferi/Undoing). Old anti-control hammers like Hydroid Krasis or Emrakul, the Promised End are much worse now thanks to Consign to Memory.

Domain Zoo

Zoo is enjoying a resurgence as Leyline of the Guildpact + Scion of Draco is allegedly great against Energy. We’re enjoying that too - Zoo remains our best matchup among the mainstream decks. They have a fast clock, some relevant disruption - a well-timed Stubborn Denial with ferocious can be lethal - and a whole colour pie of SB cards but they have none of this consistently and it’s hard for them to have the right mix of everything along with functional mana.

Compared to Boros their spells are more expensive with specific colour requirements and conditions so try to infer the shape of their hand from which lands they fetch and how they sequence their spells - are they going out of their way to leave up W (Binding) or U (Denial/Consign)?

It’s also easier to map their damage output over the next few turns - Bolt and Phlage deal 3, Tribal Flames deals 5; Scion deals 4 and Kavu deals 5. You will often find you can go off or stabilize in time unless they have some specific pair of burn spells including at least one Tribal Flames so seeing if you can/should play around this is the key skill in close games.

Stubborn Denial is the trickiest card to play around and the answer is usually “don’t” - waiting a turn to get the spare mana gives them an extra turn to play a threat to upgrade Denial anyway. Denial punishes draws that need to stabilize with Ring or use Spelunking as a bridge card and is a reason not to blindly run out T1 Amulet OTD - their best threats cost 2 mana so letting them use their mana effectively on T1 and keep curving out plays into their hands (though notably if they have to fetch up a shockland on T1 they can’t cast Scion of Draco on T2 without Leyline). Denial can be a problem if Pact is your only threat but Pact being free means you can test the waters with it to start your big turn if you have other threats (or, if Pact resolving would affect your Titan choices, you can cast it in response to the Titan ETB/Attack triggers). If you need the Pact to resolve and have time, see if you can Pact before Denial becomes ferocious and take a turn off paying for it.

Post-board, Consign presents many of the same dilemmas at the same cost - an open U mana is even more threatening - and makes Ring in particular much riskier. Ring is so good when it resolves that I think you have to keep them all anyway but downgrade it accordingly in-game.

Boseiju is an all-star here, tagging a key threat in Scion of Draco (or Leyline) and their most versatile removal in Leyline Binding. In the fair games it’s hard to kill a 6/6 - and if Titan trades for two burn spells or a good threat + a burn spell you are much closer to stabilizing - so the first Titan trigger usually finds Boseiju as Binding insurance.

One weird online variant maindecks Doorkeeper Thrull and Consign to Memory to combo with Phlage with incidental hate against various foes; have these on your radar at minimum.

Problem Cards

Consign to Memory

Consign is an oddly effective and complicated card against Amulet. The namesake is a colourless card - but one that’s hard to tag with Consign unless you are OTD and offer it up (gauging whether you want to run out T1 Amulet is a key skill post-SB against blue decks) - and Ring is a perfect card for Consign to trade up on mana with for now.

The everyday operations of the deck as well as the key sequences in your combo turns are full of triggers and it’s vital that you are clear on what’s a triggered ability vs an activated ability (or a secret third thing) - triggers ~always involve the words ‘when/ever…’ or ‘at…’, whereas activated abilities involve a cost and the ability separated by a colon (“:”). So:

– Gruul Turf entering tapped is a replacement effect; Gruul Turf returning a land (or being untapped by Amulet) is a triggered ability; Gruul Turf tapping for mana is an activated ability (specifically, a mana ability that doesn’t use the stack).

– Using Hanweir Battlements, transmuting Tolaria West, and channeling Boseiju/Otawara are all activated abilities.

– Urza’s Saga has three triggered abilities; the first two give Saga activated abilities.

– Lands entering tapped is a replacement effect; Spelunking applies an additional replacement effect (and thus can’t be responded to or Consigned) whereas Amulet triggers when a land enters tapped (this can be Consigned)

– Vesuva and Echoing Deeps choose lands as a replacement effect as they enter play (this can’t be responded to or Consigned)

Consider what Consign might do in a normal game:

– Counter any of Urza’s Saga’s chapter triggers (to stop it producing mana; gaining the Construct ability; or from finding a Amulet etc)

– Counter an Amulet trigger to deny that mana at any point (replicated Consign can counter triggers from multiple Amulets!)

– Counter a return trigger from a bounceland (if you would pick up a channel land/Tolaria West or if you have multiple land drops but need to use the same bounceland for each)

– Strand a Lotus Field in play by preventing it from sacrificing itself or other lands

– Stop Vestige from making coloured mana (this trigger is not a mana ability and does still use the stack like any other)

– Counter a Valakut trigger

– Deny you the ramp from Grazer/Spelunking

– Counter a Titan ETB (or Lumra, Colossus etc) trigger or attack trigger

– Stop the ETB trigger on the Endurance you had to desperation Pact for

– It does NOT stop Analyst from returning lands (but if you don’t have all the right pieces yet it can counter the mill trigger, or choke you on mana by countering an Amulet trigger)

It’s impossible to stop them from Consigning something, and often impossible to stop Consign hitting anything meaningful - so then you have to focus on baiting it out or playing through it. Unless you lost all your lands in the Lotus Field and/or made a Pact with a Summoner, you won’t inherently lose to Consign halting a Titan - Colossal Dreadmaw is a joke but, if they are throwing away a card each turn to stop it being so much more, it starts to be a problem.

Some interactions to note:

– You can Consign the Replicate trigger on their Consign

– The individual copies of Consign can be countered after replicate resolves (say you have a Mystical Dispute and they are trying to stop several different triggers)

– Veil of Summer doesn’t stop Consign from countering abilities, only spells; ditto Cavern of Souls

Blood Moon/Magus of the Moon/Harbinger of the Seas

Blood Moon is the scourge of conventional Amulet and remains one of the strongest tools against you no matter how many sacrifices you make elsewhere to fight it. After losing single handedly to Moon enough times it’s very tempting to embrace dedicated anti-Moon plans but be honest about yourself about how often you actually beat Moon even with these plans - if you just give yourself the illusion of ‘playing Magic’ but lose those games anyway, was it worth it?

Boseiju, Who Endures was a massive improvement for Amulet in general but a big part of that is giving you a maindeckable and tutorable out to Moon that has low opportunity cost as a good land. With enough copies of Boseiju (and ideally basic Forest) and ways to find it, you have decent counterplay vs Moon without trying hard and don’t need to load up on narrow answers - though you can go back to a Pactable answer like Outland Liberator or Foundation Breaker in Moon-heavy metagames.

With that in mind, Magus of the Moon (and now Harbinger of the Seas…) is actually much scarier - there’s no analogue to Boseiju for problem creatures and the Pactable answers are conditional so you often have to resort to actual removal. If Amulet becomes too popular, most existing Moon decks can buy a lot of equity in the matchup by switching to Magus (though this makes it much more fragile vs most other decks they would want to Moon, so this is thankfully limited).

It’s easy to reach for your Force of Vigors whenever you see Moon but the context matters here. The highly disruptive Moon decks - BR Scam in its heyday, UR Murktide during other decks’ heydays - have a long list of problem cards for you and it’s rare that Force (or other Naturalizes) catches anything else. Drawing a dead Force is a big cost against heavy discard or a wall of counters - and those can stop it from working even if it finds its mark. Maxing on Boseiju is a much more reliable strategy there even though it has other setup costs.

I do like Force more against Moon decks that fight you on the board rather than the hand/stack, especially if they have other decent targets or other Force-able hate cards. Boros Energy is a Moon deck that has also has Static Prison and other hate like Damping Sphere, and you know that your Force will resolve and unlock your whole hand.

On top of direct answers to Moon you want colourless or single-green cards that you’re happy to cast under it. Dryad is ideal here, letting you make more land drops and cast Colossal Dreadmaws. In Dryad vs Moon the card with later timestamp wins out - your basics will always tap for any colour but your nonbasics will only tap for R unless you cast Dryad post-Moon - so you have to weigh the risk of delaying your development by holding Dryad vs giving yourself better odds against Moon. The 2/4 body is sturdy against the Lightning Bolts and small attackers that tend to accompany Moon too. Setup cards like Malevolent Rumble and threats like Springheart Nantuko, Six, or the much-missed Tireless Tracker all tick this box in their own way; Generous Ent was a valuable addition as a ‘Pactable Forest’ that is also just great to cast sometimes.

If you do have the answer, think about when to use it. Under Moon your bouncelands are Mountains without the tapped/bounce a land drawbacks - you can play these out as normal lands and then Boseiju the Moon leaving yourself with access to more mana than you would have had otherwise. Even against two-colour Moon decks, they may only have time to find one basic if they are racing to Moon you ASAP - Moon can shut off Counterspell/Murktide or Dauthi Voidwalker/hardcast Grief if they can’t connect with Ragavan - and you may have more time to line up your post-Moon play if you wait a bit and leave them hobbled by their own Moon. The same goes for Dismember against Magus - both Yawg and 4C are vulnerable to Moon effects themselves.

Force of Vigor

There’s no shortage of good hate cards or good free spells in Modern but Force of Vigor is the terrifying intersection of the two. Postboard vs any deck with a lot of green cards you will often find yourself confident that you can run over the opponent - unless they have exactly Force of Vigor, which will flip or end the game on the spot. Force is one of Modern’s safety valves against Amulet’s dominance - if it ever rises above its station, green decks of all stripes can just play a bunch of Force of Vigors and they should be fine.

The unique power of Force is that it’s best against your best hands. The double Amulet starts of legend and the Saga + Amulet or Amulet -> Dryad curves get blown out by Force; if the rest of their deck or draw can handle the more normal draws, Force gives them coverage against the best ones.

Playing around Force often means taking it slow - not shoving on Turn 1 Saga (or playing Saga at all until you have another way to keep developing like Azusa), holding Amulet until you can get immediate value from it or hold up The Mycosynth Gardens to copy it in response to Force, and not exposing multiple targets at once.

Sometimes the natural progression of your draw puts them in an awkward spot. If you lead on Turn 1 Amulet, they may be tempted to sit on Force to try and get another target too like Dryad or the second Amulet - but if your follow-up is Turn 2 Azusa letting you develop towards Titan even without Amulet or playing Gardens and holding it up (with no intention to copy except as a response to Force), the impact of their Force is blunted. On the other hand, if they put themselves down a card to Force just Amulet - in what might be an otherwise unimpressive draw with Force as the incentive to keep - you are probably still fine in the slower game that results. If your draw doesn’t need Amulet to do its thing, baiting the Force with T1 Amulet (to protect a Dryad or follow-up Saga) may be a smart move.

The best way to beat Force is just having a fast draw that enables a fast Titan without relying on Amulet/Saga - this is yet another reason that I like having both more Azusas and more G sources to cast Grazer on T1 consistently, or additional + more resilient Amulet substitutes like Spelunking.

Against the threat of superweapons like Moon and Force you should look for information where you can to assess the risk. For example, suppose your Yawgmoth opponent keeps 7 on the play in Game 2 and just plays lands on Turns 1 and 2. Their deck is full of one-drops and two-drops so the odds of them having none are low and they need to have material on the board for Yawgmoth or Chord to function so it’s dangerous to keep a hand without them unless you have a very compelling reason. All signs point to Force - it would justify keeping a hand this slow, with no early plays they have more cards in hand so the basic odds of Force + green card are higher, and they might be holding back a castable green card as Force fodder. Here I would go out of my way to minimize my exposure to Force if possible.

Conclusion

That’s all… for now! Please reach out with any feedback or questions.

Timeline

2005-2006: Ravnica is released; the bouncelands (‘Karoos’) quickly jump up pick orders and are everywhere in Standard. Despite coexisting with Azusa, Bloom, and Sakura-Tribe Scout, this synergy goes unexplored outside German Nationals and the Snakes deck very late in the format

February 2010: Amulet of Vigor is printed in Worldwake; most attention is on Jace, the Mind Sculptor instead.

“I’ve heard that a lot of people are talking about Amulet of Vigor, but I’m just not seeing it. Yes, it’s awesome with Ravnica duals, but is that really your plan in Extended? You’re going to hope to draw an Amulet of Vigor and play enough Ravnica duals that it generates a bunch of mana? What expensive spells are you going to play with that mana, and what are you going to do when you don’t have the Amulet? Maybe you just want to play it in Standard with a lot of “enters the battlefield tapped” lands. That’s fine, but how many of those can you really play? And once you’ve done all this work in deckbuilding, isn’t it basically just a Birds of Paradise at best? I’ll admit that I’m not usually the person to find the awesome combo cards, but this one just looks terrible to me.” - Sam Black (who would help make Amulet the best deck in Modern later)

September 2011: Pro Tour Philadelphia sees the debut of Amulet of Vigor as a catalyst for Cloudpost decks. Gerry Thompson almost incorporates Summer Bloom + Gruul Turf into his list, Dave Williams follows through

April 2012: Avacyn Restored is released, bringing the final piece in Slayers’ Stronghold; very primitive Amulet Bloom lists appear on Magic Online towards the end of the year

February 2013: A list credited to Robert Wilbrand is featured in a CFB article, bringing the deck into the public eye; Gerry Thompson soon follows up and other articles track its development

February 2014: Amulet breaks onto the big stage at Pro Tour Valencia, with Matthias Hunt playing for 8-0 on Day 1 and giving a deck tech. Other notable names choose the deck for the PT including Stanislav Cifka, Ivan Floch, and David Williams

Mid 2014: Bence Bokor (LordCommanderSnow) achieves the highest win rate on Magic Online with Amulet (and would go on to win two PTQs in 2015)

Late 2014: With the format warped around Treasure Cruise/Dig Through Time, Amulet picks up several finishes in the slippery hands of Stephen Speck. A young Piotr Glogowski/kanister makes T8 at GP Milan

February 2015: Sam Black and Justin Cohen play Amulet at PT Washington DC with Sam playing for T8 after IDing with Justin, who finishes in 2nd (Kevin Grove also racks up a 8-2 record in Constructed). Amulet officially becomes the apex predator of Modern

January/February 2016: As expected, Summer Bloom is banned and Amulet’s reign of terror ends. In a nice coda to Bloom’s run in Modern, Bobby Fortanely wins the last pre-ban Open

August 2016: Kevin Grove finishes X-2 at GP Lille with an early list of Amulet Titan

Late 2016/Early 2017: Another wave of bannings prompts renewed interest in Amulet, with Fortanely putting it back on the map at GP Vancouver. A small band of stalwarts continues to fly the flag at SCG Opens and GPs

2018-2019: Michael Mapson places 2nd at GP Hartford; Daniel Caixeta makes T8 in Sao Paulo;

the finals of SCG Charlotte is an Amulet mirror, won by Will Pulliam. In early 2019, Amulet die-hards take over the SCG Tour

2019: War of the Spark, Modern Horizons, Core Set 2020, and Throne of Eldraine each have an incredible impact on the format. The printing of Field of the Dead and then Once Upon a Time + Castle Garenbrig lets Amulet keep up with this rising tide after Hogaak’s successive reigns of terror finally end

February 2020: Theros Beyond Death bestows Dryad of the Ilysian Grove on Amulet and inflicts Uro and much more on the rest of the format. The January bans had just killed off UG Urza with the loss of Oko and Mox Opal so Amulet stands alone again as the best deck in Modern

March 2020: Bans catch up with Amulet too as Once Upon a Time is history; Amulet recedes into the background again just before companions devastate Constructed Magic

May 2021: After a tumultuous year, Modern Horizons 2 upends the format completely. Amulet joins the ranks of Urza’s Saga decks and is one of the big winners in the early weeks as the format figures itself out

April 2023: This is published!

July 2023: I Top 8 Pro Tour LOTR with Amulet, giving hope to Amulet copers everywhere

May 2024: Modern Horizons 3 causes another massive earthquake; Nadu wrecks Modern and pushes Amulet out of the format in the short-term

August/September 2024: Nadu is banned, opening up Modern again; I propose the initial Analyst lists, other Amulet perverts like HouseOfMana quickly succeed with + iterate on the list

October 2024: I finally get around to publishing this massive MH3 update and rewriting the whole thing

Resources

Many of these were out of date even when I was originally working on a guide in 2019 but for readers who want to trace the deck’s development over time these are useful historical archives.

There are many assorted Amulet feature matches from SCG/GP/other events on YouTube.

Unfortunately, site redesigns that nobody asked for at all major content hubs along with a lack of concern from people in charge has led to a lot of link rot, especially for the old CFB articles. These are grouped at the end to note their existence in case you want to dive deep in the Internet Archive.

Pete Husisian - How To Keep Awful Titan Hands (and Win!)

Puzzle Book

Videos:

Francisco Pawluszek’s YouTube channel | Twitch stream | Detailed video guide to Amulet Titan

Jarvis Yu & Edgar Magalhaes stream | Bryan Gottlieb & Edgar Magalhaes on The GAM Podcast

SCG Columbus 2016 Deck Tech - Edgar Magalhaes | SCG Charlotte 2017 - Daryl Ayers

MTGCoverage archive (intermittent GP etc matches through 2019)

Titan Talk Podcast

Articles:

Sam Black tries Amulet Titan again for GP San Antonio

Ari Lax’s Amulet Titan primer

Edgar Magalhaes on building Amulet and facing fair decks | On sideboarding with Amulet