Sunday, June 9, 2019

Old School MTG: Mono-U Tron



I really, really want to make Tron work in Old School. I've tried a couple of variations this year, but the Old School Tron decks suffer from three things:

1) Every Eternal Central deck has access to 4x Strip Mine and 4x Mishra's Factory.

This isn't a problem, per se, but giving up access to your own Strips and Factories to jam in 12x other colorless lands is an unreasonable trade-off. Too many games in this format come down to who has the most Factories on the table. Going in with less than the full list is asking for trouble. On top of that, going in with a set of lands that only "combo" when a you get a particular set of three in play is a problem when facing off against that many Strips.

2) The Tron lands eat up too many slots that could be colored mana sources.

The only deck where I haven't had a problem with this is the all colorless (Mono Brown) deck that uses the Tron lands in place of the colored lands. Otherwise, I'm coming up with 8-10 colored mana sources in the list. And that's with me trimming Strips and Factories (Problem #1). Even with dancing around double-colored mana-cost spells, it's relatively easy to either not draw colored mana sources or to get pushed out of a color in a game.

3) This format has limited deck manipulation and tutoring.

This isn't like Modern Tron where you have several ways to filter or search for the missing pieces. You need to draw Tron naturally. And even then, it's not like your turn 3 hay-maker is Karn. It's not. You are looking at a turn 3 Triskelion. Not bad, but not usually game-ending. And other than X-spells, there isn't much to do with all that mana.

With all that said, I still played some fun games with Mono-U Tron. The play pattern is similar to a slower Tron variant in other formats, where you play the control role, take advantage with a sweeper, and then drop a beater into an empty board and protect it for the win. Occasionally, when you draw Tron naturally, you can take the aggressive role and start throwing out threats early on the curve and then use permission to keep your opponent from putting up a defense.

Here's Chris, Mind Bombing me with Reanimator.




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