Let’s hold off on the Eldrazi Overlord welcome party for just a minute while I share some bad ideas with you.

I’ve got several ideas at the ready, but as of late I’ve been especially preoccupied with Stormchaser Mage. Of course my first instinct was to replace [card]Abbot of Keral Keep[/card], now common in UR Delver lists, and take it from there. [card]Stormchaser Mage[/card] is an aggressive card, while [card]Abbot of Keral Keep[/card] has an attrition flavour. You can build to accommodate either or both. Personally, I think they take us in fairly divergent directions.

Here are my premises:
1. Delver of Secrets is a bad card in Modern.
2. Stormchaser Mage may be a good card in Modern.
3. These cards synergise with each other
4. That synergy may be worth ignoring if the good card can be supported without the bad one.

My ‘epiphany’ – if you wish to call it that – was the idea that maybe, as of the release of Oath of the Gatewatch, the UR aggressive shell has finally attained just enough threats that can produce immediate value that Delver (which does not produce immediate value) can be put to bed. For purposes of the value-calculus that follows, I am including hasty damage as immediate value.

Now, think:

Stormchaser Mage is immediate damage.

[card]Monastery Swiftspear[/card] is immediate damage.

[card]Young Pyromancer[/card] is often immediate ‘card advantage’

[card]Snapcaster Mage[/card] is often immediate card advantage

None of these creatures are [card]Delver of Secrets[/card].

Frankly, I could be very wrong here. I hope somebody shows me why I am. When you win an argument, you lose: the real winner is the one who gets to change their opinion to the correct one, thus becoming more knowledgeable than before.

Another point: omitting [card]Delver of Secrets[/card] from the aggressive UR shell lets us run cards that trigger prowess but aren’t instants and sorceries. What sorts of cards might these be? Well…

Here’s a very tentative list.

[deck]
[Lands]
3 Island
1 Mountain
4 Polluted Delta
4 Scalding Tarn
3 Steam Vents
3 Sulfur Falls
[/Lands]
[Spells]
3 Blood Moon
4 Gitaxian Probe
4 Lightning Bolt
3 Mutagenic Growth
4 Serum Visions
3 Spell Pierce
3 Twisted Image
4 Vapor Snag
[/Spells]
[Creatures]
4 Monastery Swiftspear
2 Snapcaster Mage
4 Stormchaser Mage
4 Young Pyromancer
[/Creatures]
[Sideboard]
3 Hurkyl’s Recall
2 Izzet Staticaster
2 Deprive
1 Sulfur Elemental
2 Fiery Impulse
3 Molten Rain
2 Grim Lavamancer
[/Sideboard]
[/deck]

Card Choices:

A prowess deck pushes us towards cards that can be profitably played on our own turn, which means minimal counterspells. We want a low curve with at least some number of cards that replace themselves. [card]Gitaxian Probe[/card] and [card]Serum Visions[/card] are the obvious choices, while [card]Twisted Image[/card] – a known piece of tech in many different shells for quite some time now – is less stock but, I think, warrants significant maindeck inclusion.

[card]Twisted Image[/card] can remove many creatures in the post-Twin meta. First of all, [card]Spellskite[/card] is not going to disappear from the format, since Twin’s demise and Tron’s rise have led to a resurgence of Burn and Infect. The bannings have also buffed Affinity, whose [card]Signal Pest[/card]s and [card]Ornithopter[/card]s are efficiently killed by [card]Twisted Image[/card]. [card]Twisted Image[/card] also takes care of mana dorks, which is important as [card]Collected Company[/card] decks feel poised for a reasonable boost in popularity. Those decks always suffered from tension between needing a high creature count for [card]Collected Company[/card] and sufficient removal for Twin. I think that changes now.

[card]Twisted Image[/card] is also a fantastic aggressive card here. Flipping a Stormchaser Mage’s power/toughness and triggering prowess adds three points of damage. And the card replaces itself. Seems worth testing…

[card]Mutagenic Growth[/card] is a bit more suspect. It may just disappear entirely, especially if – on balance – we end up favouring some number of counterspells more than we have. I like [card]Mutagenic Growth[/card], however, because it is somewhat of a counterspell. Though it never saved an unflipped [card]Delver of Secrets[/card] from a [card]Lightning Bolt[/card], it does save [card]Monastery Swiftspear[/card] and Stormchaser Mage, while producing a token for [card]Young Pyromancer[/card] if need be (although this seems a more suspect usage; in most situations I would hold the Growth and let the Pyromancer die, but of course there are niche cases).

I never liked [card]Spell Pierce[/card] when it forced us to choose between waiting to deploy a [card]Delver of Secrets[/card] with counterspell backup or slamming the Delver and hoping to find a solid use for [card]Spell Pierce[/card] later. Admittedly, it’s not all that different here, but our threats have the benefit of being mostly hasty and/or token-producing. Because of this, we are not so often constrained to hold our threats back for when they can be deployed with soft permission as back-up. Or we save the [card]Spell Pierce[/card]s and hope to juke an important spell from a degenerate opponent before deploying threats. But none of this sounds so appealing that I wouldn’t be willing to reconsider the card’s inclusion.

This next paragraph asks whether somebody wants to call me out on not including any copies of [card]Remand[/card] here. I’ll be frank: [card]Remand[/card] is bad in a deck as aggressive as this one. I’ve seen it in Delver decks and am never sure how far one wants to go in including it. You may see this as a red flag. A blue strategy that doesn’t get to abuse the best counterspell in the format may be intrinsically problematic. Personally, I’m not so sure this holds. [card]Remand[/card] was at its best in Twin strategies. They were better at capitalizing on the tempo than anybody else, and their curve ran higher up such that the early interaction was key.

[card]Vapor Snag[/card] is the one thing that helps us keep pace with bigger aggro strategies. It is card disadvantage, which isn’t ideal, but we are already trying to close things out, and the damage adds up. I think this card was a house in Delver decks, and is bound to be a house in a UR prowess deck.

The deck is relatively straightforward besides all this. Let’s get to the sideboard.

A Section Predictably Titled “The Sideboard” Since We Just Said We Would Go There:

Deprive is what we want to answer big things. Deprive is love. Deprive is life.

[card]Izzet Staticaster[/card] is an incredibly versatile and brutal answer against Infect, Affinity, Tokens, and [card]Lingering Souls[/card] Abzan. [card]Sulfur Elemental[/card] rounds out this part of the package by being more narrow in its hate-function but also having power, flash, and uncounterability against other blue decks and, I shall conjecture, whatever removal-heavy strategies one might want to deploy additional bodies against.

[card]Grim Lavamancer[/card] has applications against all of the above, more or less, and also constitutes a strategy in itself against more redundant aggro decks like Merfolk.

[card]Fiery Impulse[/card] does more against Merfolk and Zoo. I don’t know if this card is worthwhile; I imagine scenarios in which we don’t want to be competing with [card]Wild Nacatl[/card]s, and so I include it tentatively.

[card]Hurkyl’s Recall[/card] in large numbers: why? Because Affinity is gas. Hurkyl’s also hoses Lantern if we can find it.

Finally, three copies of [card]Molten Rain[/card], so that [card]Blood Moon[/card] isn’t on its own. If we really are anticipating a heavy Eldrazi/Tron metagame, 3 [card]Blood Moon[/card]s aren’t enough.

I’ve also been experimenting with some number of [card]Spreading Seas[/card]. They offer a slight uptick in additional prowess triggers per turn, come down earlier, and let you play a ‘smaller’ deck while performing a similar role to [card]Blood Moon[/card], albeit a more limited one.

Speculation On (A Few) Matchups:
Without saying too much, I anticipate the following odds:
Good: Tron, Affinity, Infect, [card]Scapeshift[/card]
Decent: Jund, UW(x), Grishoalbrand, Eldrazi
Semi-bad to bad: Burn, Zoo, Merfolk

And Finally…Why Not Play Burn?

Good question, astute reader! Here are some reasons:
1. Playing an unexpected strategy is beneficial.
2. Most of our ‘burn’ sources are just creatures that offer strong output over time.
3. With counterspells, particularly post board, and [card]Vapor Snag[/card], we can interact along axes not accessible to the burn player.
4. Serum Visions is good.

I think there are more reasons than these, but I cannot press the point too much – there are benefits on the side of the Burn player as well, like having a more reliable turn 4 kill.

Conclusion:
We will see where things go soon enough, since the Modern Pro Tour is taking place. For now, I’m enjoying trying to figure that out for myself. Have any thoughts about where you would take a strategy like this? Is [card]Abbot of Keral Keep[/card] too good to ignore? Should there be more Snapcasters than Pyromancers? Should I give in to the Delver menace? Is [card]Spell Snare[/card] better than [card]Spell Pierce[/card]? Does Stormchaser Mage suck? I’d be happy to get insight into any of these questions.

-Ben