by Johnny Cycles, April 4th, 2024

Hello and welcome to another edition of Keeping Modern Janky! This week, we’re revisiting one of my favorite decks – Lukka Surprise – but with some main-deck hate to slow down the greedy mana bases that are becoming more and more prevalent in today’s Modern. That’s right, we’re playing Blood Moon! Will we ruin the day of opponents from Tron to Amulet Titan? From Domain Zoo to Cascade? Or will we resolve a sad, sad Blood Moon well after our opponent starts with Leyline of the Guildpact on the battlefield and runs away with the game? There’s only one way to find out!

Decklist – Lukka Surprise

by Johnny Cycles
Format: Modern

Creatures (13)

4 Delighted Halfling
4 Ignoble Hierarch
4 Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer
1 Emrakul, the Aeons Torn

Planeswalkers (4)

4 Lukka, Coppercoat Outcast

Spells (4)

4 Lightning Bolt

Enchantments (17)

3 Footfall Crater
4 Oath of Nissa
3 Bitter Reunion
4 Blood Moon
3 Fable of the Mirror-Breaker

Lands (22)

3 Arid Mesa
1 Boseiju, Who Endures
4 Forest
5 Mountain
4 Stomping Ground
1 Verdant Catacombs
4 Wooded Foothills

Sideboard (15)

3 Veil of Summer
3 Pillage
3 Force of Vigor
3 Leyline of Sanctity
3 Leyline of the Void

Deck Tech

This deck is very similar to our original Lukka Surprise deck, which you can read about here. There are two big changes we’ve made. The first is Blood Moon. With the printing of Leyline of the Guildpact, more and more decks are trending to 4- and 5-colors. Scion of Draco has become a key combo piece, along with all the other busted Domain cards, like Leyline Binding. Can we slow our opponent down with a turn 2 Blood Moon long enough to stick an Emrakul, the Aeons Torn? The drawback of it being a dead card is ameliorated by the six different ways we have to discard it for value. At least, that’s our plan…

The second change is switching Delighted Halfling in for Noble Hierarch. This will reduce the chances of Hierarch beats stealing us a game, but X/1 creatures are somehow even more vulnerable now than before Fury was banned. I’m hoping the 1/2 Halfling will live in spots Noble Hierarch didn’t and allow us to turn it into Emrakul, the Aeons Torn for the win!

Our sideboard has also changed fairly drastically. We’re playing a more traditional 15 that shores up expected matchups. Veil of Summer against Scam and Mono Black decks, as well as giving us a way to fight through counter magic. Force of Vigor against Hammer Time, Amulet Titan, and Domain decks that rely on Leyline Binding and Leyline of the Guildpact to take over games. Leyline of Sanctity against Burn and discard decks. Leyline of the Void against graveyard strategies.

And finally, the spice – Pillage. Opponents will play around Blood Moon in games 2 and 3. And while we may end up cutting the hate piece when we’re on the draw, we can also choose to keep it in and go deeper into the land disruption plan by bringing in Pillage to destroy whatever key basic they’re relying on. It can also snag a problematic artifact or kill a resolved Scion of Draco. It’s replacing Brotherhood’s End, which may come back to haunt us if we run into a lot of Affinity or go-wide creature strategies.

In order to make room for Blood Moon, we’ve cut back on some of our pieces, though I think we still have a critical mass of what we need to reliably stick a hasty Emrakul, the Aeons Torn by turn 4.

Now, on to the games!

League 1

Match 1 vs. Hammer Time

Match 2 vs. Yawgmoth

Match 3 vs. Jund Death’s Shadow

Match 4 vs. 4-Color Scam

Match 5 vs. Yawgmoth

League Record: 0-5

Impressions from First League

What a brutal few matches we had, while two of the five we lost due to small missteps.

I’m going to run the deck through a second league, but first I’m going to make some changes. I’m sure you can guess, but the first is taking out the two copies of Commercial District. It’s true that they can help us dig for our combo pieces, but the cost is simply too high. In more than one game they cost us a whole turn, if not two, by not allowing us to cast a mana dork on schedule. We have a lot of ways to dig for our pieces so the added redundancy here is not as necessary as casting our set-up pieces on time.

Second, we cut Pillage from the sideboard. In its place I added Storm’s Wrath. Pillage was always a janky, fringe hate piece. I still think it can be good in the right spot, but we saw how sometimes your opponent just keeps playing lands and doesn’t get hosed by it. Storm’s Wrath gives us at least some answer to Yawgmoth and friends, as well as various go-wide strategies like Merfolk.

League 2 – Friendly

Match 1 vs. Amulet Titan

Match 2 vs. Izzet Murktide

Match 3 vs. Yawgmoth…take 3

Match 4 vs. Indomitable Creativity

Match 5 vs. Dimir Control

League Record: 1-4

Wrap-Up

Conclusion

Whew! Our record is brutal. I mean, BRU…TAAL! However, as usual, there are some silver linings and some caveats. We’ll get to those in a minute. First, can Blood Moon jank some opponents out by messing with greedy mana bases? The short answer, overall, we were able to win some games on the back of Blood Moon, but we only got the one match thanks to it. Modern has so many answers that I don’t think Blood Moon is good enough to be in the 60. See below for the long answer.

Per usual, of course, this is a small sample size and we lost some games to the craziest and unluckiest of circumstances. Case in point, our fourth match against 4-color Scam. We got game 1 via janky beats with Blood Moon shutting down our opponent’s deck. Game 2 was close, but our opponent was able to stay ahead of our creatures and our land destruction. Game 3, though, is where the real dagger to the heart that can be variance struck. First, we exile our Emrakul with Lukka’s +1 in our quest to find a 1-drop creature to set up our combo. Second, after navigating the game to the point where our opponent is at five life, we use Lukka’s ultimate plus Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer to sneak through two damage and cast a Lightning Bolt for the win, only to have our opponent cast Faith’s Shield.

Back breaking.

In our game versus Izzet Murktide, we stuck a turn 2 Blood Moon only to see our opponent cast four (4!!!) copies of Dragon’s Rage Channeler, Subtlety pitching Counterspell, and two Lightning Bolts to pull ahead and not care about Blood Moon. In the second game we were one Lukka away from winning but couldn’t find it.

Of course, the odds are we won’t draw a single copy of a card we have four of in our deck. However, against Amulet Titan, we got to game 3 and just needed to draw a land in order to win. Guess what? Yeah, we didn’t draw it, despite the odds being in our favor this time.

We also lost a couple of matches to our own misplays. Against Hammer Time we didn’t cast Force of Vigor at the end of our opponent’s second turn and they preceded to untap and have two protection spells to keep their permanents alive and win the game. This wasn’t a straight-up punt, as there was some benefit to holding on to the Force of Vigor, but it turned out to cost us the match.

The matches against 4-color Scam and Hammer Time were the two that got away and which would’ve given us the expected 2-3 record.

In our second league, we ran up against Indomitable Creativity, which managed not to care about our Blood Moon in game 2 thanks to a second copy of Fable of the Mirror-Breaker. Game 1 saw us run out Emrakul, the Aeons Torn without haste only to have them untap and cast Teferi, Time Raveler. This is why it’s so important to give Emrakul haste, but man, it felt like our opponent always had the answer to what we were doing.

This remained the case even in the match we won, which was our third time against Yawgmoth. After a quick victory in game 1 on the back of Blood Moon, we lost in the usual way in game 2. Game 3, our opponent mulled to six, yet still had all the answers. We stuck a turn 2 Blood Moon again, but they had both the basic Forest and the Boseiju, Who Endures to answer it. Then, after we got Emrakul, the Aeons Torn down on turn 3, they untapped, played a land, and cast Grist, the Hunger Tide to kill the Emrakul.

Un-be-liev-able!

A mull to 6 and all the answers. Never not have it!

Luckily, we had two creatures in hand and were able to run it back, stick the Emrakul on turn 4, and watch as our opponent scooped it up.

But, wow! Luck was definitely not on our side in these leagues.

Of course, we’re already facing an uphill battle with our janky combo plan that requires x/1s to survive. And there were some times either we misplayed or didn’t take the most optimal line, but overall the deck woefully underperformed. Blood Moon, as well, came out looking extremely poorly positioned in today’s Modern. Too many decks have too many answers, whether it’s Grief or Boseiju, Who Endures, or Treasure tokens or Dryad of the Ilysian Grove. Today’s best decks can much more easily play through, around, and over a resolved Blood Moon than the top decks 5 years ago. We even saw how some decks, like Jund, didn’t even care about it and were able to win with their cheap, efficient creatures cast on the back of a single basic Swamp.

I’ll add one more caveat, though. The times we were able to resolve a turn 2 Blood Moon did result in slowing our opponent down long enough for us to have a fighting chance. That we weren’t able to draw into our Lukka, Coppercoat Outcast, or into a land doesn’t mean the 3-mana hate piece didn’t do its job. And with Pillage as more land hate, we had moments when our opponents were in trouble if only we got a little lucky and they missed a land, or didn’t have that single basic in hand. Alas, we can never count on luck being on our side here at cyclesgaming.com… Thus, I think the card helps our deck and be a part of our strategy, but it wasn’t the homerun, free-win-granter I had hoped it would be.

That’s all for now. I wish I could play some more games with the deck before deadline, but Spring Break is here and it’s been hard to find time to play as much as I have. I’ll say this before I go, though. The deck is better than its record. It’s far from a 5-0 or even 4-1 deck, but it can win some matches and should put up the 2-3 and 3-2 finish more often than the 0-5 and 1-4 that we see here. It’s also a lot of fun when it goes off.

Thanks for reading and watching! Let me know in the comments how you would tweak the deck to make it more powerful, consistent, or just plain better. My next plan for Lukka is trying a 2-drop tribal Jund build looking to play a more fair game with traditional removal and hand disruption alongside some of Modern’s premier 2-drops that I can turn in to Emrakul, the Aeons Torn in the late game.