Some thoughts about Lantern Control in Modern

Recently there was a local charity tournament in the Baltimore area, to help out Baltimore area magician Charles Potts with some of the rising costs of being diagnosed with cancer. The prize pool was donated entirely by the community, and the entry fees all went to Charles's family. The format was Modern, and the tournament was looking to be very lucrative.



Having just returned from OKC the week before, where my compatriot Matt Ling and I both finished 20th and 19th, respectively, with the same exact Affinity list, I was feeling good about Modern but not necessarily good about Affinity. It's still my favorite deck, but the way Modern is evolving, the angles of attack are diversifying very very rapidly, and some pretty strong decks are emerging. Although I can't be too upset with how I finished, I definitely had some brief moments of remorse about my deck choice for OKC, especially after playing a bunch of fun games vs. Ben Friedman between rounds when he was racking up win after win with Grishoalbrand (probably my #1 choice for that tournament) and I was sitting at 3-2. I wanted to try and play something other than Affinity for the Potts tournament.

Meanwhile, Lantern won the GP. I can't say I was surprised, but I was definitely upset. Playing against Lantern is not fun, in fact it is the opposite of fun. Not only is it not fun to lose to such a terrible collection of cards, but it's also not fun to either concede prematurely OR continue dragging out a game where you know you will lose. If the Lantern deck is working properly, it forces you into one of those two situations. I was upset that it won because I kind of wanted it to just disappear after GP Charlotte.

As I flew home from OKC, I kept thinking of ways to beat Lantern. Generally when I approach Modern, I assume that every deck is pretty bad (usually because they all are). I wanted Lantern to be bad. And yet, as I kept thinking of how it wins, I would always think of ways they could trump my potential trumps.

Any way you have to interact with them, you have to both draw it in the first few turns or so (before they can start denying your draw steps) AND be pressuring them somehow. If you don't draw it or kill them, eventually they will be able to keep you from drawing any card you want to draw. On top of that, if you do happen to draw your trump cards early, they play six 1-mana discard effects.

No matter how I reasoned it out, the deck seemed unbeatable.

The Potts tournament approached and I wanted to play, in order, Lanterns, then Grishoalbrand, then Affinity. After being unable to find a copy of either of those first two decks, I brought my Affinity deck ready to play, only to find out that local goodman Matt Scott had a card-for-card copy of Zac's winning Lantern deck that wasn't being used. After a last minute audible (hadn't done one of those in a while!) I was a lot more excited about the tournament.

Mini report:

I played vs. Naya Zoo in R1. This matchup seems harder than the average one, since they have a lot of incidental cards that are just excellent vs. you (Qasali Pridemage, Noble Hierarch to sneak under bridge, a searchable Kessig Wolf Run to turn 0/1s into heavy clocks, Scavenging Ooze to break up the recursion engine). I managed to win game 1 but I sideboarded poorly in game 2, and my game 3 draw was pretty below average and I died in turn 3 of extra turns.

Turns out, this deck is a lot harder than I had imagined. I almost certainly could have won that match if I knew what I was doing.

R2 I played vs. Burn. This was supposed to be the hardest matchup for the deck, and after getting trashed very quickly, it was easy to see why. Again, I messed up pretty badly in g2 when I started to take control and deny my opponent's good draw steps, only to find that he had several copies of Bump in the Night that I couldn't keep him from playing. If only I knew about that, I'd have brought my cages in. Oops.

I beat a Grixis Pyromancer deck in r3, After getting a hang of the deck, and playing vs. a matchup that wasn't as tough, I was able to win pretty easily.

I beat Splinter Twin in r4, lost to Abzan Company in r5 after not properly anticipating Kataki after board, beat a Grixis deck in r6, a Scapeshift deck in r7, and capped my day off with a loss in r8 to another Burn deck.

In each of my four losses, I lost because I played pretty poorly. I underestimated the amount of experience and proficiency you need to win with the deck. I also got a first-hand look at some of the ways that deck can possibly lose. I think if I could replay that tournament over again knowing what I know now, I could have gone at least 6-2. Additionally, Matt Ling had also shown up to the Potts tournament deciding to play Lantern, without any discussion with me beforehand - we both kind of independently decided that it was good and that we wanted to play it. Matt fared a lot better than I did, going 6-0-2.

After coming home from that tournament, I switched focus back to future Standard for the upcoming PT, but in my routine internet goofing I found that Zac Elsik, the winner of the GP and person responsible for bringing Lantern to the forefront of Modern, had done an AMA on Reddit. You can read it here.

I'm definitely not a hater, especially after playing it in a local tournament. I got frustrated probably just as much as my opponents did. I play pretty fast on average, and so the only reason my games with Lantern take as long as they do is because of the opponents. In the Potts tournament I had opponents who would read my cards over and over and over. They would sit and think on turns where I knew every card in their hand, what they were going to draw, and what their best play was, and they would still just sit. I had this exchange MULTIPLE TIMES with my opponents:

me: Activate Ghoulcaller's Bell.
opp: OK. *does nothing*
me: That means you mill.
opp: Oh, sorry.

By the end of the tournament I had started to develop shortcuts that made it easier for my opponents to play faster, by saying exactly what I'm doing with every activation of my cards rather than just state that I'm activating them (for ex. saying "we both mill" rather than "activate my bell", or "mill you" instead of "activate shredder"). I can only imagine how many of these shortcuts that Zac has developed, and I also can only imagine the amount of patience Zac must have to deal with opponents that he knows he is going to beat, and yet they still play slow (possibly intentionally) and drag things out. If Zac told me that he only uses up a quarter of the time spent in any given match he plays, I would absolutely believe him.

However, it's easy for me to see how someone with less control of their emotions could hate Zac or his deck. if you read through that AMA, he exudes a very calm, rational confidence about his deck and its winrates, which to anyone familiar with competitive Magic would sound very exaggerated. Wrap that together with a prison deck that makes you hate playing Magic and the "losing to bad cards" psychological phenomenon and you have a recipe for haters for days.

Fast forward to this past weekend, the prerelease weekend. I've been sitting on a bunch of tickets on Magic Online that I don't want to cash out, but I also don't really want to spend them all on a single deck. I looked into buying Lantern cards, and thankfully since I already own Glimmervoids and Mox Opals because of Affinity, the Lantern deck was not all that expensive to assemble (although buying 4 Ensnaring Bridge kinda stung a bit since they aren't useful in any other deck as far as I know). I finished Lantern and went to join some Modern queues.

As is tradition whenever I spend a hefty amount to finish a deck online, I lost my first match with it. Then I lost again. Except, these weren't mana screws or opponents having insane draws or anything - they were genuine I-don't-know-how-to-play-my-deck losses. It felt strange to me. I always thought I was at least decent at Magic, and I also always felt like technical game play was my strong suit, and here's this highly technical deck that I just keep fumbling with, over and over. Put simply, it made me feel pretty small. It made me feel like everything I've learned about Magic thus far was a complete joke, and that there is a vast quantity of strategies yet to be explored.

I also felt very mortal while playing it. After a decent amount of matches with the deck, I started to notice a few things and feel a few more feelings. I had opponents who were stone cold hard locked out of the game, as in they were never going to draw another good card ever again and couldn't kill me with what they had, and they were still just making me play the game out like I was a jerk for playing Splinter Twin or something. I felt what it feels like to be on the opposite end of some of the irrational hatred that I once caught myself feeling about Lantern. I understood just a bit more why you have to be fast with this deck and that applies doubly so online. I tried playing two matches with it at once (I joined a 2-man after winning round 1 of an 8-man while everyone else was still in game 1, thinking I'd have enough time to finish the match, which was far from the truth) and my decisions were way way worse than they would be with pretty much any other deck. I lost one of those matches because I timed out, despite being firmly ahead. These things all made me feel a lot like getting older in real life makes you feel - you just realized that you've acquired enough knowledge and experience and wisdom to start doing some awesome things, just in time for your body to start deteriorating and make you have to find ways to accommodate things that you never thought you'd have to worry about.

This hit me really hard. I've always approached Magic as a very technical, black-and-white thing - there's always a right play, you always have to solve the puzzle, things like that. I tend to play my games under the assumption that my opponents are going to make the best plays every turn, and it's to the point where if one of my opponents makes some super obvious error then I suddenly don't feel as good about the resulting victory. I want to beat the very best in the world. I want the level of play to be as high as it can be and still come out on top. I'm slowly coming to realize that Magic isn't like that, and playing Lantern has sped up my exposure to that concept a bit. The best Magic players in the world are not only consistently capable of arriving at the technical "best" play, but they also know how to deviate those plays to slightly worse ones in the short term, to induce much worse ones from their opponents in the long run. Much to my chagrin, the game isn't all science - there's an art form involved. You have to be creative from time to time. I'm going to have to learn how to do that if I want to level my gameplay up.

Anyway, this has been long and rambly, and I hate to write something without some unifying theme or moral to the story, so let me wrap this up with some summarizing thoughts.

Lantern control is very, very good. Despite the fact that I think Zac's stated winrates are inflated a bit, I do think it's among the very best decks in Modern, if it's not THE best deck (at least, in non-burn-heavy metagames). Whatever biases you might have against the deck, throw them away and start learning how to play it and/or how to beat it.

I would learn how to play Lantern control if:

-you have enough time to practice it a lot
-you can neatly manage your board
-you can make decisions pretty quickly
-you have no problem making the opponent make decisions reasonably quickly

I would NOT learn how to play Lantern control, and instead focus on trying to beat it, if:

-your physical actions tend to be sloppy when you play Magic
-you don't like seeing people suffer
-you get frustrated when your opponents play slow and have to read your cards over and over
-you tend to go into downtrodden, cerebral moods by things that are far outside your norm

I would absolutely under all circumstances:

-respect Lantern control as a premier strategy in the Modern format


Props to Zac Elsik for a lot of things - winning the GP, being capable of operating this deck, bringing a unique strategy to the forefront of Modern - and props to Matt Scott for lending me the Lantern deck for the Potts tournament. Also, props to Ben Friedman, for val.

Thanks for reading.