Much Abrew: UW Acid Trip (Modern)

Tweet by SaffronOlive // Sep 03, 2018

video Much Abrew About Nothing modern

Hello, everyone! Welcome to another episode of Much Abrew About Nothing. Last week during our Instant Deck Techs, it was our Fishbowl Thursday deck that absolutely crushed the competition, which means we're heading to Modern today to play UW Acid Trip! The idea of the deck is pretty simple: we find a copy of Reality Acid, perhaps with the help of Heliod's Pilgrim to tutor it up, and then spend the rest of the game blinking and flickering our Reality Acid, slowing make our opponent sacrifice all of their relevant permanents. When things go well, we can even start attacking our opponent's lands and maybe even get a flawless victory or two! Can Acid Trip port over from Pauper to Modern? Is it fast enough to compete in the format? Let's get to the video and find out; then, we'll talk more about the deck!

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Much Abrew: UW Acid Trip (Modern)

Discussion

First, as you probably noticed, I made a couple of small changes to the Instant Deck Tech list before recording our matches, with the biggest being dropping Serum Visions for Path to Exile. Relying only on Reality Acid for removal is risky, since it's extremely slow, so having some way to deal with Turn 1 Vengevines and Goblin Guides seems important. Otherwise, we get some Ghost Quarters in the mana base and a reworked sideboard to fight against fast, unfair decks.

As far as our record, you're actually seeing a mashup of two leagues, both of which ended with us going 2-3. While going 2-3 isn't great, it's not horrible, and at least we were consistent.

Reality Acid itself was sort of a mixed bag. When things go well, it is extremely powerful, being repeatable, unconditional removal. On the other hand, when things go poorly, it's really, really slow. Without a blink card, waiting three turns to kill one thing just isn't fast enough in Modern.

The good news is that the deck has a ton of late-game power. While we didn't get any flawless victories, we had a couple of games where we would have if our opponent hadn't scooped. Being able to kill our opponent's best thing every turn is great if we live long enough to make it happen.

The bad news is that Acid Trip really struggles with fast decks, especially fast spell-based decks. We have a chance against creature-based aggro, since we have some good early-game blockers like Wall of Omens, but it's still possible we get run over. Against spell-based decks like Storm, we are almost drawing dead, especially before sideboarding, since Reality Acid and all of our flicker cards don't really do anything against spells.

The other challenge of the deck is that it's really slow when it comes to closing out the game. Even once we get our Reality Acid engine going, we're mostly beating down with small creatures, so we give our opponent a lot of time to recover. Some sort of hybrid UW Emeria / Reality Acid deck could help to solve the problem by giving us a dedicated finisher in Sun Titan (which also works with Reality Acid, since it can return it to the battlefield).

Eldrazi Displacer was extremely impressive. While it needs extra help to work with Reality Acid in the form of a Flickerwisp or Felidar Guardian blinking random tokens, Walking Ballistas or creatures with +1/+1 counters is surprisingly relevant in our current Modern format.

Venser, the Sojourner has a − 1 ability.

1 ability. All in all, UW Acid Trip was really fun and unique but probably a bit too slow to really be competitive in Modern. While it could be a sweet tier-three deck, there are some popular matchups that are close to unwinnable. Finding a way to speed up the deck and make it better against spell-based combo (maybe Spell Queller) would help, but this would mean cutting cards that synergize with Reality Acid, weakening our primary plan, so finding the right mix seems difficult.

So, should you play UW Acid Trip in Modern? I think the answer is yes but more for fun than because you're expecting to win a Grand Prix or SCG Open. The deck can grind with the best of them and win a decent number of games but also has some really bad matchups. While adding in some Spell Quellers or moving into a hybrid Acid Trip / Emeria Sun Titan shell could help, I'm not sure it would solve all of the issues. If you want to get a flawless victory with a blue-white deck, it's one of the best options going in Modern, so Acid Trip is worth messing around with. Just know going into it that you'll have some rough matchups between the amazing wins.

Conclusion

Anyway, that's all for today. Don't forget to vote for next week's deck by liking, commenting on, and subscribing to Instant Deck Tech videos! As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.