Welcome back to The Modern Perspective! One of the things they don't tell you about being a new parent is the amount of time you'll spend alone with your thoughts. It's true; you'll be awake at random hours of the night, quietly rocking a baby back and forth hoping that both the baby, and your spouse, can get some sleep. You can't let your mind aimlessly wander, lest you fall asleep, so you think about all sorts of things. Sure, I considered serious topics: the uncertainty of the future, mortality, the philosophical difference between right and wrong. I also pondered more whimsical thoughts, like what it would feel like to accrue Time Debt, or what a plaid Lucky Charms marshmallow might taste like?

Usually, I would think about Magic.

Magic formats present a near endless variety of topics to choose from. Deck lists, Banned Cards, Staples, Turn Sequencing, Fetch Land signals, Sideboard Choices and that's just the tip of the ice berg. The Magic Community is vast and each circle talks about different things in different ways. I've played this game for many years and had time to read many conversations across many different formats. I enjoy taking a conversation specific to one format and seeing if it can be applied to others.

One notion that I've always found interesting is the near set-in stone commandment that stated "Force of Will is the glue that holds Vintage together". In a world where Turn 1 wins actually can happen, a hard counter spell that doesn't require mana to cast is the only defense possible. The less resilient the combo, the better Force is at pulling apart the winning play. Vintage always was a powerful format, but Force was strong enough to hold it together.

Later, when Type 1.5 was replaced by Legacy, players rapidly honed the combo decks to deliver Turn 2 kills. Once again, the pressure was on, but Force managed to keep that format together as well. Goblin Charbelcher, Ad Nauseam, Exhume, FoW is the card that makes sure that other cards behave like they're supposed to.

So what could we consider the glue that holds Modern together? We don't have a free counter spell anywhere near as powerful as FoW, but in Modern, the card probably doesn't need to be a counter. Modern is a creature driven format. A large majority of the decks are based around creatures. Aggro, Mid-Range, even two of the best performing Combo decks, all lean heavily on Creatures. This means Creatures, and cards that interact with Creatures, matter more in Modern than they ever did in the Vintage of years past, or Legacy pre-Shards of Alara.

With that thought in mind, it's time to nominate some cards as "The Glue of Modern". Let's start with a few obvious picks.

The Conventional Candidates

These nominees already make Main Deck appearances in the format. There's no question of their impact; I'm merely speculating which (if any) of them is the card that is holding the format in check.

Lightning Bolt

Possibly the most iconic Red card of all time, for over a decade Lightning Bolt was considered too powerful to ever print in Standard. In 2009, Wizards decided it was time to re-think this philosophy and surprised us by including Bolt in Core Set 2010. Since the formats creation, Modern players have embraced Bolt wholeheartedly; Lightning Bolt is the most played Instant spell in Modern.

Lightning Bolt is the height of simplicity. Its effect is simple: 3 damage to target creature or player. Its cost is simple: 1 Red mana. For such a simple card, its effect on the format is quite complex.

That's why it might be the strongest candidate for "The Glue".

Bolt's 3 damage can kill many of the worthy MD Creatures with ease. 1cmc-3cmc Creatures, whether they be beaters, utility or combo pieces, usually don't exceed 4 Toughness. This means that at instant speed, Bolt can remove a problem as soon as it arrives. This balances out the format in many ways. A creature such as Wild Nacatl, once so feared that it was banned, could run amok in a format lacking a removal spell of Lightning Bolt's caliber. Having a relevant answer to hyper-aggressive creatures means that such creatures are fine in the format. On the flip end, powerful, yet fragile, combo creatures, such as Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker can also be shut down by a Bolt.

Don't underestimate Bolt's ability to target Players either. Modern land bases are entrenched in "Fetch & Shock" mentality. If the opponent doesn't force the issue, there is no reason that a deck can't drop 10+ life in the first few turns getting its lands set up. The prevalence of Lightning Bolt means that decks must be very cautious about the damage they take from their lands. Keeping the players "honest" is an important part of the equation. Another perk is that while there aren't very many of them, Lightning Bolt can also deal with Planeswalkers.

The combination of power, efficiency and flexibility makes Bolt very important to the Modern format.

Dismember

When they were designing cards that used Phyrexian Mana, I wonder how much work went into balancing Dismember? They had to be a little bit afraid of the prospect, didn't they? Removal available to every color had the potential to shatter the color pie. It also means that every color has the ability to keep problem creatures at bay.

Dismember's qualification for being "The Glue" stems from the fact that every color has access to it. For 4 Life and 1 Colorless Mana, any deck can inflict -5/-5 on a creature (abilities withstanding). -5 is a big number, important for dispatching several key creatures in the format, including Restoration Angel, Deceiver Exarch, Celestial Colonnade, Archangel of Thune, most Tarmogoyfs and more. In addition, giving a creature negative toughness gets around Indestructible and damage prevention effects. Even when you can't kill the creature outright, tossing down a Dismember will usually give your creature the advantage in a fight.

Once Dismember was adopted by the player base, the format certainly shifted. The creature based combo decks couldn't commit if one Land was untapped. Every deck had the means to get rid of a creature. Storm Combo can run it, UW Tron can run it. Heck, even Mono-Green Devotion can run it.

Dismember has a lot going for it in this race.

Abrupt Decay

Creatures aren't the only permanents that matter in Modern (they are just a big part of it). When you want to get rid of any problem non-land permanent with a low cost, Abrupt Decay is the card for you.

Much like Lightning Bolt, Decay can deal with almost every 1cmc-3cmc creature in the format. Not only can it hit the usual suspects, (Birds, Pestermite, Ravager, etc.) but it can eliminate some of the outliers that Bolt can't, such as Loxodon Smiter, boosted Ajani's Pridemate/Serra Ascendant and most importantly, large Tarmogoyfs. Decay is also an Instant, so it provides the same speed as Bolt.

There are also several potent Artifacts in Modern that Decay helps keep in check. Isochron Scepter, Ensnaring Bridge, The Swords of X & Y, Vedalken Shackles, The Rack and more. It's usually hard to include MD Artifact removal because it could result in a dead draw against a lot of decks. With Decay, there is no such worry.

Repeat that same sentiment but replace the word 'Artifacts' with 'Enchantments' or Liliana of the Veil and you can see why Abrupt Decay is so good.

The "Can't Be Countered" clause has to be taken into account as a "Glue" quality. The immunity to counter spells means that regardless of the open Blue Sources on the other side of the table, Abrupt Decay is probably going to solve the problem. If we consider this a 'check' to counters, then Decay is holding several different factors in place.

Abrupt Decay could be considered "over powered", but that doesn't matter in this contest.

The Unconventional Candidates

Does "The Glue" need to be a heavily used staple of the format? Can minor usage imbue a card with enough menace to quell the formation of a lop sided meta? Is the threat more important than the actual numbers? Even the mighty Force of Will saw reduced usage in Legacy as the meta changed. It still exists though, and can easily return if the need arises. Perhaps that's how the best "Glue Cards" work?

Slaughter Pact

The Pact is something of a "Late Bloomer" in Modern; it had very few appearances in the first few years of the format. Sometime around the end of 2013, players realized how useful an actual free kill spell could be. The change was both obvious and subtle.

The obvious change was the hit decks like Splinter Twin and Pod took. Twin especially found Pact hard to deal with. One of the best parts about Twin was the assumption that a tapped out opponent was wide open to combo on. Walking into a 2-for-1 was not what the Twin players were expecting. Pod decks were running into the same problem; they'd drop out Melira or Kiki and expect to win and instead were seeing their board state ripped apart. That some Pod decks were running the Pact themselves made mirror matches into a messy ordeal. As a result, GB Rock style decks began a resurgence while the Creature Combo players struggled to adapt.

The subtle change was how all of the other creature decks were impacted as well. From Affinity to Zoo, the tempo loss that could occur when you lost 2 Creatures in a turn was often insurmountable. The delayed payment hardly mattered once you were dead in the water. 1-2 Pacts in the SB became a given in most decks running Black.

The role of Slaughter Pact is very close to that of Force of Will: be a free play that stops something horrible from happening. Is this enough to name it "The Glue"?

Blood Moon

In a world where Non-Basic Lands often run wild, Blood Moon is an extremely powerful Enchantment. Modern mana bases are greedy and some decks will fold to a T3 Moon if they don't have any Basics out. Not bad from a card first printed in The Dark.

Eventually, some players decided to start running Blood Moon MD and creations such as Blue Moon (part Mono U Control deck, part...uhm...Blood Moon having deck) struck at the soft under belly of the Meta. Rather than become hapless victims, the 3 and 4 color monstrosities had no choice other than to adjust their land bases to have more Basics. They became less consistent and therefore other decks could step in and also start winning.

Another piece to keep a cyclical meta-game in place, Blood Moon is a boogeyman to scare the format straight whenever it gets out of hand.

Relic of Progenitus

You wouldn't know it from a quick glance, but Modern is actually over flowing with ridiculous Graveyard shenanigans. On the proven end, there's Living End, Melira Pod loops, Unburial Rites, Past in Flames and Glass Canon Griselbrand. On the fringes, there are decks like Dredge-Vine, Loam Assault and Neutered Eggs. And then there are the really casual decks...

If deck archetypes are too big of a focus for you, then the Dynamic Duo of Snapcaster Mage and Tarmogoyf are both graveyard centric enough to hate on.

With all of this Graveyard nuttiness going on, a cheap, colorless, flexible graveyard removal tool like Relic of Progenitus makes it extremely easy for every SB to have an answer. There are plenty of good choices for Graveyard hate in Modern, but Relic usually winds up being the best one. If there wasn't so much good Graveyard hate in the format, I'm certain even more graveyard abuse would happen and it could make the format miserable very quickly.

It might not be the card that springs to mind when people discuss important cards for the format, but Relic could be "The Glue" that keeps the Battlefield the main zone where we play the game.

The Urza Lands

Behold the Unconventional, this nomination isn't even a single card! The Urza Tron has existed in one flavor or another since the beginning of the format. Able to generate 7 Colorless mana as early as Turn 3, the deck is known for powering out huge threats like Karn Liberated and Wurmcoil Engine. Nothing new there, so what makes these lands worthy of being "The Glue"?

How many times have you heard somebody say "With the rise of (blank deck), people will start to play Tron again and put it back in its place"?

Tron is an equalizer. It is the ultimate "Go Big" deck. It thunders right over midrange decks, slower combo decks or anything else that can't keep up. It cares little about most creature removal, situational discard, or creatures smaller than 6/6. At the same time, Tron itself is weak to a multitude of strategies that it's not an unstoppable meta-crusher.

It keeps the meta moving but not stagnant.

This makes a fine candidate for "The Glue" in my book.

Conclusion

Those are my nominations for "The Glue of Modern". So what do you think? Do you agree that one of my picks is the winner of the title? Is there a card I didn't mention that you feel is a better candidate? Be sure to let me know in the Comments!

It's interesting to note that there are no White or Blue cards on my ballot. Cards like Path to Exile and Cryptic Command are very good at what they do, but over all, they weren't as "adhesive" as my choices. I think White and Blue obviously have some very strong contributions to the format, but that's an article for another day.

I hope you enjoyed this cross-format concept piece. Join me in two weeks for another deck building article where insecurities are key.

Until then,

- Gio

The Modern Perspective Archive