Evaluating Energy for Modern

Hello and welcome back to Going Rogue, where winning isn't the goal but it often happens anyway.

Rather than looking at a specific brew today, I want to turn our attention to an important question regarding deck creation in Modern: Is energy viable as a deck archetype?

The answer today is almost certainly a "no". The card pool is too small to draw from, and the power level just isn't that high. But eventually, as the mechanic returns once, twice, or maybe even three times, it's hard to see how the cards with potential don't start to add up to something meaningful. Some energy cards are already attractive fringe considerations for Modern play, just on the merits of their regular power level, so the way is already lightly paved.

What I've done for today is gone through all the cards from Kaladesh block that either produce or consume energy, culled the obvious flops, and prepared a systematic review of each card with regards to its modern potential.

The Criteria

How high is the card's ceiling?

This is the only criteria I've used to eliminate cards from even appearing on this list. It doesn't matter how much energy you have, Riparian Tiger

But beyond the cutoff criteria, there will still be a range of impacts, even if energy was infinitely available. Is the card game-ending in that perfect scenario, or merely powerful? How high is the card's floor?

For the times that we're not in Magical Christmas land, how is the card going to perform when energy synergies aren't online? Harnessed Lightning How much energy do you need to make it playable? And finally, the middle ground that is probably the most relevant indicator in all but the most linear builds, how much energy you need to be able to spend on the card to make it good. If only four energy is readily available, Longtusk Cub still looks pretty good.

Based on these criteria and a bit of a qualitative assessment, I'll assign each card a letter grade for its viability. A high grade can reflect one of two things: a) an extremely low opportunity cost over its non-energy counterpart, or b) an extremely powerful and/or reliable effect.

With that said, we've got a lot of cards to go through, so I'm going to skip the banter and get right to it.

In summary, energy is certainly not there yet, but there are enough high-potential pieces in place that I want to keep my eye on for when the mechanic inevitably returns.

Top three energy cards for Modern today:

Aether Hub, Aethersphere Harvester, Glimmer of Genius

Top three energy cards to keep your eye on:

Glint-Sleeve Siphoner, Attune with Aether, Whirler Virtuoso

Top three energy "Hail Mary" cards:

Architect of the Untamed, Consulate Surveillance, Decoction Module

What do you think about energy in the format? Got a big idea that I missed? Leave it in the comments, and we can bump this article a few years down the road and see what actually happened.