Big Mana

I would call this section Tron, but I don’t think it needs to be Tron. There might be enough good lands and ramp enablers where the Tron lands just aren’t necessary to power out your spells. Karn, the Great Creator and The One Ring are both some of the better threats that can be cast on turn 3 with the Tron Lands, and Ugin’s Labyrinth also allows for this to be cast on turn 3. However, since 7 mana is the sweet spot for both the Tron Lands and Ugin’s Labyrinth, I would assume the Tron Lands is still the best way to approach this. Karn Liberated and All is Dust are the best cards to be playing at exactly 7 mana, and Ugin the Spirit Dragon, Cityscape Leveler, and Ulamog the Ceaseless Hunger are also good additions at higher costs. 

This archetype will most likely be playing some number of Ugin’s Labyrinth, but this is not the deck that will be able to take the largest advantage of it. Casting The One Ring on turn 3 is objectively powerful, but Tron is a deck that wants to be able to mulligan a lot and play a pretty low-resource game, and a land that requires you to pitch one of your payoffs might not be where you want to invest your cardboard.

Urza’s Saga Macro-Archetype

Modern now has access to a play pattern that was generally locked behind the doors of Eternal Formats. Turn 1 Urza’s Saga into Turn 2 Ancient Tomb/City of Traitors is usually enough to win the game in Legacy or Vintage when backed up by Force of Wills, and I would assume that this is going to be a very large part of the future of Modern. Urza’s Saga is the objective best thing to be doing in Vintage, and is a backbone of artifact strategies for Legacy. I would not be surprised if Modern Horizons 3 turns this card into the powerhouse we all thought it would be during the release of Modern Horizons 2. Artifact decks have a plethora of cards that are pitchable to the Labyrinth. Let’s go over the subcategories of cards, and what decks they enable.

Prototypes

Although these cards haven’t seen play in Modern yet (outside of some questionable AspiringSpike brews), this category of cards are ones that all cost 7+ mana and are colorless (meeting the requirements for the Labyrinth), but are able to be played for cheaper at a respectable rate. I would assume Fleshforger and Combat Thresher are the only ones that would be considered “playable” in a creature/artifact/affinity shell, but you never know, Arcane Proxy is ripe to be abused in something, and Woodcaller can generate some mana and crash in for some haste damage. 

Combat Thresher also plays pretty well with Equipments due to its double strike ability, so cards such as Cranial Plating, Shadowspear, Lavaspur Boots, Lost Jitte, and anything else cheap (or searchable off of Urza’s Saga) will play great with this card. Oh, and it draws a card too, that’s pretty cool I guess.

Fleshgorger is interesting, but I do worry that the double-black in the Prototype cost will make it so it’s not easily castable in this colorless-based manabase. The card is definitely powerful, Menace and Lifelink both also play pretty well with equipment like Cranial Plating. Don’t even mention the Ward, which is really funny if you respond to the ward ability by instant-speed equipping the Plating using the BB activation cost, your opponent will have to pay a TON of life to remove it. It might be too cute, especially when we go over the next set of cards for this archetype, the real draw to this.

Affinity
(and Metalwork Colossus is here too)

The Affinity creatures were just “broken” with the release of Outlaws of Thunder Junction, spiking Simulacrum Synthesizer to over $40 due to the interaction between itself and Modern’s Affinity creatures (the two shown here as well as Frogmite). These are going to be the “cheapest” cards to cast normally in your average Affinity deck that are pitchable to the Labyrinth, and due to Simulacrum turning every Myr Enforcer into a Karnstruct Token, activating the Labyrinth to return the card back to your hand should actually come up a reasonable percentage of the time. Oh, and the Labyrinth lets you cast Simulacrum on turn 2. Probably cast a Frogmite that turn as well, get a Construct Token, you’re probably attacking for 10 damage on turn 3, with another 20 power in Constructs and Affinity guys holding back the defense for that turn. That seems like 2024 Modern power level. 

I clumped Metalwork Colossus here just because the deck might be able to do some weird shenanigans with it, Simulacrum Synthesizer, and Esoteric Duplicator, but that deck has way too many moving parts to figure out right now, I will leave the creation of this deck as an exercise for the reader.

Thought Monitor is a card that is generally played in Modern Affinity decks, and is definitely the type of card you want to play in your Simulacrum Synthesizer deck, but unfortunately does not fit the “colorless” criteria to enable the Labyrinth. I don’t think this excludes it from the deck, but it will definitely limit how many 7+ mana cards this deck can play without inducing an undesirable fail rate.

Spaghetti

Modern Horizons 3 seems to have a very large focus on the Eldrazi, so it seems a bit foolish to talk about the archetype of “Colorless Eldrazi” without having the full context of what new playable cards there will be for the deck. Currently, there actually isn’t very much that the deck would want to play that exists in current Modern. If we look back at decks from Modern’s Eldrazi Winter, none of those cards actually got to 7+ mana value. 

It’s possible that Elder Deep Fiend is good enough for the deck, but past that, there’s not any Eldrazi that have a cheap enough cost-reduction to justify putting them in a deck that wants to be casting Eldrazi Mimic and Thought-Knot Seers. The new Nulldrifter card does fit this requirement, but it is definitely not a card that this aggro deck wants to be playing. We will just have to wait and see if this “old favorite” archetype gets the support it needs

Reprint Wasteland, Ban Chalice of the Void, etc etc

This article was meant to not talk about the broken things that Ugin’s Labyrinth will enable, because there are a LOT of cards in Magic that get more broken when your lands tap for 2 mana. I could write an entire article about the best Chalice of the Void deck, the best way to cast The One Ring, how to properly play and time your Urza’s Saga, but smarter people than me will figure that out first. 

That being said, my initial impression of this card is that it is too powerful to be put into this set alone. I would not be surprised if we see Wasteland (or some toned down Wasteland impression) printed into Modern Horizons 3 to keep the Urza’s Saga Ancient Tomb decks in check. It seems like a very reasonable answer to this card, as the Imprinted card will be lost along with the Labyrinth. It seems like the cleanest answer to an obviously powerful card, and while we can debate if Modern could ever handle a Wasteland-adjacent card (not with Wrenn & Six legal it can’t, but that’s a different debate), we will just have to wait another 3 weeks until Modern Horizons 3 spoiler season officially begins.