Exploring Mr. T: A Powerful Premodern Deck Strategy

Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Much Abrew About Nothing! This week we're heading to Premodern to play some Mr. T!! Yes, that's the actual name of the deck, I didn't just make it up for the video, but in Premodern Mr. T refers to card-ref:Terravore, the biggest threat in our deck! The goal of our deck today is actually pretty simple: stick a card-ref:Terravore and then fill the graveyard with lands to turn card-ref:Terravore into a massive, trampling, usually two-shot kill threat to close out the game! Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that the way we fill the graveyard with lands is Devastating Dreams, which means when things go well our opponent won't have any lands or creatures to defend against the card-ref:Terravore, which makes it even easier for the three-drop to close out the game! Can the plan work? How good is Mr. T-erravore in Premodern? Let's jump into a league and find out!

The Deck Our deck today is built around the synergy between Mr. T - card-ref:Terravore and Devastating Dreams. card-ref:Terravore really likes lands in graveyards, getting +1/+1 for each land in any graveyard, which combined with being only three mana and having trample makes card-ref:Terravore very above the curve for Premodern (assuming we can dodge graveyard hate, if our opponent can nuke the graveyards card-ref:Terravore doesn't do much of anything). While we can get lands in our graveyard slowly by discarding them to Mox Diamond or sacrificing card-ref:Wastelands or Wooded Foothills, the card that really powers up card-ref:Terravore in our deck is Devastating Dreams! For just two mana the sorcery has us discard X cards at random to make each player sacrifice X lands or deals X damage to each creature.

We do occasionally cast mini-Devastating Dreams if we happen to have our backup threats Nimble Mongoose and/or card-ref:Werebear on the battlefield because the damage is symmetrical and will kill our creatures too, like a Devastating Dreams X=2 to fill the graveyard, potentially grow our threshold creatures and keep the threats, the actual combo kill of the deck involving casting Devastating Dreams with a card-ref:Terravore on the battlefield and a big enough X to blow up all of our opponent's lands. Let's say we have a card-ref:Terravore on the battlefield and cast a Devastating Dreams X=4 to blow up all the lands on the battlefield. The end result will be that at least eight lands go to the graveyard (potentially more if we discard some at random), which means card-ref:Terravore will get at least +8/+8 and our opponent will lose all of their lands and likely all their creatures too (we'll also lose our lands and non-card-ref:Terravore creatures, but that doesn't really matter). This means that we should be able to kill our opponent with just two card-ref:Terravore attacks and our opponent should be pretty unlikely to be able to interact with our finisher since they won't have any lands or blockers!

As far as the rest of the deck, it's mostly support cards. card-ref:Unearth lets us reanimate a card-ref:Terravore or any of our threshold creatures, making it a nice way to get back a card-ref:Werebear or Nimble Mongoose that we happen to sweep away with Devastating Dreams or a card-ref:Terravore that we happen to mill to something like card-ref:Mulch, which is our primary graveyard filler outside of Devastating Dreams. Sylvan Library is one of the best card advantage engines in Premodern, sort of like it is in Commander, while Lightning Bolt and Lava Dart give us removal.

The deck also has $6,000 worth of Mox Diamond, which is pretty awkward considering the whole deck only costs $6,367, which means the deck would be pretty cheap and easy to put together if it wasn't for this single card. While Mox Diamond is good in a lot of Premodern decks as a way to speed things up, it's especially good in our deck because the "downside" of having to discard a land to play it is often an upside since we actively want cards and more specifically lands in our graveyard to grow Mr. T and our other threats.

On the other hand, having a card like Mox Diamond cost $1,500 a copy makes me a bit scared about the future of Premodern. Assuming the format isn't sanctioned and local game stores are understanding, proxies can mostly fix the problem (and in general the Premodern community is pretty proxy-friendly), but prices like this do make it daunting for a new player to try the format, especially in paper. Since the card is on the Reserved List I don't know a realistic solution to the problem, but I'd hate to see Premodern shift from being the people's format into something more like Vintage, which is often viewed as a format for people who either have a pile of extra money or have been playing for 30+ years and have all the old staples from back when they were cheap.

All this to say, as much as I like Mr. T, unless you've got a bunch of money to burn on cardboard, I wouldn't recommend rushing out to buy it in paper, the price is just absurdly high at the moment (on Magic Online it's fine since the Reserved List doesn't exist).

Wrap Up Record-wise, we completed the reverse sweep, starting off our league 0-2 before taking down our last three matches to finish 3-2! My overall impression of the deck is that it's good and I had fun playing it, although just be warned that graveyard hate can be really tough to beat. We ran into one deck randomly playing Phyrexian Furnace in the main and it was brutal. Thankfully we have a ton of artifact and enchantment removal in the sideboard and if you are expecting your opponent to bring in some graveyard hate, you should preemptively bring some in to answer it.

The other big question I had for the deck was whether Devastating Dreams was better than just playing something like card-ref:Armageddon to blow up lands and grow card-ref:Terravore, and I'm honestly still not sure. Some games I found myself wishing for an card-ref:Armageddon because by the time we drew Devastating Dreams we didn't even have enough cards to cast it for any meaningful amount of value. In other matchups Devastating Dreams was absurd, not just blowing up lands, but also letting us sweep up a board of small creatures, which we saw against Rebels. I guess the answer probably depends on the meta you are expecting.

Speaking of the meta, I should finish by saying Premodern is pretty awesome. We played against five different decks in our league, and this wasn't the Standard version of "five different decks" where you play three different versions of Izzet and two different styles of Badgermole Cub decks, but five decks doing very different things, from control to combo to Rebel aggro! If you like old-style Magic where topdecks matter, games can be long and grindy and fast snowbally wins are far less likely, give Premodern a shot. It's super fun and the meta is amazing!

Conclusion Anyway, that's all for today. As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions in the comments.