Modern Krark-Clan Ironworks Combo

By Melissa DeTora

Melissa is a former Magic pro player and strategy writer who is now working in R&D on the Play Design team.

The great thing about Modern is there is an endless number of decks you can build. With a card pool that goes back twelve years, you can bet that there are a lot of unique interactions. Today's deck is one of the many combo decks that are possible in Modern.

The deck works by casting a bunch of card-drawing artifact spells, such as Chromatic Sphere, Chromatic Star, and Ichor Wellspring, and then getting a Krark-Clan Ironworks onto the battlefield. With four in the deck—plus Tezzeret the Seeker and Ancient Stirrings to help find it—you'll have one by turn four fairly regularly. Once you have one on the battlefield, the fun can begin.

You'll want to sacrifice your artifacts to generate mana. Once you have generated six (or more) mana, you can then use Chromatic Sphere, Chromatic Star, or Prophetic Prism to filter some of that mana into white mana and cast either Open the Vaults or Faith's Reward. All of your artifacts will return to the battlefield and you can repeat the process, generating even more mana and drawing even more cards. You'll eventually draw into another Open the Vaults or Faith's Reward and you can do it again!

You're going to be making a large amount of mana and drawing through most of your deck, and eventually you'll be able to cast your win condition: Emrakul, the Aeons Torn. This combo usually happens between turns four and six, and generally this is way too early in the game for your opponent to be able to recover from 15 damage and annihilator 6.

Sometimes you won't draw your Emrakul, and that's pretty sad, but if she's way on the bottom of your library, you still have a reasonable plan B in ultimating one of your Tezzerets. Either of these ultimates is game-winning, and even using Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas's -1 a few times can grant you a win.

Although this combo deck is vulnerable to counterspells and graveyard hate, it's a really fun deck to play. Congratulations to Yawgz for the 5-0 finish in the Magic Online Modern League!