Boom // Bust, a red MTG card that blows up lands on both sides of the board, has shot up more than five times its original value in under a week. Non-foil versions of the card are now trading for $8-10, thanks to a new Boros energy deck made possible by cards printed in Modern Horizons 3.
Boom // Bust is a split card that was originally printed in the 2007 MTG set Planar Chaos. It can be cast in either of two modes: Boom, a sorcery that costs one generic and one red mana and which destroys a land you control and one that your opponent controls; and Bust, a sorcery for five generic and one red mana which destroys all lands in play.
MTG decks that run Boom // Bust aim to break the symmetry of its land destruction effects so that only their opponent suffers. These decks run MTG land cards like the indestructible artifact dual lands printed in Modern Horizons 2, which cannot be destroyed; or Flagstones of Trokair, a legendary land that, when it’s sent to the graveyard, searches up a plains card from your library and puts it into play.
This is a pretty great disruption package, wrecking the often-complicated mana bases of combo, control, and midrange decks, and choking off rival aggro decks so they can’t sustain pressure for long enough to get the kill. But as of the release of Modern Horizons 3, Brewers have combined the Boom // Bust package with a suite of powerful new cards to create something truly unholy.
The new Boros energy aggro archetype has plenty of tricks up its sleeve, and almost all of them – except for lands, four copies of Boom // Bust, and four copies of dreaded monkey Ragavan – come from Modern Horizons 3.
The energy package includes Amped Raptor, a 2/1 first striker which generates energy when it enters play and which can use that energy to cast a spell for free; Galvanic Discharge, a one-mana removal spell that turns energy into damage; and Guide of Souls, which gives you life and energy when other creatures enter the battlefield and which can use that energy to pump a creature and give it flying.
There are some flicker shenanigans too, to abuse enter the battlefield effects. Phelia, Exuberant Shepherd is a cute doggo that can exile a creature and then make it return to the battlefield at the start of each combat; and White Orchid Phantom is a creature that destroys a land when it enters the battlefield, though the land’s controller can search up a basic land as a replacement.
You can watch YouTuber Aspiringspike demonstrate quite how potent this deck is in the video above.
I’ve been having a great time playing Modern Horizons 3 sealed on MTG Arena (19 wins across three sealed events, baby), and I’m very excited to take these frankly cracked new cards and power up my deeply mid MTG Arena decks (built as they are from the random nonsense I’ve gotten from MTG Arena codes and my usually dismal draft performance).
But I feel for Modern players. Modern was once an ‘eternal’ format, where deck archetypes were stable for years, slowly acquiring new tech whenever potent cards were printed into Standard. When the arrival of a new Horizons set on the MTG release schedule can create a deck archetype that uses 80% new spells, that’s clearly not the case any more.
On Wednesday we noted that Flagstones of Trokair’s price had also spiked by over 300%. At the time we attributed that to its appearance in a tournament winning Legacy deck, but – given Boros Energy runs four copies of it – that’s much more likely to be the source of the spike.
Source: Wargamer
