I've been playing prowess (blitz) decks in Modern for over a year and wanted to set down what I've learned. I don't claim to be a great player or even a great prowess player -- the most success I've had with the deck has been top four in a couple of RCQs -- but I've had enough experience playing it to make for a brief guide.
To catch up on the archetype, it's a red aggro deck that wants to cast a flurry of free and cheap spells to pump up its creatures and attack for lots of damage. The signature cards are Lava Dart and Soul-Scar Mage. There's some overlap with burn (Lightning Bolt, Monastery Swiftspear) but where burn decks can go the distance with direct damage, prowess decks rely more on combat. There are also some echoes of infect (Mutagenic Growth) but prowess decks tend to go wider and they play more card-draw effects.
In the format food chain, tempo eats combo eats control eats tempo. Where does that leave aggro? According to Andrea Mengucci, "it's a deck strategy that isn't successful anymore in eternal formats. Five-color zoo has to play Stubborn Denial and Reprieve to be competitive and Burn and Hammer Time are more ... combo decks than aggro."
I believe that prowess, too, needs the threat of a combo finish -- in the form of Underworld Breach -- to be competitive. Of all the other ways to refuel, Expressive Iteration works best with Underworld Breach because unlike impulse-draw or "bottle" effects, Iteration gives you the freedom to stash Breach in hand for a future turn. As an aside, Underworld Breach and Expressive Iteration are both currently banned in Pioneer and Legacy. I prefer R/U/x builds of prowess that utilize these two cards to the fullest.
Sample decklist:
4 Monastery Swiftspear
4 Soul-Scar Mage
4 Dragon's Rage Channeler
4 Questing Druid
4 Lava Dart
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Expressive Iteration
4 Preordain
4 Mishra's Bauble
4 Mutagenic Growth
3 Underworld Breach
3 Arid Mesa
2 Scalding Tarn
2 Wooded Foothills
2 Bloodstained Mire
2 Mountain
4 Steam Vents
2 Stomping GroundAs a budget deck for someone getting into Modern, prowess can be a good choice because once you upgrade the mana base from basic mountains to fetchlands and shocklands, you can port it to other decks from Murktide to burn and beyond. And yet like most decks in Modern, it's hard to play well. There's so much card selection and so many micro-decisions that the games you lose will feel like missed opportunities. Hardened Scales has a reputation as hard to play, but prowess pilots are doing nearly as much math.
As an option in today's metagame, it's a dark horse. Michael Rapp writes: "Modern is [as of March 2023] in a transition period from efficiency to power. Prowess tends to succeed when the format is at one end of the spectrum ... but struggles in the middle."
Monastery Swiftspear is the backbone of the deck. Compared to Soul-Scar Mage, it tends to do more damage because it has haste, which is to say, an extra attack. It can be a good topdeck in the late game, too, when you need to get around a wall of blockers or would be a point or two short without it.
When your opening hand has both Swiftspear and Mage, you'll typically want to lead with the latter to get the most out of your prowess triggers. If you play Monastery Swiftspear on turn one, and Soul-Scar Mage and Preordain on turn two, you can attack for a total of three damage. If you start with Soul-Scar Mage, then follow it on the second turn with Monastery Swiftspear and Preordain, you can attack for four.
In some match-ups, for instance, rhinos, Soul-Scar Mage's ability to shrink opposing creatures is valuable, and it can be better to lead with Swiftspear to draw out removal.
Note that if you have two mages on the board and you Lightning Bolt a Murktide Regent, it gets only three -1/-1 counters (not six). This is covered in the comprehensive rules on replacement effects (614.5) but it also makes a kind of sense intuitively: once the first mage replaces the damage with counters, there's nothing for the second mage to replace.
Prowess triggers are a little unusual in that you don't have to declare them as they happen. In uncomplicated board states, this makes games flow more smoothly, but after the first couple turns, it's good practice to declare the triggers anyway. It helps both players keep track of how big your creatures are and it gives the opponent more of a chance to respond to the trigger. If I've got a 1/2 Mage and I cast Preordain, they can respond to the prowess trigger with Dead // Gone to deal it two damage and (assuming I have no response of my own) destroy it before it becomes 2/3.
(And can I just take this opportunity to thank every opponent who pulls out a die as I'm casting things and triggering prowess; it's a huge help.)
If you have all three one-drops, the usual order is Soul-Scar Mage first (setting up for the following turn), Dragon's Rage Channeler next (surveil triggers can start firing right away), and finally Monastery Swiftspear (for an immediate attack). If you're looking for a land, you may want to lead with Channeler into, say, Mishra's Bauble; if you're wary of Orcish Bowmasters, you may want to keep DRC safely in hand, leading instead with the 2-toughness creatures. By the same token, consider Fire // Ice or Wrenn and Six before overextending with 1/1 DRCs.
If you're digging for a certain card or card type, and you have a DRC in play, it can be worth casting Mutagenic Growth or Lava Dart or another instant in your upkeep to have more control over what you're about to draw. And when you've left something you want on the top of the deck, it can help to put a die on it to keep from shuffling it away with an automatic fetch.
Lightning Bolt may be the gold standard, but Lava Dart is the engine of the deck and, when you add in prowess triggers, can do more damage. Especially now that Bowmasters has depleted the stock of X/1s, it can be tempting to side out Lava Dart for lack of targets, but I think you should usually resist that impulse. It's a great feeling to hit one off a surveil trigger because you get to have it both ways.
When I started playing the deck, I missed lethal a few times because I overlooked a Lava Dart in the graveyard. It can be worth casting one on turn two, targeting the opponent, just to have it available for free on a future turn.
Note that Chalice of the Void (on 1) will counter a flashed-back Lava Dart because even though you aren't spending mana to cast it, its mana value is still 1. It can still be worth flashing back for an additional prowess trigger; just be aware that the spell itself won't resolve.
Mishra's Bauble works wonders in the deck as a free spell that triggers prowess, fuels delirium, and doesn't deplete your hand. When to sacrifice it is the question: you want to avoid triggering Bowmasters, and you may want to draw on your own upkeep to hide the new card from Thoughtseize or another discard effect, but you may also be looking for Mutagenic Growth to help your creatures live through the opponent's turn. The biggest difficulty is simply remembering to draw from the trigger on the upkeep to come. One approach is to always wait until your opponent's turn to sacrifice it, putting a die on top of your deck to keep you from proceeding to your draw step without remembering. Another approach is to sacrifice it at the end of your turn and say, "go ahead, and I'll draw on your upkeep for the Bauble."
If they have a fetchland in play, the opponent can sacrifice it to prevent you from peeking at their draw by shuffling away the card you saw. You can incentivize them to crack the fetchland -- it's an extra point of damage -- by targeting their library anyway, or if it's early in the game and you're pretty sure they'll fetch at end of turn to avoid damage from a shockland, you can wait until the fetch resolves and crack the Bauble then. You can manipulate your own library as well, by baubling yourself and, if you don't like what's coming up, crack a fetchland to scry it away. There's an adage that goes something like, the better I get at Magic, the more often I find myself baubling my own library.
With DRC and Mishra's Bauble, fetchlands are an essential part of the package. To defend against Pithing Needle, an even split (two or three apiece) is ideal, but playsets of the cheapest (currently Arid Mesa and Scalding Tarn) are still better than any other option. Keep in mind, though, that mana from fetchlands is not guaranteed. Say you have Wooded Foothills in play and you want to kill your opponent's Ornithopter before Colossus Hammer can turn it into a problem. If you crack the Foothills to fetch a mountain (so as to cast Lightning Bolt), they can respond by flashing in a Hammer with Sigarda's Aid, protecting the thopter and ruining your day. Also in vogue at the moment is Tishana's Tidebinder, which can foil fetchland activations so, uh, watch out for that.
When I first became aware of Underworld Breach, I assumed that when you used it to escape a spell, that spell would be exiled, not unlike flashing back a Lava Dart. Not so: if you have Mishra's Bauble and 15 other cards in your graveyard, you can (assuming no counterplay) recast that Bauble five times. And often that's all you want to do with Underworld Breach: recast baubles to refill your hand. If you have plenty of mana and a Lightning Bolt in an otherwise full graveyard, you can recast Bolt to burn them out. Or if you have enough life and can attack unblocked, you can repeatedly escape Mutagenic Growth to pump up a creature to fatal proportions. And if your attackers have fallen victim to removal, you can recast some creatures. In fact the first thing you should recast is usually Dragon's Rage Channeler, whose surveil triggers let you refill the graveyard and prolong the breach.
In my experience, the deck struggles most against Living End, Coffers, burn, and Urza's Saga decks. Its Achilles heel is flooding out or (the other heel) running out of creatures. Supplementing red with blue, green, or white can help shore up some of these weak points.
Blue gives you Expressive Iteration and Preordain to make sure you find the cards you need, as well as counterspells for the sideboard to rebuff Living End or a fatal burn spell. In such a proactive deck, holding up mana for counters is not where you want to be, but neither is dying to an uncontested Living End. Blue is also the color with the highest concentration of prowess creatures (more even than red) and fellow travelers like Sprite Dragon.
White gives you the most versatile answer to Urza's Saga (Wear // Tear) and one of the best removal spells in the format, Prismatic Ending.
Green offers incremental value (Questing Druid), mana fixing (Abundant Harvest), and lots of options for the sideboard (Ancient Grudge, Tear Asunder, even potentially Endurance and Force of Vigor if you go all the way). Having green mana at your disposal can make Mutagenic Growth, if you play it, less painful.
Black would be possible too -- I remember the Rakdos Shadow decks that led with Monastery Swiftspear -- and it would give you access to more graveyard hate, but I haven't tried it.
By my reckoning, the deck's greatest successes in the past year or two have been with Jeskai: David Nunez's win at SCG New Jersey and a deep run by Walter Wölfler at LMS Trieste. But the printing of Questing Druid may have changed things: BCS8995 won a recent MTGO challenge with Temur.
Twelve creatures is too few. Hands without creatures are rarely keepable and you'd prefer to have two or three attackers on the battlefield to double or triple your damage potential. But there's no clear candidate for the fourth creature slot. Adding one-drops leaves you more vulnerable to Chalice of the Void, Engineered Explosives, and Blast Zone, while the available two drops are too slow and tend to trade down on mana. Here are the least bad options:
Sprite Dragon: best against decks like Scales and Hammer that don't play much removal. It's easy prey for Mystical Dispute, but flying and haste are both useful and shouldn't be underrated.
Elusive Otter: until Wilds of Eldraine, Monastery Swiftspear and Soul-Scar Mage were the only one-drops with prowess. Now there's a third. It's best against tron, storm-style combo, and (thanks to the upside-down evasion) mill. I've untapped with it and two other prowess creatures on turn three and asked myself, wait, do I have lethal here? I've cast the Grove's Bounty adventure for X = 0 to trigger prowess for exactsies. I've cast Grove's Bounty for X = 3 to break out of an Eidolon stalemate. I've also had two otters killed with a single Fire // Ice.
Questing Druid: I'm skeptical of Druid as a four-of in prowess. If you cast Seek the Beast first for maximum value, you leave yourself open to counters from Spell Pierce to Force of Negation. Passing with two mana up in the early turns is a dead giveaway that you're planning to cast Seek the Beast. There are often a lot of bad hits: two lands, Underworld Breach, another Druid. In a deck full of humans, it gets stonewalled just the same by Yawgmoth, which has protection. It doesn't grow with Bauble or Mutagenic Growth. It only seems good against midrange. But then I probably need to do more testing.
Note that when in the graveyard, the adventurer cards don't count as instants or sorceries for purposes of delirium; they're just creatures.
Khenra Spellspear: what's this? a creature that starts out with more than one point of toughness? Probably the best option in mono-red builds and worth considering when your metagame is especially hostile to X/1s. Too expensive to flip reliably, but I'd rather try to flip Spellspear than pay eight mana to buy and play Jegantha. Besides, the front face is plenty powerful by itself. Trample is useful and shouldn't be underrated. Spellspear can attack into Ledger Shredder or Murktide more easily than Sprite Dragon, and if you do succeed in flipping it, the Ward 2 is relevant, helping protect against Teferi bounces and Solitude. (Does a transformed Gitaxian Spellstalker have summoning sickness? Not as long as the front face didn't.)
I've tried and largely rejected:
I do miss the way Iconoclast gave you another angle of attack. It could let you hold spells like Lava Dart to cast on the opponent's turn; you wouldn't always have to maximize your pre-combat prowess triggers. In the same way it paired well with Light up the Stage: you could sacrifice some of the soldiers in a chump attack to hit spectacle, and cast it after combat to help replenish the ranks. Whether you were facing Jund or U/W/x control, the tokens gave you a bit of resilience to one-for-one removal, as well as a bit of protection against Sanctifier en-Vec in the form of soldiers that can block it. Against Archon decks, too, Iconoclast was an improvement over Sprite Dragon. Sacrifice a creature? No problem, have one of my 1/1 soldiers. And I found it helped against dredge, since you're making blockers you can throw to the horde.
I'm intrigued by Goblin Blast-Runner but haven't tried it yet.
I hate to cut Manamorphose. For so long it was one of the deck's signature cards, synergizing with all your creatures, not to mention Underworld Breach. The redraws help you cycle through the deck in a way that seems easy to underestimate. The more creatures you have, and the more colors you're playing, the better it looks.
But I'm sympathetic to the argument that, in 202X, it's not worth playing. It's a magnet for counterspells. As a two-mana cantrip, it's often the first thing you side out. Sometimes it whiffs and you can't use the mana. Sometimes you choose the wrong colors.
If you do choose to play it, I recommend using dice, for example, spindowns in each of the five colors, to represent the mana it makes. If there's mana left in your pool after paying a cost or passing priority, it's not just good practice to announce what's left, it's in the rules, thou shalt. I should also point out that you don't have to choose colors until Manamorphose resolves. For instance, if you have a surveil trigger, and it reveals an Expressive Iteration, you can choose to make one red and one blue.
It seems like a lot of people use Expressive Iteration to try to hit a land, putting it in exile and playing it for the turn, but to me that's a waste of the card's potential: I'd prefer to have the lands I need already and go for two threats.
Mutagenic Growth is best when you have to go fast and pour on damage. It helps you dump your hand to keep the game from going long against decks that will eventually outgun you. And against decks with damage-based removal, it can double as a free counterspell. I like having at least one in the deck to keep opponents on their toes. Provided you have the life to pay for it, it pairs well with Underworld Breach. But it's not good in all match-ups, and it can be a bad topdeck in the late game, so some players have opted to cut it.
Unholy Heat is really good. It can answer problematic creatures from Ledger Shredder to Tarmogoyf to Sheoldred, the Apocalypse. SaffronOlive has wondered whether it might be a little too good:
Glad that Wizards is starting to realize how big of a color pie break Unholy Heat is. Wouldn't mind see it go in Modern.
I've shied away from playing a full set, however, because it gives the opponent that much more incentive to attack the graveyard and keep us off delirium and Underworld Breach. And the less interactive the match-up, the less you want to see it.
Sometimes it will show up in the sideboard. According to one school of thought, it's not a good sideboard card; where you'd want it, there are more effective, more targeted cards. And if you think of sideboard cards as silver bullets, I have to agree. But if you're taking the "transitional sideboard" approach, Unholy Heat may have a place for decks full of creatures you can't afford to suffer.
Note that Unholy Heat checks delirium as it resolves, that is, before it goes to the graveyard, so if you were relying on it being the instant you needed to make four types, you'd be out of luck. The opponent can also respond with Endurance to capsize your graveyard and clamp Unholy Heat.
With the sample decklist above, Frank Karsten's formula (rounding down) gives 18. The formula is admittedly descriptive, based on what people have done in the past, and not necessarily a prescription for success. For prowess decks, flooding is painful because your creatures are underpowered without anything in hand to back them up. That's one reason the green builds that use Abundant Harvest to cheat on land feel good; you're nearly always drawing action. And yet adding a land is one way to make a good deck better: 19 or even 20 lands would be perfectly defensible as long as you go in knowing that you may need to aggressively scry, surveil, and mulligan to avoid drawing too many. Perversely, one could also make the argument that you ought to spend some time playing too few lands -- 15 in Izzet builds, say -- to build up your mulligan discipline.
You usually don't want to keep one-land openers unless you have at least four looks at a second land. Hands like this are seductive, but you can do better.
3 Monastery Swiftspear
2 Lightning Bolt
1 Preordain
1 Mountain(If the Mountain were a blue source, on the other hand . . . .)
Yes: Jegantha, the Wellspring.
Jegantha's main contribution is to help protect you from overboarding by taking up space in your sideboard. But in some match-ups -- e.g., zoo, Rakdos scam, Hammer post-board -- it can be a relevant threat and more than pays you back for its presence.
Buying Jegantha tells the opponent that you have nothing in hand and are desperate for resources. For that reason, it can work as a kind of bluff, letting you downplay a strong hand.
To keep from shuffling it into your deck unwittingly, use a different color sleeve. In the unlikely event that Jegantha winds up in the graveyard and needs to be shuffled in due to, say, an Endurance trigger, you can temporarily replace the sleeve.
Spirebluff Canal (and other fastlands): gives you a percentage point or two against burn, which may be worth the downsides. The downsides: it's not a mountain, which means it can't be sacrificed to Lava Dart and it can't be retrieved with fetchlands. If you need to topdeck a land because you're trying to get from three to four mana (for Underworld Breach) or from four to five (for Jegantha), drawing Spirebluff Canal and having to put it into play tapped feels bad. Still, I've played up to two copies and it can be good in small doses.
Fiery Islet (and other canopies): can give you peace of mind -- break glass in case of emergency -- but if you don't draw too many lands, if in fact you don't draw enough, it creates its own emergency. Prowess decks are doing their pilots enough damage already. Better to prevent floods before they happen.
Light up the Stage, Reckless Impulse, Wrenn's Resolve: the great thing about Light up the Stage is that the spectacle discount can help you hit your land drops. It can feel awkward to cast it after combat -- not the deck's modus operandi -- but compare it to leaving up mana for Seek the Beast.
Crash Through: a Preordain for simpler times. It may be worth trying one or two copies with Questing Druid as a kind of finisher. In a way, Underworld Breach and Living End are cousins, and having to "cycle" Crash Through isn't always a waste.
Flame Slash: before Fury was banned, Flame Slash was held up as a way to keep from dying to a scammed Fury. After the ban, with Yawgmoth ascendant, it's a way to take out the deck's namesake, ditto Dryad out of Amulet Titan. But the thing is, these creatures do a lot of their work the turn they come into play, and holding up Flame Slash is often not a winning strategy. Flame Slash also hits Omnath (among others), but again, you'd rather respond to the ETB trigger with Unholy Heat so they can't gain life from landfall.
Grapeshot (sorcery unfortunately): can help clean up a clogged battlefield or give you another route to victory. I wouldn't play more than one or two copies because to get the most out of it, you need to have plenty of mana and plenty of spells, and if you're in that position, you don't need Grapeshot.
Gut Shot: won't someone do something about this plague of X/1s?! A Lava Dart that can't be flashed back. Less versatile than Mutagenic Growth and for less damage.
Vapor Snag: sometimes seen in Izzet builds. Good (?) on defense against Hammer or on offense against Murktide. Vapor Snag can also be used to save one of your creatures by returning it to hand, so while it's conditional, it's also somewhat versatile. By the time you've added green or white to the deck, however, there are more and better options depending on what you're up against: Path to Exile, Run Afoul, various forms of artifact destruction.
Birthday Escape and Ranger's Firebrand: while I did like the dynamic of nominating my least valuable creature as ring bearer, I've concluded that the "ring tempts you" mechanic isn't worth chasing, at least in prowess decks. When I played eight copies of the effect, I felt it was too much of a burden for not enough of a reward. When I cut Birthday Escape, playing only the four Ranger's Firebrand, I might as well have been playing Shock. Sometimes I was forced to expend them before I had a creature to designate as ring-bearer. Sometimes my ring-bearer died.
Raze the Effigy: efficient, instant-speed artifact destruction -- perfect for Shadowspear or Colossus Hammer -- with the alternate mode of pumping up an attacker to break through a big blocker or get in some additional damage. The major drawback is that it doesn't help at all against Chalice of the Void, which is public artifact number one. And in the other mode it's hard to compete with Mutagenic Growth.
Chalice of the Void: for just two mana, the opponent can play Chalice on 1 and lock you out of the game. This can happen in game one against green tron (Karn, The Great Creator can fish it out of the sideboard), eldrazi tron, and blue-white control. It's not necessarily an instant game-over: you can try to ride Sprite Dragon or other two-drops to victory; you can cast spells into Chalice for the sole purpose of triggering prowess; and if you're playing Prismatic Ending in the maindeck, you have an out. In game two, it's worth bringing in artifact destruction against, for example, merfolk, because you can also catch Aether Vial. Against four-color control, it's more of a judgment call. Chalice of the Void may be the only artifact in their deck, and if they don't draw it, your artifact destruction is useless.
That's one reason Prismatic Ending is so good: if you don't see Chalice, you can still exile everything from Lord of Atlantis to Wrenn and Six. Note that even though Chalice's mana value is zero, you do need to pay two mana for Prismatic Ending to destroy a Chalice on 1; X = 0 would get countered.
Aside from Ending, the best way to take out problematic artifacts might be Shattering Spree. As a one-mana spell, Shattering Spree is also countered by Chalice on 1, but you can pay to replicate it; the copies won't be countered, at least not by Chalice, because they weren't cast. You can replicate to work around most counterspells by pointing multiple copies at a single target. Flusterstorm can still get you, but the replicas, at least, don't increase the storm count.
They don't trigger prowess, either. There are cards like Clever Lumimancer that do trigger on copied spells, but that's a somewhat different deck.
Note that you have to pay for the replication as an extra cost, so if you're concerned about potential counters in the opponent's hand, you can't wait to see if they play one; you have to replicate pre-emptively.
Other commonly played sideboard cards that can hit Chalice of the Void on 1 are Wear // Tear (in white) or Tear Asunder (in green), Engineered Explosives (on zero), Ancient Grudge (which also has flashback), or Destructive Revelry (with some damage for a little extra salt). Smash to Smithereens, while less flexible than Destructive Revelry, can serve as an alternative in mono-red builds.
Shadowspear: gives Urza's Saga decks a three-turn clock. Once they search it up and equip it to a creature, your chances of winning will plummet. Artifact destruction can save you and it tends to be good against Saga decks in general. You can also bring in enchantment and land destruction to go after Urza's Saga itself.
Wear // Tear, again, is fantastic here. Natural State can take out either Shadowspear or Urza's Saga. Alpine Moon will destroy Urza's Saga outright (when named) and so will Blood Moon. My objection to Alpine Moon has been that it doesn't go to the graveyard, and ours is a deck that really wants its cards, if they're not attacking, in the graveyard. But if it buys you time, you may not care.
Regarding Wear // Tear, note that fuse is from hand only; with Underworld Breach, you can't escape both halves at the same time.
Sanctifier en-Vec: can keep you off delirium, undercut Breach, and stonewall your attackers. Yet I've learned not to fear Sanctifier except as an unkillable hammer carrier. An unequipped Sanctifier is just a 2/2 you can attack through. If you're playing Preordain and Mutagenic Growth and Questing Druid, you can still achieve delirium. In post-board games, hammer decks are slower and, assuming you can deal with the construct tokens, you'll eventually draw more cards and summon more creatures than they can repel. The scariest things in that match-up are Shadowspear and the four hammers, often backed up by Blacksmith's Skill or Surge of Salvation.
For mono-red builds that may feel the need for Sanctifier-specific answers, Kozilek's Return gets around the protection and most of your creatures can withstand it (because it will trigger prowess, making Swiftspear tough enough to absorb the damage). Reality Hemorrhage (like Return but for a single target) also exists, but Kozilek's Return is more broadly useful against small-creature decks. Deployed strategically, Engineered Explosives can sweep away sanctifiers or the equipment that makes them formidable. And again, Prismatic Ending is a great catch-all if you're playing white.
Endurance: shrinks and eats Dragon's Rage Channeler and foils Underworld Breach. If you have delirium, you can respond to Endurance's ETB trigger with Unholy Heat to kill it before your graveyard disappears. Otherwise there's no good answer for it -- you probably don't want to be holding Change the Equation {1}{U} -- and you just have to go into each attack with your eyes open.
Engineered Explosives: against our one-drops, it might as well be Supreme Verdict except colorless and less expensive to play. Artifact hate is useless against it because it can often be activated right after it resolves. In the early turns it might be worth fighting with Spell Pierce, if you've brought that in for other reasons, but mostly you have to play around it and avoid overcommitting.
Painful as it can be on the receiving end, Engineered Explosives may deserve a place in our own sideboard as a "zero-cost" answer to constructs, rhinos, and Chalice of the Void. It can even be good on 1 when you're behind against Hammer.
Trinisphere: when every spell costs at least {3}, it's a lot harder to trigger prowess or profit from Underworld Breach. A sideboard staple in ponza decks, Trinisphere is also played in green tron and other toolbox decks as a Karn target. If you have Shattering Spree, the replicas count as an additional cost, so you can pay {R}{R}{R} and point one copy at Trinisphere and the other two at any other troublesome artifacts.
Damping Sphere: has a similar effect, levying higher and higher taxes on successive spells. If Shattering Spree is subject to the tax -- because it isn't the first spell you've cast this turn -- you can't get around it by replicating; you still have to pay an extra {1} for each spell that preceded it.
Hidetsugu Consumes All: a sideboard staple in zoo, scam, and zoo scam. Destroys your one-drops, flushes away your graveyard, and leaves behind a 3/3. You can lean on Spell Pierce, but usually you just have to work through it.
Brotherhood's End: as against EE, all you can do is play around it. Since, unlike EE, it deals damage, you may be able save some creatures if you can trigger prowess twice in response.
Blast Zone: an Engineered Explosives in land form. Unlike the foregoing, it's rarely online until turn four. But if you don't have a fast start, tron decks will have time to find it with Sylvan Scrying or Expedition Map.
Kor Firewalker: like Sanctifier (and see above) but instead of attacking your graveyard it bolsters the opponent's life total.
Unlicensed Hearse: graveyard hate that can double as a hard-to-kill threat. If you're up against Murktide, Prismatic Ending is an all-star answer that also hits the small-fry creatures, but otherwise your best bet is to dodge it or race it.
Ensnaring Bridge: can lock you out if you're not prepared for it. But it's not a slam dunk: since your workhorse creatures start out at one toughness, the opponent has to empty their hand for Ensnaring Bridge to do much; in fact one mill opponent confessed to siding it out. Aside from mill decks, you might see this as a Karn target in green tron and prison tron.
Sideboard options include Engineered Explosives to wipe out the tokens and, if you have access to blue, counterspells for Footfalls itself. Against cascade decks, Flusterstorm is the best choice because it's the hardest to play through. It can be incredibly satisfying to catch Crashing Footfalls with Invasive Surgery and delirium, but these decks usually play Endurance in the sideboard and can flash it in to take away delirium. Or they can simply counter Invasive Surgery with Force of Negation or Mystical Dispute. Spell Pierce can get the job done, and it's useful in non-cascade match-ups, but it gets worse and worse as the game progresses.
They can and will play around a counter by casting Violent Outburst on your turn to draw it out, then following up with Shardless Agent on their turn.
I usually take out Underworld Breach because it's too slow and too vulnerable to Endurance.
Murktide Regent itself can be hard to deal with, but you don't always need to remove it. Sometimes you can storm away and attack into or through it, especially if it's their only line of defense.
From the sideboard you mostly want ways to deal with Ledger Shredder and Murktide Regent. In white, Path to Exile is good, but watch out you don't spend it too early and help them hit their land drops; they're probably not playing many more lands than you are. In green, Run Afoul can be an efficient answer. (It can also take out Archon of Cruelty, Atraxa, and other bombs. It's no good against Serra's Emissary, though, assuming they've named instant, because it targets the opponent.)
I don't like Chained to the Rocks as an answer to Murktide because they're probably bringing in Engineered Explosives against you and you might as well kiss it goodbye. For the same reason, I prefer Prismatic Ending to Portable Hole more generally. Prismatic Ending doesn't sit on the battlefield waiting to be overturned but rather goes directly into your graveyard, which is what you want in an Underworld Breach deck.
Yawgmoth used to be a good match-up. Now that the deck's been powered up by Delighted Halfling, Orcish Bowmasters, and Agatha's Soul Cauldron, I no longer think that's true.
If you need to make room for more removal -- Prismatic Ending is once again terrific -- it's OK to trim Mutagenic Growth.
As noted, Yawgmoth itself has protection from humans, which can be a problem for your humans deck: Human Monk, Human Wizard, Human Shaman, Human Druid.
Blood Moon was the traditional answer to Amulet Titan decks, but sadly it's gotten much worse in recent years. Lorien Revealed and the other one-mana landcyclers let most decks work around it, and Haywire Mite and Boseiju let green decks wriggle away. Against Titan specifically, Magus of the Moon is a little better because they don't really have any creature removal in the maindeck and have to bring in something like Dismember and hope they find it.
The other problem with Blood Moon is that your 17-land deck can't reliably get to three untapped lands on turn three. Alpine Moon isn't great, but it's an alternative that you can at least cast reliably. Targets include Urza's Saga, any bounce land they've shown you, and Mycosynth Gardens if there's a window where it's waiting on an Amulet.
You can also use artifact destruction to keep them off Amulet of Vigor. Underworld Breach and Mutagenic Growth are the easiest ways to make room.
Alpine Moon may have its place in some match-ups, but I don't think tron is one of them. With Boseiju, Haywire Mite, and Blast Zone, to name a few, it's too easily dispatched. You want the spells you play to go to the graveyard, but not like that. What's more, turning on access to black mana can backfire by making Dismember less painful. The best strategy I've found, especially against the post-handshake builds where seven is no longer the magic number, is not to try to keep them offline but to do as much damage as possible as quickly as possible so that no amount of mana can save them.
Unholy Heat isn't great either. If you're having to use it against a planeswalker, you probably don't have many creatures left to pressure the opponent. If you're saving it for Wurmcoil Engine, now you have two problems.
One reason to prefer Tear Asunder over Destructive Revelry in the sideboard is that it's better against tron; it can exile both Wurmcoil Engine and Haywire Mite (to avoid the lifegain). Path to Exile is also good against Wurmcoil Engine and it's one of the few cards that can prevent Ulamog from being an instant win. Spell Pierce (better on the play) can help disrupt Expedition Map or Sylvan Scrying if they don't have natural Tron, and can keep Oblivion Stone or Ugin or Karn from resolving if they do.
Underworld Breach is again first on the chopping block in post-board games.
You're not trying to stop them from casting Living End, which is difficult, you're merely trying to slow them down.
As graveyard hate I prefer Tormod's Crypt {0} to Soul-Guide Lantern {1} purely because of the casting cost. Both are much better in prowess (because they can trigger it) than Leyline of the Void {2}{B}{B}, which I've played out of desperation but don't recommend.
Turn the Earth {G} (with flashback!) is also an option in green builds, but I haven't had enough experience with it to say more.
Chalice of the Void would be the best weapon against cascade decks, but copies are too expensive right now and I haven't tried it. Void Mirror is a budget alternative to Chalice that can work as a gotcha -- it can stop Force of Negation, too -- but you can't always afford to take a turn off to cast it.
Cards you want to see in your opener: Monastery Swiftspear (and we're off to the races); Dragon's Rage Channeler (aggressively surveil creatures into the graveyard for a second act).
Cards you'd rather not see in the opponent's graveyard: Generous Ent (has reach and makes food); Architects of Will (can bury any outs that might have bubbled to the top of your deck) (leave up a fetchland if you can afford it to counteract the effect and at least give yourself a chance to topdeck a bolt).
Be a little more lenient with your opening hand; it really hurts to go down a card or two and then get scammed.
I'm not a big fan of graveyard hate as a way to disrupt a scammed Grief. Better to play a high enough density of card-draw effects that you can catch back up in the midgame. Jegantha is good; Breach is good. Mutagenic Growth is not so good and can be trimmed post-board (in favor of more removal if you have it).
With Dauthi Voidwalker in play, I put a die by the graveyard so I won't reflexively drop cards into it. And when are there two separate exiles, one accessible to Voidwalker, put a die on top of the one that's "closed."
If you cast Lightning Bolt on Dauthi Voidwalker, your Bolt will be exiled with a void counter on it (Bolt resolves, then Voidwalker dies from damage); compare-contrast Fatal Push, which would go to your graveyard because it kills Voidwalker immediately.
Blood Moon (still sometimes maindecked) isn't necessarily bad against prowess in the sense that it can keep you off some creatures, sideboard cards, Expressive Iteration. Even so, your opponent can rarely afford to take a turn off to play it -- usually on turn three they're trying to fend off attackers -- and if they do have the kind of lead that would allow them to get it down early, they don't need it. So Blood Moon is usually the first thing they'll side out to make room for Hidetsugu Consumes All.
This match-up is usually pretty tense (fun?); an extra fetchland activation can mean the difference between winning and losing.
You can outdraw them in the long term but you won't live long enough to enjoy it. I think you have to put on as much pressure as possible in the early game and, if you can't race them, at least get them to worry about your creatures.
Dragon's Claw is often found in sideboards to buy time. But if you're trying to apply pressure, Dragon's Claw doesn't help. It takes two mana and two or more turns to counteract a single Lightning Bolt. In my experience, you're better served spending the mana -- two creatures' worth! -- and the card on something more offensive. And now that Roiling Vortex is so common, it's not hard for the burn player to repeatedly disable Dragon's Claw. More like monkey's paw, am I right?
If your mana base can support them, I prefer spells like Weather the Storm {1}{G} or Blossoming Calm {W}, which, unlike Dragon's Claw, is also good against stuff like Calibrated Blast.
Roiling Vortex's static ability can be brutal, turning off Mutagenic Growth, Mishra's Bauble, and any Lava Darts in the graveyard. Some of these can be swapped out post-board -- for counterspells or lifegain -- but it's not always clear-cut: Mishra's Bauble helps you set up in the early game, and Mutagenic Growth can help you protect your creatures when they're playing a more controlling game.
Effective as it is, I don't think Roiling Vortex merits dedicated enchantment hate, especially with Eidolon out of fashion, and especially if we have to pay two, as for Destructive Revelry or Prismatic Ending. Even Natural State or Mystic Repeal do nothing if the opponent doesn't happen to draw it.
Prismatic Ending may be worth it as an out against Sanctifier or Kor Firewalker.
I'm of the philosophy that if you're on the draw against Hammer, and they lead with a turn-one Sigarda's Aid and an Ornithopter, you should just ignore it and get down a threat. If they have it, let them have it -- on turn one. On subsequent turns, you'll need to play carefully and hold up interaction, but you can't play an entirely reactive game.
If you see Emeria, Shattered Skyclave, it usually indicates Solitude, though maybe just in the sideboard.
Sanctifier makes Underworld Breach too risky, and Mutagenic Growth doesn't do enough to justify its presence post-board.
Your odds improve a lot if you have access to white: Prismatic Ending, Wear // Tear for Saga and Scales, even Path to Exile. If you're stuck with blue, Hurkyl's Recall can be nice to have in the sideboard. (Recall is good against Affinity, too.)
Watch out for Damping Sphere out of the sideboard. It's tough because artifact destruction against Scales is a double-edged sword; they often want their artifacts to die. And when they don't, there's Welding Jar.
Soul-Scar Mage replaces damage with -1/-1 counters. Against a deck full of creatures with +1/+1 counters, the counters cancel each other out. But due to [waves hands] state-based actions, a creature that dies this way will still put its counters on The Ozolith. If I have a Mage on the battlefield and Lava Dart a 2/2 Zabaz, it will survive with one +1/+1 counter. If instead I cast Unholy Heat on the Zabaz, it will die (becoming effectively 0/0), but The Ozolith will get its +1/+1 counters; they're not canceled out before the creature dies.
In this match you're only the beatdown until turn three. At that point your goal becomes keeping them off Creativity. Lava Dart, at least, is good at killing the tokens from Dwarven Mine.
Archon of Cruelty is demoralizing but sometimes possible to overcome; Serra's Emissary can be unbeatable.
Mengucci writes, "Blood Moon is backbreaking against this deck ... never be able to tap out in the early game for a Wrenn and Six or a Teferi, Time Raveler ... always need a Spell Pierce for Blood Moon on turn three ..."
But having Blood Moon in your sideboard and then in your hand isn't enough to win you the game. Not only do you have to get to three lands by turn three or four, you have to sneak it past Spell Pierce, Reprieve, and Teferi, then hope they don't have Strike It Rich or Fable of the Mirror-Breaker.
Still, I used to like Blood Moon on the play, counterspells on the draw.
Alpine Moon isn't worth it; they have plenty of ways to make tokens beyond Dwarven Mine.
Watch out for Stubborn Denial. Growth can be trimmed for more removal.
Bring in Tear Asunder (or similar) for Chalice of the Void, if you see it, but not for The One Ring. Discussing Cast into the Fire on stream, AspiringSpike, not a fan, said something like, I'm not trying to remove the ring, I'm trying to burn their face off.
If they have an Aether Vial on two, they can vial in a lord to save a creature from direct damage by buffing it.
Access to blue shouldn't be given up lightly, but it can be correct to sacrifice Steam Vents to Lava Dart to turn off islandwalk and shrink Tide Shaper.
They will be bringing in Chalice of the Void and playing it on one.
Prowess is highly vulnerable to Tasha's Hideous Laughter -- bring in counterspells if you have them -- but Underworld Breach is your recompense for the rest.
It can be OK to go up a card or two (playing with 61-62 in the maindeck, 13-14 in the sideboard).
I've only played the mirror match a couple times. My impression is, the person with more creatures wins.
Don't commit the cardinal sin of bolting a 2/3 Tarmogoyf without an instant in the yard.
The Jund Saga match-up feels pretty tough. Jund has access to so much removal that only our most creature-heavy hands have a chance, and the sagas give it reliable access to Shadowspear, which is hard to beat if they can get it equipped. Some prowess builds put Prismatic Ending in the maindeck, and that would at least give you an out in game one.
Here's where you want Alpine Moon, naming Lotus Field.
Against the deck that's said to be weak to all your sideboard cards no matter what you're playing, you may not need to bring in anything.
Creeping Chill is scarier than the horde of creatures.
If you have Tormod's Crypt on the battlefield, don't activate it immediately; pass the turn and wait until the last possible moment. That way, the opponent has to worry about whether to dredge again and which, if any, resources they want to commit, knowing that you could press the button at any time. By leaving up the Crypt, you get to set them back at least one turn.
If Narcomoeba and Creeping Chill are flipped, you can respond by exiling them with the Crypt to fizzle the triggered effects.
Watch out for Goblin Grenade. Famous last words: "I can just take the damage and win on the crackback, right?" Grenade is, at least, a sorcery, so if you can block and kill a goblin, that's one less sacrificial lamb.
Good advice against blue control decks: "If they're holding mana up on your turn, make it awkward for them." Wait until they tap out, then cast everything in a flurry to overload them.
Kozilek's Return is great here. Prismatic Ending is great at dealing with Shaper's Sanctuary or (if they don't have it) with most of the elves.
You usually don't have enough removal to bolt all the dorks. If you have to choose, I think the most important creatures to go after are Leaf-Crowned Visionary and Realmwalker, which let them refuel. After that, the rest of the lords: Elvish Archdruid (which also makes mana) or Elvish Champion. Then the pseudo-lords: Ezuri (mass-pump, regenerate) and Elvish Warmaster (mass-pump, make tokens). And if you have anything left, Heritage Druid (tap elves to make mana) is the most effective of the mana producers.
Lightning Bolt and Unholy Heat are the two cards you most want to see. Conspicuous Snoop often needs to be killed on sight. Rundveldt Hordemaster, if allowed to live, is another way to lose control of the game.
As against burn, every point of life is precious. If you take out Mutagenic Growth to conserve life, you risk getting blown out by the aptly named Rough // Tumble. Counterspells are good if you have them.
This might be the rare case where it's better to take the draw and deny them the extra card. Against Boros burn, a fast start can put them on defense and give you time to pull ahead on cards, but black burn has fewer ways to kill creatures and depends on lifegain to stay alive.
The namesake creature is the best target for removal. Beware Ephemerate.
Chalice of the Void: played on zero, it's probably the best answer to Living End and can be a pain for other cascade decks, too (of course you can't also declare Jegantha as a companion, but it's worth the trade-off in those games)
Thanks to all the regulars for helping me improve.
This document was inspired by Tessa's enchantress guide, which is a great read if you like this sort of thing.
And there are other perspectives on prowess. After a top-32 finish at LMS Prague, Frakom posted an insightful -- and concise! -- sideboard guide for his Jeskai version. Even if you've got a different slice of the color pie, it's worth reading for the match-up analysis.
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Frakom's sideboard guide (April 2023)
https://bit.ly/41bJm3O
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WyjAE7NAfTHkvFfZ6Ky6vgSqHR23Xn5t14Ert5JB_Uo/
Tessa's enchantress guide (August 2022)
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ut9ZMhG0Z_LEc7SA1hJjiWTG-dUUuOpdZ9eI0gJqDc0/
David Nunez, 1st at SCG New Jersey (2023-01-15) (post-BRO, pre-ONE)
https://old.starcitygames.com/decks/158248
Walter Wölfler, Top 8 at LMS Trieste (2023-01-15) (post-BRO, pre-ONE)
https://legacyeuropeantour.com/lms-trieste-finals-modern-top-8-decklists/
bcs8995, 1st in Modern Challenge 64 (2023-12-17) (post-LCI, pre-MKM)
https://www.mtgo.com/decklist/modern-challenge-64-2023-12-1712596679#deck_bcs8995
Frank Karsten's formula for lands
https://www.channelfireball.com/article/How-Many-Lands-Do-You-Need-in-Your-Deck-An-Updated-Analysis/cd1c1a24-d439-4a8e-b369-b936edb0b38a/
"If they're holding mana up ..."
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yZXhe8wgvpuo3N1s54gM-LS--hocn2bTP4sgFVDA878/
"Realize how big of a color pie break Unholy Heat is"
https://twitter.com/SaffronOlive/status/1544344335172378624
"Prowess ... struggles in the middle"
https://blog.cardkingdom.com/modern-tier-list-march-2023-scg-con-charlotte/
"A deck strategy that isn't successful anymore"
https://www.channelfireball.com/article/How-to-Metagame-in-Modern-and-Legacy-MTG-Deep-Dive/c034418c-574f-477c-ae37-2fc829e82ef2/
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January 2024