Abbot of Keral Keep is a great Magic card. I shouldn’t need to explain it, but a 2/1 Prowess for 1R is basically the going rate for a creature, tacking a conditional card draw to that is kind of insane. I was sold on this card pretty early and I picked up a dozen because I knew I wanted to play it in every format. I can’t say yet if it’s better than [card]Young Pyromancer[/card] or [card]Eidolon of the Great Revel[/card]s, but it’s certainly in the conversation for best Red two-drop.

In Standard I’ve been playing it in an 18 land Boros deck with [card]Seeker of the Way[/card] as the only other two mana spell. I can tell you that Abbot into [card]Hammerhand[/card] feels reeeeeeally good. This article isn’t about that deck though. This is about digging into Modern to find a home for the Abbot.

Burn is the obvious starting point. [card]Monastery Swiftspear[/card], [card]Goblin Guide[/card], Abbot and [card]Young Pyromancer[/card] are basically the Red Fantastic Four. Jam some [card]Lightning Bolt[/card]s and other burn spells in there and you’ve got a deck. The tricky part of that is how many good two-mana burn spells there are in Modern. I feel like [card]Lightning Helix[/card] and [card]Boros Charm[/card] are auto-includes. So is [card]Skullcrack[/card], or if you’re splashing, [card]Atarka’s Command[/card]. I sketched out burn decks ranging from Boros to five color with [card]Wild Nacatl[/card] and [card]Tribal Flames[/card].

Then I started thinking about how prowess impacted other cards in the deck. Having prowess creatures basically added “Creatures you control get +1/+1 until end of turn” onto every non-creature spell in your deck. This came up in a Standard game when my opponent had a [card]Monastery Siege[/card] set to Dragons, making it more expensive to target them. I was trying to figure out how to kill them after they tapped out, but spending 3 mana on a [card]Wild Slash[/card] wouldn’t let me cast enough other spells. I saw that the play was to slash my own [card]Akroan Crusader[/card], replacing itself with a hasty token, and getting 3 prowess triggers.

Prowess effectively raises the floor on your spells, helping cards that have potential high impact in the early stages, but that lose value as the game goes on, which sums up black discard perfectly. I started looking at a Red/Black disruptive deck and that led me to [card]Raven’s Crime[/card]. Retrace turns all of your lands into spells, so that every non-creature card in your deck triggers prowess. Everything else fell into place pretty quickly from there.

Abbot Loam – Jeff Good

[deck]
[Lands]
3 Blood Crypt
4 Bloodstained Mire
1 Forest
1 Haunted Fengraf
1 Mountain
2 Overgrown Tomb
2 Stomping Ground
1 Swamp
2 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
2 Verdant Catacombs
3 Wooded Foothills
[/Lands]
[Spells]
2 Abrupt Decay
2 Flame Jab
2 Inquisition of Kozilek
4 Life from the Loam
3 Lightning Bolt
4 Magmatic Insight
4 Raven’s Crime
2 Terminate
3 Thoughtseize
[/Spells]
[Creatures]
4 Abbot of Keral Keep
4 Monastery Swiftspear
4 Young Pyromancer
[/Creatures]
[/deck]

Disclaimer: I haven’t thoroughly tested this yet. Many numbers might have to be tweaked and it’s possible I missed something entirely.

I’ve played my share of [card]Raven’s Crime[/card] in [card]Life from the Loam[/card] decks in the past, but those always felt slow and grindy. They leaned on three-drops like [card]Countryside Crusher[/card] or [card]Knight of the Reliquary[/card]. They were midrangey board control decks with disruption for combo and Loam as a long-game card advantage engine against control. Those decks don’t really have a home in the format right now. Control doesn’t really exist in Modern, and the closest analogs have massive endgames that trump Loam. Discard is good, but it’s not enough on its own against combo decks. You have to finish the game quickly to keep them from top-decking the win. That’s exactly what this deck is geared to do.

The card I’m smacking my forehead about is [card]Magmatic Insight[/card]. My first thought upon reading that card should have been “LIFE FROM THE MOTHERF@#%ING LOAM!!!” You couldn’t care less about pitching a land and you can either dig for cards you need or dredge back a Loam with it. This and Abbot give you some card advantage outside of [card]Life from the Loam[/card].

The plan is to rip your opponent’s hand apart with a combination of [card]Thoughtseize[/card], [card]Inquisition[/card] and [card]Raven’s Crime[/card], dropping one of your creatures in along the way, or once the coast is clear. Then you want to go to town dredging [card]Life from the Loam[/card] and casting four spells per turn. That will generate either a huge army of elementals or some rather large monks.

You also have a suite of removal spells, currently a mix of [card]Lightning Bolt[/card]s, [card]Abrupt Decay[/card]s and [card]Terminate[/card]s. Feel free to tune this package to your local metagame.

Sideboarding

I didn’t list a sideboard here, but there are tons of options. I’d start with 3x [card]Ancient Grudge[/card] with a 4th sitting nearby. The 4th Bolt has to be in the 75 too. Beyond that there’s a few ways to go. One is a faster, more “All in” package to speed the deck up. That would probably include something like [card]Kiln Fiend[/card]s and [card]Assault Strobe[/card]s. I think I’d be more inclined to put a package like that in the main and slow down into a more removal/interaction deck post-board.

The other approach, is the more typical removal & disruption plan. I don’t think the deck needs more discard, given how much it already has, but [card]Surgical Extraction[/card] is certainly an option. I’m not usually a fan of the the Thoughtseize/Surgical plan but free spells are good with Prowess and Abbot, so it’s better than usual here. I want to play [card]Gnaw to the Bone[/card] but might not have enough creatures for it to do what I want. Besides that I would just add more removal to answer the diverse threats you might face.

I want to include some extra threats too. People might bring in [card]Pyroclasm[/card] type effects to deal with Pyromancer, so there’s value in having the option to swap those for something beefier. There’s also plenty of times you just need more to bring in. Tasigur and [card]Quirion Dryad[/card] are at the top of that list for me. Dredge and cheap spells feed delve nicely. Retrace plays well with the Dryad, which started in the main but is just a little below [card]Young Pyromancer[/card] overall. The dark horse is [card]Managorger Hydra[/card]. I’m hesitant to go up to 3 mana, but trample and triggering on every spell, both yours and your opponent’s, are big advantages.

Kolaghan’s Command is another option since it can get threats back, but I wouldn’t want more than 1-2 three mana spells in the deck. I’ve been toying with some single mana defensive spells to try to protect the prowess creatures but being reactive

S.W.O.T.

This is an old analytical tool that’s good for evaluating decks in a metagame. It’s especially useful when you’re brewing and working in theory without the benefit of extensive testing. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats, with the first two being internal elements and the latter being external. Threats, in this context, are threats to you, rather than the threats you are presenting.

Strengths:
– Synergy. Every card in the deck increases the value of another card.
– Low base mana costs but scalable effects.
– Can go “tall” with prowess triggers and “wide” with [card]Young Pyromancer[/card]
– Heavy disruption.

Weaknesses:
– While there’s a lot of redundancies, the deck needs to find [card]Life from the Loam[/card] and a retrace spell to maximize synergies. [card]Magmatic Insight[/card] and Abbot might not be enough to find them in time. If the deck needs more dig, [card]Faithless Looting[/card] is the obvious solution.
– Small base toughness.
– Sorcery-heavy. There’s not much you can do on your opponent’s turn.

Opportunities:
– Combo decks tend to be light on removal and weak to discard.
– Reactive decks struggle with discard but may be heavier on removal.

Threats:
– Linear aggro like Robots, though that improves post-board thanks to [card]Ancient Grudge[/card].
– High-volumes of removal, especially cheap sweepers like [card]Pyroclasm[/card]. [card]Young Pyromancer[/card] already has a bit of a target on its back.
– Topdecks. You don’t really have any way to interact with your opponent on their turn. They’ll get to play whatever they draw.
– Heavy graveyard hate. If anyone drops a turn zero [card]Leyline of the Void[/card] you’re in trouble. If they mulligan aggressively to get to it, you should be okay though.

I’m prepared to admit that simple, straightforward burn might still be the way to go with Abbot in Modern, but I think this is a powerful take that really “uses the whole buffalo” for its cards. There’s a lot of fast combo in Modern right now and that makes me want to come out swinging with cheap creatures and aggressive disruption. What are your thoughts on the deck? Be sure to report your results if you decide to give it a try.

Jeff Good
@LowGuppy
Cohost of Not Another Magic Podcast and occasional writer here and on cardconfidants.com