Much Abrew About Nothing: Heroic Naya (Modern)
Hello, everyone! Welcome to the new and improved Much Abrew About Nothing. This week, we are headed to Modern to play Heroic Naya, an aggressive deck built around one-drops featuring the heroic mechanic, lots of pump spells, and Hardened Scales to push the +1/+1 counter theme over the top. The question we'll be trying to answer is why to play Heroic Naya over Bogles when both decks operate in a similar space. Hopefully, we'll have our answer by the time we reach the end of the videos!
We'll have some notes on Heroic Naya after the videos, but first a quick reminder. If you enjoy the Much Abrew About Nothing series and the other video content on MTGGoldfish, make sure to subscribe to the MTGGoldfish Youtube Channel to keep up on all the latest and greatest.
Heroic Naya: Instant Deck Tech
Heroic Naya vs. Tron
Heroic Naya vs. Jeskai Foundry
Heroic Naya vs. Mardu Nahiri
Heroic Naya Wrap Up
Thoughts
- First off, we only went 1–2 in matches, which isn't great.
- The problems are twofold. Not only do we lose to ourselves when we don't have a creature in our opening hand and have to mulligan into oblivion, but unlike Bogles, we also lose to spot removal like Path to Exile, Abrupt Decay, and Lightning Bolt.
- What advantages does Heroic Naya have over Bogles? Probably the biggest is Temur Battle Rage, which is more explosive in the Heroic Naya deck. We are also better against mass enchantment removal, not that mass enchantment removal is really a major part of Modern at the moment.
- By far the most important card in our deck is Vines of Vastwood, which ironically makes a creature into a Bogle until end of turn. Pretty much every win we had was the direct result of being able to fizzle a removal spell with Vine of Vastwood and getting in for one big attack.
- Overall, Heroic Naya is essentially bad Bogles. It plays like Bogles, but all of its creatures die to removal, and having hard-to-interact-with hexproof creatures is the main reason to play a Bogles-style deck.
- I have two pieces of advice moving forward. First, if you are thinking about buying the deck because you like the style of play, don't! Just go out and buy Bogles instead. Heroic Naya simply isn't worth the price tag, especially compared to Bogles. On the other hand, I think that, with a few cuts, Heroic Naya could be a fairly reasonable budget option. Instead of spending $400, start with something like this:
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
