Much Abrew: The People's Cannon (Modern)
Hello, everyone! Welcome to another episode of Much Abrew About Nothing. Last week during our Instant Deck Techs, one deck blasted its way to the top: our Fishbowl Thursday option, The People's Cannon! While I'm not exactly sure where the name comes from, The People's Cannon is basically a three-land Goblin Charbelcher combo deck for Modern. Our plan is to get all of the lands out of our deck, use a combination of weird ramp and rituals to make enough mana to cast Goblin Charbelcher, and then activate it to blast our opponent for something like 45 damage to the face, potentially as early as Turn 2! Can a deck with just three lands actually work in Modern, backed by the power of Goblin Charbelcher? Let's get to the video and find out; then, we can talk more about the deck!
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Much Abrew: The People's Cannon (Modern)
Discussion
- As far as our record, we played five matches and ended up winning three, which is a lot better than I imagined heading into our gameplay. While I figured The People's Cannon would be fun and entertaining, I wasn't really expecting that we'd post a winning record. Apparently, the deck is a bit more competitive than it looks on paper.
- In theory, it's possible that we can win on Turn 2, but after playing a bunch of matches with the deck, it's usually more like Turn 4 or 5, which isn't incredibly fast for Modern but fast enough to win a reasonable number of games, even against aggro decks like BridgeVine and Izzet Phoenix, both of which we managed to beat along the way.
- The People's Cannon is sort of a weird deck to write about because there really aren't that many tricks. Most of the decisions you have to make with the deck involve which hands to keep and which ones to mulligan. We pretty much need at least one mana source (either one of our three lands or a Chancellor of the Tangle or Simian Spirit Guide) in our opener to keep, and sometimes we even have to mulligan hands with Simian Spirit Guide, since it doesn't make the green mana we need for Caravan Vigil, Traverse the Ulvenwald, and Attune with Aether. On the other hand, as long as we have mana, most hands are keepers, even without a Goblin Charbelcher (although having something like Faithless Looting to filter through our deck helps quite a bit).
- During the original Instant Deck Tech for The People's Cannon, we drastically misevaluated Recross the Paths. While we do occasionally use it as a ramp spell, it's mostly in our deck as a tutor. If we have zero lands left in our deck when we resolve Recross the Paths, we get to stack our deck in any order we want, which basically makes it additional copies of Goblin Charbelcher.
- We've played Chancellor of the Tangle in a couple of decks in the past, and we were disappointed both times. However, Chancellor of the Tangle is great in The People's Cannon, since it gives us green mana on Turn 1 to cast our Attune with Aether-type cards to get a land and start working toward our combo. Plus, we have Faithless Looting to eventually discard it and hopefully find new cards.
- The biggest downside of The People's Cannon is consistency. The deck mulligans a lot, and since we really only have four copies of Goblin Charbelcher to close out the game, we sometimes just don't find one and spend the game drawing endless land tutors until we die. Thankfully, the combination of Recross the Paths, Faithless Looting, and our free cycling spells helps quite a bit.
- The good news is that, win or lose, The People's Cannon is a blast to play. We're often just one good draw away from winning the game, so even when things don't work out, the games are always exciting.
- So, should you play The People's Cannon in Modern? I think the answer is yes, but not as your primary Modern deck. The People's Cannon seems like a great second or third Modern deck to pull out once in a while to have some fun and surprise people at your local game store, and it's competitive enough to steal quite a few wins, especially when opponents don't know what's coming. On the other hand, I'm not sure it's consistent enough to be your primary Modern deck, and I'd imagine that the gameplay might get a bit repetitive if you played it week after week and month after month. Still, I had a blast playing the deck. The wins were awesome, and even some of the losses were pretty fun. Combine that with a fairly budget-friendly price tag, and it seems like a fun, semi-competitive option for Modern!
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. Don't forget to vote for next week's deck by liking, commenting on, and subscribing to Instant Deck Tech videos! 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.
