Elesh Norn

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Happy Tuesday  MTG Peeps,

For those of you little scamps who, with bated breath, realise that it is only seven more sleeps to Christmas, we had posted some rather lovely Magic: the Gathering rarities on our Tumblr site here and here to help whet your anticipatory appetite.  For today's post, we were going to yatter a bit about some Modern format deck ideas and then kinda got waylaid by one the cards in it - Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite, so today's post is half flavour / half MTG brewing - strap in and let's go . . .

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Flavour First - 
The Grand Cenobite Elesh Norn, the Orthodoxy's highest-ranking Praetor, commands and guides this faction of Phyrexia, promising them a glorious future under the principles of the Argent Etchings. Everything the Phyrexians practice under the Machine Orthodoxy is designed to turn Mirrodin into a perfect new Phyrexian homeland, a kind of planewide phyresis.

Led by Elesh Norn, the white-aligned faction believes that Phyrexia must adhere to the teachings of the Father of Machines. They intend to indoctrinate everyone about the truth, even if it means tearing them limb from limb and reattaching the parts into a creation that is worthy of Phyrexia. They are dogmatic, hierarchical, and orthodox in their methods.

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The Modern format brew we were interested in is essentially a 'Tron' deck (aka UrzaTron) which featured Elesh Norn as a potential finisher.  Being able to mana ramp Elesh out early with a bunch of cheap critters or tokens is simply solid and sweet.

A bit more about this sort of deck - a main ingredient are select land cards form Chronicles / Antiquities such as Urza's Tower, Urza's Mine and Urza's Power Plant. They tap for one colorless mana each, but if all three are in play simultaneously, then both Urza's Mine and Urza's Power Plant are able to tap for two colorless mana and Urza's Tower taps for three colorless mana. This combination of cards provides the juice to churn out large amounts of colorless mana and allows the player to cast high-cost spells.  We were also interesting in combining Tron with a theme of affinity.  Affinity is a keyword ability that reduces the mana cost of a spell by the number of permanents of a certain type that player controls. The ability is always written as "Affinity for [something]". The most common instance is "Affinity for artifacts".  The thought here is to be able to cast fatties such as Darksteel Colossus several turns early.  We certainly don't have a finished list yet, just ideas on the drawing board but thanks for a few purchases from MTG Mint Card a while back we do already have the genesis of a potential build.
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