If you’re playing Thopter-Sword, a consensus has been built that Grixis with a Green splash for sideboard cards is probably the ideal. If you want to play something that’s closer to midrange, you’d enjoy Thopter-Sword more. The Takeaway: if you want to play a hardcore combo deck, then PO is what you’re looking for.

They have more countermagic, and PO being an instant naturally allows them to play more flexibly around opposing interaction. Post-board, PO decks can become fairer, with Oko and Monastery Mentor being popular choices, but they are typically still heavily focused on comboing. Though usually cast as a zero-mana artifact for PO, pilots sometimes utilize the “hidden mode” of actually placing charge counters on it to blow something up. Like the old KCI decks, mainboard Engineered Explosives provide the only substantive mainboard interaction. While the Thopter-Sword shell is highly interactive, PO is almost entirely combo pieces, acceleration, and zero-mana artifacts. Some builds include ways to win the same turn (Nexus, Ascendancy), but many pilots have decided that there’s no need their opponents are too far behind when they untap to do anything. With or without Jeskai Ascendancy (we’ll get to the distinctions between the major builds in a little bit), the deck is looking to stick a Sai or a Saheeli and use Paradoxical Outcome to draw an absurd number of cards and generate an absurd on-board advantage. While the deck can certainly get there off a large Urza Construct or stall long enough to ping away with a couple of Thopters, it more often than not wins via an insurmountable Thopter army spawned from multiple PO’s, an infinite number of turns off Nexus of Fate, or an infinitely large Emry, Lurker of the Loch. PO builds of Urza, on the other hand, are much closer to pure combo decks. Collector Ouphe looks a lot worse against Tezzeret and Oko than it does against Thopter Foundry. With grindy threats like Tezzeret and Oko and efficient, flexible interaction like Thoughtseize and Assassin’s Trophy, the deck can abandon its combo plan altogether and play a fair, powerful game, rendering opponents’ sideboard answers ineffective. Post-board, Thopter-Sword plays even more like a midrange deck. Against still others, an enormous Urza Construct is good enough to beat your way to victory.

Against others, Thopter-Sword is sufficient. Against some decks, a Bridge is game over. Depending on the matchup, the deck can lean more or less into any of its many elements. Sometimes it just goes for a value engine, using Goblin Engineer to loop Arcum’s Astrolabe and an Ichor Wellspring. Thopter-Sword plays like a midrange/control/prison deck it fetches answers to its opponent’s deck by using Whir to consistently find Pithing Needle, Ensnaring Bridge, and other answers. That remains true today, and the Thopter-Sword builds of Urza are not reliant on assembling an infinite combo to win the game. Thopter-Sword existed in the fringes of Modern even before Urza was printed because there are so many decks in the format that have an incredibly difficult time dealing with the non-infinite version of the Thopter-Sword combo. Thopter-Sword and PO tend to be thought of as similar because of their inclusion of Urza and large numbers of artifacts, but their gameplay couldn’t be more different. If you’re trying to decide which variant to play in Modern, look no further! Gameplay Largely, these decks can be separated into two mega-archetypes under the Urza umbrella: Thopter-Sword decks and Paradoxical Outcome (PO) decks. With a critical mass of absurdly powerful artifact-oriented cards, we’ve seen an increase not just in popularity of Urza decks, but also an increase in diversity. In Throne of Eldraine, Wizards gave artifact strategies a new toy in the form of Emry, Lurker of the Loch. Some players worried that perhaps Urza was too good, but Wizards doesn’t seem to think so. Since the printing of Urza, Lord High Artificer, artifact decks have exploded back into Modern.

Slay the spire astrolabe