Yorion or Lurrus for best companion?
Modern forum
Posted on May 23, 2020, 4:24 p.m. by jaymc1130
I've been playing a fair amount of Modern with companions to get a feel for the format with their inclusion and although the prevailing opinion seems to be that Lurrus is the best performing companion I'm not so certain it's that clear cut.
I'm actually starting to trend toward Yorion being the best companion in Modern.
The 80 card restriction is less restrictive, and the downside of a larger deck is very negligible in the majority of cases. Both companions lend themselves very well to a value based game plan approach, but Lurrus is limited to a single use of a single card once per turn while Yorion flickers whole boards and can get wildly out of control with flicker looping generating 4, 5, 6 extra cards a turn with scry effects, token generation, no downside planeswalker activtions, etc. Yorion is also much tougher to kill off due to immunity to Fatal Push, Lightning Bolt, Abrupt Decay, etc.
Then there's some more recent tournament data that suggests Yorion decks are slightly out performing Lurrus decks at the top level of play.
I honestly think this might be the more potent of these two companions for Modern.
There's a lot that's changing in the metagame for Modern at the moment, so I don't think any one can really have a complete grasp of all the format entails and we're probably all relying on a little intuition and previously Accumulated Knowledge.
A couple of big things I have noticed about the format at the moment relate to the most common cards played in it.
Value Snek is showing up in basically anything UG, along with Uro.
Wrenn and Six obliterates Value Snek deck lists and any other deck list relying on early drops with 1 toughness.
Titans are all over the place, so killing things with 6 toughness is a thing most decks need to be able to do in the mainboard, not the easiest task.
Graveyard hate cards are all showing up maindeck.
Chalice decks are becoming more prevalent.
Lukka and Copy Cat decks are tending to set the pace in terms of how fast wins are possible.
What does all this mean for these two companions? Well, I'm not entirely sure either. A lot of working off my gut feelings here as opposed to some hard data supported by math. But my gut is telling me that Yorion might be a slight favorite? Guess it's still too soon to tell.
Flooremoji says... #2
I can't really say which is better, they just have different matchups.
It probably boils down to a metagame call rather than a companion A is better than B comparison.
The decks that Yorion is played in have always tried to outvalue all of their opponents, overwhleming them with card advantage and endless chump blockers. This approach has typically granted a favorable matchup vs midrange decks, and with the right sideboard also favorable vs aggro. I don't actually know where control decks fit on that scale.
The decks that Lurrus is typically played in try to dissasemble your opponent and then hit them while they're weak with powerful removal and undercosted creatures. Lurrus helps these decks survive a bit better when faced with tides of removal, and well pretty much everything else. All the Lurrus decks need to kill most of the creatures that Yorion decks play to help mitigate the advantage you gain from flickering a board. It is a losing battle though, because you can't keep removing everything they play when they all cantrip and it's always a pain to remove astrolabe. Lurrus decks are much closer to even on their bad matchups at the cost of having slightly less good matchups.
Of course I haven't been playing as much as I would like for a plethora of reasons, so most of this conclusion was based on previous knowledge of how the decks worked and theorycrafting.
May 23, 2020 4:37 p.m.