Interesting take, but I think this card is a bit niche. Not all decks play creatures. Will end up in sideboards (a likely fate for Force of Negation as well, but for tempo decks).

It can’t really replace removal spell slots since it cannot deal with threats sitting on the board, but this card seems reasonable to maindeck. Modern is so creature focused that this feels more like the Modern equivalent of Force of Will than the new blue one.

Pumping this to 4/4 is not going to happen very often, and to 6/6 almost never. The way the deck is currently designed incentivizes us to hold up mana for plays like Mana Leak or Shoal, even in the mid-game, so it would only “flip” in a top-deck situation; even in those, we don’t always have four lands to tap. So I think he will usually take multiple turns to level up, and will resultantly die very often. Our other mana-intensive plays (Snapcaster, or sideboard cards) lock-in value upon resolution or otherwise resist removal.

Which brings us to how bad do we want a 2/1 for one mana? I think very little, which is why we’ve never played Swiftspear or even Goblin Guide. 2 is too small a clock. Nacatl and Mongoose seem like better options for additional threats, especially the latter because of access to Path to Exile. Helps too that we can hit Nacatl with Muta to grow it over enemy creatures, whereas Mongoose is helpless on a lot of boards.

tl;dr: I’m skeptical, but haven’t tested it (and probably won’t).

I don’t think the card I just suggested does powercreep GQ, though. They’d serve different purposes.

And I would be very surprised if we did. Any kind of Wasteland lite would obsolete Ghost Quarter and Field of Ruin, and it’s pretty clear at this point that obsoleting/”upgrading” current Modern staples with strictly better versions is not what this set is about–they’ve confirmed that Counterspell is not in the set, for example. That was what some people were dreading when the set was announced months ago: that Wizards planned to turn Modern into Yu-Gi-Oh with de facto rotation via power creep.

This is something I hadn’t considered at the time of publication, but since then, I’ve run into a few Phoenix lists online featuring Aria. I’m impressed! It only takes 4 spells for them to turn the lifegain around, and after that, the enchantment kills very quickly. It’s difficult to interact with and doesn’t care about grave hate, letting Phoenix attack from a new angle. The only problem with Aria is its steep cost, which makes me think it’s perhaps more of a sideboard card. I like the idea of resolving it to “pop” enemy Death’s Shadows, though!

What I mean is a land with a higher power level designed expressly for Modern, and likely one that makes an explicit callback to Wasteland. A Wasteland that only works on lands with no basic land types, for example, would do wonders for tempo decks against the likes of Tron. But that’s just conjecture; either way, I would be surprised if we didn’t get a colorless land in Horizons that interacts with enemy nonbasics in some way.

And 4 Day’s Undoing? And 4 Narset, Parter of Veils? …Hey, not a bad idea!

Wow, this is the first time I’ve seen this mentioned! Very good to know.