The black sideboard cards are much better than the white ones for the most part, so I see no issue trying that at least.
Gonna have to disagree with this statement right here. Path to Exile, Selfless Spirit, Kataki, BFT, Linvala, Reveillark, Stony Silence, and Qasali Pridemage are staple cards that have been in the Sideboard and Maybeboard since this deck was created.
Comparing that to black you've got Abrupt Decay and Pharika.
White is and has always been far more pervasive in our sideboards. Claiming that the black cards are better is simply not true. White cards are AT LEAST as good AND more plentiful.
Haven't been chatting much in this thread as of late, excited to see someone finally moving to 20 lands. I've been on this list, with few changes for the past few months, it feels much more akin to the older versions of Company that would come to the table with a value plan and shift into combo out of nowhere and kill you if you let your guard down for a second.
Obviously I'd like to go T1 Dork, T2 Voice/Finks/Druid, T3 Finks/Voice/EWit/Rallier/Saffi/CoCo/kill you, but in competitive magic we never really get what we want do we?
What I like about this list is that it's very good at grinding against all the control decks that are so popular these days and it has an ever-surprisingly good game against Shadow decks. I'd like to find more room for hate removal like RIP and Cage, but we just don't have that kind of space in the deck these days. I have to rely on the fact that I am faster and can win games through multiple angles against those cards.
Typical cards that come out for G2 and 3 are:
- 1-2x Vizier of Remedies depending on how likely I am to combo and how likely the are to bring in Staticaster.
- 2x Noble Hierarch & 2x BoP if the game is going to be grindy, I have to be aware that I need at least 2-3 lands/dorks in my opening hand (and be able to cast them), but after that, I'll have plenty of time to draw lands and drawing dorks that don't combo is often times the worst possible draw, so leaving 2 birds in the deck feels right for these MUs.
- 3x Voice & 1-2 EWit if the game is going to be super fast and/or combo centric and Voice will never get a chance to block. Decks like Storm and Affinity leave little space for Voice to gain you value, and I don't have time to untap and gain normal value out of EWit, so I'm happy to shave 1, sometimes 2 depending on the match.
- Surprisingly - Walking Ballista against things like Scapeshift since I don't actually need to kill my opponent to win this MU, merely gaining a million life will get me there, and Walking Ballista doesn't help me do that or anything else that really matters in the MU.
- 2x Chord and 2x Company, the 1st Chord is a go-to for grindy MUs that focus on keeping my board clear of threats. I don't want to be drawing Chords with no creatures in hand and no creatures on the board, so going down to 3 or 2 is regularly a good idea. Company comes out if I see my <4 CMC creatures dropping below the 28 mark. It's rare, but sometimes I go down to 26-27 creatures, and I don't want to have 4 CoCos in that situation since the target density is too low to be worth it anymore.
Going down on lands and up on creatures has helped me to reduce flood potential, present a more relevant clock and force removal on non-optimal targets like Voice, Finks, Rallier, and Viscera Seer to open the way for a Devoted Druid threat the next turn. And vice versa, if my opponent removes my T2 druid, I don't feel as bad shifting into a value game on T3.
While I lose percentage points on how often I hit a T3 combo, I still have all the major bases covered. 4x Druid for maximum T2 Druid, 3x Vizier doesn't feel bad because Vizier is terrible when you aren't comboing anyway, 2x Recruiter has him showing up often enough to combo easily but not so often that I'm stuck with vanilla 2/2 and nothing useful for him to do, and 3x EWit has always felt right, even when going harder on the combo.
Anyway, I have always preferred this deck being deep in value options, and with Blue being so popular lately, Voice is worth his weight in gold again. Figured I'd share my list for those of you looking for a different way to approach this deck and approach the meta with it. I regularly end games against blue control decks with 2+ CoCos/Chords in hand after taking 10+ turns each. Simply presenting threat after threat after threat and forcing them to tap awkwardly and inefficiently allows me to out-value them. Comboing in those MUs is not only a lot harder to actually pull off, it's completely unnecessary if you have an effective value plan.
I've been a big fan of 'Devoted Vizier' as far as naming the deck. There are brews where even Company is being dropped, but everything seems to always revolve around Devoted Druid, Vizier of Remedies, and Chord of Calling these days. That or just 'Vizier.'
To me, it's kind of like the whole Legacy thing with Shardless. I can literally just say "I'm on Shardless tonight" and everyone in the room knows 65+ of the cards in my deck, I don't even have to tell you the colors, you already know. All this "Counters Company" crap seems like it's dancing around the obvious. Vizier has only ever seen play in decks that are already playing Devoted Druid and probably some sort of toolbox set to go with it. There's a lot of flex slots and different decks currently under the umbrella, but I still know the general game plan of the deck and have a general idea of what I need to look out for and play around if you were to tell me my opponent is on Vizier.
Notably, you cannot keep hands in the same manner that you would with a bigger mana base as most other people are playing Abzan Company decks right now. I think of it more like burn. When you look at your hand, you need a clear plan for the first few turns and acknowledge that the deck probably needs to give you a certain set of cards for you to really kick things into high gear, given that you run 20 lands and 10 dorks, that thing is often more mana, but again, mana is literally half your deck, so that tends not to be an issue.
Also, you can end up stuck on 2-3 mana for a while so don't expect to hit T3 CoCo every game like you can with more traditional builds, and can just as often have a very stale game where you play out a druid, only to have your opponent kill it, only to play out another druid the next turn.
At the end of the day, the deck is primarily a GW beatdown deck with obviously undersized creatures, but that gives it the tools to play an older Abzan Company style where you keep presenting threats until your opponent is forced to answer them, at which point you get to combo in response, which means you play at a very different tempo than a deck that is primarily trying to kill it's opponents on turn 3 with a Druid>Vizier>Recruiter>Ballista combo. Not that you DON'T ever get T3 kills, you definitely do, you're just not going to be as consistent as someone running more mana sources and combo pieces when it comes to early combo kills.
I am running a version of the deck that has 3x Voice, 2x Rallier, 4x Finks, 3x Ewit, and 1x Saffi for the recursion/value side of the deck, and it performs great against the field while giving up percentage points in the mirror. Depending on how saturated your local area is with Coco decks, it could be a good choice. Maybe the best example I've had is facing down a smattering of board wipes and Ballistas out of Tron and never ending his turn with less than 2 creatures on my side of the board. The amount of recursion in the deck is just silly, the only card I never want to see out of that deck these days is Ugin, and luckily, he's gone out of style with most Tron players these days.
My deck runs 4 Noble, 2 BoP, 4 Druids, and 20 lands. 30 mana sources is plenty for a deck that tops out at 4 CMC and focuses on 2 drops. I have a single Godless Shrine, and a single Overgrown Tomb, and my 2 BoPs as my only B sources with my only B spells in the 75 being 1 Viscera Seer and 3x Tide hollow Scullers.
Cedric's fluff at the end of the stream yesterday resonated with me a lot since it's basically the same thing I've been feeling - and it's why I'm moving to 4x Voice in the main.
The combos are obviously powerful, a T3 kill has GOT to be worth playing in Modern... but something is missing with the deck, that is also obvious. In my experience, the part that has been missing is resilient creatures that put the opponent on the back foot and open the way for combo kills out of nowhere. I have had too many games where they kill something, I reload, they wipe the board, I CoCo, hit a druid and a bird, and draw a Vizier off the top. Without a meaningful way to force our opponent to spend their removal, they can spend the whole game shooting down Druids and Viziers, and never let the combo get off the ground.
There was a single AbzCo deck in the top 32 at the Open yesterday. Elves and Humans made it too, but those are both fundamentally different decks, and thinking about what is different about them that got them here and what is holding AbzCo back, I keep coming back to same thing over and over. Not enough aggro.
We'll see how it goes in Vegas later this week, but for now, I'm sure the direction to move is AWAY from the combo. What we've been missing is the ability to flood the board with creatures that cannot be easily ignored. The deck that DID make it played 3 Voices in the side. I, personally, have always felt that Voice is a card you want in the main or not at all. For me, at least, it's significantly harder to lose a G1 and decide THIS is a MU I want Voice for compared to losing G1 and realizing Voice isn't doing anything for me here.
To further discussion on my sideboard, here's another list, now that I'm looking at it, I'm not so sure I want the Maelstrom Pulses or moving up to 3 Fulminators:
I've found choke to be invaluable throughout my history of playing Abzan Company since blue-based control is such gear shift for us and Choke is one of the pieces that I feel has historically made it a good MU. Like I said, I'd rather it be 2, not 1, and your argument convinces me I need to find a spot to move it up. Especially when the best deck in the format is heavily reliant on Islands, I feel fine with it in the deck, and probably should have never shaved the 2nd one to begin with.
Being stuck on 2 mana is A-ok with me. I can play several turns on 2, the bigger concern would be having the right colors.
2/2 Path/Pulse split sounds good, I might move that direction.
Part of the appeal with Fulminator Mage is with the recursion available and the 1-of is very much so saying "I'd rather just not play against Tron to begin with" while still giving me something relevant to bring in and it has meaningful interaction with Grixis Shadow as well. The deck plays 3 red sources, 3 black sources, and 4 blue sources. Saffi, Rec Sage, and Reveillark all offer paths to destroy multiple lands and choking them off a single color can have huge ramifications on their tempo. It's won me games already, but not so many that I want to go all-in on the land destruction plan, especially with so few black sources of my own. It's also good against oddball situations like blowing up a mountain with exactly 6 Valakut triggers on the stack, another consideration I'd rather avoid but feel like I should have SOMETHING to do should I come up against that.
Posting one last time this week for last minute input. After watching the Open this weekend, I am thoroughly convinced that the issue Company is having as a deck is that it's going too hard on the combo. A worthy mistake to make, the combos are what make the deck powerful, but we need aggro to open the way for combo. That said, the MD is basically non-negotiable, but input on the side is welcome:
Yes, it's 61 cards, but I'm actually pretty happy with that since I wanted less dorks and less mana flooding. This lets me play 30 mana sources and still feel like I've "cut" on them.
Some of the logic revolves around the fact that T2 Voice has always been one of the strongest things this deck has to offer; Rallier + Finks + Voice + EWit creatues a huge "sticky creatures" package that opponents must face down and spend removal on. This makes things like T3 and T4 Druid better overall since the early removal is more likely to hit a non-druid creature because reasons. I'd like the 1x Choke in the side to be 2x Choke, but I felt like I needed to make a concession to Tron, so the 2nd Choke became a Fulminator Mage. Looking at the board again, I'm not sure I really want Pontiff, should I take him out and put Choke #2 back in? Rec Sage vs Pridemage #2 - a worthy consideration, especially considering that Pridemage brings Exalted triggers if he's not killing Cages.
I've done a bit of testing with this list online, and I am fairly happy with it. The prime example being that I went up against a Jeskai Control list yesterday and ended up shaving down to 0 Nobles and 2 Druids. I beat my opponent's face in with Voices, Elemental Tokens, and Ralliers. Combo was never an option and, frankly, I didn't need it. My opponent hit me with Supreme Verdict at one point and I had 4 creatures on the board ready to attack before I untapped. Slow up on the combo, get em when the getting is good with beats.
The moment that convinced me that this is worth trying was simply watching the guy who was running 0 birds 4 voice last night.
G1 - T1 Noble, T2 Druid, T3 Vizier, make a bunch of mana and.... flood the board with creatures because I didn't find a combo piece? T4, hit you for 4 because I have a Voice 2 Nobles, and bunch of other ***** on the board, draw 2 extra cards by popping Canopy, playing EWit, and popping Canopy again. T5 play a Gavony and start swinging in with the team and pumping. T6 find a chord and swing in with the team for lethal rather than reveal the card that came off the top.
This was a legitimate aggro beat down in a game that went CLEARLY wrong for the deck and still resulted in a T6 kill with no spells being played during the last 2 turns.
G2 - Same thing happened, but he ran into an EE on 2 which killed 8+ creatures. He lost that one.
G3 - Early combo threat answered by Path. Shift over into the same aggro game we just watched happen twice earlier and win the game around T5.
The threat of a ridiculously large elemental token was relevant in all 3 games. He still could have combo'd just the same as I could had his draws lined up differently, but *this is important to me* when his combo plan fell apart, he was still aggressive and got to force his opponent to spend resources on living, rather than just protecting against the combo. During the matches I watched, Druid was just as important for keeping the deck functioning normal as it was being a combo piece. Thinking about it now, I might move up to 4x Vizier too just to have the extra mana generation when needed, not for the combo, but just to make all the G necessary to play the game.
I might move Spirit to the main, I mostly wanted to get the core idea of the shift out there. Drop the birds, move up to 4 nobles, and get a Finks/Voice/Rallier set for attacking. To be clear, I'm not having an issue running out of cards necessarily, I'm not having an issue keeping SOMETHING on board the vast majority of the time, the issue comes down to the fact that I find myself lacking ways to turn those things into meaningful threats in a timely manner. A 5/6 bird takes 5 turns to get that big and can be handled with a single removal spell. But a Voice can be a 4/4 attacker on T3. If we're not pressuring our opponents life total, they have the freedom to keep counters and removal up for the important stuff and they can safely ignore the rest, that's the problem I'm encountering over and over.
The guy who was on Grixis Control last night had 4 Damnations in his SB. He came ready to kill some creatures...
Last night I ran into no less than 4 Supreme Verdicts, 1 Damnation, and 1 Anger of the Gods.
Lighthing Bolt, Terminate, Path to Exile and Fatal Push all got to hit a Druid in response to a Chord for 2.
I watched my opponents draw at least 15 cards off Ancestral Visions and Planeswalkers provided further value and eventual wincons. Hell, I lost to Narest drawing an extra card every turn one game.
Control is a force in my area, and is getting better in Modern in general. Grixis Shadow just won an Open this past weekend.
Gavony + BoP isn't enough to get you there vs endless card advantage decks.
Every single game I play that goes beyond 4 turns, I find myself flooding out. I was side boarding lands out last night because there are too many do-nothing mana sources in the deck and I still lost due to flooding.
23 lands, 6 1 drop dorks, and 4 druids = 33 cards that do jack all in a control match, and that is by far the biggest problem I've been having with the deck lately. All the mana in the world doesn't matter when all you're doing is drawing more mana.
I had a game where I had 21 lands, 2 birds, and 2 druids in the deck and STILL couldn't find anything relevant to do in the match because the deck is so full of do-nothing creatures and completely reliant on the combo.
The meta in my area has changed, nobody lets you untap for T3 without having a removal spell ready to go. The Druid combo will never get off the ground, so it's time to take it to their face and punish them for hating so hard on an 0/2.
T3 CoCo is nice, but what I really want to be doing is putting Voice into play and swinging into their face.
I fell off the face of the earth a few weeks ago. Anyway, I'm back with new ideas:
Went to a GPT last night and got destroyed by control, so I'm moving back toward Voice of Resurgence and my favorite SB card - Choke. Oddly enough, there was another guy in the room who was already on Voice tech and he went undefeated through Swiss, it's just too good against removal-heavy decks that are often also sporting counter magic:
Things to note: 0 BOPs, 21 lands. There are plenty of 2 mana plays and 29 mana sources in the deck, we needed room for action somewhere, and these feel worse and worse the longer the game goes on.
4 Finks + 3 Voice + 3 Ralliers backed up by 4 Nobles and a Pridemage for Exalted triggers: The beatstick plan is real.
Everything else is fairly obvious. This is a rough idea, and definitely will need some refinement, but control has gotten bigger and bigger in my area and I feel like you need to be taking things like Grixis Control and UW stuff into consideration right now.
So after playing the Naya Druid list, I can firmly say that I hate it. I ended the night 1-5. I won against Burn, lost to Eldrazi Tron, Eldrazi Tron, UW Control, and Affinity. Draws weren't optimal in many of the games, but you shouldn't have to draw T3 kills every game for a deck to function.
To put it as concisely as possible, the problem is that the deck feels like crap if you never get to untap with a druid on the board and relevant cards in hand to combo. Yes, I got to hit people upside the head with a 8/2 trampling Rallier thanks to Kessig's Wolf Run, it didn't matter. Yes, I got to pump my druid to 4/2 with Rhonas and attack with both, all that did was trade for some removal from my opponent. Yes, I got to attack my opponent for 3 AND CoCo on the 3rd turn of a game, who cares?
The entire deck seems to hinge on the idea of untapping with Druid and in order for you to get there, your opponents need to not understand what Druid is capable of (everyone who is any good in my area understands what Druid is capable of). I had a game against Eldrazi Tron where I started with a turn 3 kill in hand, and as soon as Druid hit the board on T2, Dismember, paying 4 life went straight toward the Druid's face. I get that the deck is blazingly fast, and is almost a guaranteed kill by turn 4 if your opponent doesn't interact, but counting on your opponent being stupid, playing a bad deck, or not drawing anything relevant is not the way to win in this game. I'm going back to Abzan, because as always, the strength of this playstyle comes from the ability to play a value game and randomly turn that into an infinite combo. Going all in on the combo has never felt good to me in the past, and doesn't feel good to me now.
Gonna have to disagree with this statement right here. Path to Exile, Selfless Spirit, Kataki, BFT, Linvala, Reveillark, Stony Silence, and Qasali Pridemage are staple cards that have been in the Sideboard and Maybeboard since this deck was created.
Comparing that to black you've got Abrupt Decay and Pharika.
White is and has always been far more pervasive in our sideboards. Claiming that the black cards are better is simply not true. White cards are AT LEAST as good AND more plentiful.
4x Birds of Paradise
2x Noble Hierarch
Druid/Vizier Dudes (10)
4x Devoted Druid
3x Vizier of Remedies
2x Duskwatch Recruiter
1x Walking Ballista
Finks/Seer Combo (7)
4x Kitchen Finks
2x Viscera Seer
1x Anafenza, Kin-Tree Spirit
Bad Combo Pieces That Never Combo (2)
1x Renegade Rallier
1x Saffi Eriksdotter
Value For Days (7)
3x Eternal Witness
1x Scavenging Ooze
3x Voice of Resurgence
3x Forest
2x Gavony Township
1x Godless Shrine
2x Horizon Canopy
1x Overgrown Tomb
1x Plains
2x Temple Garden
4x Verdant Catacombs
4x Windswept Heath
Instant (8)
4x Chord of Calling
4x Collected Company
2x Aven Mindcensor
1x Burrenton Forge-Tender
1x Kataki, War's Wage
1x Linvala, Keeper of Silence
1x Orzhov Pontiff
3x Path to Exile
1x Qasali Pridemage
1x Reveillark
1x Selfless Spirit
3x Tidehollow Sculler
Obviously I'd like to go T1 Dork, T2 Voice/Finks/Druid, T3 Finks/Voice/EWit/Rallier/Saffi/CoCo/kill you, but in competitive magic we never really get what we want do we?
What I like about this list is that it's very good at grinding against all the control decks that are so popular these days and it has an ever-surprisingly good game against Shadow decks. I'd like to find more room for hate removal like RIP and Cage, but we just don't have that kind of space in the deck these days. I have to rely on the fact that I am faster and can win games through multiple angles against those cards.
Typical cards that come out for G2 and 3 are:
- 1-2x Vizier of Remedies depending on how likely I am to combo and how likely the are to bring in Staticaster.
- 2x Noble Hierarch & 2x BoP if the game is going to be grindy, I have to be aware that I need at least 2-3 lands/dorks in my opening hand (and be able to cast them), but after that, I'll have plenty of time to draw lands and drawing dorks that don't combo is often times the worst possible draw, so leaving 2 birds in the deck feels right for these MUs.
- 3x Voice & 1-2 EWit if the game is going to be super fast and/or combo centric and Voice will never get a chance to block. Decks like Storm and Affinity leave little space for Voice to gain you value, and I don't have time to untap and gain normal value out of EWit, so I'm happy to shave 1, sometimes 2 depending on the match.
- Surprisingly - Walking Ballista against things like Scapeshift since I don't actually need to kill my opponent to win this MU, merely gaining a million life will get me there, and Walking Ballista doesn't help me do that or anything else that really matters in the MU.
- 2x Chord and 2x Company, the 1st Chord is a go-to for grindy MUs that focus on keeping my board clear of threats. I don't want to be drawing Chords with no creatures in hand and no creatures on the board, so going down to 3 or 2 is regularly a good idea. Company comes out if I see my <4 CMC creatures dropping below the 28 mark. It's rare, but sometimes I go down to 26-27 creatures, and I don't want to have 4 CoCos in that situation since the target density is too low to be worth it anymore.
Going down on lands and up on creatures has helped me to reduce flood potential, present a more relevant clock and force removal on non-optimal targets like Voice, Finks, Rallier, and Viscera Seer to open the way for a Devoted Druid threat the next turn. And vice versa, if my opponent removes my T2 druid, I don't feel as bad shifting into a value game on T3.
While I lose percentage points on how often I hit a T3 combo, I still have all the major bases covered. 4x Druid for maximum T2 Druid, 3x Vizier doesn't feel bad because Vizier is terrible when you aren't comboing anyway, 2x Recruiter has him showing up often enough to combo easily but not so often that I'm stuck with vanilla 2/2 and nothing useful for him to do, and 3x EWit has always felt right, even when going harder on the combo.
Anyway, I have always preferred this deck being deep in value options, and with Blue being so popular lately, Voice is worth his weight in gold again. Figured I'd share my list for those of you looking for a different way to approach this deck and approach the meta with it. I regularly end games against blue control decks with 2+ CoCos/Chords in hand after taking 10+ turns each. Simply presenting threat after threat after threat and forcing them to tap awkwardly and inefficiently allows me to out-value them. Comboing in those MUs is not only a lot harder to actually pull off, it's completely unnecessary if you have an effective value plan.
To me, it's kind of like the whole Legacy thing with Shardless. I can literally just say "I'm on Shardless tonight" and everyone in the room knows 65+ of the cards in my deck, I don't even have to tell you the colors, you already know. All this "Counters Company" crap seems like it's dancing around the obvious. Vizier has only ever seen play in decks that are already playing Devoted Druid and probably some sort of toolbox set to go with it. There's a lot of flex slots and different decks currently under the umbrella, but I still know the general game plan of the deck and have a general idea of what I need to look out for and play around if you were to tell me my opponent is on Vizier.
Here's the list:
4x Noble Hierarch
2x Birds of Paradise
4x Devoted Druid
Recursive Dudes (13)
4x Kitchen Finks
3x Voice of Resurgence
3x Eternal Witness
2x Renegade Rallier
1x Saffi Eriksdotter
Utility & Combo crap I never want to draw (9)
3x Vizier of Remedies
1x Anafenza, Kin-Tree Spirit
1x Duskwatch Recruiter
1x Fiend Hunter
1x Scavenging Ooze
1x Viscera Seer
1x Walking Ballista
4x Chord of Calling
4x Collected Company
Land (20)
3x Forest
2x Gavony Township
1x Godless Shrine
2x Horizon Canopy
1x Overgrown Tomb
1x Plains
2x Temple Garden
4x Verdant Catacombs
4x Windswept Heath
3x Tidehollow Sculler
3x Path to Exile
2x Qasali Pridemage
1x Aven Mindcensor
1x Burrenton Forge-Tender
1x Kataki, War's Wage
1x Linvala, Keeper of Silence
1x Orzhov Pontiff
1x Reveillark
1x Selfless Spirit
tappedout link:
http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/voice-company/
Notably, you cannot keep hands in the same manner that you would with a bigger mana base as most other people are playing Abzan Company decks right now. I think of it more like burn. When you look at your hand, you need a clear plan for the first few turns and acknowledge that the deck probably needs to give you a certain set of cards for you to really kick things into high gear, given that you run 20 lands and 10 dorks, that thing is often more mana, but again, mana is literally half your deck, so that tends not to be an issue.
Also, you can end up stuck on 2-3 mana for a while so don't expect to hit T3 CoCo every game like you can with more traditional builds, and can just as often have a very stale game where you play out a druid, only to have your opponent kill it, only to play out another druid the next turn.
At the end of the day, the deck is primarily a GW beatdown deck with obviously undersized creatures, but that gives it the tools to play an older Abzan Company style where you keep presenting threats until your opponent is forced to answer them, at which point you get to combo in response, which means you play at a very different tempo than a deck that is primarily trying to kill it's opponents on turn 3 with a Druid>Vizier>Recruiter>Ballista combo. Not that you DON'T ever get T3 kills, you definitely do, you're just not going to be as consistent as someone running more mana sources and combo pieces when it comes to early combo kills.
My deck runs 4 Noble, 2 BoP, 4 Druids, and 20 lands. 30 mana sources is plenty for a deck that tops out at 4 CMC and focuses on 2 drops. I have a single Godless Shrine, and a single Overgrown Tomb, and my 2 BoPs as my only B sources with my only B spells in the 75 being 1 Viscera Seer and 3x Tide hollow Scullers.
The combos are obviously powerful, a T3 kill has GOT to be worth playing in Modern... but something is missing with the deck, that is also obvious. In my experience, the part that has been missing is resilient creatures that put the opponent on the back foot and open the way for combo kills out of nowhere. I have had too many games where they kill something, I reload, they wipe the board, I CoCo, hit a druid and a bird, and draw a Vizier off the top. Without a meaningful way to force our opponent to spend their removal, they can spend the whole game shooting down Druids and Viziers, and never let the combo get off the ground.
There was a single AbzCo deck in the top 32 at the Open yesterday. Elves and Humans made it too, but those are both fundamentally different decks, and thinking about what is different about them that got them here and what is holding AbzCo back, I keep coming back to same thing over and over. Not enough aggro.
We'll see how it goes in Vegas later this week, but for now, I'm sure the direction to move is AWAY from the combo. What we've been missing is the ability to flood the board with creatures that cannot be easily ignored. The deck that DID make it played 3 Voices in the side. I, personally, have always felt that Voice is a card you want in the main or not at all. For me, at least, it's significantly harder to lose a G1 and decide THIS is a MU I want Voice for compared to losing G1 and realizing Voice isn't doing anything for me here.
To further discussion on my sideboard, here's another list, now that I'm looking at it, I'm not so sure I want the Maelstrom Pulses or moving up to 3 Fulminators:
1x Burrenton Forge-Tender
2x Choke
3x Fulminator Mage
2x Maelstrom Pulse
2x Path to Exile
2x Qasali Pridemage
1x Reveillark
1x Scavenging Ooze
1x Selfless Spirit
Being stuck on 2 mana is A-ok with me. I can play several turns on 2, the bigger concern would be having the right colors.
2/2 Path/Pulse split sounds good, I might move that direction.
Part of the appeal with Fulminator Mage is with the recursion available and the 1-of is very much so saying "I'd rather just not play against Tron to begin with" while still giving me something relevant to bring in and it has meaningful interaction with Grixis Shadow as well. The deck plays 3 red sources, 3 black sources, and 4 blue sources. Saffi, Rec Sage, and Reveillark all offer paths to destroy multiple lands and choking them off a single color can have huge ramifications on their tempo. It's won me games already, but not so many that I want to go all-in on the land destruction plan, especially with so few black sources of my own. It's also good against oddball situations like blowing up a mountain with exactly 6 Valakut triggers on the stack, another consideration I'd rather avoid but feel like I should have SOMETHING to do should I come up against that.
4x Noble Hierarch
4x Devoted Druid
Value (17)
4x Voice of Resurgence
4x Kitchen Finks
3x Renegade Rallier
3x Eternal Witness
1x Saffi Eriksdotter
1x Scavenging Ooze
1x Anafenza, Kin-Tree Spirit
Anemic Combo Pieces I'm sad to draw unless I'm killing my opponent (6)
3x Vizier of Remedies
1x Duskwatch Recruiter
1x Viscera Seer
1x Walking Ballista
4x Chord of Calling
4x Collected Company
Land (22)
2x Forest
3x Gavony Township
1x Godless Shrine
3x Horizon Canopy
1x Overgrown Tomb
1x Plains
1x Swamp
2x Temple Garden
4x Verdant Catacombs
4x Windswept Heath
1x Burrenton Forge-Tender
1x Choke
1x Eidolon of Rhetoric
1x Ethersworn Canonist
1x Fulminator Mage
1x Orzhov Pontiff
4x Path to Exile
1x Qasali Pridemage
1x Reclamation Sage
1x Reveillark
1x Scavenging Ooze
1x Selfless Spirit
Yes, it's 61 cards, but I'm actually pretty happy with that since I wanted less dorks and less mana flooding. This lets me play 30 mana sources and still feel like I've "cut" on them.
Some of the logic revolves around the fact that T2 Voice has always been one of the strongest things this deck has to offer; Rallier + Finks + Voice + EWit creatues a huge "sticky creatures" package that opponents must face down and spend removal on. This makes things like T3 and T4 Druid better overall since the early removal is more likely to hit a non-druid creature because reasons. I'd like the 1x Choke in the side to be 2x Choke, but I felt like I needed to make a concession to Tron, so the 2nd Choke became a Fulminator Mage. Looking at the board again, I'm not sure I really want Pontiff, should I take him out and put Choke #2 back in? Rec Sage vs Pridemage #2 - a worthy consideration, especially considering that Pridemage brings Exalted triggers if he's not killing Cages.
I've done a bit of testing with this list online, and I am fairly happy with it. The prime example being that I went up against a Jeskai Control list yesterday and ended up shaving down to 0 Nobles and 2 Druids. I beat my opponent's face in with Voices, Elemental Tokens, and Ralliers. Combo was never an option and, frankly, I didn't need it. My opponent hit me with Supreme Verdict at one point and I had 4 creatures on the board ready to attack before I untapped. Slow up on the combo, get em when the getting is good with beats.
G1 - T1 Noble, T2 Druid, T3 Vizier, make a bunch of mana and.... flood the board with creatures because I didn't find a combo piece? T4, hit you for 4 because I have a Voice 2 Nobles, and bunch of other ***** on the board, draw 2 extra cards by popping Canopy, playing EWit, and popping Canopy again. T5 play a Gavony and start swinging in with the team and pumping. T6 find a chord and swing in with the team for lethal rather than reveal the card that came off the top.
This was a legitimate aggro beat down in a game that went CLEARLY wrong for the deck and still resulted in a T6 kill with no spells being played during the last 2 turns.
G2 - Same thing happened, but he ran into an EE on 2 which killed 8+ creatures. He lost that one.
G3 - Early combo threat answered by Path. Shift over into the same aggro game we just watched happen twice earlier and win the game around T5.
The threat of a ridiculously large elemental token was relevant in all 3 games. He still could have combo'd just the same as I could had his draws lined up differently, but *this is important to me* when his combo plan fell apart, he was still aggressive and got to force his opponent to spend resources on living, rather than just protecting against the combo. During the matches I watched, Druid was just as important for keeping the deck functioning normal as it was being a combo piece. Thinking about it now, I might move up to 4x Vizier too just to have the extra mana generation when needed, not for the combo, but just to make all the G necessary to play the game.
The guy who was on Grixis Control last night had 4 Damnations in his SB. He came ready to kill some creatures...
Lighthing Bolt, Terminate, Path to Exile and Fatal Push all got to hit a Druid in response to a Chord for 2.
I watched my opponents draw at least 15 cards off Ancestral Visions and Planeswalkers provided further value and eventual wincons. Hell, I lost to Narest drawing an extra card every turn one game.
Control is a force in my area, and is getting better in Modern in general. Grixis Shadow just won an Open this past weekend.
Gavony + BoP isn't enough to get you there vs endless card advantage decks.
23 lands, 6 1 drop dorks, and 4 druids = 33 cards that do jack all in a control match, and that is by far the biggest problem I've been having with the deck lately. All the mana in the world doesn't matter when all you're doing is drawing more mana.
I had a game where I had 21 lands, 2 birds, and 2 druids in the deck and STILL couldn't find anything relevant to do in the match because the deck is so full of do-nothing creatures and completely reliant on the combo.
The meta in my area has changed, nobody lets you untap for T3 without having a removal spell ready to go. The Druid combo will never get off the ground, so it's time to take it to their face and punish them for hating so hard on an 0/2.
T3 CoCo is nice, but what I really want to be doing is putting Voice into play and swinging into their face.
Went to a GPT last night and got destroyed by control, so I'm moving back toward Voice of Resurgence and my favorite SB card - Choke. Oddly enough, there was another guy in the room who was already on Voice tech and he went undefeated through Swiss, it's just too good against removal-heavy decks that are often also sporting counter magic:
1x Anafenza, Kin-Tree Spirit
4x Devoted Druid
1x Duskwatch Recruiter
3x Eternal Witness
4x Kitchen Finks
4x Noble Hierarch
1x Qasali Pridemage
3x Renegade Rallier
1x Saffi Eriksdotter
1x Scavenging Ooze
1x Viscera Seer
3x Vizier of Remedies
3x Voice of Resurgence
1x Walking Ballista
2x Forest
3x Gavony Township
1x Godless Shrine
3x Horizon Canopy
1x Overgrown Tomb
1x Plains
1x Swamp
2x Temple Garden
3x Verdant Catacombs
4x Windswept Heath
Instant (8)
4x Chord of Calling
4x Collected Company
1x Burrenton Forge-Tender
1x Choke
1x Eidolon of Rhetoric
4x Path to Exile
1x Reclamation Sage
1x Reveillark
1x Scavenging Ooze
1x Selfless Spirit
1x Sigarda, Host of Herons
3x Tidehollow Sculler
Things to note: 0 BOPs, 21 lands. There are plenty of 2 mana plays and 29 mana sources in the deck, we needed room for action somewhere, and these feel worse and worse the longer the game goes on.
4 Finks + 3 Voice + 3 Ralliers backed up by 4 Nobles and a Pridemage for Exalted triggers: The beatstick plan is real.
Everything else is fairly obvious. This is a rough idea, and definitely will need some refinement, but control has gotten bigger and bigger in my area and I feel like you need to be taking things like Grixis Control and UW stuff into consideration right now.
To put it as concisely as possible, the problem is that the deck feels like crap if you never get to untap with a druid on the board and relevant cards in hand to combo. Yes, I got to hit people upside the head with a 8/2 trampling Rallier thanks to Kessig's Wolf Run, it didn't matter. Yes, I got to pump my druid to 4/2 with Rhonas and attack with both, all that did was trade for some removal from my opponent. Yes, I got to attack my opponent for 3 AND CoCo on the 3rd turn of a game, who cares?
The entire deck seems to hinge on the idea of untapping with Druid and in order for you to get there, your opponents need to not understand what Druid is capable of (everyone who is any good in my area understands what Druid is capable of). I had a game against Eldrazi Tron where I started with a turn 3 kill in hand, and as soon as Druid hit the board on T2, Dismember, paying 4 life went straight toward the Druid's face. I get that the deck is blazingly fast, and is almost a guaranteed kill by turn 4 if your opponent doesn't interact, but counting on your opponent being stupid, playing a bad deck, or not drawing anything relevant is not the way to win in this game. I'm going back to Abzan, because as always, the strength of this playstyle comes from the ability to play a value game and randomly turn that into an infinite combo. Going all in on the combo has never felt good to me in the past, and doesn't feel good to me now.