I wasn't trying to say you should definitely play teachings or anything. I'm saying I don't really see a good reason to go Green with this deck. Assassin's Trophy is cool and all but it doesn't add much. The thought of unconditional removal gets people really excited but there are so few situations in modern where you really need it and adding a third color makes a big difference for a control mana base.
Just for context I play BW Smallpox right now. Not the same deck but we generally use the same card pool.
Collective Brutality is pretty good against GW Company decks, worse against the valuetown version, but still very good on the play. It most often kills a dork and snipes a company: the two cards we need to kill asap.
The thing with GW Valuetown is that we need to run them out of resources asap or they will run away with the game. I play this match up often as my friend plays GW Valuetown. The games I win are usually the games where I kill a dork, Discard their best turn 2 (3-drop creature) play, and Discard their Collected Company. After this Liliana / Sorin does the trick.
Two of these key plays can be preformed by Collective Brutality alone. It's really only great in your opening hand but your opening hand is essentially all you have to work with in the match up, you aren't going to out value the value train.
I like all of these changes. Happy to hear that Unmoored Ego is doing well for you. it seems like a very powerful card that should win a lot of unfair match ups on its own so we can slant the deck to just beat up on fair decks a little.
So there are sort of two ways to build this deck: tap-out and draw-go. Obviously you'll have some sorcery speed stuff in draw-go but you want to keep it to a minimum. I enjoy tap-out a bit more becuase I think discard and planeswalkers are the more powerful way to play the deck. But if you don't like discard you may think about leaning even more draw-go. So maybe adding things like Torrential Gearhulk or other flash threats over things like The Scarab God would help keep the deck more consistent and having the same play pattern each turn. I would also cut Liliana of the Veil since you want to keep up Counterspells.
I agree on your assessment of The Scarab God. He's good against BGx but usually not much else for me. He's either too slow or too hard to defend.
Humans was usually 50/50 for me. the more removal the better (Damnation will help!) since reflector mage deals with creatures really well.
It would be more helpful if you posted your list so we could get context. I've found that Fulminator is really powerful against UWx. It can stave off the Boardwipes / Cryptics / planeswalkers for a turn. But if you don't need the help against UWx it may be better to use those sideboard slots in another way like you said.
I've played a lot of UB Control in the past and I don't really think what it was missing was a catch-all threat like Assassin's Trophy. The biggest thing it was really missing was White "gotcha" cards like Stony Silence and RIP. It was amazing in fair match ups (and often won control mirrors) but the unfair match ups were really hard. I'm not sure Green (Assassin's Trophy) adds all that much to the deck to be honest. If you're going Sultai you should definitely play it but I would be more interested if there was a better reason to play Green. Being able to kill anything is cool but in reality UB has tools for everything besides artifacts and enchantments which aren't that prevalent in modern (at least not in my experience).
I think Pulse of Murasa is really cool but being a 3 drop can be tough. Green Control decks in the past have played Explore to help ramp up to Cryptic Command a Turn early which is exactly what Hoogland's build wants to do. I've seen some interesting BUG Mystical Teachings decks that I'm interested in trying but are probably too slow for the current meta. Some sort of BUGw Gifts deck could also work to try to leverage Life from the Loam.
Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that UB is already very strong and Assassin's Trophy doesn't seem to help much from my perspective as a UB player. BUG needs a good reason to be in Green and that's tough without trending midrange toward Goyf and Trackers.
I like the more midrange approach to the deck, trying to out value rather than stall forever like some lists have done in the past. Without tools like Terminus we end up needing to win quickly against some percentage of decks so it's tough to really play a pure control deck.
That said, your deck could be more focused. I think Ancestral Visions is too slow for your deck. And as much as I dislike the card your deck really wants thoughtscour and probably some number of serum visions.
In this type of deck Liliana of the Veil is pretty good, so maybe cut some counter spells for more Veils since she doesn't synergize with counters. Along with this you want to play some targeted discard.
Tendrills and Languish are a little strange. Even with that many creatures you can play a couple Damnation instead of these wipes.
All of these suggestions are under the assumption you want to play a more midrangey build. if you want to be more controlling play more damnation and cut a lot of the creatures. Logic Knot is another good option for both builds.
I dump my hand pretty quickly with Collective Brutality, Smallpox, and Liliana. Having 4 drop planeswalkers can be a liability but I think I've been getting unlucky and drawing my 4 drops more than I will on average. But if Bridge is vital I can always start discarding win conditions and lock the game up. This only works game 1 when bridge is a free win though, so not that often. Maybe my deck would be better with a lower curve?
Haakon is cool and all but he's super slow. In order to get back one guy you need to add 3 to their mana cost. In order for smallpox to "not be symmetrical" it costs you 5 mana. Obviously he takes over the game if you go super long but the deck needs an early game plan and other builds of the deck are already super slow. Lingering Souls, Bitterblossom and Planeswalkers are the usual win cons which are very slow without anthems. Haakon doesn't really fill a gap in that game plan.
I built the deck by starting with a BW Smallpox shell and I just found that tokens / planeswalkers tended to be the most relevant and synergistic win conditions. It wasn't supposed to be a tokens deck, it just sort of ended up that way through lots of testing and a few iterations of the deck. I've also never played BW Tokens like the usual builds in this thread so I may be off in some of my analysis.
You're right that my deck is much slower than the average Tokens deck. If I'm playing against a combo / tron opponent I can hold my bridges game 1 and side them out so doing things like Sorin, Lord of Innistrad's -2 isn't a bad thing and can get me there sometimes, but it's no where near as good of a match up as it could be. Tron is the nightmare match up but most combo decks are very manageable.
Storm is pretty easy with Liliana / Collective Brutality. I haven't played against Company but I figure I have enough removal to shut them down and win at my own pace. The combo decks that have given me trouble in the past have been the graveyard combo decks. Bridge + RIP helps here a lot and then I don't need a very fast clock to win the game from there.
Since I'm sacrificing my own lands and I need to play a couple extra I wanted those to be man lands. Also, I get into "top deck mode" pretty often and want to draw as many relevant cards as possible. And since I'm a slower deck I think 4 vents is correct.
I would think that Bridge isn't very good against you since many of your creatures have 1 power. But maybe Bridge decks are too efficient at emptying their hands. I played an Artifact Prison deck the other day and his bridge was not really an issue except for one turn when I cast Anguished Unmaking on it. I'm guessing there was a lot of luck involved, but that's been my only experience with it on the other side of the table.
I've found that my creature match ups are pretty 50/50 and often coming down to the die roll. With all of my removal it's not impossible to keep up but it's not easy either. Specifically Aether Vial decks are an issue because they usually play 2 creatures a turn when I'm usually playing 1 removal spell a turn. I figured Bridge could give me the extra turn or two to catch up and turn the corner in these match ups. And it's really the graveyard decks that I'm most worried about with Bridge.
Hey everyone, I have been playing BW Smallpox for a little while now and it has transitioned to look a little bit like BW Tokens and I like reading the discussions here to get some ideas for more token cards I could play. Here's the list:
I think Bridge is a great card for tokens if you are going for a more controlling build. It causes issue with my anthems like Sorins but luckily those are optional. Obviously Intangible Virtue doesn't fit with in this deck because of the Bridges. Start // Finish has been very useful as a card that I can discard to Liliana / Smallpox / Collective Brutality. What do you all think of the deck? Any token producers you think I should include? Thanks.
You're correct that the card the deck is missing is a perfect two-for-one like Hymn to Tourach (even if it didn't say "random" it would be amazing). Currently, it's tough to keep up with our opponents even if they don't have a source of card advantage and if they land, say, a planeswalker that draws a card each turn we quickly start to fall behind. This is why the common wisdom is "always take the draw" because we need to keep our opponent's hand as empty as possible and them drawing an extra card on their turn 1 can pose a real problem.
Smallpox and Collective Brutality are similar in that neither really generates card advantage. We are spending Brutality plus a card from our hand to kill a creature and discard a spell. That's a 2-for-2. We cast Pox and we are probably discarding a card and sacrificing a land and only breaking parity in the "creature" department so that's a 3-for-3. These cards are still great in the deck because we need to get their hand empty asap but they aren't creating card advantage. So really, our main sources of card advantage are Liliana (after a few turns if things work out for us) and Wrench Mind.
If we include Experimental Frenzy we see a lot more cards and it doesn't mess with Raven's Crime or Collective Brutality. These are all good things, but what match ups does it really help against? There aren't many decks in modern that actively try to keep a full hand because full hands rarely matter in modern. What matters is board presence. 8rack capitalizes on this because the best way to create a board presence is to dump your hand onto the battlefield. Many decks are also playing Ensnaring Bridge to try to cheese out wins against the creature decks. But against these decks, card advantage generally doesn't help us. We could draw 2 more thoughtseizes and 2 more wrench minds and have the mana to cast them all but if the humans opponent has 1 card left in hand none of that mattered.
The decks that care about having a full hand are UWx control and that's about it right now. So yes, Experimental Frenzy seems like a fine sideboard card if you expect the game to go long. It's also a fine card against midrange decks that decide to just stop playing spells because they have a threat and need to race our racks. We already have cards that help in these match ups in mono black (and really, that 3-5 life you spend setting up a two color mana base often comes into play when racing so it's not trivial to splash). Against UWx we have Delirium Skeins which isn't perfect but it often empties their hand, then we just need to win before the planeswalker top-deck. Against midrange we have Pack Rat which is a must answer threat that can use up a lot of our opponent's resources so that we can win with either racks or rats. Again, this card isn't perfect but it's what's worked for me. Frenzy is a card worth testing, but as a sideboard 1 or 2-of, not a maindeck curve topper and I will explain why I think that:
Frenzy costs too much: 4 mana is a lot in this deck. Often playing 4 liliana and 2 Bridge feels like a high curve already. And both of those cards immediately affect the game. 4 mana is not trivial and often we want that fourth land to go towards a Raven's Crime, especially in the match ups Frenzy would be good in. We play a high land count to enable Raven's Crime and Smallpox, not to reliably play 4 drops.
Frenzy is a 4 mana do nothing: on turn 4 we often still have a couple cards in hand ready to destroy a creature / discard a bunch of cards. Rarely can we take a turn off, and a crucial turn at that, to play this. Remember that we always take the draw so we are almost always behind. All of our cards at 2 mana and above help us close the tempo gap, This creates an even bigger gap. There are many 4 mana cards that "just win the game" but that's not what we need, we are worried about tempo at every stage in the game.
Frenzy isn't good in many match ups: as I've detailed above, Frenzy is good when our opponent has lots of cards, but in match ups where our opponent quickly empties their hand (this is a lot of decks in the format) we can't spend the mana to play this becuase we are so far behind. We need to spend mana on more relevant interaction.
So I think Frenzy is a fine card and it does help in some situations, but it's too narrow to be a maindeck card in my opinion.
Planeswalkers are a common problem for any Black based midrange / control deck. The back bone of our deck, and many similar decks, is the turn 1 discard spell like Thoughtseize and removal like Fatal Push. So our deck is hyper efficient 1-for-1s and keeping up with "draw a card every turn" or "exile a permanent every turn" is tough to combat.
You're right that Thoughtseize deals with the early game planeswalker but it doesn't help against the Jace that got scried to the top with a Serum Visions or a Karn that was found with Ancient Stirrings.
So in a meta of Tron / UWx / Humans, black midrange just isn't as powerful as it once was.
I like 3x of both Stony and RIP but it may fill up your sideboard too much.
Riverwise Auger is pretty bad imo. He's not really a good replacement for Jace. If you combine it with SfA, Opt and Telling Time like this deck does you can probably make it work and upgrade into Jace later on. But I think you will have more success with a non-miracles list. This list is very inconsistent looking and I think you would be better served by a consistent deck that's a little powered down rather than a powerful deck that is less consistent.
Entreat is also a very swingy win condition and it's awful in your opening hand (so is terminus too!). Planeswalkers are more consistent and they provide value even when you're behind.
Vampire Hexmage isn't a usual inclusion but may be worth it. Our worst match ups: Tron and UWx both use planeswalkers to accrue advantage that we can't keep up with. So having a way to destroy them is pretty important. Making them discard their planeswalkers is a good option in the early game but we don't have enough land disruption or a fast enough clock to keep Tron or UWx off the mana they need to play their walkers given they top deck them later in the game. It's not a terrible sideboard option since it shores up at least 2 really bad match ups but Chalice decks (which like someone else said isn't a popular strategy).
Ratchet Bomb is a more standard inclusion in the sideboard and it can be good. It cleans up tokens and it isn't terrible when you start ticking it up to 1 or 2. But it's often too slow if that's your plan so it's really only useful for tokens and chalice.
So the question becomes: what do we want help against: PWs or tokens? We have Bridge and Bontu's for Tokens and we don't have anything for PWs. So you need to decide if 1 or 2 Hexmages in the board really helps your UWx and Tron match ups enough to consider inclusion, or if an extra token board wipe will seal the match up.
I'm not a miracles player so I can't really give you a good answer. But My guess is that Jace is core to the miracles game plan. If you don't have at least 2 Jace I wouldn't attempt miracles.
Search for Azcanta is a card you will want in any form of UW control in the long run so if you can afford them or if you have a way to access them I would go for it. You said the next step is to get a couple cryptic and I think that's a good idea and better than getting SfA, to give you an idea of how to order your upgrades, especially with how many cantrips you already have.
Thanks for posting. This thread has been dead for a while and it's good that you are playing some off the wall cards.
I'll start out by saying you have a lot of *good* cards but I'm not sure how they will line up in the greater modern format. That said, I'm sure your local meta looks different from the meta of a GP or something but I have some notes, assuming your local meta looks at least somewhat similar to that larger meta and I have just some notes in general.
I'll start more general: Bridge is an extremely powerful card, and you're right, it shuts down a lot of decks, many of which don't run Bridge answers in the main board. That being said, I think it hurts you way too much for it to be viable in your deck. I suppose it's a fine tutor target in some match ups but you really don't have any way to punch through your own bridge besides both Liliana ults. But you can't be expecting to ult either planeswalker just because you have a bridge. Maybe you can in a few match ups, and maybe that's good enough for the card to be a 1-of. I'm not sure but I don't like how high variance it is.
Continuing with your tutor targets, what are Relic, Needle, and Bile Blight doing in your main deck? I get that you can tutor them but remember, you only have 1 tutor. I've played a lot of Infernal Tutor in B Midrange like this and trust me, you don't want such narrow cards even as 1-ofs. Now if half your meta is Dredge, keep the Relic, that makes sense. But I'm guessing your meta is not that skewed.
By the way, I've stopped playing Infernal Tutor in my decks because my meta has shifted to a lot of counterspells: UWx, U Moon, Spirits are 3 of the top decks in my meta and Infernal Tutor just gives them two chances to counter one spells. So it's just a meta thing right now, otherwise I think it's a good 1-of card in any Liliana deck.
I will note that I'm a big fan of 1 Tutor, 1 Damnation main and extra sweepers in the side like what you have. This is the type of card I want as a 1-of in my Tutor decks: something that you'd happily play mainboard, but may be too narrow to play 2+ copies. Along the same lines, I like Bojuka Bog as your tutor target over Relic since worst case Bog is still a land.
8 one-cmc targeted discard is a lot. I think you may want to scale this back to about 6. that way you have fewer dead draws in the late game. I think Collective Brutality is great in these slots like you said.
Vampire nighthawk is a pretty poor card. What's the best case scenario here? You gain 2 life every turn? You kill one creature with the death touch? It ends up just being a body or a removal spell that your opponent agrees to attack into. Look at your other 3 drops: they're all planeswalkers. That tells me that your deck wants to slam a value engine on turn 3 and start grinding, not play a blocker. If you really want life link / death touch there's Gifted Aetherborn this card aligns much better with your deck.
Looking at the current modern meta, Pack Rat, your primary threat, is super slow. You have a lot of disruption but I don't know if it's going to carry you long enough for pack rat to become relevant. Keep in mind that you need a lot of turns and a lot of mana to make the rats work. I'm not sure if there's a direct replacement for the rats. What you need is a way to quickly close out the game like Phyrexian Obliterator, but he isn't going to be great in your current build because without other ways to pressure your opponent's life total he's just a 5/5. Obliterator is better as the top end of an aggro deck than the finisher of a control deck. I think playing a few Pack Rats is fine but I would also diversify your threats if you find another good card for that. Maybe something like Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet could work for you. This works much better alongside all of your removal.
Mutavaults could help with your clock, and I would play 4 of these and 4 Urborg, maybe cut back on the Strip Mine effects.
Collective Brutality is pretty good against GW Company decks, worse against the valuetown version, but still very good on the play. It most often kills a dork and snipes a company: the two cards we need to kill asap.
The thing with GW Valuetown is that we need to run them out of resources asap or they will run away with the game. I play this match up often as my friend plays GW Valuetown. The games I win are usually the games where I kill a dork, Discard their best turn 2 (3-drop creature) play, and Discard their Collected Company. After this Liliana / Sorin does the trick.
Two of these key plays can be preformed by Collective Brutality alone. It's really only great in your opening hand but your opening hand is essentially all you have to work with in the match up, you aren't going to out value the value train.
So there are sort of two ways to build this deck: tap-out and draw-go. Obviously you'll have some sorcery speed stuff in draw-go but you want to keep it to a minimum. I enjoy tap-out a bit more becuase I think discard and planeswalkers are the more powerful way to play the deck. But if you don't like discard you may think about leaning even more draw-go. So maybe adding things like Torrential Gearhulk or other flash threats over things like The Scarab God would help keep the deck more consistent and having the same play pattern each turn. I would also cut Liliana of the Veil since you want to keep up Counterspells.
I agree on your assessment of The Scarab God. He's good against BGx but usually not much else for me. He's either too slow or too hard to defend.
Humans was usually 50/50 for me. the more removal the better (Damnation will help!) since reflector mage deals with creatures really well.
I think Pulse of Murasa is really cool but being a 3 drop can be tough. Green Control decks in the past have played Explore to help ramp up to Cryptic Command a Turn early which is exactly what Hoogland's build wants to do. I've seen some interesting BUG Mystical Teachings decks that I'm interested in trying but are probably too slow for the current meta. Some sort of BUGw Gifts deck could also work to try to leverage Life from the Loam.
Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that UB is already very strong and Assassin's Trophy doesn't seem to help much from my perspective as a UB player. BUG needs a good reason to be in Green and that's tough without trending midrange toward Goyf and Trackers.
That said, your deck could be more focused. I think Ancestral Visions is too slow for your deck. And as much as I dislike the card your deck really wants thoughtscour and probably some number of serum visions.
In this type of deck Liliana of the Veil is pretty good, so maybe cut some counter spells for more Veils since she doesn't synergize with counters. Along with this you want to play some targeted discard.
Tendrills and Languish are a little strange. Even with that many creatures you can play a couple Damnation instead of these wipes.
All of these suggestions are under the assumption you want to play a more midrangey build. if you want to be more controlling play more damnation and cut a lot of the creatures. Logic Knot is another good option for both builds.
Haakon is cool and all but he's super slow. In order to get back one guy you need to add 3 to their mana cost. In order for smallpox to "not be symmetrical" it costs you 5 mana. Obviously he takes over the game if you go super long but the deck needs an early game plan and other builds of the deck are already super slow. Lingering Souls, Bitterblossom and Planeswalkers are the usual win cons which are very slow without anthems. Haakon doesn't really fill a gap in that game plan.
You're right that my deck is much slower than the average Tokens deck. If I'm playing against a combo / tron opponent I can hold my bridges game 1 and side them out so doing things like Sorin, Lord of Innistrad's -2 isn't a bad thing and can get me there sometimes, but it's no where near as good of a match up as it could be. Tron is the nightmare match up but most combo decks are very manageable.
Storm is pretty easy with Liliana / Collective Brutality. I haven't played against Company but I figure I have enough removal to shut them down and win at my own pace. The combo decks that have given me trouble in the past have been the graveyard combo decks. Bridge + RIP helps here a lot and then I don't need a very fast clock to win the game from there.
Since I'm sacrificing my own lands and I need to play a couple extra I wanted those to be man lands. Also, I get into "top deck mode" pretty often and want to draw as many relevant cards as possible. And since I'm a slower deck I think 4 vents is correct.
I would think that Bridge isn't very good against you since many of your creatures have 1 power. But maybe Bridge decks are too efficient at emptying their hands. I played an Artifact Prison deck the other day and his bridge was not really an issue except for one turn when I cast Anguished Unmaking on it. I'm guessing there was a lot of luck involved, but that's been my only experience with it on the other side of the table.
I've found that my creature match ups are pretty 50/50 and often coming down to the die roll. With all of my removal it's not impossible to keep up but it's not easy either. Specifically Aether Vial decks are an issue because they usually play 2 creatures a turn when I'm usually playing 1 removal spell a turn. I figured Bridge could give me the extra turn or two to catch up and turn the corner in these match ups. And it's really the graveyard decks that I'm most worried about with Bridge.
2 Fetid Heath
4 Flagstones of Trokair
3 Godless Shrine
3 Marsh Flats
2 Mutavault
1 Plains
4 Shambling Vent
3 Swamp
3 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
Enchantments (3)
3 Bitterblossom
Artifacts (2)
2 Ensnaring Bridge
3 Inquisition of Kozilek
3 Thoughtseize
3 Collective Brutality
4 Smallpox
4 Lingering Souls
Instants (5)
3 Fatal Push
1 Mana Tithe
1 Start // Finish
Planeswalkers (8)
4 Liliana of the Veil
2 Sorin, Solemn Visitor
2 Sorin, Lord of Innistrad
1 Engineered Explosives
1 Darkblast
3 Rest in Peace
2 Stony Silence
4 Fulminator Mage
1 Bontu's Last Reckoning
2 Anguished Unmaking
1 Damnation
I think Bridge is a great card for tokens if you are going for a more controlling build. It causes issue with my anthems like Sorins but luckily those are optional. Obviously Intangible Virtue doesn't fit with in this deck because of the Bridges. Start // Finish has been very useful as a card that I can discard to Liliana / Smallpox / Collective Brutality. What do you all think of the deck? Any token producers you think I should include? Thanks.
Smallpox and Collective Brutality are similar in that neither really generates card advantage. We are spending Brutality plus a card from our hand to kill a creature and discard a spell. That's a 2-for-2. We cast Pox and we are probably discarding a card and sacrificing a land and only breaking parity in the "creature" department so that's a 3-for-3. These cards are still great in the deck because we need to get their hand empty asap but they aren't creating card advantage. So really, our main sources of card advantage are Liliana (after a few turns if things work out for us) and Wrench Mind.
If we include Experimental Frenzy we see a lot more cards and it doesn't mess with Raven's Crime or Collective Brutality. These are all good things, but what match ups does it really help against? There aren't many decks in modern that actively try to keep a full hand because full hands rarely matter in modern. What matters is board presence. 8rack capitalizes on this because the best way to create a board presence is to dump your hand onto the battlefield. Many decks are also playing Ensnaring Bridge to try to cheese out wins against the creature decks. But against these decks, card advantage generally doesn't help us. We could draw 2 more thoughtseizes and 2 more wrench minds and have the mana to cast them all but if the humans opponent has 1 card left in hand none of that mattered.
The decks that care about having a full hand are UWx control and that's about it right now. So yes, Experimental Frenzy seems like a fine sideboard card if you expect the game to go long. It's also a fine card against midrange decks that decide to just stop playing spells because they have a threat and need to race our racks. We already have cards that help in these match ups in mono black (and really, that 3-5 life you spend setting up a two color mana base often comes into play when racing so it's not trivial to splash). Against UWx we have Delirium Skeins which isn't perfect but it often empties their hand, then we just need to win before the planeswalker top-deck. Against midrange we have Pack Rat which is a must answer threat that can use up a lot of our opponent's resources so that we can win with either racks or rats. Again, this card isn't perfect but it's what's worked for me. Frenzy is a card worth testing, but as a sideboard 1 or 2-of, not a maindeck curve topper and I will explain why I think that:
Frenzy costs too much: 4 mana is a lot in this deck. Often playing 4 liliana and 2 Bridge feels like a high curve already. And both of those cards immediately affect the game. 4 mana is not trivial and often we want that fourth land to go towards a Raven's Crime, especially in the match ups Frenzy would be good in. We play a high land count to enable Raven's Crime and Smallpox, not to reliably play 4 drops.
Frenzy is a 4 mana do nothing: on turn 4 we often still have a couple cards in hand ready to destroy a creature / discard a bunch of cards. Rarely can we take a turn off, and a crucial turn at that, to play this. Remember that we always take the draw so we are almost always behind. All of our cards at 2 mana and above help us close the tempo gap, This creates an even bigger gap. There are many 4 mana cards that "just win the game" but that's not what we need, we are worried about tempo at every stage in the game.
Frenzy isn't good in many match ups: as I've detailed above, Frenzy is good when our opponent has lots of cards, but in match ups where our opponent quickly empties their hand (this is a lot of decks in the format) we can't spend the mana to play this becuase we are so far behind. We need to spend mana on more relevant interaction.
So I think Frenzy is a fine card and it does help in some situations, but it's too narrow to be a maindeck card in my opinion.
You're right that Thoughtseize deals with the early game planeswalker but it doesn't help against the Jace that got scried to the top with a Serum Visions or a Karn that was found with Ancient Stirrings.
So in a meta of Tron / UWx / Humans, black midrange just isn't as powerful as it once was.
Riverwise Auger is pretty bad imo. He's not really a good replacement for Jace. If you combine it with SfA, Opt and Telling Time like this deck does you can probably make it work and upgrade into Jace later on. But I think you will have more success with a non-miracles list. This list is very inconsistent looking and I think you would be better served by a consistent deck that's a little powered down rather than a powerful deck that is less consistent.
Entreat is also a very swingy win condition and it's awful in your opening hand (so is terminus too!). Planeswalkers are more consistent and they provide value even when you're behind.
Ratchet Bomb is a more standard inclusion in the sideboard and it can be good. It cleans up tokens and it isn't terrible when you start ticking it up to 1 or 2. But it's often too slow if that's your plan so it's really only useful for tokens and chalice.
So the question becomes: what do we want help against: PWs or tokens? We have Bridge and Bontu's for Tokens and we don't have anything for PWs. So you need to decide if 1 or 2 Hexmages in the board really helps your UWx and Tron match ups enough to consider inclusion, or if an extra token board wipe will seal the match up.
I'm not a miracles player so I can't really give you a good answer. But My guess is that Jace is core to the miracles game plan. If you don't have at least 2 Jace I wouldn't attempt miracles.
Search for Azcanta is a card you will want in any form of UW control in the long run so if you can afford them or if you have a way to access them I would go for it. You said the next step is to get a couple cryptic and I think that's a good idea and better than getting SfA, to give you an idea of how to order your upgrades, especially with how many cantrips you already have.
I'll start out by saying you have a lot of *good* cards but I'm not sure how they will line up in the greater modern format. That said, I'm sure your local meta looks different from the meta of a GP or something but I have some notes, assuming your local meta looks at least somewhat similar to that larger meta and I have just some notes in general.
I'll start more general: Bridge is an extremely powerful card, and you're right, it shuts down a lot of decks, many of which don't run Bridge answers in the main board. That being said, I think it hurts you way too much for it to be viable in your deck. I suppose it's a fine tutor target in some match ups but you really don't have any way to punch through your own bridge besides both Liliana ults. But you can't be expecting to ult either planeswalker just because you have a bridge. Maybe you can in a few match ups, and maybe that's good enough for the card to be a 1-of. I'm not sure but I don't like how high variance it is.
Continuing with your tutor targets, what are Relic, Needle, and Bile Blight doing in your main deck? I get that you can tutor them but remember, you only have 1 tutor. I've played a lot of Infernal Tutor in B Midrange like this and trust me, you don't want such narrow cards even as 1-ofs. Now if half your meta is Dredge, keep the Relic, that makes sense. But I'm guessing your meta is not that skewed.
By the way, I've stopped playing Infernal Tutor in my decks because my meta has shifted to a lot of counterspells: UWx, U Moon, Spirits are 3 of the top decks in my meta and Infernal Tutor just gives them two chances to counter one spells. So it's just a meta thing right now, otherwise I think it's a good 1-of card in any Liliana deck.
I will note that I'm a big fan of 1 Tutor, 1 Damnation main and extra sweepers in the side like what you have. This is the type of card I want as a 1-of in my Tutor decks: something that you'd happily play mainboard, but may be too narrow to play 2+ copies. Along the same lines, I like Bojuka Bog as your tutor target over Relic since worst case Bog is still a land.
8 one-cmc targeted discard is a lot. I think you may want to scale this back to about 6. that way you have fewer dead draws in the late game. I think Collective Brutality is great in these slots like you said.
Vampire nighthawk is a pretty poor card. What's the best case scenario here? You gain 2 life every turn? You kill one creature with the death touch? It ends up just being a body or a removal spell that your opponent agrees to attack into. Look at your other 3 drops: they're all planeswalkers. That tells me that your deck wants to slam a value engine on turn 3 and start grinding, not play a blocker. If you really want life link / death touch there's Gifted Aetherborn this card aligns much better with your deck.
Looking at the current modern meta, Pack Rat, your primary threat, is super slow. You have a lot of disruption but I don't know if it's going to carry you long enough for pack rat to become relevant. Keep in mind that you need a lot of turns and a lot of mana to make the rats work. I'm not sure if there's a direct replacement for the rats. What you need is a way to quickly close out the game like Phyrexian Obliterator, but he isn't going to be great in your current build because without other ways to pressure your opponent's life total he's just a 5/5. Obliterator is better as the top end of an aggro deck than the finisher of a control deck. I think playing a few Pack Rats is fine but I would also diversify your threats if you find another good card for that. Maybe something like Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet could work for you. This works much better alongside all of your removal.
Mutavaults could help with your clock, and I would play 4 of these and 4 Urborg, maybe cut back on the Strip Mine effects.