MTG Salvation

I attempted a combo oriented version of Jund that relied on Arcanist+Temur+Become Immense and while it can outrace burn and is a lot of fun when it goes off, the consistency was awful.

The fetch lands are such a huge part of GDS, I'm not sure that's realistic. You could do the horizon lands / pain lands and lose a lot of the strength / explosiveness GDS has but I wouldn't necessarily recommend it. Fetches happen to fill the graveyard for Angler too. You'd have to make some significant changes and if I had to build a budget Shadow list without fetches it'd probably do Abzan / Jund. Something with a heavier creature count that doesn't necessarily rely on Shadow to put in most of the work.

If you had a sorcery on top of your deck you'd get to cast it because of Eisha, you'd pay the cost using Bolas's Citadel's effect (unless you wanted to pay mana assuming you had any available) then make a copy of it when you cast it because of Melek's effect.

I'm not at all content with my side-board. I've basically just mashed it together and will be making significant changes there. I think Destiny Spinner is probably going to be a bad card. Maybe I'll go up on Harpooner's / Mystic / Return to Nature. I'm currently expecting a lot of U/W and U/W/B control with sprinkles of mono black devotion.

Opinions and thoughts, especially on the sideboard would be great.

Edit: After a few local events I removed 2 Zur Taa for 2 Paradise Druid. It slows me down a little bit but I have some mana issues (mainly not drawing any) and it has helped consistency. There is a lot of blue/white control locally. I removed a Domri's Ambush and put in a Collision Colossus for Dream Trawlers and the Walls created by the 1W enchantment. It's been useful. I took out Destiny Spinners for a second Collision // Colossus and a couple other cards but I don't recall. I will have to update later. So changes so far in main:

-2 Zhur Taa
-1 Domri's Ambush
+2 Paradise Druid
+1 Collision Colossus

I don't think the creature base in red/white is good enough. They do have some good cards, but not nearly enough to justify playing the colors competitively. There are just way too many good creatures in a color like Green. And green gets card draw with mechanics like Adventure. And with Gruul being somewhat popular right now, I don't think Red/White has a chance. Their creatures don't match up well enough.

I think because of the diversity of the modern format it's likely a little more beginner friendly than Standard is. I've seen people come into a modern local tournament and do rather well with some strange decks but it's very rare that I see that in standard. The only downside of modern over standard, in my opinion, is the sheer amount of available cards available. But with your previous experience, I think that will be less of an issue. And admittedly, it's a pretty easy hurdle to get over if you decide to play semi-regularly.

I encountered a Heliod deck running ballista and that 0/0 insect that gives itself 2 counters. There are a few different ways to gain infinite life and they don't necessarily rely on Ballista. It seems pretty consistent.

My buddy played an Uro Titan Ramp deck and that performed quite well. It beat it's amulet counterpart, but I'm not quite sure if it's necessarily better.