Warms my heart to see that he found a way to get through Eldrazi Tron, according to his interview. I basically gave up on this style of deck, either WB or BR, since the Eldrazi Tron matchup was so hopeless. I would not have thought that Tidehollow Sculler would do so much work to turn that matchup around. I'll have to test myself!
I am also curious about those Mutavaults, not because of mana issues, but because I would have imagined that you would have wanted Ghost Quarter instead.
1) I think Lili Mark V could be real good, especially if opposing Lingering Souls decks make an upswing. I also think she supports the crucial card-advantage aspect that is so important for the deck, by getting things back from the yard and by killing small dudes on the other side. My only concern is that lifegain is very important, and Sorin has saved me many time when in the single digits on life. I think that running Lili over Sorin probably means adding more lifegain to the side to compensate.
Completely agree on the lifegain part, and in fact my list has 5 such cards + Vault in the 75 to compensate. Not sure if it's enough.
4) I love the early game discard plan. I have reluctantly shaved those slots over a period of many months, and as you note, I only felt able to do it because of TKS--and because we have had a good T1 play in Relic, and now in Push. Mind Stone is more proactive in ramping threats out, and is better in the late game since it is not a dead draw in a topdeck war, but I do miss my reliable T1 disruption. I think this list is extremely tight--as I mentioned earlier I have not been able to get below 61 in my current build testing Push and a single Extraction in the main.
I agree that the extra discard is much worse in the lategame. My only problem with Mind Stone is that it kind of makes the deck have a lot of early game air. Relic into Mind Stone is a pretty weak opening against most decks, but I felt like I kind of had to make that play more often than I would like. Perhaps the problem was that I wasn't mulliganing enough? It's hard to say.
I've done a fair amount of testing, mostly against the fair decks of the format (Jund, blue control decks, etc), Affinity, and Burn. Here is what I have learned and some ideas that I think might be worth trying:
1) Relative to the BR Processors deck that I described in the previous page, the lack of K-Command and burn spells makes it more likely than the BR deck to run out of gas or fall a few points short of lethal, so I think prioritizing threat density is more important than I had previously realized. For this reason, I think Shambling Vent is indeed something you want, and I'm going to start running it at least as a 2-of. Sorry for doubting you, deaddrift!
A less obvious (and more controversial) change that this logic leads to is running Liliana, the Last Hope instead of Sorin, Solemn Visitor. They're both somewhat-situational value cards, but I think Liliana performs her job a little better in this deck. I know Sorin's anthem is great when you've got tokens, but it's mainly great when you've already established a board presence, whereas a Liliana can claw you back into a game where you've run out of gas by rebuying a Smasher or whatever, whereas I am basically never happy making a Vampire token with Sorin. When you're a ahead on board, the +1 can shut the door in the same way Sorin does by changing a lot of the combat math for your opponent. I know it's not as flashy as dealing 12+ and gaining a pile of life, but I think it might still be good enough. Against aggro decks like Affinity and Infect, it can singlehandedly win the game (even if they pump a Glistener Elf or whatever in response to the +1, it will die on their upkeep since Liliana's effect lasts until the beginning of your next turn, not until the end of turn.). Against other Lingering Souls decks, it just busts open the Spirit subgame in your favor.
It might not work out, but I think it's a logical idea to try.
2) Hangarback Walker is still good, but I think we can do even better. It was really required in BR in order to have some defense against Liliana of the Veil, but in this deck, Lingering Souls performs much of the same work. But what to replace it with? I know the standard reply will be Matter Reshaper, but I think this is too conservative still. My thoughts:
I think our imagination has been restricted a bit because we're afraid of just getting our creatures Fatal Pushed, but the problem is that Fatal Push actually hasn't taken over the format. Look at the top 16 of this weekend's SCG Modern Classic, for instance. Fatal Push is being played, but it isn't something you need to warp your entire gameplan around. i.e. I think it's OK to run some creatures that aren't guaranteed value even if they die to Push. For example, Jund and Abzan aren't unplayable all of a sudden, even though Grim Flayer and Tarmogoyf die to unrevolted Pushes. The key point is that they're very low opportunity-cost cards with very high ceilings. If they stick, they can win the game. Things like Matter Reshaper will almost never cause you to fall behind on cards, but it will rarely actually win you games outright, and there are plenty of board states where casting a Matter Reshaper does nothing.
From this perspective, I think Endless One could actually be good in this deck. You want to block 2/2's out of Zoo and Burn, and Endless One does that on turn 2 even without a Temple. On later turns, it can become even larger than Reality Smasher, and will just Abyss every other midrange deck's threats until they find a non-Bolt removal spell. In draws when you actually do have a Temple but no Relic, it is a play that allows you to hold Wasteland Strangler for later value, or double cast removal and a 2/2 blocker if you have it, which ought to stabilize most boards. It is also castable under Blood Moon, and represents adequate pressure against Sun and Moon decks that attempt to hide behind Blood Moon while playing only a small amount of removal that can deal with huge creatures.
3) Everyone is running 4 Path / 2 Push instead of 4 Push / 2 Path, and I'm not exactly sure why. The deck is trying to stabilize to TKS and Smasher, which means you don't want to be giving aggro decks an extra land's worth of tempo. You'll cast Path early if you have to, but I'd much rather cast Push. You might be worried about high-cmc threats like Tasigur or Angler, but I would argue that you shouldn't be since (a) we run a bunch of creatures that just flat out beat those in combat, and (b) we still have access to some Paths anyway, so it's not like we don't have outs. Push + GQ also allows us to try to get in front of very creature-dense decks like Bant Eldrazi or Naya/Abzan Company (where we're just not going to be able to kill all their threats 90% of the time), whereas Path feels counterproductive (e.g. Path Voice of Resurgence, untap into Collected Company??).
4) Early interaction. I think even though we have a ton of Thought-Knots, it would still be nice to have something closer to the the usual BGx density of discard spells to make it less likely we die in the early game. I think we're the best midrange deck, so let's not die before midgame.
Hangarback Walker seems like it could be pretty good on T2. It would definitely be very good when held back with 1 up--like ideally from an untapped Ghost Quarter--when also threatening a Relic crack. That would be three lines of instant-speed interaction off one mana. It's better than Reshaper under Blood Moon. It would be a great late-game-topdeck-war card, far better than Reshaper. But Walker has a couple caveats, it seems to me. It dies to un-Revolted Push, and doesn't benefit from Cavern of Souls or Temple. It's much slower in the early game, and like Relic, it prioritizes keeping up available mana in a deck that can be mana-hungry as it is, which can lead to playing off-curve. It conflicts with Mind Stone for the T2 play, and unlike Stone it doesn't ramp to Seer, Sorin, and Smasher. (Though, also unlike Stone, it is actually a proactive threat.) It makes Stony Silence and Pithing Needle better against us--not sure if that last actually matters so much, though.
On the caveats:
1) If they kill Walker with a Push, that's positive value for us. It doesn't change the amount of power on our board at all and they're down a card. I hope they blow their removal on that and not TKS. As for Stony Silence and Pithing Needle, I am happy if our opponents bring that in against us. Our artifacts are not our primary threats. I mean, we ourselves are siding in Stony Silence from our own board...
2) Blue control decks are both unpopular and even-to-positive matchups since you have Souls and huge threats that you can pace one at a time. Not super happy about running Cavern at all. No synergy with Temple is a legit concern, but Walker is there to do something when you don't have a Temple. If you do have a Temple, hopefully you have something decent to cast.
3) Playing Walker with Mind Stone seems fine - I think the deck would like more than a few 2's, since you don't have Temple in your opener about half of the time. When Temple is there, you're in business so whatever, and when it's not, you need to do something proactive on turn 2, and I can totally see situations where one or the other is better. Mind Stone is a good plan when you're not being pressured (to set up TKS and so forth) and Walker is a good plan when you're on defense. Here's a line that comes up occasionally. You keep a hand with no Temple, play turn 1 Relic or whatever, and your opponent responds with turn 1 Goblin Guide or Nacatl or Swiftspear or whatever. Hangarback Walker saves you at least 2 life by blocking and possibly more if you follow up with any 3 or 4-drop (which also blocks).
Concealed Courtyard is great, but so is Shambling Vent. Tough call on the right balance. Still not too sold on running Eldrazi Displacer in this build, because it automatically becomes the best target for Bolt in our entire deck. But it's amazing when it sticks, though, it's true.
Vent is definitely a good card, and it could be right to play some, but lists here that run like 0 or 1 Courtyard seem wrong to me, that's all. Untapped dual lands are really good, especially in games where we're just trying to stall to TKS and Smasher.
I'm not sold on Displacer either, this is for sure experimental. I can easily see it being extremely bad just because we usually don't have time to activate it if we play it on t2 or t3, and playing a 3/3 for 3 that often gets no value is definitely not what I'm trying to do with this deck's best draws.
I played Oblivion Ring for quite a while and decided that I wanted the instant speed and protection from Decay, Maelstrom Pulse, Qasali Pridemage, etc. But I have definitely found that I couldn't cast Unmaking before, due to either mana availability or life total, so it's a judgment call. Specifically regarding Tron, note that O-Ring is vulnerable to many of their cards, including Oblivion Stone, Karn Liberated, and Nature's Claim out of the side.
Unmaking seems too hard to cast and too slow when you're deploying it as anything except planeswalker removal. I'm pretty happy with Disenchant, to be honest. Our creature and removal suite is already pretty good at battling planeswalkers, and I'm not convinced we need a card specifically for them. I'd rather play Celestial Purge if I were in the market for such a spell since honestly all the commonly-played planeswalkers I'm afraid of are black or red except Karn (and your plan versus Karn is to strip it from hand and/or stop Tron from getting assembled).
Hi everyone! Working on this deck again after almost a year's hiatus. Here are my thoughts. Warning: a lot of text incoming.
I've spent most of that time playing various linear decks, but during Modern PPTQ season, I played to great success a BR Processors deck inspired by the list Joe Soh top 16'd with at GP Guangzhou at the end of August last year. That BR deck was better positioned than BW at the time since Lightning Bolt was generally a lot better against the linear-aggro field I expected at the time - Infect, Affinity, and so on. To give you an idea of what this deck looked like, here's a list that I made the finals of a ~60 person PPTQ with (my carmate was 1st place, so we had a pretty good car!):
Lessons that I think are relevant to this deck from my PPTQ season:
1) Hangarback Walker looks like garbage but it is actually really good, and it gets better in a Fatal Push metagame. The deck is dying for a turn 2 play when you don't have a Temple, and this is a card that buys time in the early game and becomes a ridiculous threat in the late game against any deck that doesn't have access to Path. The reason why we didn't care about having a card like this before Pro Tour OGW broke the format open was as follows: (a) the format was a lot slower since Twin had just been banned and people didn't catch up quite yet (b) 2-3 Eye of Ugin is a lot more than zero.
Anyway, Walker saved my ass again and again versus a huge multitude of aggressive decks. I think this thread's decision to run with Matter Reshaper is not unreasonable, but I think you all should give Walker a try.
2) Smasher > Herder now, and I think this is something you all have agreed on and understood, as far as I can tell.
3) Blackcleave Cliffs is awesome, and we should try to run a lot of Concealed Courtyards now that we have all kinds of 1-cmc spells to cast early on. I know Path isn't the best turn 1 play, but regardless sometimes you need to hold your nose and do it, especially versus the most explosive aggro decks. Legitimately don't understand the complete lack of enthusiasm here! Ghost Quarter is also awesome and solves many problems.
I made some minimal changes to the BR list and went to a 34-person IQ. I scrubbed at 2-3, beating Ponza and Mill, losing to Burn, Affinity, and a BR Boom/Bust deck. My losses to Burn and Affinity were extremely close. I misplayed a few times mainly because I haven't played Modern in a few months (Legacy Champs + GP Louisville put all my MtG time on Legacy), and I think the tournament could have gone much better for me if I were sharper. But regardless it was a very educational tournament. This is what I ran:
1) Fatal Push is not Lightning Bolt. IDK why I thought it was a good idea to run so many removal spells that have no other utility on an empty board, but I routinely found myself with extremely reactive hands that could not appropriately interact with decks like Burn or Affinity. You need to interact on the board; you just can't keep up with mono-removal. Definitely need to cut down to like 6 or so. Maybe -1 Push, -1 Path. I'd like to make room for Displacers in these slots since it's sort of like removal but also a 3/3 and a Revolt enabler if you're really desperate.
2) Smasher looks a lot worse without appropriate creature support, see (1). I think it's still better than Herder but its best when you can bait out some removal spells before you play it. With today's configuration, it looked a little anemic.
3) Mind Stone seems like a good idea to have another good 2 to play (and again, it enables Revolt). I don't know if I want more than 1-2 of this, but I'll certainly try it out. Double and triple Relic hands look a lot more awkward now that Dredge and Become Immense aren't as worrisome, so a Relic is the natural thing to cut to make room for this.
The issue I find with a hyperlinear build of Dredge is the lack of versatility. Your enablers not only allow you to dredge, but also allow you to dig for cards that can shut your opponent's countermeasures off. With the number of enablers we run, dredging shouldn't be an issue. Turn 1 Loot into Turn 2 dredge enable dredge is pretty much the point of the deck. Post board, I want to see either the cards that I sided in or cards that can get to those cards.
That being said, I don't think we can possibly dredge better than we've been unless Wizards throws us a 1-mana Tormenting Voice. So the rest of the build should be focused on killing our opponent with our creatures. When you're done with turn 2, you don't want to see anything other than dredgers in the grave and payoff creatures. This is where the Conflagrate/Loam engine kicks in. We dredge 3 per turn while stockpiling our hand.
Imagine this scenario: turn 1:land, Faithless Looting/Neonate, hand count at 5. Turn 2: dredge, land, Cathartic Reunion, hand count 5. Turn 3: dredge Loam, cast Loam, play land, hand count 7. See where I'm going? The lands in hand go towards that turn 4-5 Conflagrate for 10-13 while you're applying pressure with creatures. If you don't see enough gas in the first 20-30 cards binned, then you just keep dredging and flashing Loot.
The gameplan is already established, so all we're really waiting for is: a) what is the most ideal manabase outside of personal preference? b) better versions of cards that exist and c) better anti-hate. Maintaining flex spots also allows us to modify the MB to fit meta-dependent challenges. Maybe we can run a few stats?
Everyone, including me, is going to be playing Reunion soon, so I think having enablers that also find hate cards is not really a concern anymore. I agree that when our flex enabler slots were Inquiry + Tome Scour that this could be an issue, but overall, we felt that having the quicker enablers gave us more percentage points from being more proactive and getting underneath the hate than the percentage points we lost from not being able to find anti-hate cards as efficiently. Our philosophy was that being more fearless was a better strategy.
I think I want to emphasize this a bit more: combo decks in all formats suffer if you over-sideboard or fear the hate too much. It is important to accept the fact that sometimes you will keep hands that have no anti-hate, but are otherwise the nut draw, and then just lose to turn 1 Cage or something - this is just how it is playing a combo deck. Or to put it another way, which may be completely obvious: you have to throw away opening hands that can fight against hate if the hand otherwise wouldn't be able to stomp an opponent who simply didn't draw their hate card.
Anyway, the relevant question right now, as you allude to in the end of your post, is tuning numbers. We actually did write code simulating opening hands to arrive at our final numbers, and that's actually how we came to the conclusion that having 14-15 enablers was better than having more land (contrary to others). This probably will not change drastically with Cathartic Reunion, but I haven't yet written the new code to perform simulations with the new card. It's possible we want another dredger for Cathartic Reunion. We didn't do any statistical analyses of the "metagame" as such since that's really hard to pin down in Modern, especially in large tournaments.
Hey iostream - thanks for the replay.
It's interesting that you pointed out the "miss amalgam trigger" thing, because I just came across it testing on MODO. It is really annoying to get a 1/1 flyer on their T1 and a binned amalgam on T2 upkeep that you cant get back. 100% overlooked this point, so that makes a lot of sense.
The main thing that comes to light is the "do you want ot play 16-17 lands or 20-21". My playstyle does lean towards flexibility and turn 3-4 games, rather than going all in. It is preference, and you're certainly not incorrect to run the list you do. Your results are very impressive between the 2 of you. It's just not my preference!
Thanks for your insight, its really useful. Makes me see where I have gone wrong with my tome scour list before
Glad I could help! I think the playstyle comments may actually become somewhat less relevant after Kaladesh. Reunion will likely lead to the two types of decklists converging, since now I have to run enough land to cast 2cmc spells on turn 2 just like everyone else has been
That being said, I'm still high on Tome Scour, and I'll be testing various combinations.
Hey Dinosorus - nice report, and well played getting as far as you did. I have to say, your match report follows quite closely what I'd expect. If the match-ups line up well, and assuming you don't get the 5% awful dredge, you'll win without too much fuss. The decks that are hard to beat then lean on getting the 5% mental "i cant loose" dredge, which can happen.
Just a quick question, and it may be something that you've already addressed - if so, apologies! Tome Scour.. I tested the card, and definitely just had a bad manabase for it, so moved away from it (I wasn't a fan of the 8 pain lands). However, I feel like shriekhorn achieves something very similar (4 random cards before T2 draw step, 6 cards total - in comparison to 5 cards all the time). Shriekhorn is clearly easier on the manabase, and allows you to run fetchlands that combo with bloodghast a tiny bit (they can also turn a T2 Loam into a passable play). Can you make a case for Tome Scour being worth the manabase trouble? I know you didn't dislike the manabase all day, but my personal experience really put me off it (a T1 gemstone mine isn't always the best, since you need mana past T3, and triple-pain lands is just awful). Are the cases where it just looks awesome compared to shriekhorn (which I think does a very similar job on T1)!??
dinausorus and I generally regard fetching on your opponent's turn to be highly overrated. As you may recall, I played a Stitchwing Skaab in GP Charlotte for the same reason which was the first cut afterwards as I found myself destroying Anger decks the entire tournament just by not over-extending. The decks that can run tons of big slow sweepers are the decks where you don't need 14 power to clock them.
As for the pain of the mana base, this is something that comes up all the time, and it basically comes down to playstyle. We are playing the deck as aggressively as you can imagine. We advocate extremely aggressive mulliganning specifically to maximize the probability of playing extremely fast, short games, where the pain you take from your mana base, regardless of what it is, just doesn't matter. If you want to play builds with 21 lands and 12 or fewer enablers, then of course 8 painful lands will be an issue because that version of the deck is playing towards much longer games. It's just our opinion that that choice is inferior to being 100% linear and explosive.
Taking for granted our opinion on how Dredge should be played, there are two points I want to make about Tome Scour versus Shriekhorn. First, the relevant comparison (from our perspective) is the probability of having a dredger in the top 5 versus the top 4 - not the top 6. Tome Scour is there to turn your next draw step into a Dredge. You usually do not have time to wait an extra turn to reap the benefit of the extra card Shriekhorn gives you. Second, Shriekhorn has small downsides that you are overlooking. Shriekhorn doesn't give you the cards all at once, which will sometimes make you lose an Amalgam trigger, and Shriekhorn turns on opposing Decays and K-Commands. If you insist on the Jund manabase, I would consider Memory Sluice instead of Shriekhorn.
I realize that typically, such differences seem small, but when it comes to Dredge (or at least dinausorus's and my version), little edges that affect consistency just flat out matter more than tactical flexibility. The deck just can't play a game of normal Magic. You have to start Dredging and going off before think about whether you can flash in Bloodghast at the right time.
All those lists play Shriekhorn what are the rest of your thoughts on this card? Basically its a put two cards in your GY a turn after paying 1 mana correct? I mean it would be a much more interesting card to me if you could remove all three charge counters a turn basically a golgari grave troll for 1 mana. Personally I don't think it makes the cut, however cant argue with the results the lists using it are putting up.
I am still a big fan of Tome Scour, and given that a fair portion of those decks were playing the rainbow manabase, it seems better than Shriekhorn. Shriekhorn nets an extra card before your second draw step, but the fact that they don't come all at once makes it less likely that you get to trigger Amalgam (e.g. if your top 5 contains a Narcomoeba in the top 2 and an Amalgam in the bottom 3).
I haven't played Modern in a while, but PPTQ season is coming up, and dinausorus made me aware of this thread, so I'm back!
Conflagrate is an idea that my team had before GP Charlotte, but we never really tried it out seriously, so it's probably good for me to try it, especially now that so many other pilots have proved its worth. I'll probably try lists close to what dinausorus posted.
People who run Rally - how good is it? I have had one in the board because my sideboard is terrible right now and it has been pretty insane when I used it. I want to find room for it in the main but I am having so much trouble finding a cut for it. Worth it?
It plays a role similar to Conflagrate in that it allows you to win randomly and out of nowhere, but as with Conflagrate, there are matchups where it's good and where it's bad. In general, I like a 1/1 split in the main/side. In lists with Conflagrate and no Bridges, it may be less good since you already have some reach and don't generate as many bodies as you do with Bridges.
If BGx is weaker post-ban due to being unable to grind out blue Ancestral Vision decks, aggro decks that can clock us efficiently are suppressed by Thopter/Sword, and people are loading up their decks with a bunch of durdly cards like Ancestral Vision, is this deck well positioned?
Isn't it going to be too hard to cast the 5-drops with only 4 Sol lands instead of 6? I'm a little worried that the curves people are posting are too high.
Despite Baron_Sengir_007's horrible tone, I think there is a legitimate question as to whether or not BW retains any advantage over Mimic-based builds in general (UR, Colorless, or otherwise). The Pro Tour was not super-inbred, and I don't know why this keeps being said. Basically all major archetypes were represented if you look at the metagame breakdown, and the conversion rates into day 2 and top 25 speak for themselves. The Mimic decks are definitely the real deal. There are two main things that I think are working against us now:
First, all our one-for-ones are too expensive. Both the discard and the removal we play is just not good because they can play their hand way faster than we can answer it. If you played Standard during Affinity's reign in 2004, you will remember that Shatter and Oxidize were actually not very effective versus them because they would just play artifacts faster than you can destroy them. The same is true here. Their decks are designed to maximize the amount of virtual mana that Eye of Ugin makes by overloading on 2's and 3's, and we just can't answer them all. They will commonly play 2 things a turn for two consecutive turns, and because the things they are playing dodge almost every 1-cmc removal spell besides Dismember, we cannot hope to match their velocity with reactive spells. We have to play sweepers, but there are no 3cmc sweepers that reliably sweep them. So we have to look to 4cmc sweepers like Damnation. But this is not reliable. Sometimes Damnation will be too slow, sometimes it will be stripped by TKS, sometimes it will be Warping Wailed, sometimes it will not deal with multiple manlands, and sometimes they will read you and hold back a fatty or two so that your sweeper doesn't actually alleviate the pressure. There are a lot of things that can go wrong, and I think that it is too risky to be a viable plan.
You might argue in response that all of these things are true of Affinity as well, but the difference there is (1) Souls is actually good against them and generates value, and (2) most of their artifacts don't really matter, just the "lords" - Plating, Overseer, and Ravager. With Eldrazi, nearly every creature they play is capable of doing real damage and attacking through our typical boardstates - even Mimic.
You might also argue that all my concerns are true of Little Kid Abzan, and you'd be right. That's actually a bad matchup for us! The difference is now Mimic-based Eldrazi has great matchups against decks that Little Kid struggles with, and it has an insane amount of hype now, so we should expect to see it more often.
Second, Ensnaring Bridge, Worship, and other hate cards that the metagame is moving towards hampers us just as badly as it does them.
In the face of these two challenges, I have serious doubts about whether Processor-based builds can compete.
Is it me, or are the Eldrazi deck at the Pro Tour really lackluster?
Would've expected something sweeter from "the pros", but the decks on this site seem more powerful and interesting...
It's not just you. The colorless Eldrazi deck is spiffy and good in the PT meta but it would get wrecked by Midrange and Control. The UR list we just saw made me scratch my head because he would be far better off playing a Bx variant based on what I see of his draws and plays.
I think you've gotta give more respect to the pros. There's a reason that they're there and we're here.
That being said, these are indeed decks prepared for a precise metagame, and the element of surprise is important. The colorless Eldrazi deck's sideboard is truly a horror, as LSV and Nakamura's round 5 matches on camera showed. Once people have a plan, they will have to be adjusted.
I am also curious about those Mutavaults, not because of mana issues, but because I would have imagined that you would have wanted Ghost Quarter instead.
Completely agree on the lifegain part, and in fact my list has 5 such cards + Vault in the 75 to compensate. Not sure if it's enough.
I agree that the extra discard is much worse in the lategame. My only problem with Mind Stone is that it kind of makes the deck have a lot of early game air. Relic into Mind Stone is a pretty weak opening against most decks, but I felt like I kind of had to make that play more often than I would like. Perhaps the problem was that I wasn't mulliganing enough? It's hard to say.
1) Relative to the BR Processors deck that I described in the previous page, the lack of K-Command and burn spells makes it more likely than the BR deck to run out of gas or fall a few points short of lethal, so I think prioritizing threat density is more important than I had previously realized. For this reason, I think Shambling Vent is indeed something you want, and I'm going to start running it at least as a 2-of. Sorry for doubting you, deaddrift!
A less obvious (and more controversial) change that this logic leads to is running Liliana, the Last Hope instead of Sorin, Solemn Visitor. They're both somewhat-situational value cards, but I think Liliana performs her job a little better in this deck. I know Sorin's anthem is great when you've got tokens, but it's mainly great when you've already established a board presence, whereas a Liliana can claw you back into a game where you've run out of gas by rebuying a Smasher or whatever, whereas I am basically never happy making a Vampire token with Sorin. When you're a ahead on board, the +1 can shut the door in the same way Sorin does by changing a lot of the combat math for your opponent. I know it's not as flashy as dealing 12+ and gaining a pile of life, but I think it might still be good enough. Against aggro decks like Affinity and Infect, it can singlehandedly win the game (even if they pump a Glistener Elf or whatever in response to the +1, it will die on their upkeep since Liliana's effect lasts until the beginning of your next turn, not until the end of turn.). Against other Lingering Souls decks, it just busts open the Spirit subgame in your favor.
It might not work out, but I think it's a logical idea to try.
2) Hangarback Walker is still good, but I think we can do even better. It was really required in BR in order to have some defense against Liliana of the Veil, but in this deck, Lingering Souls performs much of the same work. But what to replace it with? I know the standard reply will be Matter Reshaper, but I think this is too conservative still. My thoughts:
I think our imagination has been restricted a bit because we're afraid of just getting our creatures Fatal Pushed, but the problem is that Fatal Push actually hasn't taken over the format. Look at the top 16 of this weekend's SCG Modern Classic, for instance. Fatal Push is being played, but it isn't something you need to warp your entire gameplan around. i.e. I think it's OK to run some creatures that aren't guaranteed value even if they die to Push. For example, Jund and Abzan aren't unplayable all of a sudden, even though Grim Flayer and Tarmogoyf die to unrevolted Pushes. The key point is that they're very low opportunity-cost cards with very high ceilings. If they stick, they can win the game. Things like Matter Reshaper will almost never cause you to fall behind on cards, but it will rarely actually win you games outright, and there are plenty of board states where casting a Matter Reshaper does nothing.
From this perspective, I think Endless One could actually be good in this deck. You want to block 2/2's out of Zoo and Burn, and Endless One does that on turn 2 even without a Temple. On later turns, it can become even larger than Reality Smasher, and will just Abyss every other midrange deck's threats until they find a non-Bolt removal spell. In draws when you actually do have a Temple but no Relic, it is a play that allows you to hold Wasteland Strangler for later value, or double cast removal and a 2/2 blocker if you have it, which ought to stabilize most boards. It is also castable under Blood Moon, and represents adequate pressure against Sun and Moon decks that attempt to hide behind Blood Moon while playing only a small amount of removal that can deal with huge creatures.
3) Everyone is running 4 Path / 2 Push instead of 4 Push / 2 Path, and I'm not exactly sure why. The deck is trying to stabilize to TKS and Smasher, which means you don't want to be giving aggro decks an extra land's worth of tempo. You'll cast Path early if you have to, but I'd much rather cast Push. You might be worried about high-cmc threats like Tasigur or Angler, but I would argue that you shouldn't be since (a) we run a bunch of creatures that just flat out beat those in combat, and (b) we still have access to some Paths anyway, so it's not like we don't have outs. Push + GQ also allows us to try to get in front of very creature-dense decks like Bant Eldrazi or Naya/Abzan Company (where we're just not going to be able to kill all their threats 90% of the time), whereas Path feels counterproductive (e.g. Path Voice of Resurgence, untap into Collected Company??).
4) Early interaction. I think even though we have a ton of Thought-Knots, it would still be nice to have something closer to the the usual BGx density of discard spells to make it less likely we die in the early game. I think we're the best midrange deck, so let's not die before midgame.
Here's a list that I'd like to kick around:
2 Concealed Courtyard
4 Eldrazi Temple
3 Ghost Quarter
1 Godless Shrine
4 Marsh Flats
1 Plains
2 Shambling Vent
2 Swamp
1 Vault of the Archangel
4 Endless One
4 Lingering Souls
4 Reality Smasher
4 Thought-Knot Seer
3 Wasteland Strangler
4 Inquisition of Kozilek
1 Thoughtseize
4 Fatal Push
1 Liliana, the Last Hope
2 Path to Exile
4 Relic of Progenitus
2 Blessed Alliance
2 Collective Brutality
1 Damnation
2 Disenchant
1 Ob Nixilis Reignited
3 Stony Silence
2 Surgical Extraction
2 Thoughtseize
On the caveats:
1) If they kill Walker with a Push, that's positive value for us. It doesn't change the amount of power on our board at all and they're down a card. I hope they blow their removal on that and not TKS. As for Stony Silence and Pithing Needle, I am happy if our opponents bring that in against us. Our artifacts are not our primary threats. I mean, we ourselves are siding in Stony Silence from our own board...
2) Blue control decks are both unpopular and even-to-positive matchups since you have Souls and huge threats that you can pace one at a time. Not super happy about running Cavern at all. No synergy with Temple is a legit concern, but Walker is there to do something when you don't have a Temple. If you do have a Temple, hopefully you have something decent to cast.
3) Playing Walker with Mind Stone seems fine - I think the deck would like more than a few 2's, since you don't have Temple in your opener about half of the time. When Temple is there, you're in business so whatever, and when it's not, you need to do something proactive on turn 2, and I can totally see situations where one or the other is better. Mind Stone is a good plan when you're not being pressured (to set up TKS and so forth) and Walker is a good plan when you're on defense. Here's a line that comes up occasionally. You keep a hand with no Temple, play turn 1 Relic or whatever, and your opponent responds with turn 1 Goblin Guide or Nacatl or Swiftspear or whatever. Hangarback Walker saves you at least 2 life by blocking and possibly more if you follow up with any 3 or 4-drop (which also blocks).
Vent is definitely a good card, and it could be right to play some, but lists here that run like 0 or 1 Courtyard seem wrong to me, that's all. Untapped dual lands are really good, especially in games where we're just trying to stall to TKS and Smasher.
I'm not sold on Displacer either, this is for sure experimental. I can easily see it being extremely bad just because we usually don't have time to activate it if we play it on t2 or t3, and playing a 3/3 for 3 that often gets no value is definitely not what I'm trying to do with this deck's best draws.
Unmaking seems too hard to cast and too slow when you're deploying it as anything except planeswalker removal. I'm pretty happy with Disenchant, to be honest. Our creature and removal suite is already pretty good at battling planeswalkers, and I'm not convinced we need a card specifically for them. I'd rather play Celestial Purge if I were in the market for such a spell since honestly all the commonly-played planeswalkers I'm afraid of are black or red except Karn (and your plan versus Karn is to strip it from hand and/or stop Tron from getting assembled).
I've spent most of that time playing various linear decks, but during Modern PPTQ season, I played to great success a BR Processors deck inspired by the list Joe Soh top 16'd with at GP Guangzhou at the end of August last year. That BR deck was better positioned than BW at the time since Lightning Bolt was generally a lot better against the linear-aggro field I expected at the time - Infect, Affinity, and so on. To give you an idea of what this deck looked like, here's a list that I made the finals of a ~60 person PPTQ with (my carmate was 1st place, so we had a pretty good car!):
1 Blood Crypt
4 Bloodstained Mire
4 Eldrazi Temple
4 Ghost Quarter
1 Mountain
4 Sulfurous Springs
2 Swamp
3 Hangarback Walker
1 Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet
4 Reality Smasher
4 Thought-Knot Seer
3 Wasteland Strangler
2 Kolaghan's Command
4 Lightning Bolt
1 Slaughter Pact
3 Terminate
1 Liliana, the Last Hope
4 Relic of Progenitus
4 Inquisition of Kozilek
1 Thoughtseize
2 Blight Herder
2 Collective Brutality
2 Damnation
2 Duress
2 Engineered Explosives
1 Ob Nixilis Reignited
1 Slaughter Games
2 Surgical Extraction
1 Vandalblast
Lessons that I think are relevant to this deck from my PPTQ season:
1) Hangarback Walker looks like garbage but it is actually really good, and it gets better in a Fatal Push metagame. The deck is dying for a turn 2 play when you don't have a Temple, and this is a card that buys time in the early game and becomes a ridiculous threat in the late game against any deck that doesn't have access to Path. The reason why we didn't care about having a card like this before Pro Tour OGW broke the format open was as follows: (a) the format was a lot slower since Twin had just been banned and people didn't catch up quite yet (b) 2-3 Eye of Ugin is a lot more than zero.
Anyway, Walker saved my ass again and again versus a huge multitude of aggressive decks. I think this thread's decision to run with Matter Reshaper is not unreasonable, but I think you all should give Walker a try.
2) Smasher > Herder now, and I think this is something you all have agreed on and understood, as far as I can tell.
3) Blackcleave Cliffs is awesome, and we should try to run a lot of Concealed Courtyards now that we have all kinds of 1-cmc spells to cast early on. I know Path isn't the best turn 1 play, but regardless sometimes you need to hold your nose and do it, especially versus the most explosive aggro decks. Legitimately don't understand the complete lack of enthusiasm here! Ghost Quarter is also awesome and solves many problems.
I made some minimal changes to the BR list and went to a 34-person IQ. I scrubbed at 2-3, beating Ponza and Mill, losing to Burn, Affinity, and a BR Boom/Bust deck. My losses to Burn and Affinity were extremely close. I misplayed a few times mainly because I haven't played Modern in a few months (Legacy Champs + GP Louisville put all my MtG time on Legacy), and I think the tournament could have gone much better for me if I were sharper. But regardless it was a very educational tournament. This is what I ran:
4 Lingering Souls
4 Reality Smasher
4 Thought-Knot Seer
3 Wasteland Strangler
4 Fatal Push
4 Path to Exile
3 Inquisition of Kozilek
2 Thoughtseize
4 Relic of Progenitus
1 Sorin, Solemn Visitor
4 Concealed Courtyard
4 Eldrazi Temple
3 Ghost Quarter
1 Godless Shrine
4 Marsh Flats
1 Plains
2 Swamp
1 Vault of the Archangel
2 Blight Herder
2 Collective Brutality
1 Damnation
2 Disenchant
2 Duress
1 Surgical Extraction
1 Engineered Explosives
3 Stony Silence
1 Liliana, the Last Hope
Things I learned:
1) Fatal Push is not Lightning Bolt. IDK why I thought it was a good idea to run so many removal spells that have no other utility on an empty board, but I routinely found myself with extremely reactive hands that could not appropriately interact with decks like Burn or Affinity. You need to interact on the board; you just can't keep up with mono-removal. Definitely need to cut down to like 6 or so. Maybe -1 Push, -1 Path. I'd like to make room for Displacers in these slots since it's sort of like removal but also a 3/3 and a Revolt enabler if you're really desperate.
2) Smasher looks a lot worse without appropriate creature support, see (1). I think it's still better than Herder but its best when you can bait out some removal spells before you play it. With today's configuration, it looked a little anemic.
3) Mind Stone seems like a good idea to have another good 2 to play (and again, it enables Revolt). I don't know if I want more than 1-2 of this, but I'll certainly try it out. Double and triple Relic hands look a lot more awkward now that Dredge and Become Immense aren't as worrisome, so a Relic is the natural thing to cut to make room for this.
Going forward, here's what I'd like to try:
3 Hangarback Walker
4 Lingering Souls
4 Reality Smasher
4 Thought-Knot Seer
3 Wasteland Strangler
3 Fatal Push
3 Path to Exile
3 Inquisition of Kozilek
2 Thoughtseize
3 Relic of Progenitus
1 Mind Stone
1 Sorin, Solemn Visitor
4 Concealed Courtyard
4 Eldrazi Temple
3 Ghost Quarter
1 Godless Shrine
4 Marsh Flats
1 Plains
2 Swamp
1 Vault of the Archangel
2 Blight Herder
2 Collective Brutality
1 Damnation
2 Disenchant
2 Duress
1 Surgical Extraction
1 Engineered Explosives
3 Stony Silence
1 Liliana, the Last Hope
I think I want to emphasize this a bit more: combo decks in all formats suffer if you over-sideboard or fear the hate too much. It is important to accept the fact that sometimes you will keep hands that have no anti-hate, but are otherwise the nut draw, and then just lose to turn 1 Cage or something - this is just how it is playing a combo deck. Or to put it another way, which may be completely obvious: you have to throw away opening hands that can fight against hate if the hand otherwise wouldn't be able to stomp an opponent who simply didn't draw their hate card.
Anyway, the relevant question right now, as you allude to in the end of your post, is tuning numbers. We actually did write code simulating opening hands to arrive at our final numbers, and that's actually how we came to the conclusion that having 14-15 enablers was better than having more land (contrary to others). This probably will not change drastically with Cathartic Reunion, but I haven't yet written the new code to perform simulations with the new card. It's possible we want another dredger for Cathartic Reunion. We didn't do any statistical analyses of the "metagame" as such since that's really hard to pin down in Modern, especially in large tournaments.
Glad I could help! I think the playstyle comments may actually become somewhat less relevant after Kaladesh. Reunion will likely lead to the two types of decklists converging, since now I have to run enough land to cast 2cmc spells on turn 2 just like everyone else has been
That being said, I'm still high on Tome Scour, and I'll be testing various combinations.
As for the pain of the mana base, this is something that comes up all the time, and it basically comes down to playstyle. We are playing the deck as aggressively as you can imagine. We advocate extremely aggressive mulliganning specifically to maximize the probability of playing extremely fast, short games, where the pain you take from your mana base, regardless of what it is, just doesn't matter. If you want to play builds with 21 lands and 12 or fewer enablers, then of course 8 painful lands will be an issue because that version of the deck is playing towards much longer games. It's just our opinion that that choice is inferior to being 100% linear and explosive.
Taking for granted our opinion on how Dredge should be played, there are two points I want to make about Tome Scour versus Shriekhorn. First, the relevant comparison (from our perspective) is the probability of having a dredger in the top 5 versus the top 4 - not the top 6. Tome Scour is there to turn your next draw step into a Dredge. You usually do not have time to wait an extra turn to reap the benefit of the extra card Shriekhorn gives you. Second, Shriekhorn has small downsides that you are overlooking. Shriekhorn doesn't give you the cards all at once, which will sometimes make you lose an Amalgam trigger, and Shriekhorn turns on opposing Decays and K-Commands. If you insist on the Jund manabase, I would consider Memory Sluice instead of Shriekhorn.
I realize that typically, such differences seem small, but when it comes to Dredge (or at least dinausorus's and my version), little edges that affect consistency just flat out matter more than tactical flexibility. The deck just can't play a game of normal Magic. You have to start Dredging and going off before think about whether you can flash in Bloodghast at the right time.
Conflagrate is an idea that my team had before GP Charlotte, but we never really tried it out seriously, so it's probably good for me to try it, especially now that so many other pilots have proved its worth. I'll probably try lists close to what dinausorus posted.
It plays a role similar to Conflagrate in that it allows you to win randomly and out of nowhere, but as with Conflagrate, there are matchups where it's good and where it's bad. In general, I like a 1/1 split in the main/side. In lists with Conflagrate and no Bridges, it may be less good since you already have some reach and don't generate as many bodies as you do with Bridges.
First, all our one-for-ones are too expensive. Both the discard and the removal we play is just not good because they can play their hand way faster than we can answer it. If you played Standard during Affinity's reign in 2004, you will remember that Shatter and Oxidize were actually not very effective versus them because they would just play artifacts faster than you can destroy them. The same is true here. Their decks are designed to maximize the amount of virtual mana that Eye of Ugin makes by overloading on 2's and 3's, and we just can't answer them all. They will commonly play 2 things a turn for two consecutive turns, and because the things they are playing dodge almost every 1-cmc removal spell besides Dismember, we cannot hope to match their velocity with reactive spells. We have to play sweepers, but there are no 3cmc sweepers that reliably sweep them. So we have to look to 4cmc sweepers like Damnation. But this is not reliable. Sometimes Damnation will be too slow, sometimes it will be stripped by TKS, sometimes it will be Warping Wailed, sometimes it will not deal with multiple manlands, and sometimes they will read you and hold back a fatty or two so that your sweeper doesn't actually alleviate the pressure. There are a lot of things that can go wrong, and I think that it is too risky to be a viable plan.
You might argue in response that all of these things are true of Affinity as well, but the difference there is (1) Souls is actually good against them and generates value, and (2) most of their artifacts don't really matter, just the "lords" - Plating, Overseer, and Ravager. With Eldrazi, nearly every creature they play is capable of doing real damage and attacking through our typical boardstates - even Mimic.
You might also argue that all my concerns are true of Little Kid Abzan, and you'd be right. That's actually a bad matchup for us! The difference is now Mimic-based Eldrazi has great matchups against decks that Little Kid struggles with, and it has an insane amount of hype now, so we should expect to see it more often.
Second, Ensnaring Bridge, Worship, and other hate cards that the metagame is moving towards hampers us just as badly as it does them.
In the face of these two challenges, I have serious doubts about whether Processor-based builds can compete.
That being said, these are indeed decks prepared for a precise metagame, and the element of surprise is important. The colorless Eldrazi deck's sideboard is truly a horror, as LSV and Nakamura's round 5 matches on camera showed. Once people have a plan, they will have to be adjusted.