This may surprise you, but Ninja of the Deep Hours was one of my first favorite cards. I played Tomoharu Saito’s Sea Stompy deck from the first Pro Tour Honolulu more than anyone should have and I love nothing more than attacking with a Birds of Paradise on turn 2.
Years later, with Lightning Bolt around, Ninja of the Deep Hours has had a hard time of things. Getting your Ninja killed for one mana is a huge tempo sink that you really can’t risk in a fast format like Modern.
But Lightning Bolt is at its nadir in the metagame right now, and Ninja of the Deep Hours will dodge Fatal Push a reasonable portion of the time. Still, having to be wary of using your key card any time your opponent has an untapped fetchland is not a great place to be. You need some way to defend your Ninja, even on turn 2.
Enter Disrupting Shoal. The free counterspell easily protects Ninja of the Deep Hours or any of your other threats from Fatal Push, given the number of one-mana spells in the deck, and the tempo swing from countering anything more expensive is huge. Conveniently, the card advantage from Ninja fuels Disrupting Shoal, so there’s a nice bit of mutual synergy there.
Now that we’ve adequately protected our key card, we need to make sure it can land early and often. That means aggressively oriented one-mana creatures, preferably with evasion. Delver of Secrets is the obvious choice, but Faerie Miscreant is anything but. Flying Man is long past its competitive prime, but one that draws a card is quite nice, and bouncing it to re-trigger is even nicer.
Faerie Miscreant also nicely enables Spellstutter Sprite, which is sneakily a great card right now. It lines up well against Death’s Shadow and Affinity, the two most popular decks, and every Modern deck has a bevy of cheap spells. And along with Snapcaster Mage, it gives you a huge number of creatures that you can ninjutsu for value.
This deck won’t overpower opponents. You’ll win games by inches with tempo and enough card advantage to let you two-for-one yourself to answer a key opposing threat if need be. Your opponents are going to scoff at your pile of 1/1s pecking away, but they aren’t going to scoff when you count to twenty.
Creatures (19)
- 4 Ninja of the Deep Hours
- 3 Spellstutter Sprite
- 4 Snapcaster Mage
- 4 Delver of Secrets
- 4 Faerie Miscreant
Lands (20)
Spells (21)
