Nahiri: not just for Jeskai anymore.
The powerful planeswalker, in combination with Emrakul, the Aeons Torn and Griselbrand, is a perfect back-up plan for the Goryo’s Vengeance deck. It
doesn’t use the graveyard, so you aren’t as vulnerable to the normal hate as previous versions of the deck, and it can win the game by itself, so it is
ideal as a backup plan when your first attacks have been successfully defended and you are low on total resources.
The rummaging ability on Nahiri allows you to get some of the card filtering back that you miss from eliminating blue, and also makes it reasonable to play
a full eight creatures without fear of getting flooded on them too often. And if your opponent taps out to aggressively pressure Nahiri, you can use the +2
to set up Goryo’s Vengeance.
Without the resilience provided by Serum Visions and Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy, this list uses plenty of discard spells in order to force through its
game-winning spells. With so many enablers for your creatures, you gain consistency through redundancy rather than velocity.
Relative to the Nourishing Shoal lists of Reanimator, this list replaces Worldspine Wurm and Borborygmos Enraged with the more powerful Emrakul, the Aeons
Torn. While your Griselbrand draws are less powerful, your non-Griselbrand draws are significantly better.
The downside of Emrakul, the Aeons Torn is that it can sometimes leave you short of a kill with no way to close the game. This list compensates for that
possibility with some of the fringe cards, namely Insolent Neonate, Lingering Souls, and Lightning Bolt. Neonate gives you some more filtering and another
enabler for Goryo’s Vengeance, while Bolt and Souls provide a modicum of interaction to buy some time for your combo. But all three are quite good at
dealing the last few points of damage necessary to finish a game after your opponent has been thoroughly annihilated by Emrakul, leaving no worries about
losing an embarrassing game by bricking for ten turns as your opponent comes back from the brink of oblivion.
The sideboard gives you some additional interaction against other combo decks and the full four copies of Leyline of Sanctity against discard effects.
Faithless Looting is a great way to filter away excess copies of Leylines, so maxing out on the powerful effect makes sense here.
Your other answer to hate is Boseiju, Who Shelters All, which is great against counterspells. I could see a second or third copy make the list in
particularly blue-heavy metagames. Mardu colors provide all the most annoying (or awesome, depending on which side of them you typically fall on) hate
enchantments in Modern, and they all make an appearance here.
But the craziest card in the sideboard is Quicksilver Amulet. It’s another way to cheat your big creaures onto the battlefield but does so in a more robust
way than your maindeck effects. So if you need to make your creatures really count, you can keep them around for the steep price of eight mana. I’m not
sure if another enabler is necessary, but your opponents sure won’t forget the time they lost a Modern match to a bulk rare.
Creatures (14)
Planeswalkers (2)
Lands (21)
Spells (23)
