Four-Color Rally was the best deck during the last Standard season. Abzan Company is making a strong case as the best deck in Modern. What if we combined the two?
Okay, it’s not exactly an even combination, as this deck is certainly more Rally than Company, and it’s much more combo-centric than either of its parents, but that just makes it all the more exciting.
At its heart, this deck is trying to play out some cheap creatures, hopefully building a significant battlefield presence with Collected Company, and fill its graveyard with Satyr Wayfinder. If your opponent isn’t able to be able to deal with your creatures, you’ll simply attack them to death. If they do expend a lot of resources to interact, then Rally the Ancestors or Return to the Ranks along with Viscera Seer can set up a combo finish by triggering Blood Artist and Zulaport Cutthroat a bajillion times. (Trust, me I’m a certified number scientist … or certifiable. I can never remember which one.)
Anyway, it’s important to note that even if your opponent isn’t trying to interact with your creatures, you can combo them out by simply sacrificing your battlefield to Viscera Seer before casting one of the white spells. In fact, if you really need to race, you can sacrifice those creatures, gain some extra life if needed, and use the scrying from Viscera Seer to find your finisher, an elegance that I can certainly get behind that should help the deck a lot against combo decks where it otherwise would struggle.
It’s for that reason that I am surprised not to see any additional sacrifice outlets in the deck, especially Cartel Aristocrat, which fits so nicely. I am not that enamored with Tidehollow Sculler, even if you can permanently exile a card by sacrificing it with its enters-the-battlefield trigger on the stack, but it’s likely that you need the disruption against the many combo decks in Modern.
Considering that, I think the most likely cut is Rally or Return to the Ranks, and I’m honestly not sure which is the worse of the two. But eight copies seem like a lot when you really should only need to resolve one to finish a game. Ancestral Vision decks should bring more counterspells to Modern than we’ve seen since Splinter Twin left the format, but with Tidehollow Sculler to strip their hand and Voice of Resurgence to punish them for countering our spells, I do not think eight finisher cards are necessary to overload their disruption.
I could also see fitting in more ways to fill the graveyard and enable a fast combo, most likely Grisly Salvage. Given the low impact of your individual cards, Salvage is not a great card but could serve as a nice role-player in small numbers.
The last card that stands out to me in the maindeck is Elves of Deep Shadow. Since you are trying to cast WW spells and not BB spells, I would prefer Noble Hierarch, or even Avacyn’s Pilgrim if the Exalted of Hierarch isn’t as welcome in a swarming deck.
The sideboard contains an expected array of hatebears, mostly aimed at aggressive red decks and Affinity. I would like some number of Scavenging Oozes for opposing graveyard decks and some spot removal for opposing Oozes and other problematic creatures. Murderous Cut would fit nicely over the strange choice of Wrath of God, even if the latter is reasonable against the rise of Zoo decks.
If Abzan Company retains the popularity it currently has, this deck will take a significant amount of splash hate from players trying to beat Kitchen Finks and company, but if it is anything like that deck, it should be powerful enough to persevere through the hate, and persevere with style.
Creatures (29)
- 4 Birds of Paradise
- 2 Elves of Deep Shadow
- 4 Tidehollow Sculler
- 4 Viscera Seer
- 4 Blood Artist
- 4 Voice of Resurgence
- 4 Satyr Wayfinder
- 3 Zulaport Cutthroat
Lands (19)
Spells (12)
