Nope. This isn’t happening. I repeat. This. Is. Not. Happening.
Bad Todd Stevens! You stop this right now!
We just emerged from the harsh depths of Eldrazi Winter and are basking in a glorious and warm spring filled with diverse Modern metagames and interesting matches. Everything has been great. And I look through the Top 32 decklists from #SCGINDY and see this…monstrosity. This abomination against all that is holy and good in this world.
Why? Why would you do this to us, Todd? What have we done to deserve this?
If you listen to Todd’s deck tech on the list, you will hear that the genesis of the deck was from Michael Majors and Gerry Thompson, so they deserve a healthy amount of ire as well, but it’s Todd that has brought the deck out of the shadows and into the limelight. He has resurrected the Eldrazi so that they may continue on their never-ending quest for world domination.
It is up to us, the few brave and righteous souls willing to band together, to stop this menace once and for all, so let us dissect our enemy.
This list is a spiritual successor of the U/W Eldrazi list that assumed the position of default best deck before Eye of Ugin was banned, leveraging the power of Eldrazi Displacer and Drowner of Hope to dominate the battlefield going long. The issue to be solved was how to replace some of the explosive power of Eye of Ugin, and Noble Hierarch and Ancient Stirrings to help find more copies of Eldrazi Temple appear to be the answer.
Without Eye, we see that Eldrazi Mimic fails to make the cut, as does Endless One, since those cards are fairly weak without the potential for explosive Eye draws, and they are replaced by the more consistently solid cards Matter Reshaper and Tamogoyf.
Yes, I just described Tarmogoyf with the words “consistently solid.” Yes, I was serious. No, I have not suffered any brain damage, at least that I can recall. Tarmogoyf can be surprisingly small in this deck, since you do not have many noncreature spells and the need for colorless sources limits the number of fetchlands you can play; notably this list only has five. Still, your powerful creatures force enough interaction from your opponent that their graveyard should fuel your Tarmogoyfs fairly quickly.
With the need for three different colors as well as colorless mana, the manabase in this deck is certainly the biggest challenge. With only one blue fetchland and a Ghost Quarter, the basic Island looks out of place and can be a fourth Cavern or a pain land to help facilitate your blue sideboard cards, although the rise of various Nahiri decks, and thus Path to Exile, makes me want to play as many basic lands as possible.
Attacking this deck’s mana may be a good way of going about things, making decks like Merfolk more appealing. With how little room there is outside the manabase for innovation, I expect it to be refined rather quickly unless the hive mind rejects the possibility of another dominating Eldrazi deck.
And, let’s be honest, no one wants to see this deck dominate again. Anyone with a sense of compassion and human decency will do everything in their power to keep it limited to the fringes of the format. But…if you’re interested in winning tournaments, it turns out playing Thought-Knot Seer and Reality Smasher well ahead of schedule is a pretty good plan.
So if, a month from now, we once again find ourselves burdened under the unyieldingly heavy yoke of Eldrazi oppression, you all know who to blame:
Todd Stevens.
Creatures (28)
- 4 Tarmogoyf
- 4 Noble Hierarch
- 4 Drowner of Hope
- 1 World Breaker
- 3 Eldrazi Displacer
- 4 Reality Smasher
- 4 Thought-Knot Seer
- 4 Matter Reshaper
Lands (24)
Spells (8)
