Faithless Looting – Hollow One – Vengevine is the newest shell to emerge in Modern. In the wake of Julian Grace-Martin’s performance in Syracuse, various incarnations of the deck have been explored, but for the most part those lists are backing up the strong Plan A with a fairly anemic Plan B, usually built around cheap creatures that can either get aggressive alone or serve as enablers to recur Vengevine.
This list is different. It makes Vengevine somewhat worse with a reduced count of cheap creatures but makes up for it by finding a way to make your Faithless Lootings and Cathartic Reunions better: Goryo’s Vengeance.
The red velocity spells have enabled reanimator strategies for a while in Modern, and here we see a small package of it and Griselbrand, the best of the targets, and one that can either finish the game off after your opponent has answered the first wave, essentially functioning is a large burn spell, or let you reload, discard a Vengevine or two to hand size, and recur them the next turn for the finishing blow.
Having another graveyard-centric plan can be problematic against cards like Relic of Progenitus or Rest in Peace, but notably it does tax your opponents’ Surgical Extractions, and for a deck that wants to explode on turns 2 or 3, getting better against the cheapest hate card has a lot of value.
But should those cards prove problematic, this list incorporates the Death’s Shadow innovation, supported by Thoughtseize, Street Wraith, and the already painful manabase. We all know by now how powerful that card can be, often dominating the battlefield by itself. It won’t be there to save you every time graveyard hate gets the better of you, but you only need to steal a few of those games to make a big impact.
While having gameplans that are divergent enough to avoid the same hate is ideal, it’s more important for the plans to work together and be robust enough to go toe to toe with the powerful decks of Modern. Goryo’s Vengeance does that better than any other plan I’ve seen for this shell, and the shell itself is certainly powerful enough to make waves in Modern should the right home for it be found.
Creatures (27)
- 4 Street Wraith
- 4 Death's Shadow
- 4 Vengevine
- 4 Griselbrand
- 3 Gurmag Angler
- 4 Insolent Neonate
- 4 Hollow One
Lands (18)
Spells (15)
Sideboard
