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Video Daily Digest: Human After All

There’s a new tribal deck in Modern that seemingly sprang up overnight! With lots of Humans to find with Collected Company (and lots of insanely good Magic Online results), it’s little surprise Ross Merriam was intrigued ahead of SCG Charlotte!

In this space, I’m typically aiming to highlight unique decks in the metagame, and while they need to put up at least one good result to even be considered, they often don’t have a string of good finishes to look upon. Today’s deck bucks that trend, since you can find it in nearly every list of 5-0 decks released this week.

The deck itself is rather straightforward: a bunch of Humans and Collected Company to ensure that you find a critical mass of them to take advantage of the tribal synergies. But this is not a Human aggro deck a la Tom Ross in Standard, pure aggression with little late-game or disruption. In fact, the deck has a surprising amount of the latter for a deck that is so limited in its potential card pool.

Reflector Mage and Sin Collector are great hits off Collected Company, turning the card into an interactive spell rather than a pure threat, and splashing the two colors is easy with fetchlands and Cavern of Souls. Additionally, the two Thalias easily slow down any Modern opponent, and this is certainly a deck that will punish any kind of stumble.

This set of creatures covers the gamut of disruption, letting you slow down creature-heavy and spell-heavy decks alike. Answer hordes of creatures or singular large threats and either overload cheap spot removal spells by making them more expensive or strip away expensive sweepers from your opponent’s hand. You don’t see this kind of versatility within a single tribe in a smaller format like Standard, but Modern has such a large card pool that a little digging will yield a solid option for whatever you need.

Unsurprisingly, the sideboard continues this trend with narrow, powerful Humans to dig toward with Collected Company. Mirran Crusader is very difficult for Death’s Shadow decks to answer, since they play one to two Lightning Bolts. Kambal, Consul of Allocation is a nightmare for Burn and Storm. The remaining three are sideboard staples that need no explanation, to the extent that Reclamation Sage makes the cut despite not being a Human. If your metagame is particularly skewed toward either artifacts or enchantments, you have War Priest of Thune and Vithian Renegade as options, but Modern is too wide to leave that kind of hole most of the time.

Grixis Shadow and Dredge have all the hype going into SCG Charlotte, but I’m going to keep an eye out for this one to see if it can replicate its recent online success in the paper metagame.