If you haven’t paid close attention to Modern lately, you might believe you could leave your graveyard hate at home now that the Violent Outburst ban has killed off Living End – only for the scariest Angel and Demon in Modern to blindside you as early as Turn 2.
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After a series of false starts, one of Modern’s most overlooked cards is finally getting its revenge!
A Brief History of Vengeance
Goryo’s Vengeance was begging for someone to break it in Modern for years. The idea of annihilating everything out of nowhere with Emrakul, the Aeons Torn for just two mana was intoxicating but elusive in Modern, where more consistent combo decks stole its thunder and Deceiver Exarch / Pestermite gave the ever-popular Splinter Twin decks a natural trump.
Griselbrand was a game-changer for any deck hoping to cheat out a giant creature, from Sneak and Show and Reanimator in Legacy to Oath of Druids in Vintage, but it took a long time to realize its obvious potential in Modern. The Grishoalbrand deck took a Grand Prix by storm but disappeared just as quickly, becoming a harmless fringe deck and eventually collateral damage from the Faithless Looting ban.
The appearance of Orcish Bowmasters was a final humiliation for Griselbrand, who can’t even draw dozens of cards on Turn 2 in peace in Legacy anymore! Who would win – an all-powerful demon who controlled Liliana’s soul and had to be imprisoned in the Helvault, or a few random Orcs?
The Unifier
Atraxa, Grand Unifier immediately became the default thing to sneak in, just as Griselbrand had a decade prior. Atraxa doesn’t enable the same dedicated combo insanity as Griselbrand, but it crushes any fair fight, dominating the battlefield with a formidable set of stats and keywords while giving you a fresh hand of relevant spells. Activating Griselbrand really did feel like making a deal with the devil – if you paid that much life and missed, you could die an improbable death. Atraxa gives you everything you could ask for up front without asking anything in return.
You can turn Goryo’s Vengeance into the best draw spell imaginable – but then what? It’s not clear what you should actually do once you tear through your deck. Why take the risk of setting up this big finish if you have to pass the turn and can’t make use of most of these new cards?
The Free Spell Factor
It’s a good problem to have, but your answer to that question says a lot about your larger strategic goals. In the all-in combo decks based around Griselbrand, you would use Modern’s last examples of free mana ramp in Simian Spirit Guide or Mox Amber to set up another Goryo’s Vengeance for a lethal Emrakul or another finisher like Borborygmos Enraged. The banning of Simian Spirit Guide took that whole approach to combo with it, and pure combo in general has struggled against the free interaction in the Modern Horizons sets, from Force of Negation to Endurance.
Those free spells are not only a problem, but also a solution. Every Griselbrand activation or Atraxa trigger is likely to turn up an evoke creature you can cast for free and your choice of fodder in the right colours for it. Atraxa’s seemingly demanding mana cost becomes another unearned upside here – you can pitch her to both Grief and Solitude, as well as the duo of Force of Negation and Subtlety that have shaped blue decks in Modern for the past few years.
The banning announcement that silenced Violent Outburst called out the danger of Force of Negation as a free way to force through your key card on the opponent’s turn. You get to enjoy that play pattern here too with Goryo’s Vengeance.
Ephemerate
The Grief + Ephemerate combo terrified Modern fans during preview season but flopped hard – nobody predicted Feign Death and friends would launch Grief to the top instead. Attempts to put this in a fair Orzhov shell similar to Rakdos Evoke fell flat, as the white cards didn’t pull their weight and your threats didn’t apply enough pressure to end the low-resource game you forced on both players with this opening. Giving Grief that extra point of power with your Undying Malice made it a much faster clock, and Solitude is positively glacial when compared to Fury. This Esper deck dodges those concerns, using Grief and Solitude not as threats but as a unique form of interaction to buy time for the combo and then embellish the combo turn.
Ephemerate also assumes a new role as a combo piece, letting your legend avoid being exiled by Goryo’s Vengeance at end of turn – and giving you another Atraxa trigger on the house! Griselbrand and Atraxa offer overwhelming card advantage in the classic sense, but also let you ignore such abstract concepts if they stick around as the perfect finisher.
The Setup Cards
Natural Reanimator setup cards like Faithful Mending and Tainted Indulgence appear in most lists, but Ephemerate also nudges you towards creatures with ‘when this enters…’ effects as your enablers. Seeing Fallaji Archaeologist in a Modern deck may bring back painful memories of Augur of Bolas missing constantly, but the context here is different – the self-mill is a relevant upside when it bins your legends, and you have a clear focus on finding the namesake combo card rather than using it as a mopey value play.
Some players have enlisted new officer Steamcore Scholar for a more expensive yet impressive version of that effect, one that can be a discard outlet for an Atraxa stuck in your hand as well as a source of real card advantage. Some more colourful lists run Fable of the Mirror-Breaker, which needs no introduction but is even more versatile here than usual. Treasure makes it realistic to hard-cast your evoke creatures (or even Atraxa!); a flipped Fable can copy them or other enablers like Archaeologist/Scholar, and the rummaging ties the room together until then.
The Bowmasters
Orcish Bowmasters is another broadly strong card with additional synergy here. Ephemerate lets you double up on the damage triggers to take down larger prey or create a fresh Army token. When Bowmasters battles were more common, Ephemerate on your Bowmasters would protect your copy while shooting theirs.
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This basic formula has been around for a year since Atraxa’s arrival and has rewarded its devoted followers, but it failed to gain wider traction until now. What changed?
Murders at Karlov Manor Manabases
The surveil lands in Murders at Karlov Manor outperformed everyone’s expectations. Even decks that don’t seem like natural homes for them thanks to an awkward mana curve or low fetchland count have gone out of their way to fit at least the first surveil land, and they are all glad they did.
Esper Goryo’s Vengeance can make a strong claim to being the best home for these lands in Modern, and its manabase reflects this, with many lists running four or more different Surveil lands. A combo deck based around a specific card values the ‘free’ card selection a lot, and without many demands on your mana early, you have more room to fetch at least one copy at your leisure. If your Turn 1 surveil land hits the jackpot and bins Atraxa or Griselbrand, you can bypass the need to fiddle around with Faithful Mending and go for a Turn 2 Goryo’s Vengeance – a whole turn faster than you could go off normally.
Drawing a Leyline
We are at the height of the Leyline of the Guildpact + Scion of Draco craze. Content creators know that cramming that combo in totally unsuitable shells like Yawgmoth or Tron is an easy way to guarantee clicks and another round of discourse about how Leyline is ruining gameplay and humiliating the colour pie – especially if your bizarre mashup coasts to an easy 5-0 on the back of Leyline and Scion!
Esper Goryo’s Vengeance is no exception to that rule, but there’s a valid strategic argument for it too. You badly need a backup win condition to avoid being wholly reliant on finding and resolving Goryo’s Vengeance, especially in post-sideboard games when you know graveyard hate is coming. The card filtering that sets up your reanimation can also assemble the Leyline + Scion combo or trade in a redundant copy of either.
Getting to use Territorial Kavu as a discard outlet has its own charm, but it can also lessen your need for one by offering another realistic route to victory. Before surveil lands, some previous iterations leaned on Triomes to fuel a small domain package for Leyline Binding and a strong setup card in Shadow Prophecy – now you can have guaranteed domain without cracking a fetchland at all!
Esper Goryo’s Vengeance took off as a response to the pre-ban dominance of Cascade – it could happily take the fight to Crashing Footfalls on their terms, and its core plan lined up perfectly against Living End. Recent results have shown that the deck is no one-trick wonder – it’s here to stay and worth respecting or adopting yourself, at least until Modern Horizons 3 turns the whole format on its head again in just a few months.
