Modern Musings: Spooky Decks

Hey everyone, and welcome to another Modern Musings! This week we are going to get into the spookier side of magic and show you some Halloween themed modern decks!  And since Halloween is all about the monsters, we’ll be taking a close look at the various spooky tribes that exist in modern.  Get ready for some Vampires and Spirits!

Spirits

Can’t have Halloween without some spooky ghosts around.  Fortunately for us, Tribal spirits is a very real and competitive archetype in modern.  Let’s take a look:

So how does this deck work?  The rough idea is that you can play all your creatures at instant speed thanks to Rattlechains and Collected Company, allowing you to hold up mana for removal or countermagic (in the form of Spell Queller).  The other advantage to playing spirits is that all your creatures have flying, and because all your creatures have flash, your opponent will always be stressed that you might flash in a couple extra beaters into a lord and hit for a huge chunk of their life total.  And that’s pretty much the plan; flash in beaters on your opponents end step and blank all their removal with hexproof spirits.

Vampires

Next up we have our favorite blood-sucking fiends, vampires!  Vampires is another tribe that has gotten a some attention in recent sets, most notably in Ixalan.  A ton of new vampires got printed including a lot of white ones (which is unusual).  Unfortunately most of them aren’t really competitive enough for modern, but there are some interesting ones like Bishop of the Bloodstained  and Bloodcrazed Paladin that could make it into a deck at some point.  For our vampire deck today, though, we’re going to revisit a bit of an old but familiar strategy involving these cards:

If you played standard during Dragons of Tarkir then Rally the Ancestors is going to look very familiar to you; it turns what would be an normal aggro deck into a crazy instant-speed combo deck with Blood Artist.  Let’s take a look at an old list of SaffronOlive’s that I updated to include some more recent cards.

I’ve always really liked this deck and I think the updated mana base along with Fatal Push will really help the deck out.  The basic plan with this deck is to play the beatdown game until you draw Rally the Ancestors or Return to the Ranks, then combo them out with a sacrifice outlet and Blood Artist.  Pawn of Ulamog makes combo-ing even easier as it doubles your blood artist triggers as well as provides a bunch of mana to cast another Rally the Ancestors if you want.

Anyway, that’s all for this week. Next week we’ll be talking about Pro Tour Ixalan, so stay tuned and have a fun and safe Halloween!