Hey Everyone! Welcome to another Modern Musings!  This week I want to take another, slightly different look at the Eldrazi Processors archetype.  This idea has been bouncing around in my head for a week and I think it has real competitive merit, so I’m going to explore it a little bit.

What are Processors?

If you haven’t seen a processor before, its a creature subtype on Eldrazi cards that usually has an effect that puts cards from an opponent’s exile pile into their graveyard.  Probably the most used processor is Wasteland Strangler:

Creature removal on a 3/2 body is quite strong, even if it takes a little work to get there.  So the next question some of you are asking is; how do we get cards into our opponent’s exile pile?  Previously I’ve used these cards to get the job done:

And in many matchups, these cards are great about filling the exile pile with plenty of fuel for even our hungriest processors like Blight Herder:

There is a pretty gaping hole in this strategy though: What if our opponents don’t put cards in their graveyards for us to exile?  This may sound a little strange, but it happens more than you’d think.  For example, both Humans and Merfolk don’t naturally put any cards into their graveyard for us to exile with Relic of Progenitus.  Elves is similar in that it puts some cards in its graveyard, but not very many.  It doesn’t help that all these decks also happen to run Cavern of Souls meaning even our delays can be useless making it extremely difficult to get any cards into our opponent’s exile pile at all.  This is a problem as these decks apply a ton of early pressure, making it more important that you can 2 for 1 them with an on curve wasteland strangler (kill something with its trigger and be able to block and kill a creature).  So how do we solve these issues?  The simple answer is that instead of exiling from their graveyard, we should be exiling from their library instead.  The card best suited for this has actually been around for a while and already exists in the competitive modern format.  You are probably familiar with Pyxis of Pandemonium:

I’m really itching to try this card not only because it solves all the problems I laid out above, but because its second ability is for once not a blank.  Normally, when you see this card it’s in the lantern control deck that tries to control the top of both player’s decks.  In that deck, the second ability of this card may as well be flavor text for how often it has been used.  In our deck though it’s super sweet because not only do we get to feed our processors cards, but we break the parity of Pyxis by eating our opponent’s cards from exile.  This means that eventually we can threaten a huge board out of nowhere while our opponents get little to nothing.  I think this gives the deck an entirely new axis to play on that it might have been missing before.

There are some disadvantages to ditching Relic of Progenitus though.  The biggest is that we can’t cycle away our Pyxis early to draw a card.  Though I feel that the second ability is somewhat vindicates this downside.  The other disadvantage is that we don’t get to randomly hose graveyard decks, which means decks that were previously easy matchups could now be quite challenging.  Like Living End or Storm for example.

So for Pyxis to work, we need to potentially eat a lot of cards from exile.  Unfortunately we don’t have a lot of option as processors basically only come in one set as Oath of the Gatewatch didn’t  have any processors at all.  In fact, there are only 11 processors in the game:

Our pickings are fairly slim, but right away, I know that we want to be playing both Blight Herder and Wasteland Strangler.  Both of these cards are very high power-level and are most of our justification for jumping through all of these hoops.  But we also need a way to consistently eat our opponent’s Pyxis cards, and of our three choices, I think that one choice is a clear winner:

Void Attendant is a card that I had written off a long time ago because I had figured getting cards into your opponent’s exile pile was too difficult for its ability to work consistently, but clearly in our deck, that is not going to be the case.  It also ties in well with our Blight Herder token generation, giving us the ability to go wide as as big.  Void Attendant is a great defensive card in general as if it sticks on the board, can clog the board with eldrazi scions very quickly.  I also like Void Attendant because it gives us reason to go green in an eldrazi deck, which means we have access to the all-powerful Ancient Stirrings.

Finally going wide and going green are two prerequisites for playing a once hyped but now forgotten eldrazi from eldritch moon:

While we might have to sacrifice some of our eldrazi scions to cast this bad boy, its well worth it as it should end the game upon its cast trigger alone.  Even on a moderate board of three creatures, a resolved Decimator of the Provinces will you 13 extra power on board, and did I mention it gives your team trample?  This guy is a house, but somewhat hard to cast at 10 mana, fortunately for us, he can get a hefty discount thanks to emerge.

With all these pieces in mind, I think we can build our deck:

 

Anyway that’s all for this week! Let me know what you think in the comments.

One Response

  1. Memoman

    Thank you for the article, I’m going to try a version of this deck myself. That being said, I don’t understand why you’re running the adarkar wastes in this build – sideboard options?

    Reply

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