Modern Musings: The Deal With Delirium

Anyone who reads my articles knows by now that I love Eldrazi.  Unfortunately though, I haven’t had much opportunity to play with Emrakul, the Promised End.  I really enjoyed the standard G/B delirium decks that had this monster of a card sitting on the top end of their curve.  Sadly, Modern hasn’t quite been able to accommodate this particular Spaghetti Monster quite as well as her first incarnation.  But today I look to change that and try to make a deck that can consistently power out an early Emrakul.  Still, there’s another card that I really want to try out. You might recognize it:

Oops! I meant this one:

Hymn to Tourach sees regular play in legacy because the ability to make your opponent discard random cards has the effect of messing with their plans.  As we’ve seen with the rise of Hollow One decks, Burning Inquiry enables the most degenerate situations.  A couple weeks ago I was playing a Modern FNM and my opponent was on the Hollow One deck, I was on the draw with my Aetherworks Marvel brew.  My opponent played a Burning Inquiry on turn one, and I happened to discard all 3 lands that were in my hand, turning my reasonable 3-land hand into a 0-land hand.  While that was extremely unlikely to happen, it still illustrates the power of random discard.  It gives you the power to hit a few of your opponents best cards instead of one of their best or 2 of their choosing (like with Mind Rot).

Eldrazi Synergy

If our plan is to has a very cheap Emrakul, the Promised End, then we probably should be running Eldrazi Temples as well.  If we are running those then it stands to reason that we should probably add Thought-Knot Seer as well to utilize the power of the temples.  Similarly, while not always the most relevant interaction, Nameless Inversion can be cast with Eldrazi Temple as well, though it only really matters if you can utilize the extra mana for another Eldrazi spell. Nameless Inversion is particularly good in this deck, since Tribal counts towards card types in graveyard. Unfortunately we can’t go too overboard with the Eldrazi since we would too heavily dilute our delirium plan.

Delirium Enablers  

Because we are trying to get as many card types into our graveyard as possible, we need to look at cards that enable us to do just that.  The best cards to look at are the ones that have multiple card types stuffed onto a single card.  Nameless Inversion is one that we mentioned earlier, but here are some others that are pretty good:

Fortunately all of these cards are quite powerful on their own, the fact that they help with delirium is just a bonus. But it’s not enough to just have these cards, we need a fast way to put them into our graveyard, and that’s where these come in:

These cards allow us to both fill our graveyard and in the case of Grapple with the Past and Liliana, the Last Hope, they can help us return powerful cards that we sent there. Satyr Wayfinder helps us fill our graveyard while making sure that we don’t miss our land drops. This is important because we’ll probably need at least 6 lands in play so we can cast Emrakul.

The Payoffs

These are the reason that we are going through all this trouble in the first place, the cards that make all this work worth it.

These are the payoffs. Traverse allows us to find whatever we need to finish the game or answer an opposing threat. It also allows us to run a lot of toolbox creatures in our mainboard.

The List

I’m excited to play this list, as I’ve been wanting to cast an Emrakul, the Promised End in modern for quite some time. Until next time, watch for that potential Untaidake, the Cloud Keeper price spike, and keep on brewing!