First and foremost; Rest in Peace, Gitaxian Probe. You were a powerhouse in this deck and your banning has forced me to change this deck significantly. However, in return for taking you into the afterlife, WOTC has granted this deck a much more solid mana base with the creation of enemy color fast lands. WOTC taketh, WOTC giveth.
Before I even go into each individual card in this deck, I'd just like to say who will and won't enjoy this deck, and I'll immediately go into its pros and cons.
You'll like this deck if you;
- Like decks that can deal explosive amounts of damage all in one turn
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Enjoy being able to stall out games while your opponents can barely drop anything with a CMC higher than three at most
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Want to use a deck outside of the modern meta
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Enjoy wiping all lands from the board, while also having a 9/7 enter with haste all in the same turn
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Enjoy limiting the options of nearly any deck that you play against
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Enjoy having constant hand advantage on your opponent, as well as having your land count increase while your opponents can hover between 0 and 1
You won't like this deck if;
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You don't like somewhat unreliable mana bases
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You value your friends
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You like to explicitly play tier one decks, and you are in fact a Spike
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If you think land destruction was an absolute mistake
Lets think about how this deck will do against most decks.
Tron; REKT. Boom to break up their Tron lands will be huge, as will hitting them with Crack the Earth when they dont have Chromatic Star or Chromatic Sphere out to eat the sacrifice.
Humans/Spirits; REKT, depending on how you draw. Lightning Bolt and Lightning Helix will prevent dying by turn 4, and being able to Boom and Crack the Earth their Cavern of Souls/Ancient Ziggurat will help disrupt their mana base a LOT. The 2 Gut Shots in the mainboard also help keep down a turn 1 Mausoleum Wanderer, Noble Hierarch or Champion of the Parish. With the low amounts of removal the decks run, a turn 2 Young Pyromancer can create a ton of chump blockers as well, and if I get a Greater Gargadon out they will likely have nothing to use against it outside of Path to Exiles. However, if you have a slow starting hand with little to no removal, this deck will struggle a lot against these decks, however that is the case for any deck.
Burn; Not a great match up. Burn can drop most of their spells with one/two mana, so the land disruption this deck packs will likely not do much against it at all. The 4 Lightning Helixs in this deck will help slow them down, but honestly I believe burn will run over this deck a lot of the time.
KCI Combo; Also an iffy match up. Similar to us, they run Ichor Wellspring, which our Crack the Earth will allow them to sacrifice. Actually, a lot of that deck is based on artifacts going to the graveyard, so Crack the Earth might actually help them out a decent amount of the time. However, it is not always a dead card, and a T1 crack the earth can help disrupt things like Mox Opal. Also, with our 4 Surgical Extractions in the sideboard, we can kill the combo (by removing Pyrite Spellbomb at instant speed, although the back up Sword of the Meek will also need to be hit with a Surgical Extraction so as to stop the Thopter Foundry combo. Ideally, we could just hit Krark-Clan Ironworks with a Surgical Extraction, but the odds of the card ever entering the graveyard are slim so that would be hard.
Vengevine or Hollow One decks; Maybe rekt? 4 Surgical Extractions in the sideboard can kill these decks outright, and Lightning Bolt and Lightning Helix can slow the decks down (hopefully) until we can get one of those Surgical Extractions. Crack the Earth won't have much of an affect on these decks but it will also help to slow them down.
Jund; Oof, this looks like a hard match-up as well (maybe I should be worried that I feel like I keep saying this??). Tarmogoyf can be an absolute beast against this deck turn 2, and hand disruption like Thoughtseize can also be a pain. But, if we can Boom and get a Greater Gargadon out, I think we have a very solid chance of winning.
