~Total deck cost (including sideboard, excluding basic lands): $180 (TCGPlayer) as of 29 March 2020~
Getting into Modern these days seems almost impossible, mainly due to the price of staples and the mana base. This series of decks aims to showcase decks that can definitely steal matches at FNM given the right field, while providing a clear upgrade path to a more tiered deck if applicable, in order to show that Modern can be played for around the same price as a tiered Standard or Pioneer deck.
This is Vial Goblins, an old Legacy archetype made (mostly) legal in Modern through Modern Horizons, Dominaria and Core 2020. This is a grindy midrange deck that aims to bury the opponent in card advantage through Goblin Ringleader coupled with the ability to tutor up wincons and silver bullets through Goblin Matron. It can also have quite explosive turns through Aether Vial and Goblin Warchief cheating on large amounts of mana for your finishers.
Due to the versatility provided by Matron and Ringleader, the deck is highly customizable. It can be loaded up with silver bullets like Zo-Zu the Punisher, Stingscourger, or even Goblin Trashmaster to gain an edge against your local metagame. Don't take this list as a definitive Vial Goblins list: play around with various other Goblins and see which ones work for you.
Vial Goblins does well in fair metagames: if your LGS meta is full of control variants or midrange fests (ie Jund, Bant Stoneblade, UW Control, etc) Goblins will do very well. On the other hand, Goblins struggles with big mana archetypes that can go over the top of it and fast spell-based combo archetypes that can attack at an angle that Goblins is ill-equipped to handle.
Future upgrades:
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Cavern of Souls: This card is amazing in Goblins, and is probably the upgrade that would impact
win rates most. It prevents your creatures from being countered and fixes mana, too. This, alongside Vial, make the matchup against control variants a literal cakewalk: easily one of the most lopsided matchups in Modern given enough practice.
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Other lands: The ideal mana base includes expensive cards like Bloodstained Mire and Auntie's Hovel, which are nice to have but won't necessarily raise win rates by a significant amount. Upgrade to these only if you both have the money and really love the deck, otherwise just stick with the budget mana base.
Even further budget concessions:
- Unearth: An alternative card to run instead of Vial if you're on an extreme budget. Running these instead of Vials slashes the deck's price in half. It's quite a bit worse due to losing the ability to 'flash' in uncounterable Goblins, but opens up new lines of play for the deck and can sometimes act as extra copies of some Goblins (namely Matron). Consider this card if you're just playing casually with friends and don't want to drop a lot of cash into it.
