Sideboard


Demonic Acid

This deck started out as a "constellation control" deck, though it has evolved away mostly from using constellation triggers and now it aims to control the game by abusing enter and leave the battlefield triggers from enchantments that are repeatedly bounced back to your hand.

The principal idea behind this strategy is that because you are using the same cards over and over, this creates a long term card advantage that accumulates more and more over time. At the same time you aim to strangle the resources of your opponent, including the lands they need to play their topdecks, creating some nice inevitability.

The control elements in this deck covers land destruction, hand disruption, card advantage, permanent spot removal, one-sided board sweeps, discard, life loss and life gain. It aims to be very flexible in which of those lines to deploy, and many cards in the deck has multiple uses.

Riptide Chimera: Bounces one enchantment each upkeep, and gives us a 3/4 flying body for 3 mana. Good value in this deck and a potent blocker/beater as well. Requires that you have things on the field so it's not forced to bounce itself (but it can sometimes be a viable line of play to do that, if it has negative effects like -1 counters played on it or if you need an extra echantment in your hand)

Cloudstone Curio: This is the more potent and long term bouncer, allowing us to repeatedly bounce several things against each other in the same turn. Also harder to remove.

Semblance Anvil: With any of your enchantment creatures underneath, this card allows us to cast all of our deck for 1-3 mana, really unlocking the potential for stacking up the triggers. This+cloudstone is extremely potent. Be aware that this card can be a really bad trade if played into bounce or artifact removal, consider siding it out in some MUs for that reason.

Trophy Mage: Fetches any of the mainboard and most of the sideboard artifacts. Typically aimed towards consistently deploying Cloudstone + Anvil, followed by fetching the remaining stuff as needed. The body is generally used to just chump block with to protect some life total.

Serum Visions: Don't think this needs any further explanation, good filtering in most blue decks.

Reality Acid: Remove any permanent you want. Take away their mana, their combo pieces, their threats, whatever. With the Cloudstone+Anvil this card goes absolutely nutballs, Just bounce it against any of your other echantments and clear the board.

Spreading Seas: Card Advantage and Land Disruption, limit their splash color, turn of utility lands and get ahead. The potency of this card is greatly amplified by the bouncing, since you'll draw several cards and can move it around when a better target comes out, for example if it becomes more important to limit another color than the one you started with. Can also be used to give yourself more islands for Vedalken Shackles.

Tectonic Edge: Rounding out our land disruption package, good with the seas because you can disrupt the first few lands and then use this to keep the 4th away. Very relevant that you can hold priority to trigger several of these against 4 lands, to get around the 4 land limit and get them down from 4 to 2.

Demonic Pact: The embodiment of risk vs reward, this card fits very well in this deck and opens up a flexible suite of value plays. Bounce it to keep it fresh and your opponent will be hard pressed to play his threats into the 4 damage or keep it in hand into the discard, makes for the perfect card to induce misplays, and when neither of those apply you just pull ahead with the card draw. It is quite important to plan ahead so you can bounce it in time, but sometimes it's correct to just jam this in and take the risk even without bounce in hand, especially if you can anticipate either winning or losing within 3 turns anyways, which actually isn't unusual at all. This card should be sided out/not played against any kind of mindslaver effect as they can just chose "lose the game".

Doomwake Giant: Big nasty repeatable board sweeper. With this in play and some bounce going some go-wide decks just fold. Great against elves, goblins and what have you. Gets around hexproof, indestructible and protection too.

Trial of Ambition: Forced sacrifices are great, and this one works really well in this deck. It can be important to stack the triggers correctly when casting this in conjunction with doomwake giant or to bounce reality acid if it's on a creature. You want the trial trigger at the bottom of the stack so they don't get the chance to sac a creature that will die anyways to the other effects.

Vedalken Shackles: Steal their dudes. This card is in the maindeck mainly because it's the most generally useful 3 CMC artifact I found for this important slot, which is being the 3rd target for Trophy Mage so they don't become dead draws after securing cloudstone and anvil. I really like the shackles in a lot of matchups, but it is the most obvious card to side out for any of the more specific sideboard hate artifacts.

Brain Maggot: Hand disruption, takes any nonland card and serves as another echantment creature for consistency. Bouncing this can be useful to switch cards when the first is no longer a problem to deal with.

Inquisition of Kozilek: More hand disruption, this deck needs a little setup and a turn 1 IOK can buy that time for you in a lot of games.

One of the big strengths of this deck is that it can almost always use any amount of mana it has available by just bouncing things a few more times, this means flooding is very rarely a problem. Conversely it works fine on 3-4 lands as well, especially with the Semblance Anvil out. This is a great bonus to consistency, and you'll often find yourself happy to draw either land or spell because both will allow you a play.I won't go through the mana base land by land, and there are a lot of flexibility in how to build it. 3-4 Tectonic Edges are essential to saturate your land disruption package, and so is keeping the island count reasonably high if you want to run Vedalken Shackles main.

Damping Matrix: Replaces Vedalken Shackles against any deck that wants to use activated artifact or creature abilities, there is quite a lot of them and this is probably my most used SB card. Find it with Trophy Mage like the rest of your artifacts.

Defense Grid: Not fetchable with the mage, but very synergistic in this deck. We don't want to cast anything in our opponents turn anyways and this makes a very natural swap for Spreading Seas against blue decks to turn off their counterspell game.

Doomwake Giant: I like going up to 3 copies of the giant against decks with wide boards, tokens and elves etc.

Ceremonious Rejection: Artifact, Eldrazi and Tron hate.

Hurkyll's Recall : Artifact hate.

Leyline of the Void: Obvious graveyard hate for a deck that likes enchantment triggers, pitch redundant copies to Anvil or just play them for extra constellation triggers. Budget alternative is Agent of Erebos

Oath of Liliana: Replaces Trial of Ambition against Leyline of Sanctity and things like that.

Sword of Feast and Famine & Sword of War and Peace: Just solid force multipliers playing against those colors.

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Revision 2 See all

(6 years ago)

+1 Ceremonious Rejection side
-1 Erebos, God of the Dead side
Date added 7 years
Last updated 6 years
Legality

This deck is Modern legal.

Rarity (main - side)

3 - 2 Mythic Rares

19 - 12 Rares

21 - 1 Uncommons

10 - 0 Commons

Cards 60
Avg. CMC 2.55
Tokens Zombie 2/2 B
Folders Modern, Budget
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