Heartless Turtles

Modern Artifact Budget Casual Combo Infinite Combo Mono-Black

jpritcha

Creature (33)

• 2x Cabal Paladin
• 1x Cavalier of Night
• 3x Grim Haruspex
• 3x Midnight Reaper
• 4x Myr Retriever
• 3x Necropede
• 2x Nightmare Shepherd
• 4x Perilous Myr
• 3x Scrap Trawler
• 1x Silent Arbiter
• 2x Sparring Construct
• 3x Stonecoil Serpent
• 2x Syr Konrad, the Grim

Land (21)

• 3x Barren Moor
• 18x Swamp

Enchantment (4)

• 4x Heartless Summoning

Instant (2)

• 2x Shred Memory

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Sideboard

Creature (8)

• 1x Massacre Girl
• 1x Nightmare Shepherd
• 1x Pilgrim's Eye
• 3x Scrapheap Scrounger
• 1x Shimmer Myr
• 1x Silent Arbiter

Land (4)

• 3x Evolving Wilds
• 1x Forest

Artifact (1)

• 1x Grafted Wargear

Instant (2)

• 2x Return to Nature

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Maybeboard

Creature (1)

• 1x Bontu the Glorified

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THE PITCH

• Are you a Johnny player that likes combo decks with all sorts of fun and weird interactions?
• How about chaining triggered abilities together to do tons of busted things? 🐢🐢🐢
• How about free burn, removal, and recursion spells?
• Or maybe an infinite combo allowing you to draw the entire deck, ping for infinite damage, or make an infinitely big creature?
• What about casting 5+ spells on turn 3, disrupting the board, and drawing cards in the process?
• What if you could do all of that for a small fraction of the cost of other decks in the Modern meta?

Well then, I have the deck for you!

MAIN DECK

• Heartless Summoning is the main deck enabler, it allows us to cast 2 CMC artifact creatures as free sorcery speed spells, and also lets us double or triple spell with 3/4 CMC creatures as early as turn 3.
• Myr Retriever is the linchpin creature of the deck, it buys back any artifacts, counts for a death trigger, and infinitely recurs itself with 2 copies.
• Scrap Trawler provides a ton of extra recursion and almost always trades well even when chumping. While Heartless Summoning + Myr Retriever may be the combo everyone knows, I think this card is the real MVP. It lets us turtle all the way down the mana curve with artifact creatures (hence the deck name 🐢🐢🐢), getting value out of all of them as they hit the graveyard. It's sort of like reverse Birthing Pod.
• Shred Memory tutors Heartless Summoning, Myr Retriever and any other 2 CMC spell.
• Cabal Paladin hits for 2 with every artifact we cast. This can actually enable a turn 3 win WITHOUT the infinite Myr Retriever combo. Pretty bonkers!
• Grim Haruspex and Midnight Reaper draw cards on death triggers.
• Perilous Myr and Necropede disrupt the board, hit for direct damage, and fuel death triggers.
• Silent Arbiter shuts down go wide strategies and buys a lot of time. Side in another or side it out depending on the matchup.
• Sparring Construct combos with Scrap Trawler to put a +1/+1 counter on any creature whenever we cast a free 2 CMC artifact creature with it in our graveyard (this combo lets us make creatures infinitely large with 2 Myr Retriever). It also adds to the death triggers and really helps in making the deck more explosive.
• Stonecoil Serpent is a relevant card at any point in the game, an allstar on offense and defense. Also, it counts as a 0 CMC artifact card, so it comes back from the graveyard on a Scrap Trawler trigger when any other artifact (even Sparring Construct!) hits the graveyard.
• Filigree Familiar is a value artifact card that works well with Scrap Trawler.
• Nightmare Shepherd is something I really want to play and experiment with. His ability, while not always relevant, is great with Filigree Familiar and Perilous Myr. His base stats as either a 4/4 flyer for 4, or a 3/3 flyer for 2 are also pretty efficient.
• Syr Konrad, the Grim is another way to win with an infinite death triggers. He pairs well with Nightmare Shepherd on the top end of the curve (option of doing 3 damage to an opponent when any creature dies). He also hates on many graveyard hate strategies (with the exception of exile replacement effects).
• Cavalier of Night is the top end value card. He does everything you could want and pairs great with Syr Konrad, the Grim and Nightmare Shepherd. He is a huge problem for the opponent if there are 2 or more Myr Retrievers in the graveyard.

SIDEBOARD

• Graveyard hate is the biggest thing that must be dealt with. Thankfully it's not a huge part of the modern meta anymore, but we still need to be prepared. Return to Nature is the answer. (swap a Forest for a Swamp, 3x Evolving Wilds for 3x Barren Moor and 2x Return to Nature for 1x Shred Memory and 1x some creature).
• Pilgrim's Eye fetches our forest.
• Massacre Girl is an excellent top end board wipe.
• Scrapheap Scrounger is an aggressive recursive threat against decks that have few creatures and works very well with Syr Konrad, the Grim.
• Grafted Wargear also helps move into an aggressive strategy.
• Shimmer Myr so you like free spells? How about free instant speed spells? It can be cast in response to a removal spell on a death trigger creature or Heartless Summoning , allowing us to cast our free artifact creatures at instant speed and get value out of them before the removal spell resolves! Best brought in against heavy removal or counterspell decks.

I am open to more suggestions. I'm still experimenting! The deck is mostly for fun, but I welcome any suggestions, especially on the sideboard.

MY COMMENTS ON CURRENT PLAYTESTING

• One of the biggest issues with decks that build around Heartless Summoning is that they tend to be absolute crap without HS in play. I've used this as one of my main criteria when designing this deck. Make it work and curve out well before HS, and then explode once HS hits the battlefield. Stonecoil Serpent is one of the best cards for this strategy since does literally everything well. Attacking with trample, blocking with reach, dodging multicolored removal, and recurring easily. Also, HS actually pumps Stonecoil into a free to cast a 1/1 (2 counters, -1/-1).
• I was considering swapping out a single Shred Memory for Spoils of the Vault, but after doing the math, spoils just isn't that great for anything other than land, since a decent amount of the time it just kills us (casting it for HS on turn 1 has a 50% chance of hitting us for over 10 life).
• One of my favorite things in Magic is finding good uses for unplayed cards with unique abilities (I'm a Johnny through and through). In this deck those cards are Sparring Construct and Cabal Paladin, neither are particularly powerful in a vacuum, but in the context of artifact recursion they become extremely potent and are win conditions in this deck.
• The deck is still somewhat of a glass cannon. But with the London mulligan going to 6 or even 5 isn't particularly bad, and the potential card advantage is well worth it.

Top Ranked	Achieved #63 position overall 4 years ago Achieved #15 position in Modern 4 years ago Achieved #1 position in Modern Budget 4 years ago Achieved #1 position in Modern Casual 4 years ago
Date added	4 years
Last updated	4 years
Exclude colors	G
Legality	This deck is Modern legal.
Rarity (main - side)	1 - 0 Mythic Rares 19 - 7 Rares 12 - 1 Uncommons 10 - 6 Commons
Cards	60
Avg. CMC	2.51
Tokens	Copy Clone, Morph 2/2 C
Folders	decks that i like, Decks I like, Decks, modern copies, Want to make, Tabletop
Based on	Heartless Summoning Shenanigans jpritcha MDN