Most Modern decks share one defining feature; a reliance on land to provide mana. This is an extremely exploitable weakness, which this deck capitalizes on to win using a highly controlling and efficient strategy.
In the early game, deny your opponent any sort of board presence by wiping out their creatures with any of the deck's Murder type spells, and then prevent them from casting any more with Rain of Tears.
Smallpox is extremely one-sided in this deck; we have no creatures, and the incremental life loss, land destruction and discard don't worry us because Elixir of Immortality is ready to shuffle our graveyard back into our library any time we like. Batterskull can be used as a beater when our opponent has been set back enough by land destruction, and is safe from our self-destructive Smallpoxes as we can simply return it to our hand and cast it again for a new token to attack with the following turn.
The longer the game goes on, the less lands we will draw (eventually all but six of the deck's lands will be out on the battlefield, with 4 Swamps and 2Ghost Quarters being cycled by Elixir) making the deck increasingly consistent at drawing answers to any threats our opponent is able to get onto the board. Ideally by this point their mana base will be so ruined they won't really be casting anything anyway due to endless, recurring Ghost Quarters, Rain of Tears and Smallpox.
Liliana of the Dark Realms seriously speeds up the ramp for this deck, acting as a filter for lands, a repeatable kill spell, and finally ramping the mana base up for huge Consume Spirits
If at any stage you get bored of running your opponent's library out of cards one turn at a time, the deck has a secondary win condition in Consume Spirit. Also, anyone thinking of Treasure Cruiseing will be sorely disappointed when we drop a Bojuka Bog and all their Delve fodder disappears.
Yes, you can sideboard against it, and yes, this strategy is not infallible, but for a smaller cost you can win against most top tier Modern decks using this kind of strategy - and I am all for low budget solutions to the yawn-inducing 200-Pound-at-least metagame.
This deck can be built on as low as a 15 Pound budget by swapping Batterskull for a third Duress, 2 Liliana of the Dark Realms for another Swamp and a final Duress and the Phyrexian Arenas for Underworld Connections and still works pretty well.
Suggestions and comments and things would be great.
