This was my first take on building a competitive Modern deck so I decided to aim for something spicy and unique. Often described as my "Solitare deck" by my friends, it is a fun yet powerful deck so I hope you enjoy it too. : )
The name of the game is attrition. In the current Modern meta, hyper fast decks tend to soar above the others, being able to outpace many a deck before they can even get on their feet. While this deck is not a fast one, it has some key pieces which allow for it to keep up to pace with/to fend off these aggro decks without needing to compromise its ability to deal with other archetypes.
Two key pieces of the deck are Bitterblossom and Impact Tremors, which are a great value engine for the deck. When paired together, they provide both a nice flying board presence and direct damage to opponents over time. Being enchantments, they are also somewhat hard to deal with.
The Soul Sister cards (Soul Warden and Soul's Attendant) help to further the value provided by this engine, giving us enough life gain to often exceed the life loss and pad our life total.
Corpse Knight allows for us to more consistently get an Impact Tremors-esque ability on the field and also comes with the upside of having a body itself to trigger enter the battlefield effects (ETBs)/to be able to block and attack with should we need or want to.
Welcoming Vampire allows for ample card draw off of the lower attack valued creatures in the deck/is one of the numerous flyers that we are able to whittle our opponents down with and Esper Sentinel helps in keeping our hand topped off and gives our deck even more fuel to work with.
Seasoned Pyromancer allows us to get through cards we'd rather not have in hand (or would prefer in our graveyard) and trades it get to what we want in hand more quickly; bonus points if you're empty handed (as it'll just draw you two cards). It also has the nice benefit of triggering Impact Tremors an upwards of 3 times, providing several bodies(, even from the grave) and being a superb exile and return (blink) target.
Norin the Wary is a consistent way to trigger our plethora of ETB effects and is also a near surefire way to make it so that we draw off of Welcoming Vampire during our opponents' turns as well as our own. He can even be used to get a couple extra ETB triggers even when there is already another Norin on the field (due to his exile triggering on cast) but one will perish at the end of turn if used this way(, due to him being such a legendary character).
Charming Prince can blink our non-token creatures for that oh so sweet ETB value but can also help fix our draws or gain even MORE life. >; ) Plus, he can be used to reset a Welcoming Vampire's trigger (to draw 2 cards off it during our turn alongside Norin the Wary due to being able to order end step triggers) or a tapped creature for blocks and can blink another copy of himself to continuously trigger our ETBs both during our and our opponents' turns.
Finally, we have Lingering Souls which is just a card that oozes with value. It not only provides a couple triggers for our enter the battlefield effects but it also gives us more flyers to work with. Additionally, it can be cast again from our graveyard on the cheap and is able to be dumped with Seasoned Pyromancer to great effect. This card really helps in more grindy match ups but works well even outside of those.
In the land base, I included a nice package to consistently get the types of mana we need while having enough basics to push through Blood Moon should we need to. Also, due to the relatively low restrictions on our cards' mana costs (with the worst being Seasoned Pyromancer's double red and Corpse Knight's white/black in the mainboard), including a utility land can be a solid choice(; such as Sokenzan, Crucible of Defiance to possibly get some more ETBs). I'd swap whatever you end up choosing in place of either a basic land or Savai Triome.
As a general rule of thumb for choosing lands to play in-game, aiming for fast mana early (to set up), 1-2 black source(s), 2 red sources and as many white ones as you can muster by turn 3 is a solid approach; if you don't suspect a Blood Moon. Otherwise, don't fret and just play to what's in your hand yet try to get the above set up eventually. If you ever have a turn where you won't have a play to match your land count (i.e. turn 2 with no 2 drops and only 1 or no 1 drop/s) get out Savai Triome to save yourself some planning.
The sideboard I crafted to have options for multiple popular archetypes in Modern including Rest in Peace to deal with graveyard decks, Damping Sphere to mess with spell-slinging decks and Tron, Thoughtseize to interfere with combo/control/mid-range decks, Void Mirror to bash free spells (forces, cascaded spells and those stinky evoke elementals) and colorlessly cast ones (Tron/artifacts sometimes), Necromentia to prevent problem cards (be they combo cards or generally important ones, (including lands,)) and lastly Wear / Tear, as a catch all to artifacts/enchantments.
As a final tip, it's alright to trade our one drops early on to stop Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer from hitting us. Risking him stealing a Soul Sister is pretty dangerous but hey, it can be fun to play with fire, so I wouldn't blame you if you'd like to keep your Sentinel/Soul Sister alive.
; )
Thank you so much for taking the time to see the deck I've meticulously pieced together and for reading all I had to say about it. I hope you found it interesting and that it might inspire you to give it or a similar deck a shot. I have included a pretty darn large set of cards in the maybe pool that I thought might be good includes and that could help in the creation of different variants of the deck; should anybody want to mess around with it themselves. Any feedback is much appreciated so thank you in advance. I hope you have a swell day and a fun time playing Magic! : D
