Dave and Adam’s FNM – Now with Even More Prizes!

Welcome back to the Friday Night recap! Our big development I’d like to share with you this time is our new Magic prize multiplier. Every person who participates in our free weekly FNM now has a chance at even better prizes. Each week we hold a drawing giving all of our Magic players a chance of walking away with an extra pack of the current Magic set or a free pack of sleeves on top of our normal store credit prizes.  If our players are extra lucky, instead of store credit it could end up being cash prizes or even double cash prizes, meaning a 4-0 on that night will earn the player $100 in cash! If you would like your shot at free prizes, stop in to our mega-store every Friday night!

As a little treat for you all, I thought I’d share my Modern Bant Eldrazi list:

4x Cavern of Souls

4x Windswept Heath

1x Temple Garden

1x Hallowed Fountain

1x Breeding Pool

4x Eldrazi Temple

2x Forest

1x Plains

1x Ghost Quarter

3x Brushland

2x Yavimaya Coast

4x Noble Hierarch

1x Birds of Paradise

2x Spellskite

2x Eldrazi Skyspawner

3x Eldrazi Displacer

4x Matter Reshaper

4x Thought-Knot Seer

4x Reality Smasher

4x Drowner of Hope

4x Ancient Stirrings

4x Path to Exile

Sideboard

3x Engineered Explosives

1x Dismember

3x Negate

3x Grafdigger’s Cage

2x Stony Silence

1x Fracturing Gust

1x Disenchant

1x World Breaker

Bant Eldrazi is a relative newcomer in Modern, and while it isn’t as good as the earlier  iteration of Eldrazi in Modern, it’s still very good. The older deck, prior to the banning of Eye of Ugin, was really quite degenerate, and I don’t know of anyone who was surprised or especially sad to see it go. Even with only Eldrazi Temple as your only 2-mana land the deck is still capable of a turn-2 Thought-Knot Seer on a fairly consistent basis.

The deck plays out like an aggressively-skewed midrange deck, wanting to play efficiently priced creatures “ahead” of curve. The core of the deck is Matter Reshaper, Thought-Knot Seer and Reality Smasher, and you usually never want to board those out. Reshaper is an easy to play threat, a good blocker and resistant to removal, since when it dies it can either ramp you into your larger creatures even earlier or find you another thing to do. Thought-Knot is a 4/4 Thoughtsieze that synergizes very nicely with Displacer. Smasher is a big dumb brute that’s resistant to removal and can potentially just kill your opponent out of nowhere.

The biggest problem with the deck is its lack of reach. If the initial onslaught of spaghetti monsters isn’t enough to get the job done, the deck tends to sputter out. Drowner + Displacer can help get you through a board stall, but if you overextend into a sweeper you end up in pretty rough shape. Perhaps the deck will get some sort of late-game haymaker from Eldritch Moon? Casting Coax from the Blind Eternities and getting the new Emrakul, the Promised End from your sideboard seems like a decent way to end a game. The deck doesn’t even have a hard time getting 3-4 card types in the graveyard in game 1, making casting her for 9 or 10 completely reasonable, though for 10 mana, I’m not certain whether you’d want to be playing her or Ulamog. Wish sideboards usually reward toolbox configurations, so maybe both are correct?

What are you all’s opinions on the new Eldrazi popping up in Eldritch Moon? Or the new Meld cards? Am I way off on wanting to cast any of the Eldrazi titans in Modern? Let us know in the comments, or come to our FNM every week and let us know in person!