Prior to Unearth, Esper Midrange was still a build that wanted to take advantage of the card Thought Scour. The core power to our color scheme rested in cards like Snapcaster Mage, Lingering Souls, and power delve creatures like Tasigur and Gurmag Angler, all of which benefited from use of the graveyard. This, however, restricted our access to the efficient use of other potent threats in our color scheme, namely Monastery Mentor.
Mentor seemingly fits right into our build strategy, being a heavily spell-based-cantripping midrange deck. The problem before was that Mentor was a bit clunky at 3cmc, and offered no real graveyard synergy. Too often you would play a Mentor on turn 3 and get no value out of it before it was picked off by an opponents cheap removal spell. After that, it offered no value to our strategy other than being fodder for your Tasigur or Angler. Needless to say, this powerful card just wasn't good enough.
In my humble opinion, Unearth has changed all of that for us. It fixes all the previous issues we had with Mentor, and makes the card very, very playable... Now we are less concerned if it gets killed or milled over with a Thought Scour, and in many scenarios we would rather see it in the graveyard than attempt to cast it from our hand. I built this deck with all of this in mind, while aiming to preserve and promote our previous game strategy.
Mana Base: 18 lands, primarily UB
-While white makes up about 30% of our spells, the bulk of those cards we don't necessarily want to cast, at least from our hand. Often times both Lingering Souls and Monastery Mentor have more value in our graveyard than in our hand. With that in mind, our true average cmc can be as low as 1.17, making 18 lands the perfect amount when you factor in the cantripps and card filtering effects built into the deck.
Cantrips: 3 Mishra's Bauble, 2 Serum Visions, 4 Thought Scour
-The cantrip suite is interesting because you're working to find the balance in synergy and dyssynergy with certain cards in the deck. Thought Scour is the great enabler of this deck so it's an obvious 4-of, but the split of Mishra's Bauble and Serum Visions is a bit trickier. Bauble is phenomenal with Mentor, it triggers revolt on Fatal Push, makes your Thought Scours and fetch-lands better, and enables earlier Tasigurs and JVP flips. However, it doesn't work well with Snapcaster Mage or Jace, Telepath Unbound. Serum Visions is an all-around powerful tool for card selection in both the early and late game, and has the bonus of being hit by Snap and J,TU in the graveyard.
Disruption: 4 Inquisition of Kozilek, 2 Thoughtseize, 1 Collective Brutality
-Pretty standards package of cards with the addition of main deck Collective Brutality which works well with Lingering Souls and pitching Mentors
Removal: 4 Fatal Push, 2 Path to Exile
-WB offers the best creature removal spells. These numbers/ratios are pretty meta dependent I'd say.
Recusion: 3 Snapcaster Mage, 2 Jace, Vryn's Prodigy, 3 Unearth
-Spell recursion thanks to Snapcaster Mage and JVP is part of what makes Esper so powerful, adding creature recursion via Unearth takes it over the top. Definitely not hating on Bolt-Snap-Bolt, but Unearth-Snap-Unearth is prettttttttttty cool. JVP also works double duty is this deck helping us loot and pitch value into our graveyard.
Threats: 4 Monastery Mentor, 4 Lingering Souls, 2 Tasigur the Golden Fang
-The phenomenal thing about this threat suite is its ability to go wide and tall, while not getting blown out by a single hate card. We aren't a "graveyard deck", but rather a deck that utilizes the graveyard. While graveyard hate certainly slows us down, it doesn't shut us down. Mentor and Lingering Souls are still plenty castable from our hand and need to be answered immediately. Board wipes are kind of funny when we can so easily rebuild. The combo of both? Ok, you got us...
Planeswalkers: 2 Teferi, Time Raveler
-Honestly just a really good card in Modern. There are a lot of decks in the format which its static ability is great against, and its bounce-draw ability works as a removal spell or to reuse our own Snapcaster Mages. In Esper, Teferi's +1 also makes our hand disruption very, very good...
Sideboard: 1 Disenchant, 1 Dovin's Veto, 1 Engineered Explosives, 3 Fulminator Mage, 2 Kambal, 1 Plague Engineer, 4 Ravenous Trap, 2 Stony Silence
-Pretty meta dependent probably, but there are a couple things to keep in mind. The sideboard creatures can all be targeted by unearth if they get milled over or killed (Fulminator Mage + Unearth = Haha Tron). Most graveyard decks are going to be expecting Leyline of the Void from us and will bring in removal for it. Ravenous Trap bypasses that and also can be recast by Snapcaster Mage for 0cmc if the condition is met. (Leyline might still be better)
