Paired this up for a quick 1v1 against Spirits and holy smokes. The creatures absolutely blanked Skyclave Apparition and Spell Queller. That’s a promising sign for our Fatal Push test. Chalice of the Void will still hurt, keeping us off our cantrips but we have enough counter magic to rather invalidate that. The idea of this shell is to take the stock U/R Murktide build and go heavy on the beaters to go over prevalent removal making it harder for the red and black decks.
Murktide Regent is a behemoth flier that comes down big. Something I did not really notice was that getting multiples out grows them successively. So say you exile five spells to drop an 8/8 flier. Well if that isn’t big enough, if you restock your graveyard and exile another five spells to delve out another Murktide, the original Murktide also gets +5/+5. A little win more but Modern is chaotic. Beautiful. Getting multiples sounds like it gets costly to delve but not only do we have tons of cheap spells but thanks to Consider and Thought Scour we can get more to our yard quickly.
We also have Stormwing Entity which can be more vulnerable to Bolt but we can easily grow it out of range in response. Bolt your face and invalidate bolt to bird. Beautiful. Drop a spell and drop it for two and go right past Fatal Push with a scry 2. Marvelous.
Lastly is Bedlam Reveler. It can run into Murktide at times but often you can just cast it and then cast Murktide. Great to empty your hand on and restock and load up more delve fuel. Delicious.
This suite of beaters certainly looks effective against many removals. I was really only aiming for Bolt and Push so to see them perform against Apparition and Queller was tasty. I imagine we’ll see a similar strength of performance against other potential hate pieces for blowing up a smattering of cheap creatures such as Engineered Explosives, Hidestugu Consumes All, Abrupt Decay, and more. Obviously Path to Exile and Solitude still perform, Endurance is a heavy presence right now (in part because of the prevalence of U/R Murktide). Our threats are immune to Inquisition of Kozilek but can still get got by a Thoughtseize or greif. I don’t think Apparition and Queller are huge parts of the current meta but they were a great example of just what this adaptation is going for.
Is this better than running Channeler and Ragavan. Go find out.
