So I've never been one for building tier 1 decks. I like weird, janky card interactions and decks that make people do a double-take, built around cards everyone else sees as crap.To wit: Pact of the Titan + Djinn Illuminatus. Pact of the Titan seems pretty awful. A 4/4 giant at the cost of, basically, 5 mana or the game is pretty terrible, even if it does have flash. Djinn Illuminatus is pretty sweet; it flies and lets you copy spells for as low as their mana cost. With Pact of the Titan's cost of 0, Djinn Illuminatus can copy it an arbitrary number of times, at the low, low cost of losing the entire game during your next upkeep. So we have something of a combo, but all it does now is lose the game as hard as it possibly can.In order to actually win with this setup, we have
Surge of Zeal
and Impact Tremors, which turn our infinite giants into either infinite 4/4 attackers OR just a death of infinite damage.So, we have our combo and can actually win with it. But Djinn Illuminatus costs 8 mana, and in Modern, that may as well be 80 mana, so how do we make it work?Simple: Polymorph and/or Indomitable Creativity, combined with almost-but-not-quite creatures such as Kher Keep,
Zoetic Cavern
, and the absolute mother of jank,
Write into Being
. With these and absolutely no other artifacts or creatures, we're just four mana away from flipping into our Djinn Illuminatus and hopefully winning the game!The rest of the deck serves as draw, mild search and scry effects, and protection for the combo. Remand is especially nice in this list, since in a pinch, it can be used to bounce a Pact of the Titan, effectively casting
Think Twice
without the flashback. It's far from optimal, but it's still a nice option to have when you need a draw.The last two cards, Metallurgic Summonings, work twofold. Since the deck is effectively creatureless, it can flood our board with tokens as a secondary win condition. These tokens can also make for fine Polymorph targets to fuel the combo.
The sideboard right now is a bit up in the air, so comments on that would be greatly appreciated. One thing to note is that I do intend to find room for Pact of Negation and some fetchlands, but the price point is a bit high for me right now.
