Updates to the land base:
Well, as usual after a lot of deliberation, I decided that this deck is primarily black deck. While the deck is still very clearly a 2-color deck, the proportion of the mana requirements for this deck are skewed more to requiring black than green. this is a huge distinction. While the deck needs double green by turn 2, and uses a lot of green mana, most of the mana you will be spending is black is the idea. So why does this matter? It’s time we reevaluate the mana base.
While it may seem like a corner case situation, I have lost too many games that should have otherwise been heavily skewed my way due to having a land that could not produce black mana. This brings me to the foundational idea behind this set of changes: the deck is no longer playing basic forests. This is a big change to make, for one, there is no painless way to get instant green mana off of a fetch land, and the deck can no longer cast gemrazers and young wolves underneath blood moon among many other things. So why make this change? Well, as stated earlier, this deck is primarily black, with less green requirements albeit the cards being played require more than normal green mana. This means that in a lot of cases, basic forest doesn’t produce mana, so you are basically stone raining yourself. This may seem like a corner case situation, but when you’re playing a deck where ideally your opening hand has 2 lands in it and you expect to play the first 3 to 4 turns with only those 2 lands, you can see how many hands have to get shipped back when you draw the basic forest. Moving beyond opening hands, lot of play revolves around leaving black mana open for village rites and retribution of the ancients, so when having 2 or 3 lands, casting spells and being able to hold up mana for these plays quickly becomes something you have to choose between. Even going into the late game, when you have your engine up and are trying to use it over the course of several turns, not being able to use that mana if you have a forest becomes a huge issue. Looking at things this way, you can see that not being able to produce mana doesn’t affect you in just one turn, but multiple, meaning you lose out on a lot of mana over the course of several turns. This kind of tempo loss and mana disadvantage is not something you can afford in modern, especially when playing a deck like this, where mana needs to be used as efficiently as possible to keep in the game.
But what about Urborg and the filter lands? These cards are great, and helped to remedy the problem, but also made it harder to accurately identify for a long time. Relying on these lands to make your forest a usable card for most of the deck presents a lot of issues. What are the odds that your 2 land opening hand has both a basic forest and one of these lands? Relying on something like this also gives your opponents another angle of attack that makes you vulnerable in another way, your lands. If you have a forest and an urborg in play, or a a forest, twilight mire, and any other land, you can see how just one spreading seas or stone rain basically takes you out 2 lands. While these lands are good, and still have a spot in the deck to help make double green off of your swamps in the case of twilight mire, or give you access to painless mana off of nurturing peatland, fetches, and an easier way to utilize your twilight mires in the case of urborg, relying on them to make a land work in your mana base just isn’t something you can do.
With that, heres the changes: -2 forests, +1 Overgrown Tomb, +1 Verdant Catacombs
It is also worth noting that now the deck supports and black fetch now that you will only be fetching lands that are swamps, so that’s nice for budget reasons if you don’t specifically have verdant Catacombs. Outside of that, the deck is the same as before with some minor changes to the sideboard.
These changes also mean that unfortunately, any cool lands or utility lands that are green compete for a flex slot instead of just being fun of shoe-ins, so no yavimaya, cradle of growth (doesn’t help much anyways), no Boseiju, Who Endures, and no Pendalhaven sadly unless you want to cut one of your spells. That said, it may be worth looking into black utility lands such as Takenuma, Abandoned Mire, though generally, I think the landbase is good as it is, since in practice you generally are able to use all your lands when you have them.
Some notes on the sideboard:
I think it might be worth looking at replacing dauthi voidwalker in the side for leyline of the void, since most decks that dauthi voidwalker is played for are built to answer the card, where leyline is much harder for those decks while letting you keep to your gameplan instead of devoting a lot of mana in the early game to interact with the graveyard.
While Necroplasm is certainly cool, and I would like to test it more, I think I found a better use for the slot in another piece of graveyard hate. I am finding that rhinos is not as bad of a matchup than I thought, and I could devote the slot to more graveyard hate or lifegain to hedge against burn.
All of this may seem like a lot of thought for a bunch of little changes, but you can see how going through these edits over time these changes go from being one or 2 cards, to more and more. Looking back at what the deck used to be, the current deck is much more streamlined and focused. Its odd to think that this deck used to play 2 yawgmoths, or 2 basic forests, no butcher ghouls, even no gemrazers, no deadly brews, no viscera seers, and if only my update history went back to before I took this deck seriously as a viable modern deck, none of the cards that I would say make this deck what it is today. Looking at how the deck has evolved; a lot has really changed. These deliberate changes over time really add up, and I can’t wait to see how the deck changes in the future.
