The Human Tribe shall not be forgotten!
I played Naya Blitz for a bit during Innistrad-RTR standard and it was one of my favorite decks to mess around with casually. I finally caved and decided to attempt at Modernizing it, especially with the recent printings of
Kytheon, Hero of Akros
and
Abbot of Keral Keep. I certainly do not contend that this is a Tier 1 Modern Deck - it's just a pile of cheesey Human aggro that usually can deal 20 by turn 3 or 4. Granted, that mostly depends on our opponents not having T-1
Lightning Bolt, so take it with a grain of salt.
Our goal is simple: send a swarm of Humans at our opponents to hack and slash them down to zero. The core of the deck can be broken down into two pieces: our
-drops and
Burning-Tree Emissary
. Both
Champion of the Parish and
Kytheon, Hero of Akros
reward us handsomely for playing multiple creatures early and
Burning-Tree Emissary
is the best tool at facilitating this. For this reason, every other creature in the deck costs either
or
, allowing for a double creature Turn-2. Perhaps the best line is as follows:
Champion of the Parish also puts us under some deck-building constraints - asking us to only play Humans and returning the favor with a huge beatstick. This isn't a huge drawback though as it also lets us max out our Cavern of Souls voodoo.
Spells
While I'd like to believe that we can ignore what our opponents are doing and just throw Humans at them, this is not the reality of the state of Modern. For that reason, we need some non-creature interactivity. The only real downside is that we can't cast any of these spells off of our Cavern of Souls, but that's probably an acceptable opportunity cost.
There probably isn't much that needs to be said about the ubiquitous
Lightning Bolt - it is simply the best removal spell in Modern for three reasons:
- As a -mana spell, Bolt is a severe tempo swing when it kills a creature. For that reason, Bolt's very presence prevents some rather potent creatures from even seeing Modern play.
- Unlike most other removal spells in Modern, Bolt can close out a game by going straight to your opponent's face.
- Bolt kills Planeswalkers!
We do get some nice synergy with Bolt and our two Prowess creatures, Monastery Swiftspear and Abbot of Keral Keep where it can generate an extra 1 or 2 points of damage to close out the game.
Lastly, the drawback of Path (ramping our opponent) is largely mitigated by our deck. We are aggressive enough that ramping the enemy shouldn't matter very much - they'll be dead before they can do anything with their mana! This would be a little different if more people played Wrath of God. Anger of the Gods is also an issue, but by the time we're casting Path, our opponent already has mana, so ramping them is a non-issue.
Speaking of
Anger of the Gods...Our deck is quite weak to sweeper effects, and Anger will kill every one of our creatures except for a rather burly
Champion of the Parish or a transformed
Kytheon, Hero of Akros
. With
Boros Charm, we have some maindeck protection from sweepers/spot-removal while also having the ability to generate a lot of extra damage through either the 4-damage burn mode, giving a huge Champion
Doublestrike and also triggering
Prowess at the same time!
Boros Charm also affords us the ability to make some less than ideal attacks so that we can trigger
Firefist Striker
's Battalion or flip a
Kytheon, Hero of Akros
.
Creatures
Here is the man behind the machine, the raison d'etre of the deck. Without
Champion of the Parish we would be playing some other non-Human creatures instead and wouldn't care so much about maxing out on our Turn-2
Burning-Tree Emissary
chains. In many cases Champion will be swinging for 3 or even 4 damage on Turn-2, making him a better beater than even Goyf - if he survives. This is of course the risk we're taking in playing this style of deck - a single well timed
Lightning Bolt from our opponent will really slow the pain train down.
I suppose that
Champion of the Parish is comparable to
Noble Hierarch, in the sense that we know going in there's a chance he'll just die on Turn-1, but the power he brings to the deck is well worth that risk.
In all honesty, we're really looking for an opening hand with either Champion or
Kytheon, Hero of Akros
in it. While hands that lack these two may still be playable, they are absolutely not what we're looking for.
Kytheon, Hero of Akros
is the second coming of
Champion of the Parish. While he doesn't grow with each Human that enters, he does still reward us for playing multiple creatures on Turn-2, especially if they have
Haste. Kytheon does start out a little less explosive than Champion, but once he's flipped he quickly makes up that lost ground.
We actually have 2 means to transform Kytheon on Turn-2:
Unfortunately, he is Legendary but we are interested enough in seeing Turn-1 Kytheon that we're running 4 copies anyway.
As I've mentioned above, the ideal sequence involves as many BTE's as possible culminating in a Lightning Mauler to Soulbond with one of them and hit like a truck on Turn-2. However, there are other options as well for when we don't see our hasty electricians and we'll dive into those below.
In most cases,
Lightning Mauler is the ideal
Burning-Tree Emissary
chain as it allows us to have our most explosive starts. He is also a fantastic top-deck later in the game when we just need to go wider and push some more damage through. One of the best tricks with Mauler is to
Soulbond with a
Kytheon, Hero of Akros
so that when Kytheon flips our Mauler is no longer bonded and lets us bestow his hastiness to another creature the next turn.
There will be some circumstance where we'll want to play our Lightning Mauler unbonded for a turn, knowing that we can cast
Firefist Striker
the next turn and surprising swing right past that blocker that our opponent just played.
Mayor of Avabruck
is another great
Burning-Tree Emissary
chain. While he doesn't grant haste he does provide a surprising amount of power to the board. There will be many games where we field 4-5 creatures by Turn-3 and in those cases a single
Mayor of Avabruck
will be supplying us with 5-6 power spread out over multiple bodies.
Furthermore, we aren't too sad if he flips either. If this happens, we do lose the +1/+1 buff for our Humans, but we get to generate a free 3/3 body every turn which can really help to grind out some games.
The card draw ability is theoretically great for non- decks. In this deck however, it requires quite a lot of set up to really ever work. In order to expect any value from the exile effect we must wait to cast Abbot until Turn-3 (so that we can cast him and possibly peel a land off the top), but this is not worth doing unless we have a superior Turn-2 play anyway. If we want to be able to cast our exiled card, we really need to wait until Turn-4 to cast Abbot and that is just a little too late for our schedule. Granted, these aren't really arguments against Abbot of Keral Keep, but I don't think that it's worth considering the exile clause when evaluating him in this deck.
