Death & Taxes is a White Weenie deck with tricks. Its gameplan is to use efficient beaters with great ETB effects to maintain board control. It can deny mana to opponents with the great synergies between Leonin Arbiter, Aven Mindcensor, and Ghost Quarter, but there are many other handy tricks.
For more information on this great archetype, go here.
Mainboard
Aether Vial - The glue that holds this deck together. This card allows a ton of insane interactions in addition to just letting you drop more threats.
Student of Warfare
- Modern's best white 1-drop in my opinion. Can be a 3/3 first strike on turn 2, and you'll rarely want to pump him up even further.
Knight of Meadowgrain
- Another efficient beater. You'll notice that this deck has a lot of first strike because blink effects can abuse it so well.
Thalia, Guardian of Thraben - A much needed card. Great against control and makes our first game combo matchups way better.
Leonin Arbiter - Makes Ghost Quarter and Path to Exile many times better. He can also shut down fetchlands, ramping strategies, tutors, etc. He can also be vialed in response to any search effect, netting some nice card advantage.
Aven Mindcensor - Complements Leonin Arbiter. I can say everything about this card that I said about him, but this guy even has flash and flying.
Flickerwisp - Probably the best card in this deck. He's amazingly versatile. He can untap your creatures, remove blockers, and remove counters off of permanents. You can vial him in to remove an opponent's land for a turn, or save a creature with first strike after he does damage, or in response to removal. The list goes on. He's also a great flier.
Mangara of Corondor
- The creature that spawned the original Legacy Death & Taxes lists, due to incredible synergy between it, Flickerwisp, and Karakas. In Modern, though, he's not quite as effective; he can still do a lot of cool things, and help with your mana denial plan, but he draws a lot of removal and doesn't have Mother of Runes to back him up like in Legacy. I'm thinking about even cutting him from this list completely.
Blade Splicer - Making a 3/3 first striker is not too shabby. Being able to blink him and make another 3/3 first striker makes him outstanding. He can put a lot of pressure on an opponent in this way.
Kitchen Finks - Abusing his lifegain and persist with blink effects puts this guy over the top, especially against those pesky aggro matchups.
Path to Exile - The best white removal in Modern, and it becomes even better with Leonin Arbiter and Aven Mindcensor
Ghost Quarter - Like Path to Exile, becomes way better with other cards. It's basically a soft-Strip Mine with certain cards, and really helps with your land destruction plan.
Tectonic Edge - The other good land destruction, it's only a 2-of because I want to really make sure I can hit 2 plains by turn 3.
Sideboard
Jotun Grunt
- Great graveyard hate on a great body. Against certain decks he is a total house. You can even use Flickerwisp to reset his age counters.
Phyrexian Revoker - Really versatile. He can hurt a great majority of decks, but he's in the sideboard because he's almost completely dead in matchups where he can't hit anything.
Kataki, War's Wage - Good against Affinity for obvious reasons, but helps against matchups that depend on certain artifacts.
Ethersworn Canonist - Kills combo decks. Vial it in against storm and others and make them waste their combo turn.
