Want to play 4 Sinkhole in Modern? Want power crept Lightning Bolts and Rampant Growth that cantrips? Want a better 1 drop body than Ragavan? Do you, too, realize that mainboard Pick Your Poison wrecks all the top decks in the format?
Then look no further, friend, for you have found what you seek. This is my Gruul Saga/Boom list, the 4th iteration of a deck I've tried in a bunch of different color combos (Mono R, Izzet, Rakdos, Gruul), and I think the version best suited for our current meta.
Saga/Boom is a midrange/ponza style deck that focuses on powerful tempo plays like Boom / Bust or Cleansing Wildfire early on, then uses saga constructs (extra large from our artifact lands) to hit opponents super hard before they can stabilize. The deck is based around the synergy between boom/bust, indestructible artifact lands, and Urza's Saga, with additional synergies from Gleeful Demolition and Galvanic Blast. Gleeful is a super key card that applies early pressure, stalls out aggro strats, and gives us 4 slots of mainboard artifact destruction at no extra charge. 8 Bolts compliment the aggro plan either for board control or to finish off opponents. Galvanic is great in particular because it kills Nadu, Thought Knot, Yawgmoth, Wrenn, etc. Sowing Mycospawn and Map effectively give us 8 Sagas instead of 4 which gives the deck consistency and a lot of grind power. Our main threat being attached to a land also insulates us from Thoughtseize and Counterspell. Obsidian Charmaw in the maindeck tops out our curve with a solid flying threat/ponza card, plus it gives us more hate against the tough Eldrazi matchup where we really want to see our LD. Freestrider Lookout fits in really nice with the plan, finding sagas and pumping our constructs. The deck has a lot of 1 drop saga targets, 7 total, but I actually like this high number because it is now easier to turn on metalcraft fast and pump constructs out of bolt range before your opponent can remove them. Not to mention the silver bullet aspect. 61st card is a Surgical Extraction, I'm a big believer in maindeck surgical especially in a list with so much removal and a meta so reliant on particular cards like Nadu, Necro, Phlage, or the Tron lands. Plus it's just a baller move to peek their deck G1. Finally that brings us to Pick Your Poison, just a beautiful card. It kills Nadu, Necro, Saga, Murktide, Ring, Ruby, Archon/Atraxa, there is basically no deck this card isn't great against right now. I considered putting the 4th in the board, but went for an extra Boseiju instead because the instant speed uncounterable removal is helpful in some cases like against Necro where we can deprive them of their first trigger or against a Nadu player who tries to hold everything up to avoid removal. Then we got a bunch of graveyard hate in the board for Ruby and the other graveyard decks, Bolt Bend as a 1 mana gotcha vs control/removal, then sweepers for Drazis, Nadu, that cat deck, yawg, affinity, etc.
And that's the deck. I think it's pretty sweet. Beats the tier decks more than it loses. And all together with the board it's just $358.92 on TCGPlayer. :) Thanks for reading, would love to hear any thoughts you have on the list!
