You know how the saying goes, right? There are only 3 certainties in Magic - death, taxes, and... Eldrazi?
I wish there were a more creative name for this deck than "Eldrazi and Taxes." Come on, seriously? There need to be more deck names like Fruity Pebbles. Is it possible to do that with this deck?
Anyhow. This deck plays a lot like your average modern Death and Taxes, with a few changes. The addition of black gives us access to hand disruption in the form of Tidehollow Sculler and card advantage in the form of Dark Confidant as well as a bunch of sideboard options like Fatal Push and Zealous Persecution. Adding Eldrazi just accents all of that. Thought-Knot Seer controls the hand, Wasteland Strangler and Eldrazi Displacer control the board, and they all complement the D&T core of Thalia, Guardian of Thraben, Leonin Arbiter, and Flickerwisp incredibly well.
The name of the game is playing efficient threats that also limit our opponent's options. Like any Death and Taxes variant, we're loaded with instant speed silliness and insane tech thanks to Aether Vial. For example: when your opponent attacks you, you can vial in a Flickerwisp, exiling an attacker until end of turn. Then activate Eldrazi Displacer and blink Wasteland Strangler. The card you flickered out goes to the graveyard, letting you -3/-3 another. This is probably my favorite stabilization combo since it functions as an instant speed double kill spell for 3 mana. Displacer is extremely important to getting extra ETB triggers out of anything.
Other fun stuff:
Leonin Arbiter turns your Ghost Quarters into Strip Mines and makes your Path to Exiles have no drawback whatsoever. Vialing in an arbiter in response to your opponent cracking a fetchland is especially fun.
Flickerwisp does more than remove creatures with strangler. YOu can blink tokens out of existence, you can reset counters on something, and it's an evasive beater. "its wings disturb more than air" is up there with Dark Confidant in the world of accurate flavor texts.
Note that Eldrazi Displacer returns the exiled creature to the battlefield tapped. You can sort of pull a Mother of Runes imitation here in that you can block something and then remove your blocker from combat with displacer so that you take no damage, or you can target your opponent's creature to remove it from combat. Same with the flickerwisp. Displacer also lets you steal two cards with Tidehollow Sculler. With a displacer resolved, vial in a sculler on your opponent's draw step, and then with the trigger on the stack blink your sculler with displacer. The leaves-the-battlefield trigger resolves with nothing to return, so when it comes back, you take one card and put it under the sculler, and another that gets exiled permanently. It's not only fantastic fuel for Wasteland Strangler but it absolutely decimates your opponent's hand.
Speaking of Wasteland Strangler - it eats suspend cards like Rift Bolt for lunch. There's also some dumb stuff you can do with it and Flickerwisp or Eldrazi Displacer. Vial in a wisp, flicker out a big dude, blink strangler with displacer or just cast strangler and process the big dude to the graveyard, killing another dude. Or just eat their Rift Bolt and kill their Eidolon of the Great Revel. Burn players get very salty when you do this.
There are a billion tricks with this deck. I'll keep updating it as I play around. I used to have Reality Smashers in here but I axed them for Thalia, Heretic Cathar and Blade Splicer because they synergize with the deck idea much better, and they don't cost you a quarter of your life to flip to Dark Confidant.
Any suggestions you have would be really helpful! As would be +1s. Thanks!
