Tired of losing against aggro? Bored of playing against people who have spent crazy amount of money on their decks and have all the good cards? Look no further than Victory On Swan Condition! This deck is something I like to call a Lethal Joke Deck. The concept is simple and borderline stupid, but suprisingly effective in practice.
Because this deck is 40 lands, it costs a fraction of what a mainstream modern deck would, and comes with the added bonus of your opponents' looks of disbelief when you kill them on turn four with a swan and some lands. The most expensive card in the deck is Seismic Assault, which costs about 5 dollars each.
The objective of this deck is simply to resolve one Seismic Assault and one Swans of Bryn Argoll. The goal is to draw lands and throw them at our opponent. But how do we get there? The combo is that we abuse the swans' ability to draw us cards by rapidly shooting our own swans with our lands. One land deals two damage, which means that one land draws you two cards when shooting your swan.
Next comes a breakdown of every card in the deck. Considering we have 20 nonland cards in this deck, it doesnt take long.
The Main Bois
Swans of Bryn Argoll - The swans are our main card draw engine and will help us draw our entire deck. It's also a 4/3 flyer that can't be damaged for 4, which enables it to be a clock on its own.
Seismic Assault - This bad boy turns every single land in our deck into a free Shock! Together with the swans you have access to instant speed free Divination. It's also excellent at shooting down small creatures that could block your swans.
Usually you will end up with 10 lands in your hand if you keep shooting your swans, but we have measures to help us achieve our goal:
Support
Molten Vortex - This card is a wannabe Seismic Assault, but it helps us draw into our copies of Seismic Assault.
Treasure Hunt - Oohh boy! This card is potentially nuts in this deck. There are only 20 nonland cards in this deck, so you're highly likely to draw a couple of lands. Another great thing about this card is that it guarantees you to draw a nonland card. Therefore you both draw lands you can shoot to draw more cards and spells that help you assemble your combo.
Swan Song - I've included some counterspells to defend our combo, and I just had to go with Swan Song since it's so thematically fitting. The bird token that they get also conveniently dies to one land thrown by Seismic Assault.
Lightning Bolt - We include one copy because it in this deck becomes an Ancestral Recall. Shoot your Swans of Bryn Argoll and draw three!
Serum Visions - The Modern draw and Scry spell. Helps dig a couple of cards into our deck.
Temple of Epiphany - Manawise, it's just a slowland, but the scrying helps mitigating redundant land draws in the early game.
Anger of the Gods - Is a useful cheap sweeper that can get rid of a lot of creatures at the same time. If you cast this while having Swans of Bryn Argoll out, you also draw three cards, which is insane! If you use this alongside Seismic Assault, you can make extra benefit of Anger's exile effect by shooting creatures with toughness 4 and upwards before Anger of the Gods resolves.
Day's Undoing - This one off is here mostly as a failsafe. Should you attempt to draw your entire deck without ever getting up to 10 lands, you can cast this to shuffle your hand and now massive graveyard to try again. You can also throw all of the lands you happen to have in your hand at your opponent before this resolves to get maximum value. Note that your turn ends when casting this spell, so make sure to play your other non-instants before casting this. Your turn ending isn't harmful for your combo most of the time as you can combo off at your opponent's upkeep.
There you have it. Birbs and 40 lands. The deck is better than one would think.
