Budget Modern 8 Rack

What's better than countering spells? Making them useless before they had any chance to be cast, that's what!

First the obvious has to be said, this deck is immeasurably worse without Liliana. She is the only card besides Smallpox that both kills creatures and discards cards and there isn't really much reason to play this deck - outside of a downright unhealthy adoration of asking your opponents for cards in hand - without her.

Now, the deck is a lot weaker without Lili and - due to budget constraints - without Mutavaults too. To replace the Mutavaults we are playing 2 Nether Spirits. Now, the number 2 and the words "Nether Spirit" shouldn't really be used in the same sentence. But we want to draw 1 often, like every game. So what then do we do should we draw a second one? Delve one away or use Return to turn it into a zombie. Now I may be wrong, but it seems to me that we need every tiny edge we can get if we want to make up for the fact we are saving a couple hundred $ on the deck. And I think Nether Spirit is just that edge as it wants to be discarded, it blocks masterfully, and it wins games... eventually. It really cannot be overstated just how relevant those two facts are. Keeping an Angler or a Death's Shadow at bay for multiple turns in a row and then turning around and posing a clock is very, very good. At least as far as cheap modern control decks go.

NOTE: Is a 3/1 split on Murderous Cut and Never // Return better than a 2/2 split? The downside of Cut is that it is only really castable late or after a Smallpox. The downside of Never is that it is always 3 mana. Which is worse? And by how much?

Castle Locthwain is a wondrous edition we are hoping to ride all the way to Mars. It is essentially a 3 mana draw 1 lose 1. Awful in most decks, a godsend in ours, given that many matchups will have 2-5 turn windows when either player is doing very little if anything.

Blast Zone and Hostile Desert are very much experimental. It may well turn out that having 1 more Castle and two more swamps would be better. Though a 3/4 isn't exactly something to scoff at.

11 win conditions of all sorts and stripes, having nothing in common besides the speed of roughly 3.5 snails on morphine combine with 23 discard spells, 13 removal spells and 23 mana sources to amount to more than 60 cards, firstly. And secondly, to a budget deck is built such that it takes many risks;

2 Spirits
Only 2 Pushes
4 Davriels without bridges
Only 1 Shrieking Affliction
Only 1 Delirium Skeins

All these are risks designed to make the gameplay experience very slanted. I mean this in the sense that you will often have a Spirit, which will help you, until you have 2, which will kill you. You will almost always have Davriel, which will help you, unless it dies immediately, you lose tempo, and that kills you 3 turns down the line. Etc. The only reason to play this is that you love Smallpox only slightly less than you love appeasing your wallet. And if that is the case, I think this is as good as it gets.

Now that last statement isn't exactly true as I have not tested this, nor have I spent a sufficient amount of time pondering the modern metagame to make the sideboard and the mainboard as optimal as can be.

• Budget
• Modern
• Mono Black
• 8 Rack
• Discard
• Control