This is it! The first ever Team Unified Modern Grand Prix is taking place this weekend in San Antonio, and I am thrilled to be a part of it. Together with my teammates Joe Demestrio and Josh McClain, we’re going to take our best shot at bringing home a trophy together. Of course, both of these erstwhile pros have been hard at work in the lab trying to figure out which piece of the Modern puzzle they’d like to use for the tournament, as well as shaking off some of the rust that comes with a semi-retirement period.

Fortunately for all of you trying to piece together the wonderful world of Unified Modern, I have some of their findings to help with any last-minute metagame predictions or sideboard shuffles your team may need to succeed. From Affinity to Zoo, here are the best of the best and the secret decks you may want to consider for your GP.

1: Death’s Shadow (all stripes)

Now, there are a number of options for Death's Shadow decks, including Jund, Abzan, Grixis, Four-Color (usually excluding Blue), or even the more exotic Esper or Sultai builds. There are benefits and drawbacks to each build, because while a Blue variant may get Thought Scour, Gurmag Angler, Snapcaster Mage, and counterspells, Green variants gain Traverse the Ulvenwald and Tarmogoyf, and White variants gain Path to Exile, Lingering Souls, Ranger of Eos, and Orzhov Charm. Don’t sleep on Orzhov Charm!

Some of the spicy tech choices you might look into are main-decking a few copies of Nihil Spellbomb, as both Blue and Green versions of the deck need their graveyard to be robust for Tarmogoyf, Traverse, Snapcaster Mage, and Delve creatures. Additionally, Dredge, Abzan Company, Living End, and even Grixis Control have large graveyard synergies that you would be well-served to incidentally hate on, and the opportunity cost of a card like Nihil Spellbomb is rather low. It’s also an artifact for Delirium and your own Tarmogoyfs, which is nice in the many cases where the graveyard hate is not particularly relevant. If you do choose not to maindeck the card (which is perfectly reasonable, don’t get me wrong), I would certainly look into sideboarding a few copies regardless. Easy to slot in, cheap hate with applications against a large swath of the Modern metagame is just about the best you can hope for, and Nihil Spellbomb covers all of those nicely.

Pain's Reward is a sweet sideboard tech option as well, as the card is somewhat akin to an extra-large Painful Truths, but watch out! If you are playing the Death's Shadow mirror and both you and your opponent have out Phyrexian Unlife, you might get yourself into a weird situation where each player is trying to name a bigger number than the last. Don’t worry, even for these corner case scenarios, I have you covered. This number right here is the largest number ever used in a mathematical proof, and it’s a doozy. If you are lucky enough to find yourself in a Pain's Reward bidding war with both players unable to die, you’ll be glad you spent the time and energy to research Graham’s Number.

(In all seriousness, your opponent will always be able to say “I choose whatever number you chose, plus one. Fortunately, this situation is unlikely to come up, as I don’t think Unlife is particularly good in the Death's Shadow mirror.)

Now, Death's Shadow is a powerful archetype, but you’ll need something to go along with it. If you want to try to combine Abzan Shadow with Dredge, you can get a pretty potent one-two punch of busted decks. Which leads me to . . . 

2: Dredge

Dredge conflicts with Death's Shadow, for sure. You can’t play the fetchland mana base alongside Jund Shadow, and you have to play Duress over Thoughtseize in your Dredge sideboard. Collective Brutality can’t be in your Death's Shadow deck (hence the appeal of Unlife) because it’s a must-have in your Dredge sideboard, especially in the great state of Texas. Remember the rule: red dirt = Red decks. The biggest decisions for your Dredge player are going to be the presence or absence of Vengeful Pharaoh in the sideboard, the number of Gnaw to the Bones in the sideboard, the quantity (three or four?) of Collective Brutality in the 75, how to best replace Abrupt Decay (assuming another deck wants those), the presence of Scourge Devils, the question of the Greater Gargadon/Bridge from Below package, and the mana base. Should the mana base include fetchlands? If so, it’ll want Arid Mesa and Wooded Foothills, to not compete with Abzan Shadow and any Blue deck. If not, it’ll be chock-full of Mana Confluences and Gemstone Mines, enabling you to cast your Prized Amalgams in post-board games (while being a bit less flexible for purposes of reanimating Bloodghasts).

At press time, I’m pretty likely to be packing the ghastly ghouls of the graveyard, and here’s the list I like:

Dredge ? Modern | Ben Friedman

• Creatures (24)
• 1 Haunted Dead
• 3 Golgari Thug
• 4 Bloodghast
• 4 Insolent Neonate
• 4 Narcomoeba
• 4 Prized Amalgam
• 4 Stinkweed Imp

• Sorceries (17)
• 2 Collective Brutality
• 3 Conflagrate
• 4 Cathartic Reunion
• 4 Faithless Looting
• 4 Life from the Loam

• Lands (19)
• 2 Mountain
• 1 Blackcleave Cliffs
• 1 Blood Crypt
• 2 Dakmor Salvage
• 2 Gemstone Mine
• 2 Stomping Ground
• 3 Arid Mesa
• 3 Copperline Gorge
• 3 Wooded Foothills

• Sideboard (15)
• 2 Collective Brutality
• 2 Vengeful Pharaoh
• 3 Duress
• 2 Gnaw to the Bone
• 2 Ancient Grudge
• 2 Lightning Axe
• 2 Maelstrom Pulse

Buy This Deck

I must say, though, that the possibility of Greater Gargadon and Bridge from Below getting together is really giving me the sweats. Nothing sweeter than going completely nuts, and the Gargadon gives you a ton of play against Rest in Peace. A 9/7 is hard to beat, folks! I’ll be testing with a few copies of the giant elephant as a possible anti-hate measure, as well as one of my completely off-the-wall ideas, the one and only Pack Rat.

Imagine this: Your opponent (I’m imagining it being Owen Turtenwald, but it could be anyone. It’s your fantasy!) smugly plays a turn-two Rest in Peace, and you slam a Pack Rat. Your opponent has flashbacks to the year 2013, when Mono-Black Devotion ruled the roost, and tears well up in their eyes. As a bunch of oversized vermin turn their life total upside down, they reveal a hand of a second Rest in Peace, a Relic of Progenitus, and a bunch of lands. Great game, well played, Patrick Rattington takes home the gold. Suck on that, Dredge haters!

Okay, back in the realm of reality and out of the realm of ridiculous fantasy, we have another deck or four to explore for Modern.

3: Abzan/Abzan Company

These decks can’t combine with most varieties of Death's Shadow, so I expect them to be significantly less played than normal, but Abzan Company is still a pretty nice deck that people seem to have forgotten about. With the rise of Relic of Progenitus and Rest in Peace, and the subsequent fall in Grafdigger's Cage, Collected Company, and Chord of Calling are safer to cast than ever. It’s definitely possible to grind out Death's Shadow with a deck like Abzan Company, as the deck has a lot of the same resilience as plain old regular Abzan Midrange. Abzan Midrange, of course, is successful against Death's Shadow, but it’s hard to justify playing Abzan Midrange instead of Death's Shadow based on sheer power level alone. Abzan Midrange basically conflicts with every normal deck in Modern, unfortunately, which limits its playability in the Unified format. If you want to combine a Collected Company deck with Death's Shadow, you could also play Knightfall, a perennially underrated contender that most opponents won’t know how to handle. But let’s say you don’t even want to consider conflicts. You want a couple of decks that you can play without accidentally stealing your friends’ removal or discard. Though these next decks may be a bit weak to Burn, they’re still pretty strong choices for a team tournament. First up . . . 

4: Tron

Tron is back and ready to rock. While Tron fights over Collective Brutality and/or Fatal Push, your biggest fights with are Path to Exile and Rest in Peace. If you’re crazy like Joe Lossett, you can even substitute Condemn for Path to Exile, because nothing is sweeter than Condemning your opponent’s Death's Shadow for the ol’ double-kill.

Here’s Joe’s list, but you don’t have to contort your list. You can play with Path to Exile and Rest in Peace over his substitutes.

W/G Tron ? Modern | Joe Lossett

• Creatures (7)
• 1 Walking Ballista
• 2 Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger
• 2 World Breaker
• 2 Wurmcoil Engine

• Planeswalkers (6)
• 2 Ugin, the Spirit Dragon
• 4 Karn Liberated

• Instants (3)
• 3 Condemn

• Sorceries (8)
• 4 Ancient Stirrings
• 4 Sylvan Scrying

• Artifacts (17)
• 2 Relic of Progenitus
• 3 Oblivion Stone
• 4 Chromatic Sphere
• 4 Chromatic Star
• 4 Expedition Map

• Lands (19)
• 1 Forest
• 1 Plains
• 1 Sanctum of Ugin
• 4 Razorverge Thicket
• 4 Urza's Mine
• 4 Urza's Power Plant
• 4 Urza's Tower

• Sideboard (15)
• 2 Blessed Alliance
• 1 Condemn
• 2 Eidolon of Rhetoric
• 4 Nature's Claim
• 2 Pithing Needle
• 2 Relic of Progenitus
• 1 Rule of Law
• 1 Seal of Primordium

Buy This Deck

Truly a thing of beauty. Though, if you want to play a Tron list that doesn’t compete with anything (aside from Bant Eldrazi, I suppose), you might want to pick up Eldrazi Tron. Surprisingly, Eldrazi Tron (which I have actually never played against in real life!) is the fourth most popular archetype on MTGGoldfish, and it puts up decent results against a large swath of the format. The one recommendation I’d make is to play a few copies of Basilisk Collar main. Collar does so much work with Walking Ballista, it’s unbelievable. That’s one of the best ways to beat Death's Shadow and Affinity, two of the worse matchups for Eldrazi Tron.

And, speaking of Affinity, it’s one of the best options for a low-conflict deck in Unified Modern, although it’s not necessarily one that I’m comfortable piloting. If you combined Abzan Shadow, Affinity, and Dredge, you’d have a super solid trio of powerful linears and aggro-combo decks.

5: Affinity

What is there to say about Affinity that hasn’t been said already? My one tip for those of you who aren’t sure how to structure your Affinity sideboards is that you’ll want a quartet of Relic of Progenitus for Death's Shadow and Dredge, while Duress might have to replace Thoughtseize in the sideboard due to conflicts with your Death's Shadow player. I’d hedge with two maindeck copies of Master of Etherium and two of Etched Champion, but pack two more Champions in the board for Shadow, Dredge, Grixis, and other assorted midrange decks. I’d also pack five or even six Spire of Industry/Glimmervoids, as once you get to that threshold you can use Wear // Tear as a legitimate answer to Stony Silence. With only ? of your opponents even packing Stony, though, you’ve got a great shot at tearing up the competition with the robot army.

6-10: Ad Nauseam, Merfolk, Elves, Bant Eldrazi, and Valakut

Merfolk is a super-low-conflict deck, but it’s a little low on raw power. I know a few skilled pilots of the fish army, but it hasn’t done enough for me in testing, and I’ll be setting it aside for a higher power ceiling deck. If you have an experienced fishmonger, though, it’s a solid choice that gives maximum flexibility to your other two players.

Elves is my dark horse to do well, mainly because people are so focused on beating Death's Shadow, Dredge, Affinity, and the like that they are likely to be short on the type of sweepers they’d need to actually beat Elves. Like Dredge, Elves explodes on the board and makes it extremely tough for Death's Shadow to break through, while threatening a topdecked Shaman of the Pack to put Death's Shadow away out of nowhere. Though it’s a little soft to combo decks and decks with a bunch of sweepers, it might be just the ticket as another low-conflict option for your third player. I mean, seriously. Who else is going to play Heritage Druid?

Then we come to Valakut, a deck that I don’t love against a field of Death's Shadow, Affinity and Dredge, but rest assured, folks will be playing it. It’s a powerful choice, and as long as you’re prepared to handle the common matchups, you stand to do well against a lot of the less-common choices. Think Merfolk, Elves, Tron, Bant Eldrazi, etc. You’ll probably want a full set of Anger of the Gods, as having your main interactive spell incidentally destroy Dredge is a great choice.

Believe me, there are more viable archetypes, including Burn (remember the rule about aggro in Texas!) as well as a number of control shells of every color combination, but I am sure that the above list will cover the vast majority of the Unified Modern metagame. Whether you’re packing Merfolk, Dredge, and Valakut or Jund Shadow, Ad Nauseam, and Bant Eldrazi, this stands to be one of the most memorable tournaments in many years, and I consider myself lucky just to have the chance to participate. I expect a masterclass in Modern this weekend, and look forward to many more chances to play team events like this one in the near future!