There are a ton of powerful cards in the Bant color combination in Modern. Despite that, there hasn’t really been a great Bant deck in the format in quite some time — unless you count Bant Eldrazi, which is more of an Eldrazi deck than anything else. That said, Shadows Over Innistrad block gave us a ton of powerful Spirits, and touching Green gives you access to Noble Hierarch and Collected Company to pull everything together. The end result? An exciting deck that can play the instant-speed tempo game much better than anything we’ve seen in quite some time. Let’s take a look:

Bant Spirits - Modern | Mangeman, 5-0 Modern League

• Creatures (29)
• 2 Phantasmal Image
• 3 Geist of Saint Traft
• 4 Drogskol Captain
• 4 Mausoleum Wanderer
• 4 Noble Hierarch
• 4 Rattlechains
• 4 Selfless Spirit
• 4 Spell Queller

• Instants (8)
• 4 Collected Company
• 4 Path to Exile

• Enchantments (1)
• 1 Steel of the Godhead

• Lands (22)
• 1 Forest
• 1 Island
• 1 Plains
• 1 Gavony Township
• 1 Hallowed Fountain
• 1 Misty Rainforest
• 1 Temple Garden
• 3 Breeding Pool
• 4 Botanical Sanctum
• 4 Flooded Strand
• 4 Windswept Heath

• Sideboard (15)
• 1 Engineered Explosives
• 1 Negate
• 1 Rhox War Monk
• 2 Blessed Alliance
• 2 Qasali Pridemage
• 2 Spellskite
• 3 Rest in Peace
• 3 Stony Silence

Buy This Deck

This deck is really interesting because of the number of different angles you have, the sheer variety of things you can force your opponent to worry about. For example, you can lead off with Noble Hierarch into Geist of Saint Traft. Or you can curve Mausoleum Wanderer into Rattlechains and leave up tricky effects like Spell Queller and Selfless Spirit up for the rest of the game. Or you can just play a bunch of Drogskol Captain and Phantasmal Image. No matter what it is your opponent is trying to do, you’ve got the tools to fight back.

A huge strength of this deck is the density of hexproof effects in it. Modern is a format that is defined, in large part, by Lightning Bolt, Path to Exile, and Snapcaster Mage. Having the likes of Geist of Saint Traft, Rattlechains, and Drogskol Captain to fight against those removal spells is huge, particularly when Rattlechains and Collected Company allow you to do so at instant-speed and Selfless Spirit deals with most non-targeted removal.

It’s also worth mentioning just how absurd Spell Queller is in this deck. The fact that you have so many ways to protect your Spell Quellers, as well as Collected Company and Phantasmal Image to give you more effective copies, means that the card is as close to a hard counter as it can possibly be. The difference is that your counterspell isn’t vulnerable to the likes of Negate or Dispel, two common trumps in control mirrors.

If you’re looking for a flexible deck that can play all the angles, this seems like a great place to start.