Swans of Bryn Argoll is a wonky Magic card. Upon its first printing, it was the crux of a combo deck in old Extended, featuring Chain of Plasma as a way to draw most of your deck and combo off with Simian Spirit Guide and Conflagrate with Pact of Negation backup. Swans also became a real thing in Standard, with decks playing upwards of thirty lands in conjunction with Bloodbraid Elf and Seismic Assault to kill your opponent. Despite this, the card has seen very little play in Modern. Frank Lepore is ready to change that:

Seismic Swans - Modern | Frank Lepore

• Creatures (10)
• 2 Countryside Crusher
• 4 Simian Spirit Guide
• 4 Swans of Bryn Argoll

• Instants (5)
• 1 Lightning Helix
• 4 Lightning Bolt

• Sorceries (4)
• 4 Life from the Loam

• Enchantments (6)
• 2 Molten Vortex
• 4 Seismic Assault

• Lands (35)
• 1 Fire-Lit Thicket
• 1 Ghost Quarter
• 1 Snow-Covered Forest
• 2 Horizon Canopy
• 2 Sacred Foundry
• 2 Snow-Covered Mountain
• 2 Snow-Covered Plains
• 2 Stomping Ground
• 3 Windswept Heath
• 3 Wooded Foothills
• 4 Arid Mesa
• 4 Rugged Prairie
• 4 Temple of Abandon
• 4 Temple of Triumph

• Sideboard (15)
• 1 Ancient Grudge
• 1 Anger of the Gods
• 1 Bojuka Bog
• 1 Grafdigger's Cage
• 1 Leyline of Sanctity
• 1 Nahiri, the Harbinger
• 1 Ravenous Trap
• 1 Sigarda, Host of Herons
• 1 Spellskite
• 1 Stony Silence
• 1 Wear // Tear
• 2 Aven Mindcensor
• 2 Scavenging Ooze

Buy This Deck

The biggest selling point is, unlike Life from the Loam decks with Raven's Crime and other attrition-oriented control plans, you’ve got a combo finish with Swans of Bryn Argoll. Once you resolve a Swans, you can discard one land to Seismic Assault to attempt to deal two damage to Swans of Bryn Argoll and draw two cards. Given you play upward of thirty five lands, it’s not hard to imagine just chaining lands to draw two cards until you have ten to throw at your opponent’s face. If you’re short on lands in hand, but have access to a couple extra mana, you can add dredges of Life from the Loam to make up the extra damage with relative ease. You can even play Dakmor Salvage to ensure one of the cards you draw is always a land to keep the chain going.

The added advantage of playing Life from the Loam is you can play techy singleton lands. Maindeck Bojuka Bog is completely reasonable. It wouldn’t be hard to justify multiple Ghost Quarters to fight against Urza Tron decks, Cavern of Souls to fight Remand, or even Radiant Fountain to buy half a turn against Burn, all depending on what you expect to play most commonly.

If you’re looking for a wacky control deck with a sweet combo finish, this is a relatively powerful and compact engine. The biggest difficulty will be determining which interactive elements are necessary and how many you can play without lowering the density of lands required to combo kill opponents. It’s an interesting deck-building problem to try to solve, and I certainly hope we see more people attempting in the near future.