When Winding Constrictor first broke out in Standard, we saw a handful of people trying to explore what the card could do in Modern. There were a handful of builds that utilized the likes of Arcbound Ravager and Arcbound Worker to try and build an enormous Hangarback Walker or Walking Ballista. This week, we’ve got a deck from Caleb Durward that explores a version that goes a little bit bigger:

Abzan Counters - Modern | Caleb Durward

• Creatures (24)
• 2 Archangel of Thune
• 3 Birds of Paradise
• 3 Scavenging Ooze
• 4 Noble Hierarch
• 4 Spike Feeder
• 4 Walking Ballista
• 4 Winding Constrictor

• Planeswalkers (2)
• 2 Nissa, Voice of Zendikar

• Instants (7)
• 3 Path to Exile
• 4 Dromoka's Command

• Enchantments (4)
• 4 Hardened Scales

• Lands (22)
• 1 Plains
• 1 Swamp
• 2 Forest
• 1 Godless Shrine
• 1 Horizon Canopy
• 1 Marsh Flats
• 1 Temple Garden
• 2 Blooming Marsh
• 2 Gavony Township
• 2 Overgrown Tomb
• 2 Razorverge Thicket
• 2 Windswept Heath
• 4 Verdant Catacomb

• Sideboard (15)
• 1 Path to Exile
• 2 Stony Silence
• 2 Lingering Souls
• 2 Fatal Push
• 2 Selfless Spirit
• 2 Rest in Peace
• 4 Thoughtseize

Buy This Deck

Hardened Scales and Winding Constrictor are the keys to the deck, and either one early on allows you to play a medium-sized Walking Ballista to snipe off key one-toughness creatures or just start beating down. You can also play a huge Spike Feeder which can gain a ton of life and stall out the ground if your opponent had a quick start. Spike Feeder is also a great mana sink, since you can activate its ability to generate additional +1/+1 counters on a target creature. Add to that Scavenging Ooze’s ability to get out of hand fairly quickly, and you’ve got a deck that can take over the board with a plethora of huge creatures with relative ease. At the top end of the curve, you’ve got the Archangel of Thune combo with Spike feeder, which lets you gain infinite life and make your creatures infinitely large.

The real strength of this deck is that it combines a powerful, proactive gameplan with a flexible and interactive sideboard. Erring on the side of doing something powerful is usually correct in Modern, but, depending on the matchup, you can trim the cards that are less powerful to board efficient interaction to shut down your opponent’s deck.

If you’re looking for something new and exciting to try in Modern, this deck plays a lot of powerful cards and can get out of control fairly quickly. Not only that, but your sideboard has the most efficient interaction and the best sideboard cards in the format and you can tweak your deck to be as interactive as you want in sideboarded games. There’s a lot of flexibility in this type of shell, and I really hope that it’s powerful enough that we start seeing Winding Constrictors in Modern.