A week before last - which was our awesome Sorin, Imperious Bloodlord preview - I talked about Modern Horizons, and its impact on the Modern format, which was far reaching at that point, and it was only the first week. I was impressed that a set that everyone had deemed "not Modern enough" had cards showing up in nearly every deck that I saw. Well, today's deck kind of takes that notion to the next level.

I found today's deck last week, and it was basically everything I wanted to do in Magic: play Blue, Black, and Green, have Ninjas in my deck, and have the closest rendition of Baleful Strix possible. I tried the deck out on Magic Online that same day and ended up with something like a 5-1 record, which felt very good for a deck I had just picked up and was packed to the brim with some rather obscure cards. But let's get into all that after I show you the deck:

Sultai Snow Ninjas | Modern | Zxrogue, Modern League 2019-06-18, (5-0)

• Creatures (20)
• 4 Faerie Seer
• 4 Fallen Shinobi
• 4 Ice-Fang Coatl
• 4 Mist-Syndicate Naga
• 4 Tarmogoyf

• Instants (12)
• 2 Assassin's Trophy
• 2 Force of Negation
• 4 Fatal Push
• 4 Remand

• Sorceries (6)
• 1 Maelstrom Pulse
• 2 Thoughtseize
• 3 Inquisition of Kozilek

• Artifacts (2)
• 2 Nihil Spellbomb

• Lands (20)
• 2 Snow-Covered Forest
• 2 Snow-Covered Island
• 2 Snow-Covered Swamp
• 1 Breeding Pool
• 1 Watery Grave
• 2 Creeping Tar Pit
• 3 Polluted Delta
• 3 Verdant Catacombs
• 4 Prismatic Vista

• Sideboard (15)
• 1 Ceremonious Rejection
• 3 Dead of Winter
• 1 Dispel
• 1 Force of Negation
• 4 Leyline of the Void
• 2 Liliana, the Last Hope
• 2 Surgical Extraction
• 1 Thrun, the Last Troll

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On paper.

This card crushed. No one is going to kill your 1/1 Faerie Seer, especially if they don't know what's going on, and once you've ninjutsu'd in your Mist-Syndicate Naga, it's very often too late to do anything. They have to have a Fatal Push that has been revolted, a Lightning Bolt, or a Path to Exile to really deal with it. That's kind of it. After that point, you now have two Mist-Syndicate Nagas, which threaten to be four Mist-Syndicate Nagas, and so on, and so on, and so on. You know how these things go. Eventually Josh recanted his judgment, stating he may have been wrong here.

But Faerie Seer isn't the only card we're looking forward to bringing back to our hand. Ice-Fang Coatl is also one of the juiciest targets (I know ninjutsu doesn't target, it's a figure of speech!) you could ask for. For those who have followed my content, you may know that Baleful Strix is one of my favorite cards, and a card I would have loved to see added to the Modern card pool. While we didn't get Baleful Strix in Modern Horizons, we did get this snakey boi. I'll be honest, not having automatic deathtouch was a bit of a turn off for me when I first saw this guy, but after having played with him, boy does he deliver.

(Worth noting, I immediately ordered playsets of these cards once I actually played the deck a bit; feel free to use promo code FRANK5 if you do the same to get 5% off.)

Being able to keep up things like Remand or Fatal Push, only to sneak the snake into play at the end of their turn, ready to be bounced back to your hand, to draw another card, while slipping a - you guessed it - Mist-Syndicate Naga into play is just great, and exactly what the deck is looking to do. This is also one of the key "engines" of the deck, repeatedly drawing cards with Ice-Fang Coatl and allowing us to keep going. Considering our deck only has 20 lands, this is somewhat important, and also puts a higher value on the Faerie Seer, which lets us scry 2.

Some of the other Modern Horizons additions to the deck are less exciting, and more utilitarian in nature. The deck has the full four copies of Prismatic Vista, which was fantastic at searching out snow lands. One of the great parts about the deck is that nothing is double-colored. There aren't any or cards, with the sole exception of Force of Negation, which we don't have to cast via mana anyway. This means that if we're able to search out a single Snow-Covered Forest, Island, and Swamp, we should be good to go. In addition to giving our snake deathtouch, there are also three copies of Dead of Winter in the sideboard, which were just fantastic at killing everything but our own creatures. One time I did have to kill a Fallen Shinobi when X was four, but my Tarmogoyf and Ice-Fang Coatl lived, so we eventually won that game. This ends up being a very close replica of Toxic Deluge in the deck, so long as you need X to be five or less.

I did end up cutting one of the main deck Nihil Spellbombs (which is a great metagame call right now), and adding an Overgrown Tomb. I was surprised this was the one shock land that the deck didn't have access to, and there were several times I wish we had one to grab. Considering there are two more copies of Surgical Extraction, and four copies of Leyline of the Void in the sideboard, I think we're doing okay on graveyard removal.

One last thing I'd like to do, is leave you with some video footage of the deck in action. Feel free to like and subscribe to the channel while you're there!

A Seasoned Pyromancer Update

One aside I would like to mention has to do with Young Pyromancer's older brother. We talked about Seasoned Pyromancer in previous articles, and how this card is great, but recently I actually learned it's significantly better than I initially thought. Ordinarily I would be reluctant to mention this, as I would assume it was obvious, but numerous people on Twitch and YouTube mentioned that they also had no idea the card worked this way. You see, when you cast Seasoned Pyromancer and have zero cards in hand . . . you still get to draw two cards.

See, the confusion here lies in the fact that most Red cards, they only let you draw up to the number of cards you discarded. Daretti, Scrap Savant; Chandra, Flamecaller; Collective Defiance; Red is notorious for only letting you draw cards if you actually discarded some cards. But if you have zero cards in hand, Seasoned Pyromancer is basically just Mulldrifter. I played a Jund deck recently with several copies in it, and this card was just bonkers with an empty hand. I ended up drawing two cards, wondering what the heck happened, then carefully rereading the card.

So if you guys thought you only drew if you were able to discard cards, think again. This card is much better than that.

That's about it for today! Thank you all so much for reading, I love you all, and be sure to leave a comment below, and let me know what you think, good or bad. I always appreciate the feedback. I'll catch you next week!

Frank Lepore

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