Modern Black-Red Eldrazi

By Melissa DeTora

Melissa is a former Magic pro player and strategy writer who is now working in R&D on the Play Design team.

Hello everyone, and welcome to the final installment of Daily Decks for the year. For today's deck, we're going to be looking at a Modern deck that uses a mechanic from Battle for Zendikar: processing. The process mechanic has begun to take off in Standard with Wasteland Strangler, but this is the first time I've seen a Modern deck that exploits the strategy.

Wasteland Strangler is a card that I like to compare to Flametongue Kavu, which was a very dominant card in its time. It was a straight two-for-one and a card that you simply had to play in your deck, even if was just to combat opposing Flametongue Kavus. Wasteland Strangler is not nearly as dominant as the Kavu was, mostly because it's pretty hard to exile your opponent's stuff. You have to hope they exile something on their own (with delve perhaps) or you have to be actively trying to exile their cards with either the ingest mechanic or white enchantments such as Silkwrap or Stasis Snare.

Exiling things is much easier in Modern. As you can see from EternallyRamza's list, he is playing six one-mana artifacts that exile entire graveyards. In Modern, players are filling their graveyards with fetch lands and efficient spells very quickly, so an activation of one of these artifacts could exile many cards. There are plenty of removal spells that exile, such as Magma Spray and Anger of the Gods, so you are very likely to have food for your Wasteland Strangler over the course of a game.

Another really cool interaction that this deck has is Oblivion Sower with Relic of Progenitus and Nihil Spellbomb. You're going to be exiling many lands, and Oblivion Sower puts them all onto the battlefield under your control. After you cast a Sower, it's possible to have enough mana for Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger.

Eldrazi Temple is great in this deck, and this card makes it possible to cast an Oblivion Sower on turn three. If you get enough lands from the Sower, Ulamog can come out as early as turn four! That's pretty impressive.

That's it for Daily Decks for the year. Thanks for being a supporter of the column since I took it over in April. I've enjoyed writing this series, and although I will no longer be writing Daily Decks, I will continue to be a columnist for DailyMTG. Look for my first article in early January! Please continue to send feedback to me on Twitter.