Over the last couple of months, we’ve seen a handful of Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas decks trying to take advantage of Whir of Invention and cheap artifacts to power a permanent-based control deck featuring a number of powerful silver bullets. The problem with this strategy is that you have to play a lot of mana to get Tezzeret into play quickly enough to matter. Cards like Pentad Prism lower the density of cards in your deck that matter, which can be absolutely brutal in a format like Modern since it is fast enough to punish a weak start. This week, TheNobodys has put together an exciting decklist that takes the Whir of Invention shell and makes it more proactive by adding a higher density of high-impact spells:

Esper Whir - Modern | TheNobodys, 5-0 Modern League

• Creatures (1)
• 1 Ethersworn Canonist

• Planeswalkers (3)
• 3 Liliana of the Veil

• Instants (4)
• 4 Whir of Invention

• Sorceries (12)
• 1 Lingering Souls
• 3 Collective Brutality
• 4 Inquisition of Kozilek
• 4 Serum Visions

• Artifacts (20)
• 1 Pithing Needle
• 1 Time Sieve
• 2 Ensnaring Bridge
• 2 Relic of Progenitus
• 3 Mox Opal
• 3 Sword of the Meek
• 4 Mishra's Bauble
• 4 Thopter Foundry

• Lands (20)
• 2 Island
• 1 Swamp
• 1 Godless Shrine
• 1 Hallowed Fountain
• 1 Steam Vents
• 1 Watery Grave
• 2 Glimmervoid
• 3 Flooded Strand
• 4 Darkslick Shores
• 4 Polluted Delta

• Sideboard (15)
• 1 Ethersworn Canonist
• 2 Felidar Cub
• 2 Fragmentize
• 2 Grafdigger's Cage
• 3 Izzet Staticaster
• 1 Kambal, Consul of Allocation
• 2 Pithing Needle
• 1 Tezzert, Agent of Bolas
• 1 Witchbane Orb

Buy This Deck

The fundamental idea is still the same: you want to use Whir of Invention to help find cards that end games against particular opponents, such as Ensnaring Bridge and Relic of Progenitus. However, you can also just find the pieces of the Thopter Foundry plus Sword of the Meek combo. Unlike most Thopter-Sword decks, this deck doesn’t mind playing extra copies of the pieces, since you can pitch them to Liliana and Collective Brutality. Additionally, you want to put the combo together early, since you don’t have Tezzeret to win games with and you can use the thopters to pay for Whir of Invention.

The last difference is the inclusion of Time Sieve as another win condition. Time Sieve is a great singleton for this deck, since you can use Thopter Foundry and Sword of the Meek to take infinite turns, or just sacrifice miscellaneous artifacts to get an extra turn to beat down with Lingering Souls tokens or to get an extra Liliana activation.

The Tezzeret decks have always been a reasonable choice when the decks you expect to play against can be hated out by specific artifacts. The removal of the Tezzeret package makes you less capable of cheating those artifacts into play early on in the game. However, you gain the ability to play more protracted games where you can attrition opponents out with Collective Brutality, Thopter Foundry, and Liliana of the Veil.