Two weeks ago you asked for Modern. More Modern ye shall have.

Last week, we started with five deck lists fresh off the settled Bridge from Below ban, the only restriction being that they had to be anchored to color trios. After all, you don't need someone telling you Humans or Tron are good. I think that's been covered. As usual, we're here to do two things: think and progress.

Batter up.

Jeskai Saheeli

Jeskai Saheeli | Modern | Danny West

• Creatures (19)
• 1 Restoration Angel
• 2 Wall of Omens
• 4 Faerie Seer
• 4 Felidar Guardian
• 4 Ninja of the Deep Hours
• 4 Snapcaster Mage

• Planeswalkers (4)
• 4 Saheeli Rai

• Instants (12)
• 1 Spell Pierce
• 3 Opt
• 4 Lightning Bolt
• 4 Path to Exile

• Sorceries (4)
• 4 Serum Visions

• Lands (21)
• 1 Mountain
• 1 Plains
• 2 Island
• 1 Celestial Colonnade
• 1 Glacial Fortress
• 1 Sacred Foundry
• 1 Steam Vents
• 1 Sulfur Falls
• 2 Hallowed Fountain
• 3 Arid Mesa
• 3 Scalding Tarn
• 4 Flooded Strand

• Sideboard (15)
• 2 Force of Negation
• 3 Rest in Peace
• 2 Smuggler's Copter
• 1 Celestial Purge
• 1 Wall of Omens
• 1 Vendilion Clique
• 1 Spell Pierce
• 2 Burrenton Forge Tender
• 1 Seasoned Pyromancer
• 1 Wear // Tear

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There are two kinds of hybrid decks: forced and legit. I tend to think of most of them as forced, though this is my attempt to at least theorize the latter.

The tell-tale sign of a hybrid deck with a shot is that the strategies that make up the portmanteau actually bridge and feed off one another.

The gimmick here is that you can just win outright with the usual Saheeli Cat clones or you can do the Ninja Bear thing. The reason it works is that you can present a strong tempo clock while at the same time digging through cards to find the instant KO.

Wall of Omens is a concession to some of the ridiculous creature starts in the format, but man, this card feels like everything people try that's just below par for power in Modern. It doesn't work with a bunch of cards in this 75, which feels that much worse, but Saheeli can't blink Spreading Seas so you figure it out. Chart a Course? Remand?

What about this?

Oh that's the goods. Vendilion Clique does cooler things with the blinking.

This rabbit hole goes deep.

As a final note, travel on this road is probably cool with a sprinkling of Narset somewhere, but Teferi makes less sense to me. In a format this punishing, she does the punishing while he poses as the world's most narrow Cryptic Command. No thanks.

Landfall Aggro

Landfall Aggro | Modern | Danny West

• Creatures (26)
• 1 Renegade Rallier
• 1 Steppe Lynx
• 2 Grim Lavamancer
• 2 Knight of the Reliquary
• 2 Plated Geopede
• 3 Ranger-Captain of Eos
• 3 Wild Nacatl
• 4 Bloodbraid Elf
• 4 Hexdrinker
• 4 Noble Hierarch

• Planeswalkers (2)
• 2 Wrenn and Six

• Instants (10)
• 2 Atarka's Command
• 4 Lightning Bolt
• 4 Path to Exile

• Lands (22)
• 1 Mountain
• 1 Plains
• 2 Forest
• 1 Sacred Foundry
• 1 Stomping Ground
• 1 Sunbaked Canyon
• 1 Temple Garden
• 3 Horizon Canopy
• 3 Windswept Heath
• 4 Arid Mesa
• 4 Wooded Foothills

• Sideboard (15)
• 1 Domri Rade
• 2 Choke
• 1 Knight of Autumn
• 3 Ravenous Trap
• 1 Scavenging Ooze
• 3 Lightning Helix
• 3 Thalia, Guardian of Thraben
• 1 Qasali Pridemage

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Whatever the intention is behind not playing Collected Company, just pretend it's there. Maybe you're like me and you just remember when Zoo was kind of a thing sometimes.

But yeah, a miser's Steppe Lynx is certainly something to put it in a published article in 2019.

I played Steppe Lynx in a Legacy Grand Prix. Full stop.

Depending on your tournament scene, Thalia can be a great main deck card. Tarmogoyf is also a good option, though it makes for really obnoxious Lavamancer math sometimes. Zoo doesn't strike me as the kind of deck for the extra credit types. No offense. Again: I'm one of you.

Sultai Unearth

Sultai Unearth | Modern | Danny West

• Creatures (21)
• 2 Dark Confidant
• 2 Gurmag Angler
• 3 Bazaar Trademage
• 3 Snapcaster Mage
• 3 Street Wraith
• 4 Death's Shadow
• 4 Noble Hierarch

• Instants (8)
• 2 Dismember
• 2 Fatal Push
• 4 Thought Scour

• Sorceries (10)
• 2 Inquisition of Kozilek
• 4 Thoughtseize
• 4 Unearth

• Artifacts (4)
• 4 Mishra's Bauble

• Lands (17)
• 1 Forest
• 1 Island
• 1 Swamp
• 1 Breeding Pool
• 1 Nurturing Peatland
• 1 Overgrown Tomb
• 2 Misty Rainforest
• 2 Watery Grave
• 3 Verdant Catacombs
• 4 Polluted Delta

• Sideboard (15)
• 4 Cabal Therapist
• 2 Bitterblossom
• 1 Inquisition of Kozilek
• 1 Collective Brutality
• 1 Liliana, the Last Hope
• 1 Hurkyl's Recall
• 1 Fatal Push
• 2 Assassin's Trophy
• 2 Force of Despair

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Uh...

This deck looks dangerously close to "onto something here" territory.

In Death's Shadow decks of yore, Gurmag Angler's extra point of power was enough to make it the go-to over all the useless text on Tasigur. With the advent of more Horizon lands, this probably shifts some but not enough. But hey, if you're afraid of Cast Down for some reason, there's your out.

You could easily go all-in on the yard here and try to protect a Turbo Goyf like people used to all the time; however, I would think with all the graveyard hate going on that the backup plan of just attacking with a one-mana 10/10 is probably sufficient and that you wouldn't want to get that linear.

Nimble Mongoose strikes me as officially obsoleted, but you never know. Attacking as a 4/4 with Noble Hierarch would do it some good, but that's already a lot of AA ball for a card trying to find itself in Modern.

Unearth on the other hand? Man.

As the years (days?) go by, the efficient things that Unearth can do are just going to get more and more unreal. Sure, the graveyard can be a fragile place, but it seems like every few months the dead rise and muck up the format again, hate be damned. What percentage of banned cards are graveyard-based? The format's most representative card draw spell - Faithless Looting - loves the graveyard. In some ways, it is the graveyard format.

Anyone got Urza's Legacy foils for trade?

Team Temur

Let's talk about Temur for a second.

I could show you any number of decklists I sketched out for this stupid color trio this week, but I don't think that's a great idea. It's like being asked how many mice skeletons are in the deep recesses of your furniture - there's just some stuff you don't want the answer to.

This isn't a new phenomenon, but I typically have a miserable time constructing Temur decks with the right coherence. The efficiency of the cheap draw spells and Snapcaster Mage don't naturally marry with Tarmogoyf the way they used to when Splinter Twin was holding rubbish together. The format's most interesting powerful cards in these colors do not mesh as naturally as in other colors, at least in my view.

For these reasons I don't have a decklist, but here are some new places you can explore if you're more interested in playing these colors in Modern than I ever am:

Getting a specific card back and a free spell to set up easier Phoenix triggers (if that's even possible) seems like a decent idea. It's not a "real" splash for Green per se, but more people should mess with a miser's copy.

A Coiling Oracle trigger is pretty cool to have every turn, but I'm not sure this is anywhere near the level of something like Slivers, let alone Humans or Spirits. Most Elementals are not Modern-competitive. Nevertheless, there's a sort of inevitability to certain tribes where eventually enough of them get printed and paired with Aether Vial and good tournament results start daring to show up. Still think it'll be a while, if ever. Goblins will get here first I'd wager.

As a sidenote, I think it's a good design philosophy to change up the way tribes interact with one another. Risen Reef is a great example. The more tribal decks that have to rely on more than just stacking up Glorious Anthem effects, the happier I'll be.

So here's the kinky one:

In between another handful of Bloodbraid Elf + Snapcaster Mage messes, I noticed that between these, Lotus Cobra, Coiling Oracle, and several others that there are a lot of decent Snakes all of a sudden! The Sakura-Tribe variety probably doesn't get to play without broken land decks, but there still may be decent untapped ideas here with Collected Company, Snow synergies, or other such things. Mystic Snake getting to see tournament play after a ten-year hiatus right after a "better" version got printed would be absolutely incredible for destroying the idea that Magic has any indestructible absolutes. Wouldn't be a bad day for my theoretical framework is all I'm saying.

Abzan Dan

That makes nine of ten color trios, but Abzan has to wait until my next article. I may sneak it in outside my usual publishing slot, so be on your guard!

Until then, always recall that progress is at risk of happening in ways that need not conform to your goals and expectations. Strong decks are a product of lots of error correction and evolution. As players and deck-builders we can't always test everything, but we can do the much more productive act: to always be mindful of Magic's functionally infinite interactions and their sudden and exciting tendency to bring about emergent strategies.