This past weekend I wandered into Mox Boarding House to pick something up and it happened to be during their weekly Thursday Modern tournament. I was promptly informed that someone was 3-0 with a spicy Mardu Vehicles homebrew.
I was immediately intrigued and this was the list I was shown by one Zach Brady.
2 Court Homunculus
2 Inventor’s Apprentice
4 Porcelain Legionnaire
4 Scrapheap Scrounger
4 Toolcraft Exemplar
2 Cultivator’s Caravan
4 Lightning Bolt
3 Lightning Helix
4 Path to Exile
4 Shrapnel Blast
4 Smuggler’s Copter
1 Sword of Fire and Ice
1 Sword of Light and Shadow
3 Blackcleave Cliffs
1 Blood Crypt
4 Concealed Courtyard
2 Godless Shrine
4 Inspiring Vantage
4 Marsh Flats
1 Plains
1 Sacred Foundry
1 Swamp
Sideboard
3 Dark Confidant
4 Tidehollow Sculler
3 Inquisition of Kozilek
1 Gideon, Ally of Zendikar
2 Liliana, the Last Hope
2 Wear/Tear
Zach said he would definitely make some changes to the deck, and admitted that he threw the sideboard together hastily and that it wasn’t that great. When I got home, before recording our matches, he sent me an updated list that looked like this:
2 Court Homunculus
4 Dark Confidant
4 Goblin Guide
4 Porcelain Legionnaire
4 Scrapheap Scrounger
4 Toolcraft Exemplar
2 Bonesplitter
2 Cultivator’s Caravan
4 Lightning Bolt
3 Lightning Helix
4 Shrapnel Blast
3 Smuggler’s Copter
2 Blackcleave Cliffs
4 Concealed Courtyard
2 Darksteel Citadel
2 Godless Shrine
4 Inspiring Vantage
3 Marsh Flats
1 Plains
1 Sacred Foundry
1 Swamp
Sideboard
4 Path to Exile
2 Tidehollow Sculler
3 Leyline of the Void
2 Sudden Shock
2 Grafdigger’s Cage
2 Wear/Tear
While the changes are pretty minimal, I can already see a few things I’m suspicious of. As I’m extremely eager to try the deck out, we’ll discuss those after we see the deck in action.
So my initial concern was the mana base. For a deck that wants red or white on turn one and black or red/white on turn two, Darksteel Citadel is just extremely greedy. My second concern was the amount of red mana in the deck. If you spread it out, we have 14 red cards, four black cards, and nine white cards not including Porcelain Legionnaire. That’s a lot of red cards. Yet we have 10 sources of red, 12 sources of black(!), and 15 sources of white. This is definitely not where we want to be, especially when we’re predominantly a red and white deck that often wants to cast either multiple red spells in one turn or red and white one-drops.
We definitely need more red, and we definitely want a way for our Marsh Flats to find a black and a red mana. Not having one Blood Crypt is kind of a problem. I also know we don’t like including a Mountain because of Blood Moon and the fact that Mountains will be plentiful if there’s a Blood Moon in play, but realistically, sometimes our creatures are going to get Pathed and we’re going to want to fetch a Mountain.
If we’re concerned with having enough artifacts, it’s likely just better to run the full suite of Court Homunculus. I think their synergy is more important with things like Toolcraft Exemplar and Shrapnel Blast than Goblin Guide anyway.
Ultimately I think we do want some number of Path to Exile in the main deck. I get wanting to maximize our spells that deal damage, but nine times out of ten I’d rather have a Path to Exile than a Bonesplitter. Modern is a format where you want to Path creatures that are just too big, like a Tasigur, the Golden Fang for example.
Finally, I get that we don’t want to exile our own graveyard due to Scrapheap Scrounger, but Rest in Peace is just so far ahead of Leyline of the Void in terms of usefulness, it’s not even close.
Ultimately the deck was pretty fun, and I think the wins are there, it just needs a bit of tweaking. I know the mana base was definitely a point of contention. The best part about having this much burn is you can just kill your opponents out of nowhere, and that’s just good times. Thanks for reading and have a great holiday!
Frank Lepore
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