It didn’t begin as a reunion tour. Not even close. I’d just heard about this new drummer in town. He hadn’t really made it big yet, but he was playing out a lot in the local scene. Sure, it wasn’t the big leagues, but I heard good things. When I first heard him play, I knew his was the kind of sound I could work with. I talked to him, and he was interested, so I started trying to piece together the rest of the band besides me and this kid. Domri was his name.
The first group we played with—I kid you not—was a death metal outfit. I know it sounds crazy, but I just thought Domri’s sound would go perfectly with them. “The Obliterators” was what they called themselves. I was right—Domri gelled perfectly with their sound. But it just wasn’t clicking overall. While Domri was great with them, they didn’t really seem to have their act together overall. They were a pretty self-destructive bunch, and I didn’t think that would fly the way the scene is nowadays.
That was when I first thought about a reunion. After hearing Domri play with The Obliterators, I knew he had the talent, and I had this feeling he’d mesh well with our old sound. So I called up the girls and asked them what they thought.
At first, the Knight sisters were a bit hesitant. After all, neither Relly nor Ella had been around the scene much since the last big Battle of the Bands. People were saying that they just couldn’t cut it anymore. Sure, they’d choked last time when they first went up against that new band Death Rite. But was that really enough for everyone to forget about how good they were when they were on?
I convinced the girls to get together for at least few jam sessions, and they agreed. It didn’t take long before they saw what I did—that this Domri kid was the real deal. Our old chemistry was still there, and Domri meshed with it perfectly. After a few weeks of practice, I knew we had something. And it sure was good to have the old band back together.
A lot of people complain about Modern, but I’ve come to really enjoy it. The format is incredibly diverse, both in terms of the decks that see play and those that are actually successful. The Top 8 of Grand Prix San Diego consisted of eight totally distinct decks, which is a pretty awesome place to be. Some people might not like wide-open formats because it’s harder to predict what you might play against, but frankly I think people are going to find a reason to complain about anything. I do think there are some issues, mostly of sideboard cards being too important to the outcome of matches involving the more unfair “engine” decks, but overall I think the format is in fine shape.
I had a great time with Modern recently, not only playing in Grand Prix San Diego itself but also preparing for the event. The huge number of viable competitive decks makes for incredibly interesting playtesting situations. In my time preparing on Magic Online, I forced Wurmcoil Engines to fight Phyrexian Obliterators, locked blue Tron decks with Blood Moon / Stony Silence / Choke, attacked for hundreds of damage in a single turn with Knight of the Reliquary thanks to a Domri emblem, and far, far more.
So how did I end up playing Naya in the Grand Prix? Well, it actually all started with Phyrexian Obliterator. I was messing around with heavy black Jund deck featuring the lamentably underplayed 5/5 trampler alongside Domri Rade because I thought using Domri to make my opponent fight my Obliterators seemed like a fun idea. Not only was it incredibly fun, but it actually turned out to be pretty good. If I could begin a turn with either Domri or Obliterator in play and my opponent had a creature of their own, I found that I almost always won. The ability of the deck to come back from otherwise seriously disadvantaged positions with that interaction was impressive to say the least.
Also impressive was just Domri on his own. I realized pretty quickly that Domri is a much more powerful card in Modern than it is in Standard. Domri is an inherently high variance card. Sure, you can and should construct your deck with Domri in mind in order to give yourself the best chance of hitting off of his +1 ability, but some games you’ll hit twice in a row and get incredibly far ahead, while in others you’ll miss twice in a row and fall even further behind. This is exacerbated by the fact that Domri leaves the “misses” on top of your deck—if you hit land with his +1 ability, not only do you not get you extra card but you have to draw land for the turn.
This works differently in Modern thanks to fetchlands. Not only do fetchlands improve your virtual total creature count by thinning lands out of your deck and making you more likely to hit with Domri, but on the occasions when you do miss, you can use a fetchland to shuffle and hopefully still draw action on the following turn. Sometimes you miss but see a card you want anyway like a Lightning Bolt that might finish your opponent off, and you can choose not to fetch based on that information.
The quality of the dual lands and mana creatures available in Modern also make it much easier to play Domri on turn 2, which makes a big difference in his effectiveness. Many control decks are hard-pressed to handle a second turn Domri generating card advantage and ticking up to a nigh-unbeatable ultimate, and other creature decks can easily fall behind in board presence thanks to the power of the fight ability alongside sizable creatures.
Phyrexian Obliterator was my sizable creature of choice for a while, but the supporting cast just wasn’t there. The mana requirements of Obliterator really limited my card choices, and I found the deck was quite fragile against opposing aggressive decks since it dealt so much damage to itself from fetches and shocklands. It looked something like this:
Creatures (28)
- 4 Tarmogoyf
- 4 Shriekmaw
- 4 Putrid Leech
- 4 Phyrexian Obliterator
- 4 Gravecrawler
- 4 Geralf's Messenger
- 4 Deathrite Shaman
Planeswalkers (3)
Lands (23)
Spells (6)
I liked a lot of what was going on with the deck and vowed to come back to it later, but I felt like I needed to explore other options, especially when R/G Aggro and U/W/R kept showing up more and more frequently in Magic Online Daily results and didn’t seem like good matchups.
One of the things I did like about the Obliterator deck, though, was how well it matched up against Lightning Bolt. Lightning Bolt is the defining card in Modern. It sets the parameters for what creatures are actually playable in the format. If a creature costs more than Lightning Bolt and dies to it without providing some kind of value, it probably isn’t something you want to bother with. I find it amusing that Wild Nacatl got banned ostensibly to prevent synergy-based aggressive decks from seeing play, but the real culprit keeping Lord of Atlantis, Wizened Cenn, and company in check is Lightning Bolt.
In any case, I wanted to ensure that my deck was resilient to Lightning Bolt, which dovetails nicely with the sort of creature selection that Domri Rade wants to fight with. Loxodon Smiter was an easy choice since it matches up extremely well against both Lightning Bolt and Remand, both of which I expected to be very popular. Tarmogoyf was similarly a no-brainer. But what about Knight of the Reliquary?
Regular readers of my articles no doubt know that Knight of the Reliquary is my favorite card in Magic. I love powerful aggressive cards that provide a lot of gameplay options, and Knight is the best in the business. I played Knight of the Reliquary in my deck at PT Return to Ravnica, however, and regretted it because of Deathrite Shaman. Opposing Deathrite Shamans can make it extremely difficult to keep a Knight big enough to be the game-dominating threat that it’s mean to be.
So why’d it make the deck this time? Simple: Lightning Bolt. In the Junk deck I played at the Pro Tour, I didn’t really have any efficient ways to deal with opposing Deathrite Shamans, but in Naya, I have access to the best in the business. A one-mana removal spell that can kill an opposing Shaman no questions asked before it can do any damage to the lands in my graveyard makes my Knights that much more likely to be able to enter the battlefield big enough to withstand my opponent’s Lightning Bolts—in this Bolt-happy world, that can make all the difference.
Domri also plays a big role in making Knight good in this deck while it may not be elsewhere. He provides removal tacked on to a planeswalker, which means you can actually afford to kill an opposing Deathrite Shaman early on without fearing that your opponent is going to play something else that you need to destroy when you’re out of removal for it. That’s one of the big draws to Domri in a format full of powerful utility creatures—you can kill something that’s causing you some amount of trouble with the fight ability and not have to worry that you’re “spewing” removal you may need later. And with Knight on your side, the limit to what you can win fights against is essentially non-existent.
That was the basic core of the deck: mana creatures in Noble Hierarch and Deathrite Shaman, solid unBoltable bodies in Tarmogoyf, Knight of the Reliquary, and Loxodon Smiter, and Lightning Bolts and Domris for removal. Those elements of the deck never really changed in all of my testing. The rest shifted around a lot. I took a lot of inspiration from xMiMx on Magic Online, who was playing a Blood Moon Naya deck to a lot of success in Daily Events, and I tried out a lot of his ideas. I didn’t like Blood Moon as a maindeck card, however, since I thought the field was going to be very diverse and it was a weak card in a lot of matchups.
My biggest issue was finding more cheap creatures I wanted to play. I felt like the deck needed something else lower on the curve with reasonable game impact because it was very heavy at three mana. I started out with Lotus Cobra, but the deck didn’t really have many ways to use the excess mana at the time so it felt like a waste. I tried Burning-Tree Emissary for a while after I saw them in xMiMx’s deck but wasn’t really impressed. They were reasonable against opposing beatdown decks as a defensive measure or against pure combo decks to help race, but they just were too low impact against other creature decks. Eventually, I actually came back full circle to Lotus Cobra after adding Kessig Wolf Run and a few higher-cost spells, and that was where I stayed.
Here’s the deck as I ended up playing it:
Creatures (25)
- 4 Tarmogoyf
- 2 Kitchen Finks
- 3 Noble Hierarch
- 4 Knight of the Reliquary
- 1 Qasali Pridemage
- 2 Lotus Cobra
- 2 Thundermaw Hellkite
- 4 Loxodon Smiter
- 3 Deathrite Shaman
Planeswalkers (5)
Lands (23)
Spells (7)
A few notes on individual cards:
Kessig Wolf Run: Most decks I’ve seen play Gavony Township as their utility land of choice, but here I think Wolf Run is dramatically better. I actually played Kessig Wolf Run in the very first Modern Pro Tour ever—PT Philadelphia—because it is so powerful with Knight of the Reliquary. That same logic remains here—it’s pretty easy to break a stalemate with a 12/12 that you can pump and give trample—but it’s also a matter of looking at what you’re trying to do contextually.
These sort of utility lands are at their most important in games that can go long between creature decks, and many of those games in Modern are going to involve Lingering Souls, Kitchen Finks, or both. Gavony Township does very little to break through those cards, while Kessig Wolf Run can frequently kill a chump-blocking opponent on the spot, making it the clear choice. It’s worth keeping Wolf Run in mind when you have a Lotus Cobra in play since you frequently will want to save fetchlands for additional damage.
Qasali Pridemage: I knew I wanted access to two copies of Qasali Pridemage as insurance against artifacts and enchantments between the maindeck and sideboard, and I wanted to make more sideboard room at the last minute. I ended up moving the second Pridemage to the maindeck and cutting my third Lotus Cobra and then never drew the maindeck Pridemage all tournament. I like Pridemage because it’s a proactive card that gives you flexible answers to cards like Birthing Pod, Wurmcoil Engine, Batterskull, and enchantments out of the Bogle deck. There are more powerful specific answers to any of them, but they can’t attack your opponent the same way Pridemage can.
Thundermaw Hellkite: Hellkite gets the nod over something like Baneslayer or Sigarda for a few reasons. The first is Lingering Souls. I expected G/W/B to be a very popular deck thanks to its recent success online and the number of mentions it got in articles over the past few weeks, and Lingering Souls is the best card most G/W/B decks have against you. Hellkite gives you a powerful breaker against them while also serving as an excellent threat under Blood Moon. I was actually playing Vengevine in this slot for a while, but the angry plant matches up poorly against Deathrite Shaman decks and doesn’t close out games nearly as well against stuff like Wurmcoil Engine. Lotus Cobra enabling a turn 3 Hellkite with a fetchland is a nice bonus.
Ajani Vengeant: A few days before the Grand Prix, Ben Stark sent out a list to our testing group that was U/W splashing red just for Ajani Vengeant. His reasoning was that Ajani was an incredibly powerful card that had mostly been kept down by Bloodbraid Elf and that it was nearly unbeatable for many control decks on top of being a good card against beatdown. This led to comments about putting Ajani into all kinds of different decks, and I ended up replacing one of my Kitchen Finks with a copy and being quite happy with it. Amusingly, both Eric Froehlich and I ended up making Top 8 with seemingly random Ajanis in our decks.
Path to Exile: This one might not seem like it needs much explanation, but I wasn’t actually playing Path in the deck for a long time in its development. I had Burst Lightning to better fight opposing Deathrite Shamans and Dark Confidants, but after losing to the U/W/R Splinter Twin deck with zero Boltable creatures and Wurmcoil Engine one too many times, I put Path back in and was happy with the results. This deck can afford to skimp on removal compared to most decks because Domri doubles as a kill spell, but it’s hard to replace the efficiency and universality of Path.
Elspeth, Knight-Errant: Because I can.
Ulvenwald Tracker: Tracker is probably the most out-of-place-looking card on the list, but it was actually spectacular in my testing. Against any kind of removal-light creature deck like Birthing Pod, you can virtually lock the game up with Tracker and any of your sizable creatures. I had two Trackers in my sideboard for a while, but I decided they were probably too narrow to spend that much space on them and ultimately split to one Tracker and one Mindcensor.
Thrun, the Last Troll: There was word that U/W/R was going to be extremely popular at the Grand Prix, and I wanted to have some extra insurance for the matchup. Thrun isn’t really necessary against U/W/R per se, but it’s certainly the best card against them whether they’re U/W/R Control or Geist since it plays both offense and defense very well. Moving forward, I’d probably cut the Thruns for more tools against decks like Eggs and Scapeshift because those are some of the tougher matchups.
In fact, this is about what I’d probably play if I were to compete in another Modern tournament tomorrow:
Creatures (25)
- 4 Tarmogoyf
- 2 Kitchen Finks
- 3 Noble Hierarch
- 4 Knight of the Reliquary
- 1 Qasali Pridemage
- 2 Lotus Cobra
- 2 Thundermaw Hellkite
- 4 Loxodon Smiter
- 3 Deathrite Shaman
Planeswalkers (5)
Lands (23)
Spells (7)
While this list still isn’t what I’d choose to play if I knew my opponents were going to be playing combo decks, it has more tools to fight them. Specifically, I like having a diverse range of hate cards against Eggs to make Echoing Truth less effective. The first Gaddock Teeg or Mindcensor is much more effective than the second Stony Silence or Blood Moon, so splitting the difference gives you a much better chance in the matchup. The pair of Mindcensors plus Blood Moons and Tectonic Edge should hopefully help in the Scapeshift matchup, and as sad as I may be to lose Ulvenwald Tracker in the deck, the Mindcensors and Gaddock Teeg may just be better against Birthing Pod decks anyway.
Overall, I had a blast playing this deck and would highly recommend it to anyone who has reason to play Modern in the near future and likes to be on the side of good. There are all kinds of “broken” things you can do in Modern these days, but there’s still a place for an honest man attacking with honest creatures—and that’s good enough for me.
Until next time,
bmk