8 Rack and Bogles

Hey all! Today I wanted to talk to you about some Modern! There's a Modern PTQ coming up this weekend that I've been preparing for and I wanted to blab out my thoughts a bit. I have two decks put together that I can play and short of borrowing something from someone else, It's between 8 Rack and Bogles!

If you're unfamiliar with 8 Rack, let me break it down for you. It's super annoying to play against, locks you out of combat, destroys your hand, and kills you with some number and combination of The Rack and/or Shrieking Affliction.

Here's my current list;

Land: 22
2 Blinkmoth Nexus
2 Dakmor Salvage
4 Godless Shrine
4 Isolated Chapel
4 Marsh Flats
5 Swamp
1 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth

Spells: 38
3 Ensnaring Bridge
3 Ghostly Prison
4 Inquisition of Kozilek
4 Liliana of the Veil
4 Lingering Souls
2 Path to Exile
4 The Rack
3 Raven's Crime
4 Shrieking Affliction
4 Thoughtseize
3 Wrench Mind

Sideboard: 15
1 Ensnaring Bridge
1 Ghostly Prison
2 Kataki, War's Wage
4 Leyline of Sanctity
2 Rest in Peace
2 Stony Silence
2 Surgical Extraction
1 Wrench Mind

As you can see, there are a lot of hand hate spells, 14 total, plus 4 Liliana of the Veil to keep their hand light or non-existent. The first 2-3 turns is where you'll focus on their hand and remove any threats that might disrupt your plan. The plan, is usually to resolve an Ensnaring Bridge or Ghostly Prison to prevent their creatures from attacking you, no matter how many or how big. The bridge actually effects all players, not just your opponent, so you might be asking why I have Blinkmoth Nexus and Lingering Souls in here. Well, the short answer is because they are great at stalling the game to help you get your lock on board. The long answer is that they are actually a more consistent and often more reliable win condition for you. The deck likes it when both you and your opponent are in "top-deck" mode, meaning that neither of you have a hand and are just playing whatever you draw each turn. When you draw your card for your turn, creatures with power 1 or less can attack under the bridge, so you can attack with the Nexus or Souls, play your card, pass turn and now you have no hand so your opponent's creatures can't attack unless they have a power of 0. The downside to that, is Affinity can actually do that because they have Signal Pests and Ornithopters, assuming they haven't put any +1/+1 counters on them with Steel Overseer. Once they attack, they can equip a Cranial Plating or sacrifice everything to an Arcbound Ravager to pump the creature for a finishing strike. This is the reason why Kataki, War's Wage and Stony Silence are in the sideboard. This usually isn't too big of a problem with Path to Exile, and Ghostly Prison costs too much for them, usually, to pay for the attack and equip a plating.

The deck is actually super fun to play and I personally feel that it has a strong match against just about anything. Against any aggressive strategies, you just slam a Prison and/or a Bridge and then it's just a matter of time to get set up to win. Against combo decks, you disrupt their hand so much that they can't get what they need. For control match-ups, they can often rely on killing you with enough burn and Snapcaster Mages which is rough because there's no life-gain in the deck, but hand disruption hits them hard, and you can bring in Leyline of Sanctity to stop that strategy. The hardest time this deck will have, is against opposing hand disruption. Taking out your Lily or Bridge can be huge. Luckily, the Leylines stop that too!

With how well I talk about it, it does have some downsides. It suffers from bad draws. You can have a seemingly good hand but the deck often isn't consistent enough to find a Bridge or Prison to lock up the ground and you'll get beaten down by a Tarmogoyf or Vendillion Clique while you draw a bunch of useless discard spells or lands. It doesn't help that there's nothing to draw you extra cards. Dark Confidant would make a great inclusion here, however, the deck spends a lot of time getting set up to win even after you have a bridge locking things up and the Confidant will more often kill you before you have a chance to kill them. The same argument goes for Bitterblossom. Too often have I lost games in playtesting to my own Bitterblossom that I just cut it for the full set of Lingering Souls.

Well, that's 8 Rack! I'm really happy I built it. It's a lot of fun, but it's usually best when no one is expecting it. Larger competitive events are where the deck would likely perform best. It's not really geared to handle the random "FNM" decks.

Anyway, the other deck I mention was Bogles. A personal favorite of mine! Long before I actually committed to playing Modern, Bogles was a deck that I knew I wanted to play. It isn't terribly expensive to build(roughly the same price as Tron or Affinity) so I put it together. I'll talk about the awesomeness of the slippery beasts after I expose my list to all;

Lands: 20
1 Dryad Arbor
1 Forest
4 Horizon Canopy
2 Plains
4 Razorverge Thicket
4 Temple Garden
4 Verdant Catacombs

Creatures: 12
4 Gladecover Scout
4 Kor Spiritdancer
4 Slippery Bogle

Spells: 28
4 Daybreak Coronet
4 Ethereal Armor
4 Hyena Umbra
2 Path to Exile
4 Rancor
4 Spider Umbra
2 Spirit Mantle
2 Suppression Field
2 Unflinching Courage

Sideboard: 15
2 Nature's Claim
4 Leyline of Sanctity
2 Path to Exile
2 Rest in Peace
1 Spirit Link
2 Stony Silence
2 Torpor Orb

This deck is even more straightforward than 8 Rack. Play a Hexproof creature, put a LOT of enchantments on it and attack until dead. There are a lot of cool things going on in here though. If you're not familiar with the cards in here, there are some cool effects. Basically, the Totem Armors are super OP. The Totem Armor mechanic reads; "Totem armor (If enchanted creature would be destroyed, instead remove all damage from it and destroy this Aura.)". The first time I read this, the first question that popped into my head was, "What happens if there are 2 enchantments with Totem Armor on it?". A little rules digging found me a disturbing answer. Basically, you just pick one and destroy that and the rest stay on the creature. Not only is your creature Hexproof and essentially indestructible, but you have to have a way to kill it multiple times to get through the armors! You couldn't ask for a better enchantment for this deck... except maybe Daybreak Coronet. While it requires you to already have an enchantment on your creature before casting this, the benefit granted here is backbreaking... for your opponent! +3/+3, First Strike, Vigilance and Lifelink. It's really too bad you can only run 4 of these in your deck. Anyway, you get the idea of the deck.

As it is now, I would not take this to the PTQ. Having only played the deck for a couple weeks now, I'm not too confident with it, especially with how much of a glass cannon it is, but I definitely think it can steal its way to the top fairly well. The changes I am looking at making is mostly in the sideboard, but the mana base as well. For the lands, I want to squeeze in 3 Misty Rainforests and a second Dryad Arbor. I spent some time researching the deck and reading articles on it, and it's very important to have that Arbor in games where your opening hand doesn't have a hexproof creature. With 7 Fetches to grab the Arbor, it greatly increases my chances of being able to play the deck as it's meant to be played... with a creature on board!

The mana base I'm thinking about looks like this;

Lands: 21
2 Dryad Arbor
4 Horizon Canopy
3 Misty Rainforest
1 Plains
4 Razorverge Thicket
3 Temple Garden
4 Verdant Catacombs

Another interesting thing I learned was that there are matches where you need to board in so much hate, that you can't take out all the enchantments because you won't be able to produce a big enough threat. The strategy there was to board out all of your hexproof creatures instead. Sounds crazy right?! I thought so. I STILL think so! If you do it this way, you rely on your fetches to find a Dryad Arbor while you still have enough enchantments in the deck to make it a formidable foe. You just have to be really careful about decks that have access to removal spells for your Arbor since it's not Hexproof. Usually putting a Totem Armor or 2 on it is enough to keep it safe. Path to Exile is a thing though.

I also mentioned some sideboard changes. The Leylines come out for sure. They're great against hand disruption which severely cripples this deck, but the decks that run Thoughtseize, probably don't have many ways to kill a land/creature. An example is that Abrupt Decay says 'Non-land' creature. Anything else they have has to get through the Totem Armors first. Tron is a really popular archetype in my area but it seems to be a fairly easy match-up since I can go so much faster than they can. Even if they hit a Karn on turn 3, they can only exile one of my lands or enchantments and that's not enough to slow me down. So I'm not wasting the board slots on it.

Living End is a deck that I'm fairly worried about, but I only know of one person who plays it around here so I might just hope that I don't play against it and not use up space in the sideboard for it, but the sideboard is usually just Rest in Peace, which I have anyway, or Relic of Progenitus. The best use for Relic over RIP, is that when they cascade into Living End, you get to keep your creature/s in the graveyard in case they cast it again. This and Storm are good enough reasons to just have 3-4 Relic of Progenitus in the board and call it good.

The two most popular decks are Pod and Twin so I definitely need some hate for those decks. Affinity is a big one too, but I'll just have a little extra lifelink in the board in addition to the Nature's Claims I have there. For Pod and Twin, Torpor Orb hits them both pretty hard while being a permanent that's difficult for them to interact with. Pod has Qasali Pridemage to kill it and Twin can bounce it with Cryptic Command. Paired with Suppression Fields, Pod will have an extremely difficult, if not impossible, time dealing with either the Field or Orb. Paired with Spellskites, Twin will have to get through that first before being able to get rid of the Orb and then combo off.

All that being said, I think my sideboard will look like this;

2 Nature's Claim
4 Relic of Progenitus
2 Spellskite
1 Spirit Link
4 Suppression Field
2 Torpor Orb

Anyway, that's it for my Modern decks. If you have any thoughts on my card choices and theories, let me know in the comments!

Thanks for reading guys,

DannyO
WizardDen.com