Solid, just solid

So this time around I’m diving into details of Bant Company. The deck is solid, pretty solid. I switched from a 4 Spell Queller to a 4 Reflector Mage build, back afterwards, settled on Nissa, Steward of Elements for now, playing a single Jace, the Mind Sculptor out of the sideboard.

The thing that bothers me most is the fact, that Modern adapted quickly to the unbannings. Player’s quickly switched decks to either grind against Jace and Bloodbraid Elf or go under / over them.

Again, Bant is in the middle of nowhere. Kelvin Chew, the most prominent successor with Bant Knightfall, discarded Retreat to Corallhelm for two Jace’s, added two Vendilion Clique to compensate for the gap in interaction and called it a day.

Yes, the playset Voice of Resurgence haven’t been overlooked. This is more of a concession to the vast majority of player’s trying to grind Bant out – Voice ‘ll give ‘em a hard time again. If someone is upon summoning up and concluding the changes the deck went through he will recognize that this build exchanged 2-for-2 pieces of interaction (Retreat for Clique), added additional grind-power (Voice of Resurgence plus Jace) and therefore just adapted to the expected metagame, which every midrange-deck is forced to do so once in a while.

The category “midrange” was somehow like an alien to me because I always recognized the deck like a tempo-shell – but MtgSalvation forums showed me, that this wasn’t entirely correct. It does make sense in the matter that it tries to be more grindy than before, so the categorization is totally fine.

First – A brave new world

I am running two Nissa, Steward of Elements right now, which are able to close out games much faster than Jace could ever dream of. I gave the girl some tries and it was totally fine for this deck. Here’s what she does:

A)     Generate Card Advantage

Literally here 0. My deck has 50 hits for zero loyality. This ability reminds me of Domri Rade, which is easily able to grind through Control Decks w/o pressure on board. A direct comparison is lacking the fact that Domri can defend himself with his minus – a quality Nissa doesn’t share.

Nevertheless she has a chance (I guess it’s about 50/50 with 28 creatures in the deck) of turning up a critter that blocks attacking forces and therefore defend here.

B)      Generate Card Quality

The +2 is really beautiful. Some Salvation users claim that it is too sweet to be a competitive brawler, I disagree on this point because different boardstates and game situations create different needs.

It isn’t the Brainstorm that Jace does. It’s worse, no matter how u recognize it. The biggest liability: Scry 2 and the anti-synergy with fetchlands and Knight of the Reliquary. That does leave here ability much less powerful – Bant Company does lose some flexibility because instant-action takes much more attention now.

I want to highlight why I’m a big proposer, although I know about those issue. Bant Company has 8 cards that does profit immensely from the scry-stuff – 4 Collected Company, 2 Vendilion Clique, 2 Tireless Tracker.

Those 8 cards gives me a lot of flexibility – my new-best-lovely-sweet-cute-play is Cliquing myself. It has saved me already some games, but the setup with Nissa along the draw of Clique, Tracker and even Collected Company is too good to pass on.

C)      Close out the game

The -6 is as funny as it gets. Once the game gets to a boardstall creating some huge flyers becomes insanely good. Against combo or ramp it is really too cute – but hey, do other planeswalkers do an outstanding job in this case? I don’t think so.

Especially Jace has a bit of a flaw though that he can’t close the game super fast – it takes some time to tick him ‘round and ultimate him. Nissa is a tidy bit faster.

This was just a short breakdown of a cool planeswalker that doesn’t see enough play in modern. I’m on the hypetrain and hope that u’ll slam here for some games.

Second – Ups and Downs

I was impressed by some cards, others let me down way too often. I’ve picked three examples and share my thoughts and insights to you.

A)     Unified Will

Let’s begin with the bad one. This thing was crappy way too often. Look, I know counters in this format are conditional – but there’s a line were conditional is too conditional. I had a lot of situations when Unified Will was bad.

It sticked for many turns as a dead card in hand, even in matchups where it should be really helpful – Control and Combo. Either my opponent had two Snapcaster Mage’s and I had Bird plus Ooze, on another occasion a boardwipe hit me and my opponent followed up with Jace, and don’t even talk about Abzan Company – heck, has that card let me down.

Options – Disdainful Stroke plus Negate. A 2/2 split looks promising on paper. Stroke is a favorite of mine (besides Stubborn Denial and Spell Pierce) and takes care of some really powerful spells and adds some exceptional power to complement Spell Queller – the first counters 4+ cmc-spells, the latter 4- cmc-spells (see what I did there?). Some examples: Through the Breach, Primeval Titan, Jace, the Mind Sculptor, Gifts Ungiven, Wurmcoil Engine, Karn Liberated and some more.

Negate is solid, just solid. The more problematic spells for Bant are non-creature things.

B)      Vendilion Clique

Come on, I’ve never played any kind of Snapcaster Mage deck, therefore never played Clique. It’s the most fun I’ve had for the past couple of months – turn 1 Noble Hierarch into turn 2 Vendilion Clique on the draw step adds some exceptional offensive powers to the deck. The cutest thing becomes cliquing myself – I shuffled away useless stuff and sometimes drew into great answers. On top of that, nobody can deny the synergy with Nissa, Steward of Elements – it just gives me more outs in those games where I’m really in need of an answer.

C)      Reclamation Sage

This is a 1-of out of my sideboard and has a history. I’ve looked through decklists and concluded about some hard-to-beat and mediocre matchups – Ponza, UW Control, Merfolk and Bogles – in the back of my mind I knew that I was in serious need of another hatebear.

I’ve concluded that these decks have one thing in common: Enchantments!

Spreading Sea’s, Search for Azcanta, Rest in Peace, Runed Halo, Aether Vial, Rancor, Daybreak Coronet, Relic of Progenitus, Blood Moon, Utopia Sprawl and some more.

So my decision tree is not so hard to imagine – a 2-for-1, attached to a body and taking care of some problematic permanents (a problem Bant always had – taking care of different types of permanents). I’ve added a single copy to my fifteen and it really convinced me – I’m even boarding it in matchups where it’s uses are not so obvious.

Last Words

I’m going to run the deck on a couple more occasions, but won’t likely invest much time into “teching” or testing different setups or cards. The format is just too wild and untamed for not sticking to a stock list for quite some time – it’s just crazy how much strategies are performing right now.

My big assumption is, that it’s more easily to stick to a more streamlined approach – I’m running Rg Eldrazi in the near future because it’s interaction lines up better (Lightning Bolt, Thought-Knot Seer, Eldrazi Obligator), the Brawler’s are bigger at average and it doesn’t take a brain-knot to get this deck working – just a solid beatdown approach and added interaction.