Are you a Quiet Speculation member?
If not, now is a perfect time to join up! Our powerful tools, breaking-news analysis, and exclusive Discord channel will make sure you stay up to date and ahead of the curve.
A Spell Queller strategy! It turns out that Collected Company gets better with more sets being Standard legal, and Eldritch Moon brought some powerful additions. Devin Koepke put the deck to work in taking down the first major event of Eldritch Moon Standard at the Columbus Open:
Bant Company
You've seen most of this before, and there are no new cards in the sideboard. Though there is a new cast of characters in the maindeck:
Selfless Spirit makes destroy effects awkward against the deck, while Spell Queller both covers Languish and also just poses a significant detriment to the opponent's ability to play Magic. If you had any doubts about this card's power level, check out game one of the finals, in which Koepke resolved two Spell Quellers and that was pretty much the whole game. Thalia also does a good job at hindering the opponent's ability to play Magic, which can matter a lot in the mirror as you don't have to worry about the opponent adding more untapped creatures to the battlefield at instant speed.
I do think that four Thalia and three Duskwatch Recruiter seems odd, and in particular I feel like Recruiter gets better in a world where you will often leave up Spell Queller mana anyway. Dead Weight is gaining popularity, but Thalia doesn't exactly block against that.
I expect most Bant Company lists to look similar to this going forward, with the most major change being that I wouldn't expect (m)any Bounding Krasis anymore, so I would recommend adjusting your play pattern around that. This looks to be the most oppressive iteration of Bant Company we've seen to date, and unless things are shaken up significantly at the Pro Tour I would expect to get used to playing against this deck again.
Prior to this weekend, Selfless Spirit was selling closer to $2, and now is closer to $3. If you can get a set for $8-10 I like picking them up now, because this card is definitely going to remain popular.
But the last couple weeks of testing have led me to miss that early delirium for matchups where sticking Magus of the Moon or finding a crucial Snapcaster Mage could mean life or death.
Between Denial, Snapcaster Mage for Denial, and Traverse for Snapcaster for Denial, most mid-games leave us with about ten functional copies of the instant in our deck. Flayer's "gravescry 3" effect lets us dump anything that doesn't keep us ahead, and following combat with a Serum Visions lets us dig seven cards deep to find adequate disruption for our opponent's next turn. Some context: that's a Dig Through Time's-worth of new cards seen.
Disrupting Shoal shines against every linear Modern deck outside of big mana strategies like Tron and Valakut, but I've already discussed it at length elsewhere. It also fulfills a role similar to Lightning Bolt's in this deck. This section will instead focus on Stubborn Sultai's other methods of beating a Modern gauntlet.
Denial and Mana Leak can usually handle Tron's payoff cards in time for Flayer, Goyf, and Snapcaster to squeeze in 20 points of damage, although we do miss Simic Charm sometimes against a resolved 6/6.
Four slots still needed filling. I started with a full set of Stubborn Denial, reasoning that if Traverse was live more often, I could dig up Temple or Thought-Knot reliably enough to fully benefit from a one-mana Negate. But some initial tests revealed that the deck wanted more ways to interact with creatures, especially ones that lived through Tarfire. TarmoDrazi needs to interact with opponents as it sets up its lands and hand with cantrips and search effects. If it can "start playing" at the same time as a lightly disrupted opponent, Thought-Knot and Smasher will trump Kitchen Finks and Lingering Souls any day of the week. Dismember was my go-to choice here, and it hasn't disappointed me yet. Even against aggro decks, Dismember usually loses us less life than a few hits from whatever threat they would have, and costing only one is a huge deal in a deck with so many cantrips.
During Eldrazi Winter, I often joked (seriously) that Eldrazi was such a powerful deck because it ran 20 Tarmogoyfs.* Indeed, unhindered access to so many efficient threats did break the deck. While no Eye of Ugin slows us down a little, we still play those same creatures, and aggro decks like Zoo and Burn struggle immensely against a wall of 4/4s. These decks can come out from under us if we don't turn the corner aggressively, but we still enjoy positive matchups against Modern's swarms of linear aggro strategies. Our removal suite, buffered by Kozilek's Return from the sideboard, hassles synergy-based aggro decks like Chord, Affinity, Merfolk, and Elves.
When beginning any statistical or scientific inquiry, it is essential to have a known baseline to compare your results to. Reaching an interesting result is all well and good but if you can't prove that it is something new and valuable compared to the status quo then you're just wasting time. And grant money. And good luck getting more money if that's all your research is doing.
Not a bad creature to start off with. Pestermite was a format staple for years at that cost and had worse stats, though it was easier to cast. 2U may not be that much more difficult than 1WU with Modern's fetch/shock manabase, but I think it will be a barrier in this case. UW is typically a control color in Modern, and this is pretty obviously a tempo/aggro card which will limit the decks that can play it. Vendilion Clique is also very playable as a 3/1 with a double blue cost, which indicates that color commitment isn't that big a barrier to playability when the stats are right. Call it even with a slight edge for Queller since better stats make up for the harder casting cost and worse deck flexibility.
This is Fiend Hunter and Tidehollow Sculler's ability but for spells. Both have seen some play over Modern's history, but have always been limited by their narrowness. Sculler is good against combo and control decks and fairly bad against aggressive decks, whereas Hunter has the opposite problem, and even then is only good against removal-light aggro. Sculler mostly sees play in Eldrazi and Taxes where its ability is abused with Eldrazi Displacer, while Hunter is a Chord target. Since both see some play, I'll argue that the ability regardless of the target is Modern-playable, and thus so is Queller.
an extra payment. Mystic Snake on the other hand just counters the spell. No muss, no fuss, no restrictions based on CMC. Just Counterspell. I think that on average this is better than the Nightmare ability by the same standard that Sculler is usually left on the bench in favor of Inquisition of Kozilek---When you want something gone, you want it to stay gone. The only time that Queller's ability is better is against uncounterable spells, which are few but not so few that it is irrelevant. On that basis I think that Queller is merely good. It has better stats than other cards with the same ability, but it doesn't have the same flexibility or power as Mystic Snake.
The clock was too slow to make great use of the tempo that Queller gained you, and so its performance was lackluster and disappointing.
