Meme or Dream? Hellcarver Demons in Modern

Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Meme or Dream? This week, we're heading to the world of infamous small Japanese tournament Modern decks to try an odd pile of Demons headlined by the power of Hellcarver Demon, of all things. On paper, the deck looks super random. It's got Gyruda, Doom of Depths, but not all of our cards are evens. It's got Persist, but many of our creatures are legendary. It has Goryo's Vengeance, but our best hasty reanimation target is the non-legendary Hellcarver Demon. The good news is that it's also overloaded with massive creatures, which means if we can just stick one or two of them, they'll probably be enough to win us the game. The deck came in Top 8 during a recent (maybe eight-player...) small Japanese tournament, so maybe it's better than it looks? That's what we're going to figure out today as we take Hellcarver Demons through a Modern league to find out if it's a meme or dream.

Meme or Dream? Hellcarver Demons

Wrap-Up

So, Hellcarver Demons falls firmly in the meme category. We ended up going 1-4 in our league, although we did pick up a couple more sweet wins throughout our matches. The inconsistency problems we talked about in the intro were very apparent in our games. Sometimes, we'd have a Hellcarver Demon to reanimate but only Goryo's Vengeance in hand. Other times, we'd really want Griselbrand but be stuck with Persist in hand. We did some spectacular things when things came together, including winning with Hellcarver Demon in Modern, which has been on my bucket list for a while now. But in general, the deck was just too inconsistent to really be competitive.

The worst part of the deck by far was the sideboard. I honestly don't understand what the sideboard is trying to do, with it mostly being a bunch more big creatures that are arguably worse than the ones we have in the main deck and don't really fix any of the deck's issues (consistency and fighting through graveyard hate). Patriarch's Bidding is also super odd in the sideboard since it's another card that gets shut down by graveyard hate. While the mass reanimation could be an interesting main-deck build-around, it's weird in the sideboard, and I'm not sure when I would actually bring it in.

As far as improvements for the deck, apart from fixing the sideboard, one interesting option is adding Cabal Coffers and Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth as ways to ramp into our finishers naturally. Our deck is very heavily black—the only blue cards we have are Tome Scour and Otherworldly Gaze, which we could still easily play with an all-Swamp mana base thanks to fetch lands, surveil lands, and shock lands. If I were to take the deck back out for another spin, I'd change the mana base to add Urborg and Coffers, probably cut the Heartless Summoning to play more lands in general, and hope that we could hard-cast our Demons as needed to fight through graveyard hate. While I'm still not sure this would make the deck good, I do think it would at least make it better.

Conclusion

Anyway, that's all for today. As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.