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Much Abrew: Slivers!!! (Modern, Magic Online)


Hello, everyone! Welcome to another episode of Much Abrew About Nothing. For the last couple of weeks, we haven't had Instant Deck Techs so we could make room for daily Throne of Eldraine spoiler videos, which means today, rather than playing an Instant Deck Tech deck, we have a special episode! One of the tribes that got the most support in Modern Horizons was Slivers, but for some reason, even with powerful new additions like Cloudshredder Sliver, the tribe still hasn't really made a mark in Modern. Today, this is (hopefully) going to change, as we take a five-color build of Slivers out for a spin in a Modern league! The biggest upside of Slivers (apart from having a bunch of two-mana lords) is that in some sense, all Slivers are lords, with each granting every other tribe member an ability. This means if we can stack up enough Slivers, we will eventually end up with a board full of creatures, each with a pile of keywords, hopefully turning our relatively underpowered Slivers into massive threats. Do the powerful new Modern Horizons Slivers mean it is time for the tribe to rise in Modern? Let's get to the video and find out; then, we'll talk more about the deck!

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Much Abrew: Slivers

Discussion

  • We played a league with Slivers and ended up going 3-2, which isn't great but fairly reasonable, especially for a very rogue tribe.
  • Apparently, Slivers is great against Jund. We managed to beat the good-stuff pile twice. Heading into the Jund matches, I was pretty worried about Wrenn and Six (which is basically a two-mana, really slow Wrath of God if we don't find a lord to pump all of our 1/1 Slivers), but in practice, it wasn't a big issue. We even managed to win a game where our opponent played both Wrenn and Six and Liliana of the Veil early in the game. 
  • Probably the biggest problem with the deck was the sideboard. While playing an all-Sliver sideboard is cute, as we learned in our matches against Dredge and Tron, Slivers don't provide many answers to the unfair decks of the format. Considering it felt like we already crush fair decks (beating Jund twice and Eldrazi Tron once), a sideboard full of Diffusion Slivers, Frenetic Slivers, and Dregscape Slivers—all of which are primarily good against fair decks—was rough. The easiest way to improve the deck is to cut some of the random sideboard Slivers for graveyard hate and something like Damping Sphere to help against Tron and Storm-style combo. Necrotic Sliver could also be a good addition, which is somehow missing from the all-Sliver sideboard.
  • The First Sliver probably isn't necessary. I added it to the deck because it seemed fun, but we never really did anything with it. Playing another cheap Sliver or removal spell would likely be better.
  • On the other hand, the other new Modern Horizons additions were solid. Cloudshredder Sliver might be the best Sliver in our deck. The combination of haste and flying allows for some really explosive turns where we kill our opponent out of nowhere by flooding the board with Slivers and getting in for a massive attack. Honorary Sliver Unsettled Mariner is also solid, being one of the few cards that is good against unfair combo-style decks while also protecting our Slivers from targeted removal. Meanwhile, Spiteful Sliver and Dregscape Sliver didn't make a huge mark in our league (probably because they are one-ofs in the main deck), although we did have one game where Dregscape Sliver would have been lethal by allowing us to reanimate a hasty board full of Slivers that had died earlier in the game.
  • Normally, I'm skeptical of decks running both Aether Vial and Collected Company because they tend to make each other worse, but in Slivers, playing both seemed to be fine. Since we only have a Dismember as an additional non-creature spell, even with eight slots dedicated to Aether Vial and Collected Company, we had more than enough creatures to make both function consistently.
  • The mana base can be rough in some games. When we draw a five-color land or two, everything is fine, but we occasionally get have games where we draw our Swamp and a shock land (or Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth) and can't really cast anything. I'm not sure there's a way to really fix the problem since Sedge Sliver requires a Swamp on the battlefield, so we can't play a full-on five color mana base like Humans or Elementals can.
  • So, should you play Slivers? The new additions certainly did a lot of power up the deck, and it was surprising how explosive the tribe can be. The combination of cheap lords  with mass haste and evasion from Cloudshredder Sliver is a great way to steal games out of the blue, sometimes as early as Turn 4. While the sideboard needs a major update to help fight through the unfair decks of the format, if we can get that to the right place, Slivers could actually be a real, competitive tribal deck in the format. If you like tribal decks and playing with lords, Slivers is the way to go in Modern. They're fun and maybe even good at well, with some sideboard upgrades.

Conclusion

Anyway, that's all for today. As don't forget to vote for next week's deck by liking, commenting on, and subscribing to Instant Deck Tech videos! 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.



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