Much Abrew: Soultrader Combo (Modern)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Much Abrew About Nothing! This week, we're heading to our new Modern Horizons 3 Modern format to see just how good Warren Soultrader really is! Our deck's plan is to combine Warren Soultrader with Gravecrawler, which lets us sacrifice and recast Gravecrawler an infinite-ish number of times. (Since we'll run out of life eventually, it's not truly infinite.) This does nothing by itself, but if we toss one more piece into the mix—like Marionette Apprentice for infinite-ish damage or Chatterfang, Squirrel General for infinite-ish Squirrels and mana—the combo should end the game immediately! Even outside of the combo, I'm super excited to try out the deck because we've got a bunch of other new cards, including Chthonian Nightmare to help find our combo pieces from the graveyard (and protect them from removal by reanimating them if they die), and a backup plan of beating down with a massive Wight of the Reliquary or two once we use it to sacrifice Bloodghast a few times to tutor up utility lands like Phyrexian Tower and Spymaster's Vault! How good is Warren Soultrader in Modern? Is the plan of grinding out value from the graveyard with Chthonian Nightmare legit? Let's get to the video and find out!
Much Abrew: Soultrader Combo (Modern)
Thoughts
Record-wise, we finished 3-2 with Soultrader Combo, which is a solid, if unspectacular, record. The combo itself was pretty sweet—it managed to win some games super quickly, and it's more resilient than it looks thanks to cards like Chthonian Nightmare and Agatha's Soul Cauldron to reuse our combo pieces from the graveyard. Wight of the Reliquary was also great. Thanks to cards like Stitcher's Supplier for self-mill as well as our sacrifice outlets, it's pretty easy for it to be something like a two-mana 8/8, which can sometimes pick up wins just by beating down!
On the other hand, this definitely felt like an early build of Soultrader Combo. The deck seems a little unfocused and unsure whether it wants to be a combo deck or a graveyard deck. Only having two copies of Marionette Apprentice, for example, sometimes left us in a position where we had Warren Soultrader and Gravecrawler but couldn't find a finisher to close out the game. I wouldn't mind finding a way to add some more copies to the deck, although this would probably require cutting some of the graveyard-y value cards, which might make our grindy Wight of the Reliquary backup plan worse.
All in all, I came away from our league feeling like Warren Soultrader itself and the archetype in general has a lot of potential, but it's going to take some brewing work and testing to get to an optimal list! The deck's a blast to play, so let me know in the comments if you have some ideas on how to improve the deck, and maybe we'll revisit it in the future!
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.
