Back in March, Team Pantheon's Reid Duke -- a known Legacy Pox player -- developed his personal take on Modern's discard deck 8Rack.

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You can see his list below.

8Rack in Action

As you can see, his version includes some radical choices over what most 8Rack players are used to, so I thought I'd give it a spin to see if there's anything to it. I faced off against RG Tron, two Grixis Delver decks, and Blue Tron in the tournament practice room. The results:

Lessons Learned

There are several things to take away from this:

• The Tron match is improved a little thanks to Smallpox, but not nearly as much as we'd like. Some number of Surgical Extraction would help with this (and with other matches).
• Smallpox as a 4-of is just too much, even with 24 land. Either we need to increase the land count, or drop the Smallpox count.
• 4 Mutavault is too much. I knew this going in as I used 4 for months before finally doing the math and seeing clearly how greedy it is (which was in line with my own experiences). It's not always needed or useful anyway, so I don't feel too bad about trimming one.
• The lack of Ensnaring Bridge is felt very obviously and harshly many times. We absolutely need it or Damnation.
• The flexibility of Dismember was great in these matches, but especially as a 4-of, it would be brutal vs Burn, which is currently sitting pretty atop the meta at 9.2% (9% for MTGO alone), and Affinity (7%).
• No Dakmor Salvage is a mistake. With a Raven's Crime in hand, this is a Lily +1 when we don't have Lily, and a double activation when we do. Persistent discard is extremely important.
• The sideboard proved interesting and useful at times. I'd like to try it a lot more to get a better feel for it. Waste Not sideboard is something I've always approved of; Night is a card I'm glad we can use in this version (in mine it's too expensive).

So, to summarize, I vastly prefer the stock mainboard, but there could be something to the sideboard, if only a piece or two.

Until next time!