With the Columbus Invitational in the books, we now know a lot more about Modern than we did last week.

If you were skeptical about the ability of Amulet Bloom to win long games, Chris VanMeter has shown you the truth. If you weren't into Kolaghan's Command, you have now seen its power demonstrated. If you thought Kolaghan's Command would push Affinity out of the format, you have seen the resilience of that deck as well. And, at the end of the day, we have seen that Tron can beat anything.

Many players like to speculate on what will be banned next in Modern, and with the historically volatile nature of the format this behavior is typically justified. That said, the results of this weekend showcased a lot of different powerful strategies all performing quite well, leading to varied Top 8s.

I like where the format is sitting currently. It actually looks like there are a lot of powerful options instead of one deck on the verge of being banned and a bunch of medium decks that are probably just worse choices.

Collected Company and Grixis have emerged as powerful new strategies while a number of older decks have remained entirely viable. For this reason, a banning of anything wouldn't make much sense to me. I'd entertain the idea of some number of cards coming off the banlist, but for now I see it as a more valuable exercise to not speculate too aggressively on such matters.

For Columbus, there was no way that I'd have enough time to convince myself not to play Grixis Delver. After winning a PPTQ with the deck, I concluded that Delver is sort of a weak link in the deck, but I couldn't find a way to cut it without compromising the matchup against decks like Tron and Amulet Bloom. I made some minor changes to the list and registered the following for Columbus:

I ended up piloting the deck to a 7-1 record at the Invitational, with my one loss consisting of my keeping two six-card one-land hands and bricking into oblivion. The deck is very powerful, if a little confused by the inclusion of the Delvers.

The way that the deck plays out is rather strange. The best way to try to generalize what the deck is doing is by calling it an aggro-control deck with a tempo skeleton. Many of the deck's slots are capable of committing to the tempo strategy of just doing things more efficiently than your opponent and closing the game out quickly, but the deck is fully capable of going long.

Spell Snare is currently better positioned now than it has ever been, and it is a key element in allowing this deck to play the aggressor against certain decks while still being able to play the control against even the most grindy forms of opposition.

Modern is flush with relevant two-drops, the most notable being Tarmogoyf and Snapcaster Mage. When the late game of so many decks can be countered by the same tool that helps you dominate the early game, you gain some serious percentage across the board by jamming the full set of Spell Snares.

On the other end of the spectrum, your spells that cost one measure up very well against other spells that cost one, while Mana Leak and Terminate shine against almost everything that costs three or more.

One of the more obscure elements of this deck that I would like to highlight is the sideboard Countersqualls.

I've recognized Snapcaster Mage as the best card in Modern many times. One of the reasons that the card is so great is that its inclusion in any deck with four Lightning Bolts makes that deck capable of winning games as a burn deck. Countersquall amplifies this element in any matchup defined by non-creature spells, and gives you more avenues to take chip shots and really pressure your opponent's life total.

The two things that I'm most worried about when playing this deck are Lingering Souls and hexproof, and you can see that fear evidenced in the construction of my sideboard.

Electrolyze is objectively weaker than Kolaghan's Command, but you have to do something to stop from losing to a four-for-one. Engineered Explosives can be used to clean up spirits and hexproof creatures alike, though it doesn't exactly work against umbras. That's where the miser's Hibernation stands out, which also has splash damage against Collected Company Elves.

Going Forward With the Deck

The big question remains--should this deck continue to play Delver of Secrets? The answer is still unclear to me, but I've come up with what I consider to be the strongest alternatives.

Before we explore cutting Delver, it's important to understand why that's something we'd want to do.

The answer is that Delver is the odd man out when you are trying to play a control game. I was the only Delver player to post a 7-1 or better record in Columbus, with the other Grixis decks being more controlling. The decks generally shifted to Blood Moon and Cryptic Command over Delver, or Splinter Twin in the case of Kyle Boggemes.

These cards are great for stealing games, but they're very easy for an experienced player to prepare for and defeat. I like the other Grixis lists from the Invitational, but at the end of the day what they make up in grindy matchups they lose against decks like Amulet Bloom and Tron, and I believe that they hurt the bad matchups more than they improve the good ones.

The change that I'm considering is cutting Delver for Lingering Souls. The extra color isn't ideal, but Souls fits perfectly in our Thought Scour deck if we ignore the fact that the mana isn't free. This inclusion would make us much better against the other Grixis decks in addition to being great against Affinity and other Lingering Souls decks.

The major questions about making Souls work are how to configure the manabase and what, if anything, we need to change to be positive against Amulet Blood and Tron.

The manabase solution involves more Flooded Strands and just more lands in general, while the Bloom and Tron solution likely involves a very hateful sideboard. The change would be dramatic and any list I could post would be so rough, I would rather wait to see if I can make this work before posting a list.

It seems pretty likely to me that this build of the deck would likely need Blood Moon for Tron and Amulet Bloom, which may sound silly when you're splashing a fourth color, but you'd be boarding out the Lingering Souls in those matchups anyway.

As far as changes for the deck if you decide to leave Delver in, I would play my exact 75 again in a heartbeat.

You might be tempted to run Gitaxian Probe. Don't. You have the tools to beat everything. There is a cost to running four Terminate in that drawing multiples in certain matchups sucks, but having the full four will help in the matchups where it's good much more often than getting Terminate-flooded will cost you games. This is very much a three-game deck, and the more Probes you play the more tools you'll have to remove.

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I really like the state of Modern right now, and I believe that fears of bannings are unwarranted currently. Tron and Amulet Bloom would be the two potential decks on the chopping block, but neither have demonstrated any breaking of the rules in a way that wouldn't have already led to them being banned.

Infect is every bit as capable of turn two or three kills as Amulet Bloom, and neither deck seems to be oppressively pushing things out. When Cloudpost was banned, it was because it pushed all of the other slow decks out of the format, which Tron is in no way guilty of, even if it does put pressure on them. Some pressure is totally fine.

If you have any ideas for how to cut the Delvers without costing the deck too many percentage points against Tron and Bloom, I'm very interested to read them in the comments.

Thanks for reading.

-Ryan Overturf
@RyanOverdrive on Twitter