Battle for Zendikar promises to bring a lot of new toys to Modern. RG Tron stands to gain new colorless targets for Ancient Stirrings while Through the Breach decks could get some new monsters to cheat into play. Burn players might benefit from a Goblin Guide reprint (or maybe not with Goblin Piledriver in Standard…). Modern brewers are probably looking forward to other newcomers, including trap cards, Vampires, and (of course) the Rosewater-confirmed return of Allies . Can’t wait until September for the new Allies? Luckily, Modern already has Ally decks for you competitive tribal players.

In today’s Deck of the Week, we are going to look at an Allies/Collected Company blend from a recent PPTQ in Italy. As with last week’s spotlight on Soulflayer Aggro, we’ll analyze the deck itself, look at its current and historical context, and suggest some room for improvement. Allies have always been one of my favorite tribes, and I’m excited to see them get even a little face time in Modern. Let’s see what this tribe can do with some more tuning!

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The List and Strategy

Like Goblins, Humans, and other fringe tribal decks, Allies has a limited history in Modern. This mostly takes the form of Daily appearances with the occasional paper finish. Authors sometimes tackle the tribe, as Frank Lepore did in a tech piece back in March 2015. Showing just how diverse Modern is (not to mention how powerful some of its new cards are), Daniel Mulato took an Allies deck to a Top 8 finish at a recent Italian PPTQ. Mulato got fourth at the event in Montecatini Terme on 7/26, playing in a Top 8 against usual suspects like Jund, Merfolk, Grixis Control, and Burn. Here is his semi-finalist list:

As if Mulato's T4 win wasn't cool enough on its own, he came back a week later and snagged T8 at another PPTQ! His only changes were -1 Harabaz Druid and +1 Adaptive Automaton in the maindeck and -1 Suppression Field and +1 Rending Volley in the board.

Collected Company putting in more Modern work! Company has done wonders for the format, enabling at least three top-tier archetypes (Elves, Abzan Company, and Naya Zoo) and improving the odds of many other developing lists. Mulato’s Allies list is the newest tribal list to get a big boost from the card. The list has elements of both Merfolk and Naya Company, combining the synergy of the fish with the aggression and removal of Zoo. It even leverages Aether Vial, a card I explored in an earlier Deck of the Week on Modern Humans. Here are some of the key strengths and synergies in Mulato’s list, along with why these are relevant in the Modern metagame.

• Kabira Evangel is a total monster. Cast at sorcery-speed during your main phase, it effectively makes your entire squad unblockable. This alpha-strike potential is huge against the grindier decks in Modern, such as Jund, Abzan Company, and Grixis Control (just watch out for the Cryptic Command tapdown). Combined with Aether Vial, or a lucky Company flip, Evangel gets even crazier. He singlehandedly invalidates the format’s spot removal, protecting your key allies from Terminate, Lightning Bolt, Abrupt Decay, Path to Exile and any other spells thrown your way. He can also screw with combat math, shutting down an otherwise profitable attack. This is a unique effect no other tribe has access to, which makes Evangel a powerful tool in the Allies arsenal.

• Ally triggers scale nicely with Collected Company. Have a Hada Freeblade in play and flip two Allies off of a Company? That’s two counters for the Freeblade and two triggers for your flipped allies as they “see each other” entering off Company. This adds up to a lot of damage in a big hurry. One issue with this strategy is that average flips, or flips on a wiped board, aren’t great. If you have no Allies in play, Company will (on average) get you a pair of 3/3s to hold the line. Compare to Zoo, which can easily flip a Smiter/Goyf combo. Then again, the better flips in Allies are much better than the flips in Naya. For instance, with a 2/3 Freeblade and 2/2 Blademaster on the board, a flipped Evangel and Battlesinger will smash across the board for an unblockable 15 damage (6/5 Freeblade, 6/4 Blademaster, 3/1 Battlesinger). Modern rewards explosive plays and Allies has serious smash potential. This also touches on the redundancy of Allies: they don’t need “Lords” to function the same way other tribes do. This makes them strong in spot removal packed metagames, or even against sweepers. Is an Ally getting bolted with Company or Vial ready? Send in reinforcements and pump your dude in response .

• One of my favorite cards in Modern is Suppression Field. It screws over so many decks at such an early point in the game , and is something most players will never see coming. Unfortunately for Field fans like myself, not many decks can use it well. You need a white deck with minimal activated abilities, which realistically cuts out a slew of builds including Merfolk, Elves, Affinity, Burn, etc. Allies gets to run the full playset in the board. It’s rare we look to sideboards for a unique deck strength, but this is often a mistake. Some decks are uniquely suited to running powerful hate. Allies is a prime example of this, maintaining all of its core tribal synergies while still keeping an active Field. Vial is a casualty of this post-board gameplan, but that’s often the price you pay for the power of a turn two Field. Ondu Cleric is also in this category, powering out crazy amounts of life as early as turns 2-3. This buys you lots of time to handle decks like Burn and Affinity: Company and Vial can even combine with Cleric to dodge lifegain prevention effects like Skullcrack!

When I compare Allies to highter-tier tribal decks like Merfolk and Elves, the strengths that stand out to me are their explosiveness in the turn 3-4 range, their redundancy (everything is a mini-Lord), and their resilience to damage-based removal. With a Vial or Company at the ready, it’s really risky to aim burn spells (or even Anger of the Gods-style sweepers) at an Ally target. A vialed-in Evangel will save the day, and even a quick toughness pump from a newly entered creature can put the target out of range. With the metagame shifting to more battles against grindy decks like Jund and Grixis Control, this is a powerful asset for the tribe. Note this is also combined with the potential for huge Allies swings out of nowhere on turns 3-4. Even a turn five swing can quickly seal the game against even an entrenched opponent. Does this oversell Allies to some extent over Merfolk or Elves? Probably, but that’s part of the fun in working with new decks. You need to start somewhere, and Allies has some compelling foundations.

Allies in Context

Mulato may have been the most recent Allies player to put up a Modern win, but he’s by no means the first. MTGO player MadKat snagged three Daily finishes back in February, running a Hardened Scales-powered list in each of his 3-1 finishes. His sideboard had a lot of resemblances to Mulato’s, with a combination of Ondu Cleric to blunt aggressive decks and Return to the Ranks to restock during removal-heavy games. The deck also sees some occasional play in the Japanese Modern scene, including a few finishes at the end of the December 2014 season and a recent one in early July. This recent list, piloted by Ishikawa Shou on July 4th, was an even more streamlined version of Mulato’s. Ishikawa brought a full playset of Adaptive Automaton to the deck, ditching the Druid accelerators and the four-mana Paladins. Although these are isolated instances of Allies succeeding in Modern (to some extent, you can find an isolated instance of almost any deck succeeding in Modern), they are heartening performances for Allies fans everywhere.

One of the hardest things to do as a brewer is evaluate the individual successes for rogue decks. This is particularly true of rogue tribal decks, which can often feel like worse versions of existing tribal decks (e.g. Merfolk and Elves) or even existing aggro decks (e.g. Affinity, Burn, and Naya Company). Modern has a fairly high bar for deck viability, and most rogue builds fall solidly underneath that bar. Is there any metagame context that changes this outlook for Allies? As I mentioned earlier, one of these is the prevalence of fairer decks like Grixis Control and Jund, both of which are omnipresent in the metagame. These decks rely on spot removal and damage-based interaction, both of which Allies is uniquely suited to handling in its pump mechanisms, Evangel protection, Company recovery, and maindecked protection like Boros Charm. Another datapoint is the power of sideboard cards like Suppression Field and Ondu Cleric in this metagame. No other deck can run this kind of tribal-focused, bursty lifegain on top of a catchall like Field. Add to this the general power of white sideboard cards (Stony Silence, Rest in Peace, etc.), and Allies starts to look a lot more viable. The key in evaluating these kinds of decks isn’t to look at them in a vacuum. It’s to see what the strategy, or the tribe in this case, offers relative to the overall metagame. Allies is hardly a tier 2 deck, but it does have enough tools to address some important metagame realities.

Improvements and Updates

When I’m working on a new deck, especially a new brew or rogue strategy, I want to do as much as possible to differentiate it from other strategies. It’s okay to borrow some concepts from successful lists. For instance, 3-4 Path to Exiles seems mandatory in almost any white-based aggro deck in Modern (Zoo, Hatebears, Death and Taxes, Bogles, etc.). Also, we don’t want to run fewer than 27-28 creatures if we are maximizing Collected Company. Howerver, just because we are taking these lessons to heart does not mean we should copy Hatebears or Elves. That’s a great way to become a worse version of those decks. So how do we emphasize unique Allies strengths while still tuning the list? Here are some big takeaways I have from our analysis so far:

• Jack up your Allies
  Allies are some hardy guys, especially against the three-damage mainstays of Modern. It doesn’t take a lot of Ally triggers to put any of your team out of Bolt or Kolaghan's Command range, and we want to maximize this as much as possible. We also want to make our Allies too big to tangle with on the ground. Remember: we need to fight 4/5 Goyfs and Tasigurs, not to mention 5/5 Anglers. We aren’t doing this with a horde of Wild Nacatl wannabes, so we need to make sure our squad is as pumped as possible. This means maximizing creatures that make us big and putting in mechanisms to keep everything growing. Hello, Hardened Scales.

• Win out of nowhere
  I’m comfortable playing a more traditional slugfest with Allies, but I also want to be able to close out a game on turn 4-5. Evangel is half of this puzzle, and Hardened Scales is the other half. As I’ve said in this article and in others, Modern rewards explosive gameplay. Scales is as explosive as you can get. Company flips become totally nuts with a Scales in play, and you can easily swing for at least 12 damage with just two creatures off a turn four Company. Following up from the point above, the enchantment also helps you win the ground war and the removal contest, which plays to another of our strength’s. I’m cutting the Vials for Scales because Kolaghan's Command is everywhere and Abrupt Decay has seen a steep decline with all the delve creatures running around. This preserves our one-drop on the curve and closes off a whole avenue of removal for our opponent.

• Include more interaction
  Let’s face it: we aren’t racing decks like Affinity or Burn and we don’t want to autolose in game one. Enter Ondu Cleric and Dromoka's Command, two cards which shore up our ability to survive the metagame and fit perfectly into our strategy. Cleric doesn’t get buffed off Scales himself, but he gains a lot of life and rapidly puts us out of reach of many aggressive decks. He can also hear the song of the Battlesinger, so it’s not as if he can’t join combat at all. Command serves a similar function, giving us more interaction against cheap creatures and opening up many two-for-ones or even three-for-ones against the format’s premier aggressive decks (Burn/Affinity). The Scales and Command synergy is just gravy. Boros Charm is more aggressive and leads to some truly insane swings with Hardened Allies, but I think that’s too cool for a metagame with so much Twin, Burn, and Affinity. Command still gives us a small damage boost and insulates us from damage-based sweepers, adding in a layer of interaction which gives us legs in a diverse format.

With that in mind, here is my take on the Allies list:

Changelings are a tribal player’s best friend, especially Mirror Entity combined with our Druid mana generation. It's important to remember that Entity's ability only modifies base power and toughness, so any +1/+1 stack on top of this change, giving an extra boost to their damage output. I'm also a huge fan of Mauler here because an active Scales makes it pass the Bolt test, and then it's just one more spell away from outpacing Tasigur, Angler, and Goyf. I trimmed down the Company count to three and added an extra land to account for the loss of Vial. You could probably swap the Company triplet out entirely and put Vial in their place, removing that 21st land as well, which would synergize better with the lower creature count we have to run to accommodate Paths and Commands. Although I like Vial, the artifact makes us more vulnerable to Kolaghan's Command, and doesn’t lead to the big Company flips with an active Scales. I also appreciate the burstiness of Boros Charm and am sad to lose it, but we still get a mini damage pump in Dromoka's Command and benefit from the interactivity.

What do you all think of tribal Allies? How else have you built the deck and where would you take it from here? Let me know and post some lists: I’ll be sure to get back to you in the comment section!