Going into last weekend there was a lot of buzz about Red Eldrazi. It was a playable deck pre-rotation that more or less stayed in tact, and as such it was a great starting point for testing. As things played out, it was a black and white brew that ended up being the most represented eldrazi shell in Baltimore, with most of the Roanoke crew playing the deck. Nick Miller did a deck tech on the deck with Brad Nelson, though it was Eric Hymel who gave the deck it's highest finish by clinching third.

While it's labeled as an eldrazi deck, it's hard not to notice that this deck is just jamming a lot of generically powerful black and white cards. Hedron Crawler and Thought-Knot Seer are the ports from Red Eldrazi, with Eldrazi Displacer being the significant colorless upgrade. Displacer has already proven its worth in Modern, often winning games that no other card in the Modern Eldrazi deck could by either recurring your own enter the battlefield abilities or investing three mana to incapacitate an opposing creature. This deck doesn't have anything on the lever of Drowner of Hope to blink, though recurring Archangel Avacyn to make your team indestructible multiple times can be extremely powerful. If you didn't pre-order Avacyn, you kind of missed the boat on that one, though I imagine that Eldrazi Displacer has room to grow in price during its time in Standard.

The other major card that I'd make note of is located in the sideboard, and that's Tragic Arrogance. Arrogance was a card that we had in our Abzan deck for PT Origins, and it was excellent. We actually expected other teams to be on the card, and it's nice to see it seeing some play now. Even if it's just a sideboard card, the deck does feature three copies, and it wouldn't be terribly surprising to see copies show up in main decks. It's a pretty solid penny stock right now, and I like picking up a few sets.