Today we have quite a treat coming straight from the desk of Willy Edel. His list was posted about a week-and-a-half ago, and as soon as I saw it I knew I was interested. Thoughtseize in my Thought-Knot Seer deck? Yes, please! While some two-color Eldrazi decks have been popping up lately (RG Eldrazi with some 5-0 League finishes), this one really caught my eye. Get it?? Like Thought-Knot Seer! Never mind…

Anyway, the deck has a somewhat similar shell to the previously popular Bant Eldrazi archetype. Mana dorks, Ancient Stirrings, Eldrazi Temple and a pile of sizable Eldrazi to run the show. In this case, however, we've replaced Path to Exile with Fatal Push, jammed in a couple Thoughtseize, and changed our posse of Eldrazi around to avoid the blue and white ones.

I'll talk about this a bit in the videos as well, but the real appeal to me in this decklist is playing a BGx-style deck that can support Thought-Knot Seer. This list doesn't necessarily accomplish that particular goal, but it's a great starting point. Playing discard alongside efficient threats is frequently a great strategy—hence the popularity and success of Death's Shadow. The threats from Eldrazi aren't cheap like in other aggro decks, but they do have another strength: they're huge. Really huge.

For that extra muscle, we do unfortunately have to sacrifice some efficiency. This list makes up for this issue with the green elements. Eldrazi Temple is a great way to help here, but only if you can find it. Ancient Stirrings does some great double duty here (as it often does) by helping us find the powerful land when we need it, or a horrific monster straight from the Blind Eternities. (Yes, I did have to look that up; lore is not my specialty.) Birds of Paradise may not be as exciting as a Sol land but it does a decent impression of one when it survives a turn cycle. In addition, it helps us fix up our somewhat troublesome manabase.

We may technically be a two-color deck, but practically, that isn't the case. Eighteen cards in the maindeck have the Wastes symbol on them, meaning that we are fully in a third, uh, "color." Yeah, it's colorless, whatever. Llanowar Wastes and Twilight Mire are the "tri-lands" here and as such we have quite a few of them. Cavern of Souls similarly can help, however very few of our spells containing colored mana symbols are creatures. This is likely one area of the deck that could use some tuning, but frankly, I'm not sure what the solution might be. It's tough to reliably support double green, double black, and colorless. Twilight Mire is the best way of doing that, of course, but filter lands always have their own issues, especially with this many other colorless lands.

The deck has been really interesting thus far and I think it honestly has some promise. It still needs some work, and I'm not sure that I have the answers. There are a lot of different avenues you can go down with this deck and I hope people really do explore the archetype. Hopefully I'll eventually have some time to dedicate to the project, but for now I'm focused on testing for the upcoming PT.

I hope you enjoy the matches and as usual, I'm interested to hear what kind of content you'd like to see moving forward so I can continue to evolve and improve my videos. Please let me know your thoughts, and any improvements you would like to see concerning formatting, presentation, or whatever else strikes your fancy. If you'd like to see similar content, check out my Twitch channel for some live Modern games!

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL261kJ_cAQC8_8Z_uOlCdfysAHcsF5YAU]