As things currently stand, Modern is in a strange place. Eldrazi variants are dominating the format, and have introduced a number of strange incentives as a result. Lightning Bolt is no longer a format-defining removal spell, as it can’t hit either Thought-Knot Seer or Reality Smasher. Instead, players are leaning on cards like Path to Exile and Dismember, which have the downside of triggering Reality Smasher. However, there’s another way to clear Eldrazi out of the way without using these efficient Instants. Instead, you could try something like this hateful aggro deck by SpiderSpace:

G/W Leap ? Modern | SpiderSpace, 5-0 Modern League

• Creatures (27)
• 1 Eldrazi Displacer
• 2 Aven Mindcensor
• 2 Eternal Witness
• 2 Restoration Angel
• 2 Scavenging Ooze
• 2 Thalia, Guardian of Thraben
• 2 Thragtusk
• 3 Fiend Hunter
• 3 Leonin Arbiter
• 4 Flickerwisp
• 4 Noble Hierarch

• Spells (12)
• 4 Path to Exile
• 1 Evolutionary Leap
• 3 Oath of Nissa
• 4 Aether Vial

• Lands (21)
• 1 Forest
• 2 Plains
• 1 Gavony Township
• 2 Horizon Canopy
• 3 Tectonic Edge
• 4 Ghost Quarter
• 4 Razorverge Thicket
• 4 Temple Garden

• Sideboard (15)
• 1 Thalia, Guardian of Thraben
• 1 Engineered Explosives
• 2 Qasali Pridemage
• 1 Rest in Peace
• 1 Selesnya Charm
• 2 Spellskite
• 2 Stony Silence
• 2 Surgical Extraction
• 1 Vryn Wingmare
• 2 Worship

Buy This Deck

There are a number of interesting things to point out about this deck. Plan A is to just hate your opponent out of the game with cards like Leonin Arbiter, Aven Mindcensor, and Thalia, Guardian of Thraben. Against many of the decks relying on fetchlands and spell-based interaction, curving out with hate-bears will often be enough. Unfortunately, the best deck in the format doesn’t care as much about spells as it does casting giant monsters.

Enter Fiend Hunter. This card does an incredible amount of work against the Eldrazi deck, particularly in this shell. If you can buy enough time to start ramping up Aether Vials and hitting land drops, you can absolutely dominate any players looking to win the game by casting gigantic monsters. You can do this by doing cute tricks with Fiend Hunter, Flickerwisp, and Restoration Angel. Because of the way Fiend Hunter is worded, you can flicker it with the enters the battlefield trigger on the stack. This does two things. First, it allows the leaves the battlefield trigger to resolve before the enters the battlefield trigger, which lets you exile a creature permanently. Secondly, you get to rebuy your trigger and exile a second creature. Sure, your opponent can get the second creature back by killing your Fiend Hunter, but being able to get multiple giant creatures with one Fiend Hunter is enormously powerful in a format defined by Eldrazi.

The card that ties this all together for me is Evolutionary Leap. SpiderSpace’s build is a little different than some other variants because it has swapped some copies of Leap for Oath of Nissa to smooth out the early game and find Ghost Quarters, but Leap is still an enormously powerful tool for this style of deck. Evolutionary Leap also allows you to do the Fiend Hunter trick, sacrificing Fiend Hunter with its enters the battlefield trigger on the stack to exile something permanently. This also lets you turn excess hate-bears into extra Leap activations for cards like Eternal Witness, Restoration Angel, and Thragtusk, which let you bring any Eldrazi aggression to a screeching halt.