For the last couple of months, Bant Company has been a dominating presence in Standard, and the card Collected Company has started to make its presence felt in older formats like Modern. Despite the power of the Bant cards in Modern, the Collected Company decks have largely been combo oriented, like Abzan Company or Elves, rather than the value and tempo oriented strategy of the Standard lists. Grove is looking to change that:

Bant Company ? Modern | Grove, 5-0 Modern League

• Creatures (28)
• 2 Eternal Witness
• 1 Flickerwisp
• 3 Knight of the Reliquary
• 3 Meddling Mage
• 4 Noble Hierarch
• 3 Phantasmal Image
• 4 Reflector Mage
• 2 Scavenging Ooze
• 3 Spell Queller
• 1 Spellskite
• 2 Voice of Resurgence

• Spells (10)
• 4 Aether Vial
• 4 Collected Company
• 2 Path to Exile

• Land (22)
• 1 Breeding Pool
• 1 Flooded Strand
• 2 Forest
• 1 Gavony Township
• 1 Ghost Quarter
• 1 Hallowed Fountain
• 1 Horizon Canopy
• 2 Island
• 1 Lumbering Falls
• 4 Misty Rainforest
• 1 Plains
• 2 Temple Garden
• 4 Windswept Heath

• Sideboard (15)
• 1 Spellskite
• 1 Path to Exile
• 1 Dispel
• 1 Kataki, War's Wage
• 2 Kitchen Finks
• 1 Qasali Pridemage
• 2 Relic of Progenitus
• 1 Reveillark
• 2 Stony Silence
• 2 Unified Will
• 1 Vendilion Clique

Buy This Deck

The core of this deck is somewhere between the Bant Company decks of Standard and the white-based Hatebears decks of Modern. You’ve got the Reflector Mages and Spell Quellers from Standard combined with the Aether Vial engine of Modern. This combination is particularly powerful because Aether Vial allows you to leave mana up for cards like the namesake Collected Company to continue to develop in the face of opposing removal, sweepers, or countermagic.

The strength of this deck is in its ability to force opponents to have answers to powerful threats and disruptive attackers while also generating value off of various creatures. Knight of the Reliquary is a great way to apply pressure, and also provides the opportunity to tutor up powerful lands like Ghost Quarter and Gavony Township. Meddling Mage is a great choice against the combo-oriented decks, as is able to name key cards like Cranial Plating, Scapeshift, and Become Immense. You can also proactively Meddling Mage cards like Vines of Vastwood or Apostle's Blessing to make sure that subsequent Path to Exiles and Reflector Mages will stick.

That kind of disruptive beatdown plan is backed up by the ability to cast Collected Company and find something like Eternal Witness to rebuy key creatures or just get back a Collected Company. Subsequent copies Collected Company can find the likes of Phantasmal Image or Flickerwisp to double up on Eternal Witness, keeping the value train going. The trick is that, unlike other Collected Company decks, this deck can do it all at instant speed, which is a huge game changer. Now the deck can play a Faeries-esque gameplan, where your opponent doesn’t know which effect they have to try to play around.

The flash gameplan combined with maindeck Meddling Mages and a powerful value engine means that this midrange deck has serious game against all of the midrange and control decks as well as the ability to tempo out the combo decks, and might be a great place to start if you’re looking to build a fair, value-oriented Collected Company deck for Modern.