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Team Spirit

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With Shadows over Innistrad, we saw the Spirit archetype gain additional support. Spell Queller and Rattlechains are powerful, instant-speed effects that can swing a game heavily into your favor, particularly when backed up by other efficient instants. For the most part, we’ve seen these cards in Bant shells, supported by Noble Hierarch and Collected Company. In a recent PTQ, Decipio built a version of the deck that plays more like traditional Faeries.


Rattlechains
Spirits is set up to play like a tempo deck. You can leave all of your mana up on most turns and force your opponent to guess what they have to play around, since the core of your deck is comprised of flash creatures and instants. Inevitably, they’ll make poor choices about what to play around, and you’ll get to punish them appropriately.

The idea here is that you’re playing all the most efficient interactive cards, from Lightning Bolt to Mana Leak. This means that, on turns where your opponent forces you to respond, you can almost always do so. In addition, you have interactive creatures with flash. Spell Queller is the primary choice here, since it serves as a very powerful counterspell in Modern. Spell Queller gets even better when backed up by Rattlechains to protect it. These cards let you apply pressure to your opponent at instant-speed on turns where you can safely sneak them onto the battlefield.

Rattlechains is especially powerful because you can start flashing in Geist of Saint Traft. It turns out that an end step Geist of Saint Traft backed up by Celestial Colonnade, Lightning Bolts, and Snapcaster Mage adds up to twenty points of damage awfully quickly. That gives this deck the additional strength of being able to punish opponents who play too passively by pressuring them quickly and ending the game before they can sculpt a strong gameplan.

If you’re looking to play a tempo-based control deck, this seems like a very strong choice for the current format. Spell Queller is a particularly powerful interactive threat in the current Modern format, particularly when backed up by cheap counterspells and Rattlechains. One thing that has kept other control decks from performing well is their inability to turn the corner and end the game, which this deck avoids.


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