Much Abrew: Serum Powder Eldrazi (Modern, Magic Online)

by SaffronOlive // Apr 29, 2019

Hello, everyone! Welcome to another episode of Much Abrew About Nothing. War of the Spark is here, and while we'll start to explore the new format shortly, today we're giving the London mulligan rule one last test, this time by turning to the dark side of the force with Serum Powder Eldrazi. Normally, we're the ones losing to opponents who play an Eldrazi Temple or two and use the Sol land to power out huge colorless threats quickly. Is it better if we're the ones with the Eldrazi Temple? Let's get to the video and find out; then, we can talk more about the deck!

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Much Abrew: Serum Powder Eldrazi

Discussion

As for our record, we played a competitive league and finished 3-2, which is solid, if unspectacular. We managed to crush Dredge, UW Control, and Death's Shadow while dropping a somewhat close match to Titan Breach Scapeshift (where our opponent managed to draw the right combo of cards to get out from under a sideboard Blood Moon) and a not-at-all-close match against Martyr Proc, which feels like an absurdly bad matchup for our deck. Not only does Martyr Proc have a lot of removal for our Eldrazi but they gain so much life that it takes forever to actually kill our opponent, even with our big Eldrazi.

On one hand, Serum Powder Eldrazi is pretty simple: you play big creatures, attack, and hopefully kill the opponent. Actually playing the deck is pretty easy. On the other hand, the deck mulligans a lot, and figuring out which hands are good enough to keep and when we should mulligan in the hopes of finding a more explosive start is the main challenge of the deck.

While Serum Powder Eldrazi might look like a midrange deck, it's actually more of a combo deck, with the combo being fast mana. Nearly all of our best draws involve Eldrazi Temple or, if we are on the draw, Gemstone Caverns. Even though our Eldrazi are efficient, playing Thought-Knot Seer on Turn 4 into Reality Smasher on Turn 5 isn't all that threatening in Modern. As such, if you decide to pick up the deck, the most important thing you can do is practice mulliganing. While part of my goal heading into the videos was to mulligan more aggressively than normal, I probably still didn't mulligan aggressively enough.

This aggressive mulliganing pattern is the main reason why Serum Powder Eldrazi benefits from the London mulligan rule. Even though it's counter-intuitive, the deck is much better off with a five-card hand with Eldrazi Temple than it is with a decent seven without it.

As for Serum Powder itself, its main purpose is to increase our odds of finding explosive starting hands, although it does offer some additional value. If we can exile an Eternal Scourge or two, it can generate card advantage since we can cast Eternal Scourge from exile, and it can also ramp us into Reality Smasher as a bad mana rock.

Perhaps the most awkward part of the deck is the sideboard. While Blood Moon is an extremely powerful card, with only three Wastes and four Serum Powder (which often get exiled before the game even starts) to make colorless mana, we often end up locking ourselves out of playing some of our best cards with our own Blood Moon. As strange as it sounds coming from me, it might not be worth playing Blood Moon at all. And if it's not worth playing Blood Moon, it might be better to just play fully colorless Eldrazi rather than splashing into red.

In the end, Serum Powder Eldrazi feels like a lot of Modern decks at the moment: it can be extremely powerful, but it also loses to itself quite a bit. The good games are really good, while the bad games are really bad. It's certainly good enough to compete, and the London mulligan rule does improve it (and is especially helpful for Serum Powder Eldrazi since the deck doesn't scoop to a single hate card like some other decks with increased popularity thanks to the rule). But all the unfair and broken starts come at the cost of inconsistency.

So, should you play Serum Powder Eldrazi? The deck is competitive, although I'm not sure the build we played today that splashes into red is better than the more traditional colorless build. If I were going to play the deck again, I'd probably start with something like this...

Conclusion

Anyway, that's all for today. Don't forget to vote for next week's deck by liking, commenting on, and subscribing to Instant Deck Tech videos. As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.