8 Rack
I feel like I might have to find a name for these installments where I bring you a tried and true budget Modern deck with a light personal twist. Either way, today that deck is 8 Rack. An extremely fun deck where you try and force your opponent to get frustrated and scoop. There is also the backup plan which is to kill them by keeping their hand empty and bolting them every turn with The Rack or Shrieking Affliction.
8 Racks
4 The Rack 4 Shrieking Affliction
Discard
4 Funeral Charm 4 Mire's Toll 4 Raven's Crime 4 Wrench Mind 4 Smallpox 2 Stupor
The Other Stuff
2 Gurmag Angler 3 Smother 4 Victim of Night
The Lands
16 Swamp 3 Bojuka Bog 2 Dakmor Salvage
The entire purpose of this deck is to shred your opponents’ hand into absolutely nothing, play a couple copies of The Rack, and sit back while they perish. Almost any hand with a couple lands and a copy of either of these cards is going to be keepable simply because of the sheer volume of discard this deck boasts. The easiest way for you to lose is by never drawing one of your eight copies. The next easiest way for you to lose is by them developing a board before you empty them out or by them just getting the right topdecks.
Mire’s toll is the discard spell you want to play after you’ve sufficiently eaten a chunk of their hand, as it will allow you to pick almost any card and get rid of it. It is also the first card you should replace, with Blackmail, if you’re interested in going over 50$. It’s functionally similar, but just won’t be as good almost ever. It’s only another like 8$ for the playset, and it’s totally worth it. Raven’s Crime is our discard on repeat, and turns all of our extra lands into additional copies of it. It is also the reason Dakmor Salvage is in the list, as we’ll often be more willing to guarantee one discard by dredging it back than to leave our fates to the heart of the cards. Funeral Charm is the best discard spell we have. Instant speed allows us to potentially just skip our opponent’s turn once we’ve emptied out their hand by stripping it during their draw step. The deck is normally at the mercy of really good top decks, and this card is our main way to combat that. Not to mention it can function as removal in certain situations. Both of our Mind Rots, Wrench Mind and Stupor, will put in work to help us strip hands.
Even as we strip their hand away, they will be playing creatures and top decking creatures as the game goes on so we’ll need some ways to answer them. Victim of Night is basically just unconditional removal in Modern for 2, since there’s not a lot of Vampires, Zombies, or Werewolves hanging around. Fatal Pushes ugly cousin Smother also hits the bulk of the creatures in the format, and feels really lovely on the wallet. Smallpox is going to be doing a lot of work for us as it kills a creature, discards a card, and gets rid of a land. Since we only run Gurmag Angler, we should never really get hit by the creature element. We only have like 3 cards over 2 cmc, so the land doesn’t really effect us much in most situations. The only effect that will feel genuinely symmetrical most the time is the discard effect on us, but we have a lot of redundancy in discard effects on our cards so even this will often be negligible. Not to mention Raven’s Crime and Dakmor Salvage both being fine discardables since they are recursive.
With the prevalence of Graveyard matters decks in Modern, the inclusion of most of a playset of Bojuka Bog is to try and not get swept in matchups where their graveyard is basically another hand. The coming into play tapped could definitely hurt every once in a while, but I think it’s worth it. If you want to be the complete badass I wish I was, you could omit the Bojuka Bog entirely and include 2 Haunting Echoes. The mana cost is extremely high and will often just be a dead card, but the one out of ten or twenty games where it hits it would be devastatingly hilarious. I just couldn’t include both it and Bog in good conscience and decided Bog would be more consistently useful as preboard hate for quite a few matchups. Gurmag Angler gives us another way to win the game, allowing us 10 cards in the deck that can actually deal damage. It dodges loads of the removal in Modern, and will only really be coming down once they are in topdeck mode anyways so they have to draw said removal. We can easily run creatures like Nyxathid, Pack Rat, or Tombstalker over or alongside Gurmag if you want more.
Good, cheap sideboard cards like Duress. Bontu’s Last Reckoning is a great budget wrath for us. Extirpate can be our Surgical Extraction.
There’s plenty of room to build up the deck if you have a higher budget. Inquisition of Kozilek, Thoughtseize, Liliana of the Veil, Dismember, Fatal Push, Mutavault, Urborg, etc, etc. You can basically make it as expensive as you feel like.
