Devoted Druid / Vizier of Remedies was already a potent creature-based combo strategy in Modern, but between War of the Spark and Modern Horizons it has now received three key new cards in the form of Eladamri’s Call, Finale of Devastation, and Giver of Runes.
This deck already had access to some good creature selection, typically playing cards such as Chord of Calling, Eldritch Evolution, or Collected Company. However, these can be a bit clunky in the games where your mana creatures are disrupted, leaving them stuck in your hand or just being a bit too slow. The new tutor options are much lower to the ground and efficient if all we care about is assembling the infinite mana combo. Finale of Devastation also neatly doubles as an easy win condition once we’ve achieved infinite green mana, allowing us to reduce the number of “bad” combo pieces that we run such as Duskwatch Recruiter. Giver of Runes is also perfect in this deck as a lightning rod that forces your opponent to have two cheap removal spells early to have any hope of avoiding you untapping with Devoted Druid.
Devoted Druid / Vizier of Remedies Combo
There are quite a few different ways to build and tweak this deck, so we’ll discuss some of the individual card choices.
Incubation // Incongruity and Vivien, Champion of the Wilds are two more recent additions to this strategy. There are naturally 26+ creatures in this deck, so the whiff rates are extremely low. The Incongruity half lets us play some interaction even while increasing our ability to find our namesake combo. Vivien’s static ability puts fear in the opponent any time you have two mana open, though it’s possible it’s a bit too slow to merit its inclusion in the maindeck.
Postmortem Lunge is a valuable tool that allows you to threaten a win out of nowhere with a copy of Devoted Druid in the graveyard. However, it’s a bit risky to rely on this card too much, so we’re only running 1-2 copies. It’s also a bit vulnerable to the incidental graveyard hate that people are running at the moment, and is likely often a card to be sideboarded out. We also want access to at least 1 copy of Eternal Witness to be able to convert the ability to search for creatures into a Finale of Devastation for infinite, but at the moment it is best to minimize the reliance on the graveyard.
One of the draws of creature-tutor based decks like this is the ability to run silver bullet 1-ofs that can drastically affect certain situations or matchups. In this case we’re running Walking Ballista, Scavenging Ooze, and Deputy of Detention, but these flex slots can change depending on the metagame.
As expected, the sideboard is packing several more potent bullet-type creatures. With a full 8 tutor effects and Giver of Runes to protect them, these hatebear type cards are extremely potent. With the release of Collector Ouphe in Modern Horizons, these bullets can pretty much cover any situation the other unfair decks in Modern might throw at you.
We’ve seen some lists running a Knight of the Reliquary package which does seem enticing. It’s nice to have a stronger backup plan, since the all-in combo version may be vulnerable to an opponent who can pull off a Surgical Extraction on either of the key combo creatures.
It’s of course still possible to run black to gain access to the Viscera Seer-based combos with Vizier of Remedies such as infinite life with Kitchen Finks or the immediate kill with Murderous Redcap. These creatures give us a better midrange game and a chance to compete against the fair decks of the format even when the combo is successfully disrupted, but they are a bit slower to come together than the streamlined gameplan presented in the list above. Yawgmoth, Thran Physician is another new card that plays perfectly into this shell, and it could win a creature matchup on its own even if you can’t assemble all of the combo pieces.
Black of course provides some additional bullet creatures for the maindeck or sideboard, most interestingly Anafenza, the Foremost for the current metagame and the extremely powerful Plague Engineer from Modern Horizons.
We’re going to continue working on this strategy to attempt to find the optimal list, so if you have any comments or suggestions then please let us know! We’ll be uploading a video running this deck through a Modern league on MTGO in the near future, so be sure to check back! And of course, if you enjoy our Modern content, be sure to check out that sidebar and subscribe to our Modern feed!
