Every Thursday Insight is taking a quick look at one of the top-performing, most peculiar, or simply sweetest Modern decks among recent results. It's been nearly extinct, but The Rack is back! Borrowing some technology from the powerhouse that is Scam, Modern's most discard-heavy deck makes a return.
"Eight Rack" got its interesting name from the time when running playsets of and were the norm for a dedicated discard deck. The goal has always been to eat opponents' life totals with these two after stripping them off their cards.
Sadly, for a long time remained the last big addition to the deck. Aside from constructing Constructs, it's able to fetch utility artifacts like —important against or —and of course the deck's namesake. If nothing else, this allowed Eight Rack enthusiasts to slim down to a sixpack. In the past most of them opted to fill the slots with various or additional spells such as . However, someone came up with a different idea.
The notorious combination of and cards like is so good at disrupting people that the pilot included it here as well. After all, why not? Evoke Elementals even made a liability, let alone the former all-star , so we got the space. It's not just Grief that benefits from Feign Death and either. , an old meta call, supplies another solid target. If it sticks around until your next upkeep, you can use one of the instants to sacrifice it twice and have your opponent discard four. Alternatively or additionally, these spells make it more likely that the Augur survives a turn in the first place.
Augur might be at its best against Tron, which is precisely where the deck's other "discard two," , is at its worst. On that note, you bet this list has copies of main. Not only is it amazing graveyard hate, always a consideration when you put so many of the opponent's cards into their graveyard yourself. It also lets you feel like a Tron player yourself, discarding the biggest card from an opponent's hand, then just casting it from exile free of charge. To keep decks in check, this build naturally runs a playset of . Combine it with the combo, and you're already prepared for most stuff Modern can throw at you.
Instead of , the list relies on good old , and may even get some relevant X/1 with its one lucky Charm. As a discard spell isn't picky, but it's always a brutal way of finishing the draw step of a previously hellbent opponent.
| Modern Six Rack by Itabashi Seishu, 2nd at TC Tokyo Championship, August 6
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