We all knew a big banning was coming for the Eldrazi deck in modern, and it was pretty safe to assume that the card to be banned would be Eye of Ugin. It gave the deck unreasonably fast starts, helped it refuel in the late game, and could effective generate as much as 8 mana per turn in the right situations.

It was outright broken, and now it’s gone—but can the eldrazi deck survive its banning? With the right build, I think it can.

So where do we go from here?

The first step to adapting the Eldrazi deck is deciding which creatures are no longer good enough without Eye of Ugin. I think there are a few key contenders that really needed Eye of Ugin to be playable, largely the cards that were part of the explosive starts it fuelled. These are:

 Eldrazi Mimic

 Endless One

 Eldrazi Skyspawner

On the flipside, the Eldrazi that are still very playable without the explosive starts that Eye powered are:

 Thought-Knot Seer

 Reality Smasher

 Eldrazi Displacer

 Wasteland Strangler

 Blight Herder

 Any number of the 6+ CMC guys depending on the deck shell

Making the most of eye’s banning 

While Eye of Ugin was an extremely powerful part of the Eldrazi deck, it also put tight constraints on deck construction. It didn’t actually tap for mana on its own, so running non-Eldrazi creatures alongside it rarely felt good.

Now that the card is gone, we are free to experiment with other cards that complement the Eldrazi creature suite well.

Finding new opportunities

The deck doesn’t just need to adapt to a new build without Eye, it also needs to adapt to a new modern metagame. With Sword of the Meek and Ancestral Vision being unbanned, cards that were already seeing play in certain Eldrazi shells have become considerably more powerful.

Processors such as Wasteland Strangler and Blight Herder get a lot more powerful as you can process a suspended copy of Ancestral Vision into your opponent’s graveyard. Typically, you want to run Relic of Progenitus alongside those cards to ensure that they’re always fuelled, and relic has the added benefit of giving you a main deck answer to the Sword of the Meek /Thopter Foundry combo.

With all of those considerations in mind, my adapted Eldrazi build for week 1 of the new modern format looks something like this:

Without Eye of Ugin holding back our creature choices, many good Eldrazi cards can be seamlessly integrated into a “Death and Taxes” style shell. Thalia, Guardian of Thraben plays nicely with our creature-centric strategy and shuts out a number of spell-based combo decks, Blade Splicer plays nicely with Eldrazi Displacer, and Flickerwisp can help us process any permanent that’s causing us trouble.

Across the 60 cards, we have a lot of main deck hate for popular modern decks, as well as a strong suite of “must answer” threats. Together these form a strong deck that, while not as explosive as the Eye-based Eldrazi decks, still enable the Eldrazi to shine in modern.

It’s worth noting that the deck is still a work in progress, and I really haven’t spent a great amount of time thinking about the land base. It has performed acceptably in testing, but I would expect there is room for improvement.

On the land front, I think this deck is a great shell for Westvale Abbey. It gives us another colourless source, an outlet for spare mana, and can help us turn scions created by Blight Herder into a colossal flying threat.

I can’t wait to test this deck out in a proper tournament setting, and I am looking forward to seeing what the rest of the community does with Eldrazi following the Eye of Ugin ban.