Welcome back old friend. Pack Rat is one of those cards players either love or love to hate, it was a monster in limited and standard alike and I’m sure many of us played with it or against it at some point.  When Return to Ravnica rotated out of standard so did this vicious vermin, I for one thought it was the end of our time together apart from chaos drafts and cubes, but the rat is back with a vengeance in modern.

The idea of this deck is to play threats that immediately require answers or they can take over the game.  Similar to typical Jund play, they start with some early discard spells into an undercosted threat and ride that to victory, in this decks case it is often our hero from old, Pack Rat.  Similarly, there are other must answer threats in our deck, like Dark Confidant who would otherwise bury the opponent in card advantage or Goblin Rabblemaster who would less subtly bury the opponent in goblins.

Then there is the most annoying card in modern to deal with, Blood Moon.  This card can still end the game immediately against a variety of decks and often game 1 they have no answer to the enchantment.  What is worse than facing down Goblin Rabblemaster? Facing one when you can’t cast any of your spells.  Your deck is tuned to have Blood Moon not affect your game too much, you have 10 fetches that can all find basic Swamp plus 3 Swamps, meaning you have effectively 13 in your deck all letting you cast your spells after a resolved Blood Moon.  

Blood Moon and Pack Rat synergise well together, Blood Moon slows the game right down and often means that your opponent cannot play spells or can only play one a turn, while Pack Rat provides repeating threats that need to be answered.  Often, if you get a Blood Moon into play you can wait until turn 5 to cast your Pack Rat and leave up mana for make a copy.  Now Modern is usually a very fast format and doing this on turn 5 does not really match up to what other decks can do on turn 5, but Blood Moon usually slows your opponent down enough so that they are not carrying out their game plan effectively.

Liliana remains to be the best planeswalker in modern in my opinion and in this deck is provides another way to grind out your opponent.  This card is fantastic against the Death’s Shadow decks that are popular right now, due to the fact it if often a 2 for 1 against them, killing their singular threat and allowing you to gain an incremental advantage over the course of the game.  It is also very powerful against UW control, another popular deck in modern currently.  If you can get this under a counterspell, it can prove unstoppable against them.

This deck will lean heavily on getting free wins with Blood Moon and that is okay, but it can still grind out midrange decks if required.  The rest of your deck is disruption and efficient removal spells, meaning you play a good fair game when needed to.  There are even some Mutavaults that can be good threats when combined with Pack Rat that can be used if you do not resolve a Blood Moon.

So, if you want to relive the great time we all had playing with Pack Rat, try this deck out at your next modern event, it can get you some free wins while still being able to play the attrition game.  The best thing about top-decking with this deck is that often all of your cards become rats.  All you need to do is find out your Pack Rats that you had before rotation, sleeve them up and get ready to flood the board with a hoard of cute little critters (that is unless you burnt your copies after rotation like I’m sure some wanted to).