Unless you live under a rock (or maybe just don’t play Magic Online), you are aware that there’s been a Human Collected Company deck floating in the 5-0 League deck lists over the past month.

I’m not sure who created the deck or even started the trend, but Olle Rade, Butakov, and Magnus Lantto were among them, and whenever known players like these play new decks, that gives me a big incentive to try them.

Humans CoCo

Here is the first list that I saw and began working with.

The sideboard Izzet Staticaster was the reason why many websites called this deck 5-Color Humans, and I kept being so confused by it. Seriously, there are 4 Cavern of Souls and 2 Mana Confluence to cast them… I understand you can also Collected Company, but that’s still just way too greedy.

Let’s just make the obvious swap. Pontiff is definitely a little worse, yet, you can cast it much more reliably.

Now you have a green-white deck splashing blue for Reflector Mage and Meddling Mage, black for Sin Collector, Orzhov Pontiff, and Kambal, Consul of Allocation.

The mana base is still underwhelming, so I made a few changes and arrived at this.

The Mana Confluence still bugs me, but I believe there isn’t really anything better if I’m 4 colors. I could’ve added even more Flooded Strands, still, I’m concerned to run out of targets.

Gavony Township was disappointing, but my sample size wasn’t large so I’m still keeping one.

Because of the addition of a white fetchland, I have to turn Overgrown Tomb into a Godless Shrine. Which is fine, since the way the early turns play out, you usually get a green source first for your mana dork, and then you don’t really need a green ever again, so having 2 nongreen, white duals isn’t a problem.

Also, I was not satisfied with the Grixis Shadow matchup pre-board and added 2 Tireless Trackers, cutting a Thalia, Heretic Cathar and a Sin Collector, making those 2 extra fetches work overtime.

At that point, my friend Ulysse Gagnon Paradis and GP Las Vegas hotel roommate was convinced that he was going to sleeve up Humans Company.

We both agreed that the Grixis Shadow matchup was only unfavorable because of Snapcaster Mage and Kolaghan’s Command, playing the card advantage game. We would very rarely lose to their beatdown plan since we have Reflector Mage and Path to Exile. My buddy then came up with the idea of playing Eternal Witness as a way to have our own Snapcaster Mages and go nuts with Collected Company.

He was also very high on Mirran Crusader, not only because it is great in that specific matchup, but also because it attacks for a million and even in the matchups where the protections don’t do much it’s still technically a 4/4 for 3 that doubles with every pump it gets from Noble Hierarch, Thalia’s Lieutenant, and Mayor of Avabruck.

Grand Prix Las Vegas Modern

In the last few days that I would’ve had to playtest our latest ideas, I ended up doing Vegas things, which wasn’t very productive for my Magic: the Gathering results. But you know, it was worth it.

For that reason, I sleeved up a pretty stock build of Bant Eldrazi with 2 main-deck Warping Wails, as I showed off in one of my recent videos.

Ulysse played the deck though, and made his first Day 2 (congrats to him!)

With his input after playing Mirran Crusader and Eternal Witness main deck, this is what I would play going forward:

Bant Humans

That’s right—black is entirely gone from the main deck. The Sin Collectors were always underwhelming, as was the Orzhov Pontiff.

Kambal, Consul of Allocation was the best option against Burn while overlapping against Storm and potentially other matchups that I haven’t faced yet. I had enough sideboard slots to play it alongside an Overgrown Tomb, yet, if you don’t feel that way, playing Kor Firewalker over it is completely fine.

Splashing for Izzet Staticaster is still a sideboard option, but getting blue and red is much harder than white and black as white. It would be much more versatile than Kambal though, so I’m keeping that in mind.

I needed to cut on 3-drops, and this one was the first to get cut. It wasn’t horrible or anything, but not amazing either.

There is only one left and if I can think of another, better 2-drop it will probably get replaced.

Humans Company is a real Modern deck, believe it or not. It still needs a bit of tuning, but this version as it stands has a good Grixis Shadow matchup and any deck that accomplishes that is a contender.