What Are The Top Decks In Modern – Abzan Company

Abzan company is an extremely consistent and powerful combo deck that aims to assemble Viscera Seer with either Melira, Sylvok Outcast or Anafenza, Kin-Tree Spirit and then finally Kitchen Finks or Murderous Redcap. The combo works in the following way: you sacrifice Kitchen Finks or Murderous Redcap with Viscera Seer. The creature dies. Persist triggers and the creature returns to the battlefield. Depending on the creature you gain 2 life, or do 2 damage. Melira, Sylvok Outcast or Anafenza, Kin-Tree Spirit triggers as the creature enters as well. Melira stops the placement of -1/-1 counters, so the Finks or Redcap return with their previous power and toughness, whilst Anafenza allows you to place a +1/+1 counter on them which cancels the -1/-1 counter and again, allows the creatures to return with their prior power and toughness. Repeat infinitely. Win.
There are three facets of the deck that make it extremely potent and powerful. The first is speed. Viscera Seer is a turn 1 play, Melira, Sylvok Outcast is a turn 2 play, and Kitchen Finks is a turn 3 play. Thats a turn 3 win. The second factor is consistency. The deck plays four copies of Collected Company, and multiple copies of Chord of Calling. It has many, many ways of ensuring it can dig and search its way for the right cards to finish the combo. Any pieces of the combo you do manage to kill can be replaced very quickly and easily with these spells. The final facet that makes the deck extremely dangerous is resilience. Abzan Company often runs multiple copies of Eternal Witness which means that removing one part of the combo is futile – they can reanimate lost creatures with ease. Alongside this, the deck is easily able to transition from a combo deck, to an aggressive won. Even with missing pieces the opponent will be happy enough beating you in the face with the creatures they run, and given that they can run up to a whopping 30(!) the onslaught seems to never end. Note that the deck runs cards such as Noble Hierarch and Qasali Pridemage to make sure that they can swing with huge creatures due to stacked exalted triggers.

Sideboarding Against This Deck

Removal spells that exile, such as Path to Exile, work particularly well against Abzan Company. However one trick to watch out for is that smart players will respond to exiling spells with Viscera Seers exile ability which will mean the creature simply dies instead of being exiled. Do also note that graveyard exile can be activated in response to the persist triggers on Kitchen Finks or Murderous Redcap. In response to the trigger you can exile the creature from the graveyard; the trigger will still resolve but the creature will no longer be in the graveyard and therefore nothing will happen. Cards like Relic of Progenitus can enable this. Finally mass removal can work quite nicely in simultaneously removing any assembled combo pieces, and other creatures that are threatening you too. Damnation and Wrath of God do this nicely. Another note here though: Kitchen Finks and Murderous Redcap may return after you resolve a sweeper. They will decrease in strength because any Melira, Sylvok Outcasts or Anafenza, Kin-Tree Spirits will be dead, but the opponent will have board presence remaining nevertheless.