BUG Ninja Faeries

I've been wanting to restart playing Modern since Modern Horizons gave me my favorite mechanic back -- Ninjutsu. The mechanic is only good with a critical mass of dinky value creatures, which we now have in Ice-Fang Coatl. This list has been evolving for a bit, but after about 100 games playing it against myself playing the top tiers I'm confident in it.

// 60 Maindeck
// 4 Artifact
4 Arcum's Astrolabe

// 20 Creature
4 Faerie Seer
4 Ice-Fang Coatl
4 Coiling Oracle
4 Stoneforge Mystic
4 Fallen Shinobi


// 11 Instant
2 Assassin's Trophy
4 Force of Negation
3 Fatal Push
2 Abrupt Decay

//2 Equipment
1 Batterskull
1 Sword of Fire and Ice


// 20 Land
1 Breeding Pool
1 Overgrown Tomb
1 Watery Grave
4 Polluted Delta
1 Snow-Covered Forest
1 Snow-Covered Swamp
3 Snow-Covered Island
1 Hallowed Fountain
4 Misty Rainforest
2 Flooded Strand
1 Godless Shrine

// 4 Planeswalker
3 Teferi, Time Raveler
1 Liliana, the Last Hope


// 15 Sideboard
// 3 Artifact
SB: 1 Nihil Spellbomb
SB: 1 Executioner's Capsule
SB: 1 Mycosynth Lattice

// 3 Creature
SB: 2 Plague Engineer
SB: 1 Walking Ballista

// 5 Instant
SB: 2 Surgical Extraction
SB: 1 Fatal Push
SB: 1 Assassin's Trophy

// 5 Planeswalker
SB: 4 Karn, the Great Creator
SB: 1 Ashiok, Dream Render






The worst matchup is humans, which is why there's so much sideboard for it. Leylines + Surgicals along with maindeck Nihil Spellbombs make dredge extremely in our favor, but due to its popularity I don't want to run any less.

Force of Negation is a powerhouse card to keep yourself not-behind until your deck can start gaining card advantage everywhere. It also helps when you have that card advantage to maintain the lead, since mana spells are only good when you have the mana up to pay for them. Seriously, this card singlehandedly will change Modern. Every single deck that wins before turn 4 abuses a single card engine, and this shuts it off. It's like playing against old Belcher in Legacy with Force of Will, you can win matchups that were previously determined by your opponent's luck. 1-2-3 Karn is never going to be oppressive again because of FoN. That was my most hated matchup because it just felt like dumb luck before. It just sucks that FoN is virtually dead against Humans.

Fallen Shinobi: his ability is absolutely dirty against every deck. Even just getting 2 lands while being a huge threat and knocking out 5 life is huge, but grabbing at least 1 good card makes it insane. He is single handedly winning the Humans matchup because he uses their bullshit against them (hello Reflector Mage or a team of chump-blockers). Against control, they're terrified of him hitting a planeswalker. Most other decks are trying to cheat big things into play with Izzet Phoenix, Eldrazi Tron, or Dredge. With Shinobi for the late game we can focus on what Faeries in general does best... stalling.

Ingenious Infiltrator After much playtesting with it, it just didn't make the cut. Most of the time the best thing it could do is draw a card while resetting a creature, but Modern is fast enough that you don't want to trade a chump blocking Ice-Fang for a tapped 2/3. Even worse, sometimes you draw hands where you don't have any low-costing dorks but you drew all your ninjutsu creatures and you're stuck with 3 over-costed creatures. It ended up getting cut from 4-of to 0-of in the course of testing.

Ice-Fang Coatl is pretty all around good, being blue for Force, drawing a card, but most importantly has flash. I was playing this deck with Faerie Seer instead as basically a ninjutsu target, but my pre-board matchup vs. humans was literally 0%. Like their worst draws vs my best draws I'd still lose. Ice-Fang has done a huge part in bringing that matchup back, with all of your basics being snow. That means around turn 4 or so you'll usually have deathtouch online, which stalls them out a ton. Humans aren't great at topdeck wars from a stalled boardstate, and we are, so that's the route to victory. Against most other decks it's just a nice way to do something when holding up Spellstutter mana.

Assassin's Trophy is the best removal I've used in Modern. The basic land very rarely matters, but the ability to hit all the new planeswalkers, random crap like Altar of Dementia or Pyromancer's Ascension, Hollow One/Gurmag Angler, and just literally everything makes it invaluable. I think the main reason is that most decks, with the exception of UW Control, don't ever plan on casting something for more than 2 mana. Against UW Control you'd be happy to give them a land to shut off whichever planeswalker they have. With the ability to flash them back with Snapcaster, you can easily deplete every non-UW Control deck of their basics.

I had creaturelands in here, Mutavaults in particular, but you just never want to be attacking with them. Against control decks, the normal place to really want that ability, you would rather just run as many basics as possible. UW Control abuses the crap out of decks that don't run at least 4. They typically have as many Field of Ruin as you'd have creaturelands anyway. The weird 2-2-2 basic land base I'm running is less awkward than you'd expect since the majority of our 2 drops have a colorless mana in their cost so give you a lot of leeway there. It kinda sucks we have both Bitterblossom and Ice-Fang Coatl to worry about casting on turn 2 but with 8 fetches I haven't found it to be a real problem.

If there's interest I'll post more thoughts on sideboarding and what to look for in each matchup. I'm practicing this a bunch against the top tier decks in preparation for GP Minneapolis (although I'm still on the fence about going).

Looks like a very fun list, fundamentally powerful. I don't think you'll have any problems with the control or combo decks, but the faster agro decks like Burn and Humans will be challenging. Collective Brutality is a somewhat odd choice, I don't think you'll escalate it very often. The flexibility is nice but I could see Thoughtseize in those slots. Cabal Therapist seems actually kind of decent as well, for 2 reasons: Bitterblossom tokens turn into a discard engine and it has menace to get your ninjas through in combat. I would want something to boost the small dudes, maybe 1x Rancor or 1x Sword of Fire and Ice.

Good luck with this, ninjas are badass.

Collective Brutality is in for a couple reasons. At one point I had 3 in just because of how good it was in game 1. Aside from being an all-around decent card, it is the only thing in the deck that gains us life -- no small feat considering sometimes 2 more turns is all you need for Bitterblossom to win for you. Escalate is used semi-frequently to pitch extra lands, which you do tend to draw a decent number of from ninjas + ice fangs. I'm halfway considering a Chemister's Insight for a similar land pitching ability, but 4 mana is pricy for something that could be better (at 4 mana you could get Cryptic Command in here, which I've tried but cut).

CoBru is actually a great card against Burn and other really quick decks, killing their early creatures while gaining life and hitting a burn spell, but its added bonus is in pumping goyf +3/+3 or more when you pitch a Bitterblossom that you don't want to cast against them usually anyway. Against Humans it's much worse than other removal but still hits Meddling Mage or Freebooter in the first couple turns allowing you to slow down their exponential growth enough to get your other preventative measures in place. Being a "hand hate" that can also kill creatures is the biggest plus.

The interesting change to Modern with the addition of Force of Negation is I don't think hand hate is absolutely required anymore. Thoughtseize hurts with Bitterblossoms and in general against aggro since it makes you play a turn 1 untapped land, which usually means you take damage from a dual at some point later on (or take 5 on turn 1). Most of the reason to play Thoughtseize over Inquisition is the go-big style decks but they get punished quite hard by Force. I ended up cutting all non-Cobru hand hate just because they're such bad cards mid-late game, generally.

Burn isn't as much of a problem since we can slow them a lot with removal + spellstutters + Force while allowing Goyf to end the game fast. Humans are very problematic and Blast Zone could potentially go higher than 1 if I really can't get that matchup in check.

Right now the "finish the game fast" slots are all Goyfs, but I agree that a Sword of ______&_____ could be very good in here. 5 mana for its first use is always the main issue, and Goyf just being a big blocker helps a lot of the time.

I'll have to think about Cabal Therapist, I haven't considered it at all yet. It'd need some extra hand-looking effects for it to be really effective but menace is actually incredibly good so that alone makes it potentially worth it. Also, having the potential to just absolutely screw people over is always nice. At this point I don't know what I'd cut. It's kind of nice with Bitterblossom but the first turn you'd get that to work is turn 3 and I think you pretty much always sac this guy on turn 2 to disrupt your opponent.

The main question I guess is which matchups that I'm having problems with right now does it help in (does it help against Humans?)? I'd have to think about the answer to that more and/or just test more.

Thanks for the input!

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Originally Posted by Phoenix Ignition

Collective Brutality is in for a couple reasons. At one point I had 3 in just because of how good it was in game 1. Aside from being an all-around decent card, it is the only thing in the deck that gains us life -- no small feat considering sometimes 2 more turns is all you need for Bitterblossom to win for you. Escalate is used semi-frequently to pitch extra lands, which you do tend to draw a decent number of from ninjas + ice fangs. I'm halfway considering a Chemister's Insight for a similar land pitching ability, but 4 mana is pricy for something that could be better (at 4 mana you could get Cryptic Command in here, which I've tried but cut).

CoBru is actually a great card against Burn and other really quick decks, killing their early creatures while gaining life and hitting a burn spell, but its added bonus is in pumping goyf +3/+3 or more when you pitch a Bitterblossom that you don't want to cast against them usually anyway. Against Humans it's much worse than other removal but still hits Meddling Mage or Freebooter in the first couple turns allowing you to slow down their exponential growth enough to get your other preventative measures in place. Being a "hand hate" that can also kill creatures is the biggest plus.

The interesting change to Modern with the addition of Force of Negation is I don't think hand hate is absolutely required anymore. Thoughtseize hurts with Bitterblossoms and in general against aggro since it makes you play a turn 1 untapped land, which usually means you take damage from a dual at some point later on (or take 5 on turn 1). Most of the reason to play Thoughtseize over Inquisition is the go-big style decks but they get punished quite hard by Force. I ended up cutting all non-Cobru hand hate just because they're such bad cards mid-late game, generally.

Burn isn't as much of a problem since we can slow them a lot with removal + spellstutters + Force while allowing Goyf to end the game fast. Humans are very problematic and Blast Zone could potentially go higher than 1 if I really can't get that matchup in check.

Right now the "finish the game fast" slots are all Goyfs, but I agree that a Sword of ______&_____ could be very good in here. 5 mana for its first use is always the main issue, and Goyf just being a big blocker helps a lot of the time.

I'll have to think about Cabal Therapist, I haven't considered it at all yet. It'd need some extra hand-looking effects for it to be really effective but menace is actually incredibly good so that alone makes it potentially worth it. Also, having the potential to just absolutely screw people over is always nice. At this point I don't know what I'd cut. It's kind of nice with Bitterblossom but the first turn you'd get that to work is turn 3 and I think you pretty much always sac this guy on turn 2 to disrupt your opponent.

The main question I guess is which matchups that I'm having problems with right now does it help in (does it help against Humans?)? I'd have to think about the answer to that more and/or just test more.

Thanks for the input!

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Good call on the Brutality write-up, I forget the gain life aspect often. With Bitterblossom it does seem pretty good. I think Therapist being a 1-drop to get in your t2 Ninja makes it worthwile; the Therapy aspect comes when you know your matchup. It's just a thought, possibly bad, possibly good. I figured the extra BB tokens would become brutal in control matchups with Therapist. Repeatedly discarding against UW control seems absurd.

Sword of Fire and Ice (Feast and Famine, Light and Shadow) would be to break open mid-range matchups. These Swords connecting even once against Jund/BG Rock will be incredible.

On another note I've made what I think is a big improvement in the deck. I was trying out Cabal Therapist a bunch (wrote up notes on which cards to blind call in every matchup for a few situations) and realized that while it can sometimes hit big, it still wasn't enough to win against humans. That deck you can stall for as long as you want, but if all you're doing is 1-for-1ing on average you'll end up losing. What Cabal Therapist did really well was being a Menace 1 drop to anchor the Ninjutsu's better.

I also realized that I literally just can't cast Bitterblossoms in aggressive matchups. The 1 life per turn is such a favor for them that it isn't worth the 1/1 token that can only ever end up chump blocking. Putting myself on a clock means they don't need to swing into the Ice-Fangs with Deathtouch or big goyfs. To make things worse, it isn't even *that* good against UW Control. Teferi, Time Raveler and Jace can bounce your token per turn very easily making it another clock you put on yourself, while eventually wrath of goding your pool of tokens when you finally get like 3 of them.

So with Bitterblossom leaving the deck we lose an easy +2/+2 on Goyf. In addition to that, Spellstutters get much worse because the sweet spot for countering is at 2 cmc. That led me to cut bitterblossom and as a result, goyfs. That removes a lot of the fangs of the deck in terms of ending games quickly.

Enter Fallen Shinobi. His ability is absolutely dirty against every deck. Even just getting 2 lands while being a huge threat and knocking out 5 life is huge, but grabbing at least 1 good card makes it insane. He is single handedly winning the Humans matchup because he uses their bullshit against them (hello Reflector Mage or a team of chump-blockers). Against control, they're terrified of him hitting a planeswalker. Most other decks are trying to cheat big things into play with Izzet Phoenix, Eldrazi Tron, or Dredge. With Shinobi for the late game we can focus on what Faeries in general does best... stalling.

To that end, Faerie Seer does a great job of making sure we don't die or get mana screwed, and being the 1-drop with evasion to anchor the Ninjas. Being a 1-drop faerie is also sweet for Spellstutters being active at 2 cmc by turn 2.

Also, I'm trying a slightly more aggro approach. Took out the Narsets due to lack of non-creatures and added in Mist-Syndicate Naga. That card gets out of control fast and aggro decks can't afford to not leave blockers back for it.

New list updated in opening post.

Jeff Hoogland did a stream of a similar concept,
Maybe it will give you some insight:

https://youtu.be/2eJktaeZ78k

Interesting, although his version can never ever beat humans or probably Eldrazi. Mist-Syndicate Naga + Fallen Shinobi give us a clock and inevitability. With just Ingenious Infiltrators and Ice-Fangs you get a lot of card advantage but your earliest kill turn is like 10. People are seriously underestimating how good the new ninjas are.

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Originally Posted by Phoenix Ignition

Interesting, although his version can never ever beat humans or probably Eldrazi. Mist-Syndicate Naga + Fallen Shinobi give us a clock and inevitability. With just Ingenious Infiltrators and Ice-Fangs you get a lot of card advantage but your earliest kill turn is like 10. People are seriously underestimating how good the new ninjas are.

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I agree. Its probably just a list someone paid him to play. Ninjas are good, definitely tempo positive and super powerful.

FYI i've seen some videos of Gabriel Nassif of the same archetype. they are available on channel fireball's site i think (And probably on nassif's youtbue channel).
He plays 4 plague enginneer main deck to fight humans :)

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Originally Posted by Tylert

FYI i've seen some videos of Gabriel Nassif of the same archetype. they are available on channel fireball's site i think (And probably on nassif's youtbue channel).
He plays 4 plague enginneer main deck to fight humans :)

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I have beeen trying out Plague Engineers for this and Mardu elementals. I think that may be the right choice although it feels so bad against stuff like UW control.

New list after more playtesting. At this point I think I'm committed to play this at the upcoming GP. Every card in here has been painfully playtested, even if some appear to be shoe horned in (friend's words, not mine. He's insane though, Teferi is clearly worth the splash in my eyes.).

Worst card in the deck right now is probably the 3rd Snapcaster Mage. I had Ingenious Infiltrator in its slot but it turns out returning a creature to your hand to put a 2/3 in tapped and draw a single card (assuming they don't have blockers) isn't as good as just playing a Coiling Oracle. Modern is way too fast to pull your own chump blockers out of the game just to draw a card and if they have a Lightning Bolt for him, you just gave them the best tempo play they could ask for. I would love to have more UB hybrid colors for the Forces, but there aren't any good cheap ones that I can find, if anyone knows of any UB cards I should include that aren't 4 cmc or greater, let me know.

Kaya's Guile is surprisingly great. Sac then remove graveyard gives us 50%+ish game 1 matchups versus dredge and Hollow One decks. It's a single-card answer to a late game Snapcaster as well.

Force of Despair has been so much better than Force of Negation that I honestly can't believe the price tag on it. Absolute blowouts versus the most explosive decks in the format, regularly 2 for 2ing or better (for no mana and against decks who have troubles rebuilding). If the opponent plays "correctly" against it, that just means they're only playing 1 creature per turn, which allows us to not die before our card advantage engines come online.

Sideboard seems strange, but the reasoning for Karn: I was going to play something like Collector Ouphe for affinity and decks that play Walking Ballista, but it turns out that Karn is a very good sideboard against Eldrazi Tron (blows up chalices even). Also, I wanted more planeswalkers for the UW control matchup since they have a tough time dealing with all the must answer threats, and I clearly need to remove Force of Despair for games 2/3 against them. Karn is a stupidly must-answer threat right now, so I feel like he deserves that slot. It's weird to have a few artifacts just for him in the sideboard, but many of them were just slight downgrades from whatever they used to be (one Fatal Push turned into one Executioner's Capsule, one Surgical Extraction turned into one Nihil Spellbomb, one Plague Engineer turned into one Walking Ballista).

The extra Kaya's Guile is mainly there for burn, but doubles as great graveyard removal. Ashiok is kinda meh but playing it over Surgical Extraction seems fine as this deck absolutely crushes Izzet Phoenix pre-board so I didn't end up needing them, and I realize I'm light on the post-board Scapeshift hate.

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Originally Posted by Phoenix Ignition

New list after more playtesting.

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Can you share the new list?

Edit: My bad. the list is updated in the opening post :)

Updated the list slightly (-1 Snapcaster +1 Kaya's Guile, KG has been consistently great lately with either the Sacrifice effect or the graveyard wipe being huge, and with Hogaak making a comeback I think it's the right call for the meta, too) in the OP.

I added the 3rd Karn the Great Creator sideboard where there used to be a KG, mostly to shut off opponent's artifacts, but it's also just a solid card against control decks. I also took out 2 Ceremonious Rejections for 2 Surgical Extractions as I expect more dredge/hogaak and Hogaak decks built correctly are *very* good against Leyline and similar Graveyard wiping effects. They also all play Assassin's Trophy as a catch-all so I don't want to be permanent-based in my hate for them (thoughtseize still sucks but everything other than Leyline gets thoughtseized).

The deck is extremely consistent, probably owing to the 15 cantrip effects in it (8 of which, the snakes, get around Narset's anti-draw). 15 cantrips also makes you top deck like a champ, with only the 5 Forces being bad if you're top-decking without board control. Force of Despair is a powerhouse in Modern and a great card to have when you're tapping out to draw more cards. Currently I'd like to add a 3rd Force of Negation in the 75, maybe even a 4th if I could find sideboard slots, but it's such a bad card maindeck against half of the decks that I can't afford to.

Please don't forget to send us a GP report :)

Disappointing 0-2 drop. I could have kept playing but after walking around and seeing all the gaak/mono red I just didn't feel like continuing and did side events instead.

Round 1 Hogaak (featuring GB discard outlets):

Game 1 went pretty long and I felt like I had a fighting chance the whole time, with my opponent keeping a slow hand and me with Force of Despair and Kaya's Guiles to slow them down. It got to a top deck battle and my 1/1s were decent enough at stalling but I never hit the Fallen Shinobi to seal the deal. I had at least 2/3 of their deck exiled through Kaya's Guiles by the end of the game, but Guile's 1/1 token isn't impressive and 4 life will almost never matter. They finished me off with 2 hardcasted Vengevines.

Game 2 I found a Leyline and they didn't mull into hate. I finally got to use some Fallen Shinobi shenanigans, successfully completing my goals for the tournament.

Game 3 I kept a hand with Nihil Spellbomb and Kaya's Guile on a mull to 6 but never got the leyline. At one point I got them down to top deck mode with just 1 card in hand, 1 Grave Crawler, and 1 Bloodghast. End of turn they use their one card (Darkblast) and dredge 3 on their draw. It's Gravecrawler, Gravecrawler, Vengevine. My top decks are fair cards.

It stung that this pilot was clearly a new player and didn't know to use interactions like Carrion Feeder + Gravecrawler with extra mana on their turn. I should have been dead in every single game we played but they didn't know what they were doing.

Round 2 Lantern control:

I'll be honest, I just don't care to play against this deck. I got my Assassin's Trophies, Abrupt Decays, Force of Vigors, and Karns either Thoughtseized or milled and never got to play magic. The one deck I really did not expect to see in GP Hogaak.

So yeah, some lessons learned. No one can beat Hogaak more than 50% of the time, so you might as well join 'em.

But on a more useful note, I think this deck just needs 1 more bomb to be printed for it to be viable against the best decks in the format. It's similar to a lot of decks in the sense that if you hit your 1 build-around card you have entirely different games than if you never draw it (think old Legacy D&T lists drawing Aether Vial or not). Fallen Shinobi is insanely good and I expect to see it in a winning deck at some point (despite being a card that costs 4), but the current build just doesn't have enough finishers.

Also, I cannot wait for Hogaak to get the axe. What a terrible design for a card; only Leyline puts up a decent fight against it, but Force of Vigor + Assassin's Trophy are just too good of catch-all answers. I hope Vegas players file for ticket refunds and WotC emergency bans it before then because holy cow is the format warped around it.

So it turns out Stoneforge Mystic is literally the best possible card that they could have printed(unbanned) for the deck. A good threat that generates value the turn it comes in while being an innocuous attacker (although targeted removal will likely go for its face 100% of the time). Even drawing the necessary equipment package isn't so bad, since I have an ample amount of 1/1s that benefit from that.

I'm optimistic, this pretty much does everything that I said the deck needed in my last post. New list in the OP.

Mana gets a little worse, but its a strong gain for the deck.

Yes, especially since you really want white now on turn 2. I'm going to actually try taking out green at a friend's request since he's very against 4 color. I will miss Ice-fang to death, but there's no harm in trying UWB. Probably try dropping snow from that version altogether.

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Originally Posted by Phoenix Ignition

Yes, especially since you really want white now on turn 2. I'm going to actually try taking out green at a friend's request since he's very against 4 color. I will miss Ice-fang to death, but there's no harm in trying UWB. Probably try dropping snow from that version altogether.

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Take this with a grain of salt, but i've never had much success with esper in modern. I think you can make this work with a couple of tweaks. Coatl seems like a very important piece of this puzzle, worth the trouble. The answer could be Noble Hierarch, which isn't a terrible move at all. Its a 1-drop that can legitimately attack and enable ninjitsu on curve while also giving you more explosive starts. I think the place to cut is:

-2 abrupt decay (sideboard?)
-1 Liliana (double black is ambitious)
-1 Force of Negation

I think fatal push and decay overlap in role, and you have trophy for anything too big. Liliana's double black seems like a liability, even with astrolabe. Force #4 could easily be in the sideboard.

What i really like about nobleis that it allows you to more reasonably cast batterskull if sfm dies. All around, i think noble solves a lot of problems.

Whoops, Liliana actually isn't in that list anymore for that exact reason. I accidentally had 61 cards there.

I tried out Birds instead of Nobles and was underwhelmed. Acceleration is good but the dead top deck after turn 2 is hard to recover from. You're right about the 4th Force, it's too many and there are still too many all creature strategies in Modern for it to be worth it. Force of Despair isn't as good now that people aren't Phoenix/Hogaaking so unless Phoenix stays a top deck I might not go back to FoDs.

I've had similar luck with Esper but maybe SFM is a big enough push to make it decent? Fallen Shinobi is such a threat that I definitely want the black.

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Originally Posted by Phoenix Ignition

I've had similar luck with Esper but maybe SFM is a big enough push to make it decent? Fallen Shinobi is such a threat that I definitely want the black.

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I think if the colors/cards of esper weren't strong enough before Stoneforge they won't be after. The only card that gets slightly better in this new metagame for esper is Lingering Souls. Jund is getting popular again and Souls is naturally good with SFM. However, we have to recognize that white is the weakest color in modern (other than sideboard options.) Stoneforge changes that slightly, but it's a card that can be splashed with minimal effort (which I think you can still accomplish, honestly.) I really think BUG with a small splash for SFM should be totally doable. With Astrolabe, a few fetchable duals, and some number of Noble Hierarch you should be all set. I like that Noble gives 2 of your primary colors (blue and green) while also providing white for a t2 SFM.

If you took out green you lose Coatl, Oracle, Trophy, Decay. White gives you SFM, Path, Lingering Souls, ??? You get to keep your ninjas and faerie seers, what etb-value creatures would you put into the deck to enable ninjitsu? In esper colors I can't really think of anything other than maybe Snapcaster Mage. You have 8 slots to figure out with Coatl/Oracle.

EDIT: Cabal Therapist has pseudo-evasion with menace and rewards you for playing Lingering Souls, but doesn't have immediate value. Vesperlark?