The Twelve Apostles ( A primer by TraxDaMax )

[TraxDaMax]

Hello and welcome to the primer of my new modern deck!
I will start off with the history of the deck, to give you an idea how long this deck had to wait to actually come together.


History of the deck:


The main idea of this deck came with the printing of Extirpate.
A buddy of mine and myself realized that with the help of a card which could be played as much as you like, and was not a basic land, Extirpate could do Doomsday like shenanigans.
The only card for that back then, was Relentless Rats. So we started a search for combo's in which we could abuse our library size, but we were left hungry.
When Lorwyn was released and we saw Shelldock Isle, we looked for something to win with it now that we had an enabler.
But it took us untill Rise of the Eldrazi to finally find the (arguably) most broken creatures ever printed, with Emrakul, the Aeons Torn as the chief and choice here.

So we found our enablers and wincondition, but there were still several issues.

The first issue was not finding Extirpate. And adding cards to find Extirpate made the whole plan of removing cards in our library harder since the whole point of Extirpate + Relentless Rat + Shelldock Isle was to get 20 cards or less. Every card you add makes the magic number 20 harder to achieve.

The second issue was, when we didn't have Extirpate, we were playing 3 mana 2/2's. This is even mediocre in coreset limited.

So the deck got tossed untill Surgical Extraction got printed and I searched forums to ask for help, if anybody had interest but not much of that was shown, and for good reason too.
See, the first problem of the deck had actually been solved with 4 Surgical Extraction, but the "I'm playing 2/2-dorks.dec" hadn't.

Finally, M14 brought us the key to make the whole idea come together. Shadowborn Apostle.

It was an easy trade with RR, especially because Apostle has it's very own combo built in to fetch the best Demon in the game, Griselbrand.
It's also only 1 mana instead of 3, which means it can chumpblock or even attack in the meanwhile when we are looking for Extirpate/Surgical Extraction while still representing a threat of getting Grizza.
Here I give you, the first build (I'm sure it'll need finetuning) of:

The Twelve Apostles

Maindeck (60)
30 Shadowborn Apostle
3 Emrakul, the Aeons Torn
1 Griselbrand

4 Gitaxian Probe
4 Extirpate
4 Surgical Extraction

4 Shelldock Isle
4 Marsh Flats
4 Watery Grave
1 Overgrown Tomb
1 Darkslick Shore

Sideboard
4 Pithing Needle
4 Nature's Claim
1 Overgrown Tomb
4 Leyline of Sanctity
2 Dispel


Like Manaless Dredge in Legacy, we opt to draw first, and discard an Apostle. From there we try to find a Surgical Extraction/Extirpate for the Apostle in our bin, and in the meantime we just toss out the Apostle's in our hand and the ones we draw onto the battlefield. Once we have our Apostles sent to Exile, finding a Shelldock Isle and getting a wincon under it is our plan.
I have done this turn 3 in testing. And it often happends turn 4 and 5. Extra drawn Extirpates/S.E. can be used to filter out our deck even more (fetch, other Extirpate/S.E) or sometimes to remove something from our opponents if needed(snapcaster target, past in flames etc..).

The sideboard is made against the cards we hate so see:

-Fulminator Mage
-Relic of Progenitus
-Rest in Peace
-Tormod's Crypt
-Scavenging Ooze
-Deathrite Shaman
-Discard spells
-Dispel vs counters and Beast Within

Remember, if we are able to Nature's Claim an artifact/enchantment hate card, we can extract all of them from our opponents deck, we play 8 of these effects!
This friday will be my first tourny with the deck, and I'm pretty excited as so many people are playing Blue decks, which this deck is usually awesome against. There is also so little graveyard hate going on, that this is more then often just broken in half.

I hope this read didn't bore you, and if you have suggestions, I've been working on the deck for years, so I'm very dedicated to try any possible changes!