Before Modern Horizons shook the Modern format to its core, the post-Strixhaven Modern metagame consisted of a few top decks, one of which was G/W Heliod Company.
Here is an example list from when Heliod was in the top tiers. I’ll do a quick breakdown of the deck, then describe why it was so well positioned.
The Combos
Heliod, Sun-Crowned is a combo enabler for Spike Feeder and Walking Ballista. With Heliod in play, you can remove a counter from Spike Feeder to gain two life. When you do, Heliod will trigger, and you target Feeder to get the counter. Then, because Feeder has two counters on it again, you can repeat this process over and over to gain infinite life.
With Heliod in play, you can cast Walking Ballista for X=2, and then activate Heliod to give it lifelink. After you do so, you can remove counters from Ballista to ping your opponent, then gain life and put a counter on Ballista, and repeat.
The Speed
Arbor Elf and Utopia Sprawl make up the second part of this deck: mana acceleration. These two cards on their own each allow you to cast your combo cards ahead of curve and to get a mana advantage in any games that are not fought on the combo axis. Together, you can untap the land enchanted with Sprawl to generate a massive burst of mana and dump your hand into play.
Half-Fair, Half Combo
Auriok Champion and Conclave Mentor are your two drops. They do a couple of things. Firstly, Auriok Champion is naturally very good against the red decks of the format, clogging up the board on the ground and gaining a lot of life over the course of the game. Auriok’s second ability is also very synergistic with your natural plan, as it can gain life to trigger Heliod, Sun-Crowned or Archangel of Thune to buff your creatures or combo faster and through removal.
Conclave Mentor’s first ability is quite strong in this deck. It supercharges each Heliod, Sun Crowned trigger while being a decent “1.5 for 1” blocker (It gains life when it dies) against aggro decks and helping you to combo faster and through removal, just like Auriok Champion.
With Heliod in play, Auriok Champion can allow you to spend two less mana on Walking Ballista, so you can play it for x=1, it’ll get a counter, and then you give it lifelink for a total of four mana instead of six.
Conclave Mentor has a similar function, because you can get an extra counter on Walking Ballista (or Spike Feeder) when it enters the battlefield, allowing you to spend less mana to get the Walking Ballista combo going. It’s worth noting that Conclave Mentor does not need Heliod to be in play to work with your other two combo pieces, in case you want to sequence them with Heliod last.
Both of these cards also allow you to combo through some amount of removal. Consider this situation:
You have an Auriok Champion or a Conclave Mentor as well as Heliod, Sun-Crowned in play. Your opponent is representing Lightning Bolt. You cast Spike Feeder, and when it enters the battlefield, it either enters with three counters (in the case of Conclave Mentor) or you get an Auriok Champion trigger.
Now, normally you would remove a counter from Feeder and your opponent could respond by using Lightning Bolt on your Feeder. You’d be left with no window to combo again, because removing another counter from Feeder would leave it with zero toughness and it would go to the graveyard. However, with Feeder at three counters (from Auriok + Heliod or Conclave Mentor), you’d be able to remove a counter, and if they attempt to kill your Feeder, you could remove another and combo off with the removal spell on the stack. This is quite important, and learning how to use these cards to play around your opponent’s removal and learning the windows they can interact with you is quite important to certain matchups.
The Fair Game
What’s to be said about Collected Company? This card has proved its worth for many years now, and its power is truly maximized in this deck. You can often CoCo into Heliod + Feeder, and even the mediocre CoCo hits often net you a mana in value or more and get your creatures into play at instant speed. CoCo is a fickle mistress, however, and you’ll find yourself missing every now and then, to your great disappointment.
Skyclave Apparition adds some much needed removal to the maindeck, and you can even CoCo into it. There’s not much to be said about this card; it’s excellent rate and rarely dead.
Ranger Captain of Eos does it all. It has a few functions, in addition to being a 3/3 beater that gives you devotion for Heliod
- Ranger Captain will most likely tutor Walking Ballista, which allows you to set up for your combo or a midrange Walking Ballista for value.
- It can also provide a secondary toolbox with cards like Giant Killer, Burrenton Forge Tender, or a mana dork.
- Its second ability is extremely versatile. It’s good against spell based combo decks, sweeper decks, and most importantly, for getting that key combo piece down under their (noncreature) interaction.
What previously made Heliod Company so successful?
The axes that Heliod attacks on are threefold.
- Gaining infinite life with the Spike Feeder + Heliod combo.
- Dealing infinite damage with Walking Ballista + Heliod
- Attacking with efficient creatures, using incidental lifegain to maximize Heliod and beat down. Heliod being a 5/5 will most often contribute to this plan. This is often referred to as your “Midrange Plan”.
The first is what made Heliod’s good matchups so easy. Being able to gain infinite life as early as turn three, or later but with hedges against interaction, was a powerful plan that many decks couldn’t beat. If your opponents didn’t scoop to infinite life, you could rely on not caring about your life total to find a way to kill them.
Against decks with realistic outs to infinite life (win conditions that aren’t damage based, e.g. Jace, The Mind Sculptor, Thassa’s Oracle) the second two plans were what you had to rely on to get the game won. Those plans also work against decks that lose to infinite life, of course.
The important takeaway here is that, apart from the combos, Heliod’s midrange plan was actively good. It wasn’t anything close to the best thing you could be doing, but it was serviceable enough to be a reliable gameplan without the combos.
This is what lifted Heliod above the “one trick pony” status of other lifegain-centric decks. Instead of having slam-dunk matchups against aggro decks while having mediocre matchups against control and hyper-interactive midrange, Heliod was able to compete on the axes that those interactive decks wanted to play on while maintaining excellent matchups against aggro decks.
After Modern Horizons 2
With Modern Horizons 2 came a bevy of new archetypes and even returned some old ones to dominance. Let’s take a look at the meta and see what we can draw from it.
Here are the top 10 decks in Modern. What can we draw from this? Firstly, we can divide the decks into three categories. The first are uninteractive, linear strategies. Amulet Titan and Living End are the most popular of these. We don’t need to worry too much about them, because generally Heliod’s gameplan was always good against these decks – gain infinite life quickly and make your way from there.
The second type of deck is the aggro decks. Hammer Time, Blitz, and various other burn decks make up this category. Once again, they do not pose a particular problem for Heliod, with the exception of Hammer Time. Hammer Time poses an incredibly fast clock that requires us to have a quick Skyclave Apparition or very fast infinite life to keep up. They can also beat infinite life with Inkmoth Nexus. I don’t think Hammer Time is something to be too worried about, but it’s not a slam dunk like other aggro matchups.
Why has Heliod Company fallen off the map?
The answer is in the third category. I don’t have an official name for this category, but it’s composed of highly interactive midrange decks with very powerful plans and threats. Heliod was always good at beating one of those two things. Beating interaction just requires careful use of two for one spells like CoCo or Ranger Captain, while your combos can power through many threats they can produce. The problem is when these decks combine the threats and interaction so consistently and seamlessly.
Take the midrange or tempo decks based around Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer and Dragon’s Rage Channeler. These cards play tons of efficient interaction while snowballing with Ragavan and DRC. Because the threats are one mana and the interaction is also cheap, their efficiency totally steamrolls you. If you could get a combo going, you’d be well equipped to win, but that’s not how I’ve had these matchups go.
The same applies for the Temur Rhinos decks. They play an abundance of cheap or even free interaction, while backing it up with a play that has far more impact than anything but your best CoCos – cascading into a Crashing Footfalls. It’s this efficient and extremely impactful threat that allows them to interact with you at whim while not allowing you to exploit that abundance of interaction with steady two for ones and careful play like you do when playing against control decks.
In short, you can’t compete with these decks on a “midrange” axis, because their threats are so efficient compared to yours. They have too much interaction for your combos to be reliable, as well.
Things aren’t looking good for the old Heliod decks. However, the combos remain powerful. I still feel we are looking at something with potential. So, the question is, how does Heliod keep up?
The answer is clearly not in the midrange part of the deck. Your threats just can’t compete. So, that leaves us to the combo portion of the deck. But we’ve established that their interaction makes relying on the combo difficult, so how do we get around that?
By blanking that interaction entirely.
Using Sanctum Prelate
Against the Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer and Dragon’s Rage Channeler decks, if you name one, you blank the most common interaction spells
Inquisition of Kozilek
Thoughtseize
Unholy Heat
Lightning Bolt
In many of these decks, that’s close to 80% of their interaction spells!
Additionally, against the UR Ragavan/Murktide Regent tempo decks, you blank somewhere around 10 of their cantrips – everything besides Expressive Iteration – and drastically reduce the amount of cards they see.
Against the Temur Rhinos decks, you can either name zero, in order to stop their Crashing Footfalls, or you can name two. Since all of their interaction (besides Subtlety and Force of Negation) costs two mana (Brazen Borrower, Bonecrusher Giant, and Fire // Ice), you can effectively shut down most of their ways of interacting with your combos!
Sanctum Prelate is also decent against Hammer Time. Hammer Time plays a lot of ways to find its namesake equipment, as well as 4 Sigarda’s Aid, so I expect Prelate on one will be very relevant.
Sanctum Prelate is very well positioned in the metagame, and I think it might be the key to bringing Heliod back. How do we slot it in?
The New List
Here’s my first draft. Archangel of Thune had never really impressed me, so it was the first to be cut. I figured that I would also remove a Ranger-Captain of Eos, since Sanctum Prelate is a similar body and cost with more functionality at getting what we are gunning for in this meta (gaining infinite life through interaction). I’m only playing 3 Prelates, because I think that while it’s incredibly good against the decks you want it against, it’s not at its best against decks that run few noncreature spells.
I also cut 2 Conclave Mentors for 2 Eladamri’s Call. I’ve always liked Eladamri’s Call, but adding Prelate as a haymaker in certain matchups makes me ready to take the plunge and include it.
Sideboard Changes
Endurance is a phenomenal sideboard card from MH2 that serves two functions. The first and most important is that it is graveyard hate. From removing Delirium against DRC, getting rid of Delve fuel against Murktide Regent, or stopping Underworld Cookbook + Ovalchase Daredevil, graveyard hate is at a premium right now. The second function is its body. Endurance is a 3/4 with Flash and Reach, and that kind of body has never been better positioned. It blocks Dragon’s Rage Channeler and Ragavan with ease, while also being good against the graveyard portions of those decks. Because we’re gunning for the midrange/tempo decks that give Heliod such grief, I’m comfortable with three of these in the board.
While we can only cast Prismatic Ending for two colors, in this hyper-efficient Modern we need this kind of answer for one and two mana permanents. It’s also extremely versatile and I feel comfortable with two in the board.
Urza’s Saga and Underworld Cookbook shells allowed the artifact decks to rise from the rubble and regain prominence once again. I think that the artifact decks should be good matchups, but a one of Kataki, War’s Wage hedges against them all the same. You can even tutor for Kataki with Eladamri’s Call, although unfortunately not with Ranger-Captain of Eos.
I’ve trimmed a Damping Sphere because Tron decks and even Amulet Titan are diminishing in popularity. However, it’s still a powerful “catch-all” hate piece that I believe we have room for. Also, the decks that Sphere is good against are marginally more popular in the Untap Open League metagame.
Finally, we have the last Sanctum Prelate in the sideboard. When you want Prelate, you want 4 copies, so I expect to be boarding this in quite often.
Conclusion
There you have it! The combos that Heliod brings to the table are still extremely powerful, and I believe Sanctum Prelate might be the secret to allowing you to rely on the combos against the hyper efficient red based midrange decks. I am hopeful that Heliod is able to make a comeback and go toe to toe with the best of MH2.
