I'm struggling against Mardu Pyromancer and Hollow One in my LGS games recently, any suggestions?
Against mardu the best card you can have against them is Keranos, god of storms. Just pretend that they're jund where you want sweepers more than you want spot removal and things play out roughly the same. I cut the majority of my spot removal and go deep on sweepers to enforce the 1-for-1 trades as much as possible. So long as you play tight and don't fall miles behind or get trapped under a liliana you'll be fine.
Against hollow one you just have to hope that you don't get triple thoughtseized by inquiry. I wish I could speak to this match up more, but in the last 3 comp REL events I've played against it I've lost to the nuts on turn 1 or 2 each game and match. A few friends of mine play it and the running joke is that I still haven't played against it because turn 1-2 triple hollow one or BI pitch all my lands "randomly" don't count as games for testing purposes. It's kind of like dredge or the various glass cannon decks. Do they have the thing? Are you able to interact at all? If you can you win easily, if not you die in five minutes.
Against both decks an early tasigur or turn four Bolas is a major problem for them and can often win by themselves with very little support. So if you have hands that can make that happen you should be good.
Well I made top 8 of the ptq and then got clowned by dredge. I ended up beating UW miracles, esper shadow, storm, humans, and esper gifts and lost to storm before seeing the one dude on dredge in the room in the top 8. No new information sadly, just more reps with the deck against tilt. Bolas was stellar all day, the body was supremely relevant and the discard was priceless every time I got the trigger. This is all before the seven mana mode even was a consideration and I still managed to flip him 4 times throughout the day. Each time he flipped I was a bit flooded and wanted something powerful to do with my mana. Great play on turn four. Game winning play on turn fifteen.
The only change I made to my previous list was putting in two brutality in the main because there is a heavy burn presence in the area (there was at least seven of them in the room today) in place of my two scours. I never missed the scours and was never short of a hefty yard to do all the stuff with the things. Knot, Tas, Search etc always had as much food as they needed to work just by playing the game. Sort of like how you don't need to put in extra work to make tarmogoyf good, just play the game naturally and they'll work as intended.
I still hold that bolas belongs in the deck and that grixis Hard Control is a solid tier 1 deck that just doesn't have many eyes on it. Each of the matches I won were comically easy . We have answers to literally everything in the format and we have enough overlap that we can at least be 50/50 against the field with a number of match ups where we are run away favorites. It seems to me after all of this time and adding in a great value threat with bolas, if anybody is trying to play fair it's our match to lose and the unfair decks just have to hope we didn't adequately prepare. Deck is great. Bolas is bae.
PPTQ coming up tomorrow and I will be bringing Grixis control. I'll be running the Discard+Bolas version that Gods_Shadow and stokpile have played with no thoughtscours, and mine will include 2 Liliana of the Veil and as well as the 2 Rise/Falls. My spell choices are very similar to Gods_Shadow. I'm having trouble on a couple of choices in my deck as my meta-game is slightly unpredictable (we will be getting a lot of out-of-towners that I won't know). I do know that my local players usually play Tron, I'm expecting humans, and there is at least one player with RDW. I haven't seen a graveyard deck yet, but I do have some hate in the board just so I'm not caught off guard.
Hrmmmm. I am also playing a ptq tomorrow with grixis... that is also expecting an unusually large amount of people from out of town...
My first question is: 4-mana card choices?
I'm running 2 cryptics, 2 bolas, and 2 rise/fall. I would like to include 1 copy of JTMS. I'm having trouble deciding between Pia and Kirin Nalaar or Kalitas as my threat package. I haven't played with Pia and Kirin yet, so could someone elaborate on why that could be a better choice? It seems versatile if all tokens + Pia survive a turn. The biggest appeal of Kalitas to me is the lifegain + 4 toughness.
I would also like to mention that in my playtesting, with the combination of cryptic, liliana, JTMS, pia/kalitas, I sometimes run into mana-color problems (using a standard manabase with only 1 field of ruin).
I've found both Kalitas and PnK to be either amazing or worse than a basic forest depending on the match so I strongly believe that they should stay in the board. If you insist on them I'd go with PnK because they have the ability to be more than just a 3/4 with no text. But in all honesty I'd cut them for either the third cryptic or the JTMS that you want. Bolas is good enough of a 4-drop with a snap/Kommand engine that you really don't need much more creature based threats at that CMC.
My second question: 3-mana slot?
My nimble obstructionists will not be arriving in time, I would have loved them for the tron matchups =/ Because of that I am including 1 vendillion clique mainboard. Is that an ok choice or am I better taking it out for another 4-mana threat or 4th kolaghan? Clique rarely feels like a bad play but with 2 Liliana Veil and my desire to run 3 or 4 4-cmc threats, I feel like I should just use the slot for something else (would be ideal if i could find obstructionists to borrow of course)
Clique is bae. That is all.
Third question: 2-cmc slot! I don't have baby jace and that makes me sad I want more things to do on turn 2 if possible. What do you guys think are my best options? I'm including 1 Search for Azcanta, so I'm looking for 2 cards to fill that 2 cmc slot. I've seen recent discussion on young pyromancer. Even if he doesn't generate blockers immediately, I think he servers as good removal bait. Between all of the discard and recursion with Kolaghan's Command + Rise//Fall it all looks like a nice package. Am I missing any other 2 cmc choices? I'm always the kind of players who wants to put more card draw in a deck, but for this meta I think that being more active and less durdly could prove more beneficial.
Search likely won't be that great in such a creature heavy version of the deck so I'd suggest against that. Pyro is always fine, but again with such a heavy creature base it's not going to get you much value. There's nothing wrong with running collective brutality MD since it always does something. Another good option is mana leak, you're a lot heavier on colored requirements so it gives you another early game piece of disruption and it doesn't go dead nearly as fast as people tend to think it does.
My final question is card draw. I'm running 4 serum visions, 1 search, and 1 JTMS. Does that feel right? What are everyone's thoughts on ancestral vision as a one of? Even i cast it on turn 3-4, it feels like a comfortable buffer for it to resolve a few turns later. Being grixis control it is ideal to play active and aggressive, but sometimes we can be put on the defensive too, and sitting on the ancestral visions clock just seems comfortable, allowing us the option to player safer if we have to.
If you're going light on AV then they belong in the sideboard, it's just too hard to get them early enough to matter or chain them together with just the one copy. If you want to be a bit more aggressive then you can consider dire fleet daredevil as another mid to late game value play or liliana, the last hope.
Lastly, never be afraid to add in an extra land. Creeps and fields do a ton of work and don't get enough credit for a lot of our wins.
Mission briefing says "combo card" to me more than a value play honestly. We care about the body of snapcaster and if we wanted more of them we could play dire fleet daredevil, but we don't so we aren't. So far I've only seen thought erasure as a potentially playable card for us, meanwhile I've seen several that can go into a handful of different decks. Still hoping we don't get boned on this mechanic like the last time we went to ravnica.
I control search for azcanta. I have 6 cards in my graveyard. In my upkeep I resolve the search trigger and choose to put Gaea's Blessing into my yard. Am I able to transform the search or does the blessing reshuffle my yard first?
I dont think the printing of Assassin's Trophy is too bad for us, yes we will need to adapt but i think we have a kinda good matchup already and the card could just be ramping us. If it means pushing Tron out a little bit, i think it's a good printing for us. AVs will have to be a consideration and as much as I would like Cruel Ultimatum to be good... I dont think it'll ever happen :(. It's just a 7 mana sorcery that doesnt even win the game on the spot.
I might just try a sultai list with it tho it seems very powerful
I wouldn't say it's bad either, but it does mean that we have to make a noticeable adaptation to it existing. Different draw engines, more basics, etc. It also means that one of our best match ups in BGx will be returning to prominence which is quite good for us so long as we make the proper adjustments.
Erm, looks like the best removal ever printed has...just been printed. With the release of Assassin's Trophy I think we might need to get off the azcanta train since it's going to be a bit unreliable now. I fully expect BGx to come out in force and with a set of these our typical draw engines are mostly defunct. This leads me to believe that we'll probably have to go back to running AV to pull ahead on raw card count. Still stupid early to be making any significant claims, but I like to be prepared in advance. And with the PTQ season being modern I want to get as much info together and theory crafting done as possible. Gods I wish we could just run 4c and not start the game at 11 life to splash for just this to start making tron a non-issue.
Anybody else have thoughts on BGx being able to turn all of our trump cards into basic lands?
I've been fiddling around more with builds running Thought Erasure and I've been liking it a lot. I had to retool the mana base and removal suite a touch to accommodate the UB spell on turn 2 which meant tinkering with the SB. So all in all I've shuffled around maybe a dozen or so cards between the main and side and it's been performing pretty well. Here is where it's at currently:
I'm down to only 2 fields and up to 4 total fast lands to facilitate the erasures and make it far, far less likely that I'll have to shock more than once to cast my spells on curve. Adding another set of 2-drops meant that I had to add in a bit more 1-drops to help out with the curve which means another push and the fourth bolt. I've felt that my combo match ups have been improved significantly outside of tron and burn and making the control mirror impossible to lose. I'm a touch weaker to hollow one with the current configuration which can be mitigated by adding an additional terminate or GY hate piece into the list somewhere. In that match up I'm mostly just nervous about being able to kill off delve threats and not getting BM'd in all honesty.
As more cards come out I'll be testing with them and continue to durdle around with this 75 in the mean time. Two of the three guilds of grixis are in this set so I wouldn't be shocked if we see another potentially playable card for us to try out. Currently my main concern is balancing the number of fast lands with how many 4-drops (and snapcaster lines) along with the right mix of hard counters. I may want to work in a countersquall (only 2 fields makes the UB far more palatable) into the main or another dreadbore to help handle walkers, but with the extra pile of discard that might not even be a factor. In any case those are my current thoughts on the card and build, I'll be poking my head in again as I learn more and different cards get spoiled.
Apologies in advance if this has been discussed before in this thread but I gotta ask, is Nicol Bolas, the Ravager a legitimate threat to be considered as a win condition in a Grixis Control shell? Does anyone have an input about it?
One or two pages back I made a lengthy post about taking second in a pptq with 2x Bolas in my list that you can read over if you like. I've been running him for a bit now and I have been thoroughly impressed with it. You can sort of think of him as a value creature + cruel ultimatum split card. In the mid game he's a fine threat that is a 2-for-1 when he lands and later on he wins the game for 7 mana. When combined with discard from Kommand and any IoK's that you might be running, he really helps whittle away at your opponent's hand and very quickly empties them out. Additionally, the more walkers you run the better he gets due to his hidden ability called "blocking." You'd be surprised how often you can cast him and your opponent can no longer attack because of the size.
He is also stellar in control mirrors, especially against UW when their only "answer" is path. Even then, a path on Bolas gets you a land from path and 2 cards from their hand which is some insane value from a card that can win the game on it's own. I really think he's worth running, but I do recommend some amount of targeted discard or cliques to assist him coming down.
Quick question that has been bothering me: Why do UW and Jeskai play 2 Main Deck sweepers at minimum, UW even goes up to 5, while we play 1 tops. Is there something about Grixis that makes more sweepers undesirable?
There are a couple of reasons why sweepers aren't commonly wanted or needed in the average grixis control list. The first is that our finishers and best stabilizers by and large are creatures. Supreme verdict is a great way to stabilize the board, but so is a tasigur with the difference between them is that tasigur doubles as a win con and triples as a card advantage engine. Not to mention that other builds might be more creature heavy with pyromancer or bolas which is counter to the primary strength of a wrath of god effect which is breaking the symmetry. The more creatures in your list, the worst damnation becomes.
The second most likely reason is that we usually don't need them because of the fact that we play 7-8 copies of snapcaster mage. Between Kommand Shock + Raise Dead leading into the additional snapcaster triggers, we are stuffed to the gills with spot removal. Much like the UB decks in the soon to rotate standard format, we're able to keep pace quite handily purely through spot removal and killing literally everything that lands. This is why we tend to have a tough time beating multiple copies of lingering souls, it's a perfect counter to our strategy.
Personally, the only reason I main deck two copies of anger of the gods is because of the vengevine decks and various other "turn 3 mega board state" decks of the format. Between them, hollow one, and Scales Affinity I find it all too likely that you won't be able to keep pace effectively. Combine that with the fact that we don't have path to exile for bloodghast and other recursive dorks I think anger is where we want to be right now. However in most iterations of the format that we've seen I have rarely felt the need for MD sweepers outside of when Eldrazi Tron was everywhere.
TL;DR: We have enough spot removal to make up for it and sweepers also kill our finisher and board stabilization threats.
Thank you for the explanation. This makes a lot of sense: the removal saturation is real. Still, there are games where we don't draw removal+snap+command in order to get multiple uses out of our spot removal. In those cases sweepers might provide an answer. Also, even though our Tasigurs die to Damnation we can also just get him back with Kcommand. The option of just tossing Tasigur out there to stem the aggro tide, take hits (even by our own Damnation) and just get back keeps me alive occasionally.
Yeah I agree there's nothing wrong with having damnation paired with creatures to try and double as a way to stabilize the board to act as a "get out of jail free card." When eldrazi tron and Counters Company were both super popular I was on two MD damnation and an anger myself. Currently I think MD angers is a good spot to be due to the GY aggro decks being popular, but in general I don't feel the need to run MD sweepers in general outside of specific meta considerations. It really comes down to your meta, as does the majority of modern considerations, but when drafting a list for an unknown field I'd go without sweepers main without context.
Quick question that has been bothering me: Why do UW and Jeskai play 2 Main Deck sweepers at minimum, UW even goes up to 5, while we play 1 tops. Is there something about Grixis that makes more sweepers undesirable?
There are a couple of reasons why sweepers aren't commonly wanted or needed in the average grixis control list. The first is that our finishers and best stabilizers by and large are creatures. Supreme verdict is a great way to stabilize the board, but so is a tasigur with the difference between them is that tasigur doubles as a win con and triples as a card advantage engine. Not to mention that other builds might be more creature heavy with pyromancer or bolas which is counter to the primary strength of a wrath of god effect which is breaking the symmetry. The more creatures in your list, the worst damnation becomes.
The second most likely reason is that we usually don't need them because of the fact that we play 7-8 copies of snapcaster mage. Between Kommand Shock + Raise Dead leading into the additional snapcaster triggers, we are stuffed to the gills with spot removal. Much like the UB decks in the soon to rotate standard format, we're able to keep pace quite handily purely through spot removal and killing literally everything that lands. This is why we tend to have a tough time beating multiple copies of lingering souls, it's a perfect counter to our strategy.
Personally, the only reason I main deck two copies of anger of the gods is because of the vengevine decks and various other "turn 3 mega board state" decks of the format. Between them, hollow one, and Scales Affinity I find it all too likely that you won't be able to keep pace effectively. Combine that with the fact that we don't have path to exile for bloodghast and other recursive dorks I think anger is where we want to be right now. However in most iterations of the format that we've seen I have rarely felt the need for MD sweepers outside of when Eldrazi Tron was everywhere.
TL;DR: We have enough spot removal to make up for it and sweepers also kill our finisher and board stabilization threats.
Hi there, I'm considering buying into Grixis Control and I was wondering what would be an appropriate list for my LGS meta: there are NO Hollow One, KCI, Bridgevine lists, we have a not-so-regular Human player and the rest is more or less one of each.
Does it make a difference on the list or should I take whatever Corey is playing and build from there? Thanks!
Are you saying there are no graveyard aggro decks or just no hollow one of that group? If so I'd recommend my list minus the angers for something of your choice that works against what you're more concerned with. Something like extra permission or more walkers or extra cantrips. Here's my list, I wrote about it on the previous page a bit.
Has anyobdy given any thought to the new card coming in Ravnica Thought Erasure? I know that deep down we all wish we could run several copies of thoughtseize but know that we just can't afford to. It seems to fix the typical issues we tend to run into with the normal IoK and thoughtseize options. The surveil helps fuel our yard and it doesn't deal us damage like seize while also always providing value even on turn 20 against an empty hand. Also unlike IoK it can take CoCo, Jace, Gifts, and Cryptic. It also lets you take walkers and creatures unlike brutality (which is a fine MD card already). I suppose this is just a super long winded way of saying "unconditional discard spells are good."
I can see it replacing some amount of permission or other discard spells or perhaps a scour or two. I think that the only thing that would hold this card back from being a serious player is the fact that it costs 2 mana unlike the hyper efficient Iok/Seize combo. None the less it is a strong enough effect that it should get a fair shake at testing it out. Personally I'm very excited to play with this one, far more than I was with Bolas. More than that though, I'm much more confident that this will find a home in our lists in due time. Amusingly, I remember myself (and likely several others) suggesting a similar card in the "print this so I can play it in modern" thread. UB targeted discard with some cute benefit on top of it. I couldn't help but throw this out there because of how neat it is.
In any case, does anybody else think this card is real? If you think it's unplayable garbo for modern what makes you say so? And if you do think the card is bad please explain why beyond simply reading the card back to us.
i just feel that only running 2 scours may leave your graveyard too empty. you rely quite heavily on it, even for a grixis deck. there've got to be more hands this way that you have to mulligan (like tasigur, knot, azcanta, lands or similar.
I actually haven't been feeling a lack of "graveyard fuel" for the deck to still run smoothly. In the early turns knot as a bad force spike is good enough and delving a single card isn't difficult between the 1 drops and fetches. I'm not at all worried about trying to turbo flip an azcanta outside of control mirrors because I'm too busy casting my spells that I wouldn't have time to activate it even if it had flipped 2-4 turns earlier.
I agree that a turn 2 tasigur is very strong, but I'd want to be on 3 of him before I'd want to go hard on scours just because of the need to have both of them in hand for that play to be possible. Also you are correct that it's easy to slip in a scour eot at some point. My problem with that is that I want to be certain that the early game is 100% taken care of and that means not spending a bunch of spell slots and mana on cantrips.
Lastly, I don’t know about you guys, but since UW Control has become Tier one in Modern and they are really well versed in the control mirror, I think it might be time to bring Akers is back to our SB.
Personally, I believe that we are a heavy favorite in any control mirror so I don't believe that we need anything targeted for them outside of a single generic "fair match up grindy" card in the side.
Against mardu the best card you can have against them is Keranos, god of storms. Just pretend that they're jund where you want sweepers more than you want spot removal and things play out roughly the same. I cut the majority of my spot removal and go deep on sweepers to enforce the 1-for-1 trades as much as possible. So long as you play tight and don't fall miles behind or get trapped under a liliana you'll be fine.
Against hollow one you just have to hope that you don't get triple thoughtseized by inquiry. I wish I could speak to this match up more, but in the last 3 comp REL events I've played against it I've lost to the nuts on turn 1 or 2 each game and match. A few friends of mine play it and the running joke is that I still haven't played against it because turn 1-2 triple hollow one or BI pitch all my lands "randomly" don't count as games for testing purposes. It's kind of like dredge or the various glass cannon decks. Do they have the thing? Are you able to interact at all? If you can you win easily, if not you die in five minutes.
Against both decks an early tasigur or turn four Bolas is a major problem for them and can often win by themselves with very little support. So if you have hands that can make that happen you should be good.
The only change I made to my previous list was putting in two brutality in the main because there is a heavy burn presence in the area (there was at least seven of them in the room today) in place of my two scours. I never missed the scours and was never short of a hefty yard to do all the stuff with the things. Knot, Tas, Search etc always had as much food as they needed to work just by playing the game. Sort of like how you don't need to put in extra work to make tarmogoyf good, just play the game naturally and they'll work as intended.
I still hold that bolas belongs in the deck and that grixis Hard Control is a solid tier 1 deck that just doesn't have many eyes on it. Each of the matches I won were comically easy . We have answers to literally everything in the format and we have enough overlap that we can at least be 50/50 against the field with a number of match ups where we are run away favorites. It seems to me after all of this time and adding in a great value threat with bolas, if anybody is trying to play fair it's our match to lose and the unfair decks just have to hope we didn't adequately prepare. Deck is great. Bolas is bae.
Hrmmmm. I am also playing a ptq tomorrow with grixis... that is also expecting an unusually large amount of people from out of town...
I've found both Kalitas and PnK to be either amazing or worse than a basic forest depending on the match so I strongly believe that they should stay in the board. If you insist on them I'd go with PnK because they have the ability to be more than just a 3/4 with no text. But in all honesty I'd cut them for either the third cryptic or the JTMS that you want. Bolas is good enough of a 4-drop with a snap/Kommand engine that you really don't need much more creature based threats at that CMC.
Clique is bae. That is all.
Search likely won't be that great in such a creature heavy version of the deck so I'd suggest against that. Pyro is always fine, but again with such a heavy creature base it's not going to get you much value. There's nothing wrong with running collective brutality MD since it always does something. Another good option is mana leak, you're a lot heavier on colored requirements so it gives you another early game piece of disruption and it doesn't go dead nearly as fast as people tend to think it does.
If you're going light on AV then they belong in the sideboard, it's just too hard to get them early enough to matter or chain them together with just the one copy. If you want to be a bit more aggressive then you can consider dire fleet daredevil as another mid to late game value play or liliana, the last hope.
Lastly, never be afraid to add in an extra land. Creeps and fields do a ton of work and don't get enough credit for a lot of our wins.
I wouldn't say it's bad either, but it does mean that we have to make a noticeable adaptation to it existing. Different draw engines, more basics, etc. It also means that one of our best match ups in BGx will be returning to prominence which is quite good for us so long as we make the proper adjustments.
Anybody else have thoughts on BGx being able to turn all of our trump cards into basic lands?
2 Nicol Bolas, the Ravager
4 Snapcaster Mage
2 Tasigur, the Golden Fang
Durdles
2 Jace, the Mind Sculptor
2 Search for Azcanta
Removal
1 Anger of the Gods
1 Dreadbore
2 Fatal Push
3 Kolaghan's Command
4 Lightning Bolt
2 Terminate
Other Interaciton
4 Thought Erasure
3 Cryptic Command
2 Logic Knot
1 Spell Snare
1 Blood Crypt
1 Creeping Tar Pit
2 Darkslick Shores
2 Field of Ruin
3 Island
1 Mountain
4 Polluted Delta
4 Scalding Tarn
2 Spirebluff Canal
2 Steam Vents
1 Swamp
2 Watery Grave
2 Alpine Moon
1 Anger of the Gods
2 Crumble to Dust
1 Damnation
2 Disdainful Stroke
1 Fulminator Mage
2 Negate
2 Surgical Extraction
2 Vendilion Clique
I'm down to only 2 fields and up to 4 total fast lands to facilitate the erasures and make it far, far less likely that I'll have to shock more than once to cast my spells on curve. Adding another set of 2-drops meant that I had to add in a bit more 1-drops to help out with the curve which means another push and the fourth bolt. I've felt that my combo match ups have been improved significantly outside of tron and burn and making the control mirror impossible to lose. I'm a touch weaker to hollow one with the current configuration which can be mitigated by adding an additional terminate or GY hate piece into the list somewhere. In that match up I'm mostly just nervous about being able to kill off delve threats and not getting BM'd in all honesty.
As more cards come out I'll be testing with them and continue to durdle around with this 75 in the mean time. Two of the three guilds of grixis are in this set so I wouldn't be shocked if we see another potentially playable card for us to try out. Currently my main concern is balancing the number of fast lands with how many 4-drops (and snapcaster lines) along with the right mix of hard counters. I may want to work in a countersquall (only 2 fields makes the UB far more palatable) into the main or another dreadbore to help handle walkers, but with the extra pile of discard that might not even be a factor. In any case those are my current thoughts on the card and build, I'll be poking my head in again as I learn more and different cards get spoiled.
One or two pages back I made a lengthy post about taking second in a pptq with 2x Bolas in my list that you can read over if you like. I've been running him for a bit now and I have been thoroughly impressed with it. You can sort of think of him as a value creature + cruel ultimatum split card. In the mid game he's a fine threat that is a 2-for-1 when he lands and later on he wins the game for 7 mana. When combined with discard from Kommand and any IoK's that you might be running, he really helps whittle away at your opponent's hand and very quickly empties them out. Additionally, the more walkers you run the better he gets due to his hidden ability called "blocking." You'd be surprised how often you can cast him and your opponent can no longer attack because of the size.
He is also stellar in control mirrors, especially against UW when their only "answer" is path. Even then, a path on Bolas gets you a land from path and 2 cards from their hand which is some insane value from a card that can win the game on it's own. I really think he's worth running, but I do recommend some amount of targeted discard or cliques to assist him coming down.
Yeah I agree there's nothing wrong with having damnation paired with creatures to try and double as a way to stabilize the board to act as a "get out of jail free card." When eldrazi tron and Counters Company were both super popular I was on two MD damnation and an anger myself. Currently I think MD angers is a good spot to be due to the GY aggro decks being popular, but in general I don't feel the need to run MD sweepers in general outside of specific meta considerations. It really comes down to your meta, as does the majority of modern considerations, but when drafting a list for an unknown field I'd go without sweepers main without context.
There are a couple of reasons why sweepers aren't commonly wanted or needed in the average grixis control list. The first is that our finishers and best stabilizers by and large are creatures. Supreme verdict is a great way to stabilize the board, but so is a tasigur with the difference between them is that tasigur doubles as a win con and triples as a card advantage engine. Not to mention that other builds might be more creature heavy with pyromancer or bolas which is counter to the primary strength of a wrath of god effect which is breaking the symmetry. The more creatures in your list, the worst damnation becomes.
The second most likely reason is that we usually don't need them because of the fact that we play 7-8 copies of snapcaster mage. Between Kommand Shock + Raise Dead leading into the additional snapcaster triggers, we are stuffed to the gills with spot removal. Much like the UB decks in the soon to rotate standard format, we're able to keep pace quite handily purely through spot removal and killing literally everything that lands. This is why we tend to have a tough time beating multiple copies of lingering souls, it's a perfect counter to our strategy.
Personally, the only reason I main deck two copies of anger of the gods is because of the vengevine decks and various other "turn 3 mega board state" decks of the format. Between them, hollow one, and Scales Affinity I find it all too likely that you won't be able to keep pace effectively. Combine that with the fact that we don't have path to exile for bloodghast and other recursive dorks I think anger is where we want to be right now. However in most iterations of the format that we've seen I have rarely felt the need for MD sweepers outside of when Eldrazi Tron was everywhere.
TL;DR: We have enough spot removal to make up for it and sweepers also kill our finisher and board stabilization threats.
Are you saying there are no graveyard aggro decks or just no hollow one of that group? If so I'd recommend my list minus the angers for something of your choice that works against what you're more concerned with. Something like extra permission or more walkers or extra cantrips. Here's my list, I wrote about it on the previous page a bit.
2 Nicol Bolas, the Ravager
4 Snapcaster Mage
2 Tasigur, the Golden Fang
Removal
3 Kolaghan's Command
2 Anger of the Gods
3 Terminate
1 Dreadbore
3 Lightning Bolt
1 Fatal Push
Non-Creature Interaction
3 Cryptic Command
1 Spell Snare
2 Logic Knot
2 Inquisition of Kozilek
Durdles
2 Search for Azcanta
2 Jace, the Mind Sculptor
2 Thought Scour
3 Field of Ruin
3 Island
1 Mountain
4 Polluted Delta
4 Scalding Tarn
1 Spirebluff Canal
2 Steam Vents
1 Sulfur Falls
1 Swamp
2 Watery Grave
1 Blood Crypt
2 Creeping Tar Pit
1 Nihil Spellbomb
2 Damnation
2 Disdainful Stroke
1 Engineered Explosives
2 Fulminator Mage
2 Negate
1 Pia and Kiran Nalaar
2 Surgical Extraction
2 Vendilion Clique
I can see it replacing some amount of permission or other discard spells or perhaps a scour or two. I think that the only thing that would hold this card back from being a serious player is the fact that it costs 2 mana unlike the hyper efficient Iok/Seize combo. None the less it is a strong enough effect that it should get a fair shake at testing it out. Personally I'm very excited to play with this one, far more than I was with Bolas. More than that though, I'm much more confident that this will find a home in our lists in due time. Amusingly, I remember myself (and likely several others) suggesting a similar card in the "print this so I can play it in modern" thread. UB targeted discard with some cute benefit on top of it. I couldn't help but throw this out there because of how neat it is.
In any case, does anybody else think this card is real? If you think it's unplayable garbo for modern what makes you say so? And if you do think the card is bad please explain why beyond simply reading the card back to us.
I actually haven't been feeling a lack of "graveyard fuel" for the deck to still run smoothly. In the early turns knot as a bad force spike is good enough and delving a single card isn't difficult between the 1 drops and fetches. I'm not at all worried about trying to turbo flip an azcanta outside of control mirrors because I'm too busy casting my spells that I wouldn't have time to activate it even if it had flipped 2-4 turns earlier.
I agree that a turn 2 tasigur is very strong, but I'd want to be on 3 of him before I'd want to go hard on scours just because of the need to have both of them in hand for that play to be possible. Also you are correct that it's easy to slip in a scour eot at some point. My problem with that is that I want to be certain that the early game is 100% taken care of and that means not spending a bunch of spell slots and mana on cantrips.
Personally, I believe that we are a heavy favorite in any control mirror so I don't believe that we need anything targeted for them outside of a single generic "fair match up grindy" card in the side.