“Once Mirrodin’s brightest hope. Now Phyrexia’s cruel champion.”
Her name was Glissa, she was a good elf. Then she ended up a zombie elf after sipping too much of that Phyrexian go-juice. FTV: Lore gives us Glissa, the Traitor – one of only three zombie elves ever printed by Wizards and a woman of inestimable potential. That said, we’re going to have a crack at estimating a Modern deck out of her. But before we get to that let’s meet the lady herself…
Glissa Sunseeker was released back in Mirrodin block as one of, if not the, main characters in the Magic lore of the time. Her story was ultimately one of tragedy and as she fought against the forces that killed her family she found herself taking the blame for everything she had struggled to prevent. Ultimately, she was converted to the shiny card you see before you, a product of the Phyrexian forces that ravaged her plane.
In play Glissa is a thunderously difficult creature to deal, from a combat point of view. First strike and deathtouch mean she rarely gets blocked by other creatures. Her activated ability also meant that when she hit Standard in the artifact heavy Scars of Mirrodin block, whilst she didn’t take the world by storm, she did come up with a few nifty combos.
Glissa may have loved a Livewire Lash, which turns her into a killing machine, especially if the death allows her to claim back another Lash. But Glissa existed in the same block as one of the most soul destroying artifacts of all time. Facing Mindslaver is the Magic equivalent of being left at the altar by your spouse to be and then getting a series of messages with photos of them burning all of your things. Steady board states were torn asunder by the nightmare experience of being mindslaved. And if that isn’t bad enough, with Glissa around they could reclaim that Mindslaver by killing one of your creatures with your own spell. That’s a special kind of pain.
Glissa’s Modern Zombie Artifact Army.
She’s fierce. Combat she wins, a 3/3 first strike/deathtouch gives you all the nasty you need to eat anything coming your way. She’s also damn good at fetching artifacts and popping them back into your hand. So that’ll be the core of any Glissa deck right there. Her drawback is that she’ll get hit by any old lightning bolt, she costs 3 specific mana and she’s one of those annoying legendary types. But we’ll run a 4 of and risk it for a re-animated biscuit.
So a fun sample deck would go something like…
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So, if you can ignore the ludicrously expensive mana base (welcome to modern kids) then you’re looking at a deck that should, in theory, start with cheap zombies/mana/card draw before activating Glissa and the zombies into death machines with pumped up Lord abilities. And if things get out of hand we have a top end of Geth, Batterskull, or the aforementioned horrific Mindslaver.
