It's also interesting to look at a list and consider the reasons that it isn't good, or at least not good right now. Identifying weaknesses helps us to avoid those same vulnerabilities with other lists in the future.
4 Wild Nacatl
4 Tarmogoyf
4 Bloodbraid Elf
4 Dark Confidant
2 Lingering Souls
4 Liliana of the Veil
3 Thoughtseize
3 Inquisition of Kozilek
4 Lightning Bolt
1 Fatal Push
2 Terminate
1 Maelstrom Pulse
3 Marsh Flats
3 Verdant Catacomb
3 Bloodstained Mire
3 Windswept Heath
3 Wooded Foothills
1 Overgrown Tomb
1 Stomping Ground
1 Blood Crypt
1 Godless Shrine
1 Temple Garden
1 Swamp
3 Shambling Vent
Sideboard: 2 Rest in Peace, 2 Stony Silence, 2 Gaddock Teeg, 2 Ancient Grudge, 2 Alpine Moon, 2 Duress, 1 Thoughtseize, 2 Aven Mindcensor
This deck is for when your life total truly doesn't matter. If the format has lots of or all combo and little interaction, this deck is good for two reasons. One, Wild Nacatl gives your clock a boost and turns you into more of an aggro/control deck. Bloodbraid Elf's aggressiveness helps here, almost as much as the cascade, and Lightning Bolt becomes one of the best removal spells because it can go upstairs, which will be more useful when you're aggro. Liliana still is kickin' it because she supplements your clock with hand disruption, forcing your opponent to go off earlier than they would like to and be less likely to succeed.
Secondly, white's addition helps out our sideboard tremendously. While having extra discard in the sideboard like I've usually got is a pretty good catchall, white's additions are just killers. Stony Silence, Rest in Peace, Gaddock Teeg, Aven Mindcensor. Ka Pow! In Modern, if you focus your sideboard on beating up on just a couple of decks or strategies, you can really go hog wild make it almost unwinnable for them.
The reasons why this deck isn't good? Well, the mirror match suffers immensely, for starters. You life total matters a lot in the mirror, and Wild Nacatl just isn't as good as the other cards your opponent will have. Scavenging Ooze looks like a nightmare for this list, not to mention stuff like Huntmaster of the Fells and other dedicated sideboard stuff. Burn also is unwinnable when you start every game aggressively going to 11 life for your lands and Thoughtseizes. Having said that, a variation of this deck with Death's Shadow is also probably just a few steps away, if we really wanted to destroy our own life total.
Additionally, mana bases are getting taxed at the moment not just because of life loss, but also because of Field of Ruin and Blood Moon. You can't really protect yourself from those cards and play four colors at the same time.
To top it all off, the biggest problem with Wild Nacatl is Snapcaster Mage. As long as Bolt-Snap-Bolt is a play pattern that you expect to face in a tournament, Wild Nacatl isn't something you want to register. The aggressive Burn list that I've got is a list that I like a lot better in situations when I feel like Jund is playing too fair for the format. I love to load my Burn deck up with knock-out blow sideboard cards like Rest in Peace and Stony Silence, so that we have a consistent and quick plan A and some amazing action in games two and three to beat opponents trying to race us with their own combo.
4 Dark Confidant
4 Snapcaster Mage
4 Tarmogoyf
4 Liliana of the Veil
2 Maelstrom Pulse
2 Thoughtseize
4 Inquisition of Kozilek
3 Fatal Push
2 Murderous Cut
2 Abrupt Decay
1 Jace, the Mind Sculptor
4 Ancestral Vision
4 Polluted Delta, 4 Verdant Catacomb, 3 Misty Rainforest, 2 Swamp, 1 Island, 1 Forest, 2 Overgrown Tomb, 1 Breeding Pool, 1 Watery Grave, 2 Blooming Marsh, 3 Creeping Tar Pit
Sideboard: 3 Obstinate Baloth, 2 Kitchen Finks, 1 Ashiok, 3 Duress, 3 Damping Sphere, 1 Seal of Primordium, 2 Damnation
This deck has dangerous amounts of value. It looks like it's almost impossible to win a midrange mirror with this list. Ancestral Vision and Snapcaster Mage are just lights out in any matchup where you're grinding, and we still have all the usual suspects of big threats and good versatile removal spells.
However, this deck really pales in comparison to Jund or Abzan when it comes to fighting against almost anything other than a midrange mirror. Against aggro decks, we miss Lightning Bolt, Terminate, and Dreadbore so much and lean way too heavily on Liliana's -1 and Fatal Push to get rid of any small creatures. Our inability to interact with early creatures also makes us run behind on mana if an opponent has Noble Hierarch or Birds of Paradise.
We also lose out on most of our clock, so despite having the same amount of hand disruption as normal Jund, we'll never have enough of a clock to really pressure our opponent and eventually they'll draw their Ulamog or Scapeshift or Krark Clan Ironworks and kill us with it. For Ancestral Vision to be good, we need the game to last until turn 5 to get its payoff, and most decks just aren't about that.
Also, once we get to turn 5, are we sure that we're even ahead of our opponents? Because as good as Snapcaster and Ancestral Vision are, they might be worse going long than Teferi, Search for Azcanta, and Cryptic Command. We can trade 1 for 1 as well as any deck out there, but going super duper long, we probably have a lot of trouble against Jeskai's long game advantage, not to mention the danger of getting tempo'd out by Lightning Bolts and Celestial Colonnade attacks.
I think that somewhere, there is a list that's got a lot of these same elements that also has red in it to fix some of its early game problems. Lightning Bolt and Terminate are amazing at keeping you low to the ground and extending the game, so it's a welcome addition. However, we run into the same problem as the other four-color deck above where our life total is getting nailed and we are susceptible to our opponents attacking our mana. Again, Death's Shadow is an option here, which would help with our clock problems and take advantage of the mana, but I don't see it as being good against anything in the format right now.
Anywho, sometimes the time does arrive when you either need to really beat down and be disruptive like the Nacatl Jund list, or you should be grinding out like a baller with Snapcasters. Don't get me wrong, I love a good value mirror match, but it doesn't seem feasible here in 2018. But, when some of the pillars of the format fall and the metagame changes, be on the lookout for stuff like this. You never know what's going to be good in the future.
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