by Johnny Cycles, April 18th, 2025

Hello! Welcome to a very special edition of Keeping Modern Janky! This month’s deck comes from a YouTube viewer, jordanleebc19, and it’s pretty sweet, pretty janky, and a lot of fun!

It’s Simic Bird Tribal! We’re looking to take full advantage of the new Final Fantasy cards that care about Birds to flood the board with synergistic winged creatures (I’d love to say fliers, but alas, the birds from Final Fantasy haven’t mastered flight…).

Here’s the deck:

Decklist – Simic Bird Tribal

by jordanleebc19
Format: Modern

Creatures (28)

4 Birds of Paradise
4 Mockingbird
4 Sazh’s Chocobo
2 Ledger Shredder
2 Plumecreed Escort
2 Endurance
2 Realmwalker
4 Traveling Chocobo
4 Bartz and Boko

Artifacts (4)

Aether Vial

Instants (8)

2 Into the Flood Maw
4 Dazzling Denial
2 Force of Negation

Lands (20)

2 Boseiju, Who Endures
1 Breeding Pool
4 Cavern of Souls
3 Forest
1 Hedge Maze
1 Island
4 Misty Rainforest
2 Waterlogged Grove
2 Willowrush Verge

Sideboard (15)

2 Pithing Needle
2 Damping Sphere
4 Counterspell*
2 Hurkyl’s Recall
4 Ratchet Bomb
3 Force of Vigor

* the original deck list had 4 copies of Consign to Memory. I do not own any copies of this card and I can’t bring myself to shell out $80+ for a playset of an uncommon, no matter how good of a card it is…

Deck Tech

Primary Game Plan

At our heart, we are a tempo deck looking to leverage the new synergies among Bird and Bird-related cards. However, we have at least two angles of attack, depending on our opening hand.

A turn 1 Aether Vial lets us hold up mana for our counter magic while still advancing our board. Once we’ve ticked it up to 3, sticking a Traveling Chocobo or Realmwalker gives us some much-needed card advantage as we can play Birds and lands from the top of our deck.

Alternatively, a turn 1 Birds of Paradise lets us take a more aggressive approach, ramping us into a turn 2 Traveling Chocobo or Realmwalker. Untapping with one of these two cards out should allow us to pull ahead on board and resources.

Bartz and Boko give us some much needed removal. We should never pay full value for this 5 drop and, in conjunction with Traveling Chocobo, we can machine gun down our opponent’s best threats or blockers.

From there, we want to swing in with our team of Birds, ideally committing more creatures to the board only from the top of our library and while holding up mana for counter magic.

Match 1 vs. Hammertime

Match 2 vs. Living End

Match 3 vs. Belcher

Match 4 vs. Dimir Control

Match 5 vs. Ninjas

Overall Record: 2-3

Unfortunately, our record was a bit worse than this, but I’m not including each of the matches for a variety of reasons. We lost matches to Eldrazi and a variety of Energy decks. The former just went too big for us, even if we were able to compete for a bit. The latter was too efficient, synergistic, and overpowered. Similarly, we lost matches to various Prowess and Burn decks.

Thus, against the top tier decks in Modern, we were competitive, but didn’t win much. And even when we were able to compete, it didn’t feel like the norm. Against some of the Combo decks and lower tier decks, we won some matches and were more competitive.

No surprise there.

Impressions from Game Play

Well, I have to say that playing this deck was both fun and a learning experience. It was fun to pilot another person’s vision, while I also enjoyed the various synergies between the cards. The deck also made me realize that I’m not much of X/U tempo player. From Delver of Secrets decks in Legacy to the Mono Blue iterations that crop up in Standard from time to time, this style of play that involves committing one or two threats to the board and holding up interaction to protect them is not one that comes naturally to me. There was definitely a learning curve for me.

That, coupled with more than a week off of Magic and then getting sick meant that I was not at my best when I first started testing the deck. This is evidenced by some of my misplays…

Still, I managed to get more than 10 matches in and I have a few thoughts on what the deck does well and where it can be improved. I’ll start with some simple changes, then move on to the more complex ones.

More and Different Lands

Yes, we’re an Aether Vial deck and yes, we’re playing some ramp, but 20 lands still seems low, especially since we want to advance our board while also holding up counter magic, at the very least. At most, we want to chain together Birds (and at least one land) from the top of our library to build an overwhelming boardstate and that takes mana.

I think going to at least 22 lands is reasonable to help with these issues.

Four copies of Cavern of Souls feels great against Control decks, but it can create some pretty clunky situations when we don’t have more than one Island to cast our counter magic. I would cut two copies of Cavern in favor of at least one more Island.

Furthermore, in a meta that inspires others to play land destruction, playing four basics leaves us susceptible to Field of Ruin, Ghost Quarter, White Orchid Phantom, and more.

Finally, while we aren’t as all in on landfall triggers as my Mono Green Landfall deck, when we have our Sazh’s Chocobo out, we want a fetchland to make it a more respectable threat. Similarly, when we need action off the top, a fetchland will help us sculpt our draw by getting our one copy of Hedge Maze.

Out:
2 Cavern of Souls
2 Waterlogged Grove
2 Willowrush Verge

In:
2 Breeding Pool
3 Field of Ruin
2 Flooded Strand
1 Island

Counter Magic

I love Tribal decks. I’ve played Cat Tribal, Hydra Tribal, Glimmer Tribal, and Demon Tribal in Modern, not to mention an entire series dedicated to Dragon Tribal. But this isn’t Commander, where we can play at a lower power level in order to stay on flavor. Dazzling Denial should be Counterspell, plain and simple.

Yes, is a challenge with the mana base as is, but in a world of big mana decks like Eldrazi, Tron, and Amulet Titan, Dazzling Denial is too often not a hard counter when we need it to be. And even against non big mana decks, forcing an opponent to pay additional mana will often not hinder them when we are both hellbent.

Out:
4 Dazzling Denial

In:
4 Counterspell

Those are the easy changes. Now let’s get to the more complex ones.

Lack of a Finisher

Why don’t any of these Birds fly???

Okay, I’ve asked this question a lot and I’m sure the answer is one short Google search away, but the reality remains the same. Our best creatures don’t have evasion.

Sure, we can grow Sazh’s Chocobo to pretty epic proportions, but as long as it can get chump blocked by 1/1 Cat tokens and the like, we aren’t closing out any games with it.

Ditto our other birds. Bartz and Boko is good at clearing the way for our attackers, especially with Traveling Chocobo out, but we’re still just attacking with a 4/3 and a 3/2. They don’t present a fast clock in today’s Modern.

Not to mention that we’re often resolving Bartz and Boko with a board full of 0/1s…

Out:
4 Mockingbird
2 Endurance

In:
2 Realmwalker
????

I’m still testing out some different cards, but without changing the deck entirely, I’m not sure what to bring in that would power up our strategy. Any ideas?

Birds as a Tribe are Underpowered

I won’t include yet another picture of Sazh’s Chocobo and Birds of Paradise to demonstrate the overall lack of power among Birds, but even looking at the above three, it’s clear our clock won’t be particularly fast.

It’s telling of the tribe that Mockingbird has the highest ceiling…but only if we can copy a decent creature on our opponent’s side. Ledger Shredder, meanwhile, needs no introduction and can grow to a decent size, but we aren’t as efficient at triggering it as the Izzet decks are.

How this translates into gameplay is that even when we have our best synergies online and are chaining together multiple Birds from the top of our library or using Aether Vial to put down creatures while holding up Dazzling Denial mana, the reality is that we often still can’t even attack, much less kill our opponent.

It reminds me a little of my Affinity Hellkite deck for Dragons in Modern that I played after Modern Horizons 3 released. We had a thing we wanted to do, rarely did it, but even when we did, it just wasn’t that good.

Nonbos

Aether Vial is no doubt a powerful card, but it doesn’t let us play creatures from the top of our deck, nor does it synergize with Mockingbird. It also waters down our Bird count for when we have Traveling Chocobo or Realmwalker down.

Similarly, as mentioned above, Bartz and Boko can be one of our most busted cards, but it just as often came down on a board full of 0/1 Birds and maybe one other unimpressive Bird.

Out:
4 Aether Vial

In:
4 Collected Company

Of course, Collected Company is at its best when it has powerful creatures to snag. Again, Birds aren’t that great…

Where to Go From Here?

I have two directions in mind for us to take the deck, but both would alter it considerably. First, we could add . The most powerful Birds in Magic are in or are . This would take us in a more aggressive, evasive strategy that would see us flood the board with more individually powerful cards that also synergize with each other.

The second direction I’m tempted to try is to run Coat of Arms. We’re playing so many unimpressive 1- and 2-drops that there’s a good chance our opponent won’t kill the various garbage 0/1s and 1/1s we commit to the battlefield. Then, as early as turn 3, but better on turn 5, we slam Coat of Arms and swing for lethal!

Yeah, I have my doubts about this strategy but the jank of it is a powerful call!

Conclusion

Thanks again jordanleebc19 for the deck! It was fun to play! I enjoyed many of the synergies and interactions. I liked having answers to some of the broken decks in the main. That being said, I don’t think Simic Bird Tribal has a high ceiling, even with some changes to it. The Birds we have in those colors are just too underwhelming. But if you’re looking for a janky tribal deck to play in a casual Modern event, I think this is a great choice!

What do y’all think? What new direction(s) can we take Bird Tribal to make it more competitive? Fun? What Birds am I forgetting?

Thanks for reading and watching!