Falling out of love with Esper Spirits

There are decks that you love, and that you cherish, and then there are decks that you just let go. Esper Spirits is one of them for me, and this will be its eulogy.

People who know me, know that as a non Green player, I tend to vary often between Grixis and Esper decks when I'm not on Storm. I tend to try out different things in Esper, maybe too many things, like adding Plague Engineer and Notion Thief in Legacy Miracles (spoilers: it doesn't end well).

I started my 'career' in Magic in 2016, just fresh out of French Prep School, and into the Grandes Ecoles, I met the friends who would throw me into the world of Magic there. Strangely enough, I started playing Commander, and my first deck was the Breya, Etherium Sculptor precon. Then soon enough I began dabbling in other formats, beginning with Standard where I piloted God-Pharaoh's Gift, and then with Modern, where I fell in love with Storm and Grapeshot.

I loved the deck, but it didn't feel like it had my touch to it, I mostly ran off Caleb Scherer's list at first, but after a long time playing in Paris where everybody played Jund, Rock or Junk, I soon grew tired of playing with the deck. I still loved it, but it was very tiring to have to navigate those extremely hard match ups every single time I went out to play.

And then M19 and Supreme Phantom came along. I had already met Spell Queller during its Standard golden era. The trickiness of the card appealed to me, but I never had the opportunity to play them during the standard era. But when I saw the new lord, I knew that I wanted to play Spirits. Instantly my mind went to Lingering Souls, already one of my personal favorites, I knew that I wanted to play Esper, especially in my grindy meta, I wanted to outgrind everybody else with Spirits, a pack chokeful of removal (I almost exclusively played 8 at all times between Fatal Push, Path to Exile and Blessed Alliance), and a manabase that just asked to be Blood Mooned.

It was very fun, the deck could do many things, between discard effects, powerful planeswalkers, and tricky spells, I felt great. Moreover, the meta was ruled by KCI at the time and god know how good Spirits were against this boogeyman.

And then I gave up on Modern for a while, after the banning of KCI, I started investing myself a lot into Legacy, where I played a lot, as well as into Judge training rather than playing Modern. A few months swung by, and when I came back to Modern, Hogaak was everywhere, and I tried tweaking Storm to try and beat the way too fast meta.

Later on, when I tried pulling it out again after the unban of Stoneforge Mystic, I felt two things: the main reason to play Esper, Lingering Souls, was not good enough in face of Stoneforge, and I had lost my touch to tweak my sideboard perfectly. My build of Esper always played on way too thin to be viable margins to in, and it relied heavily on two for ones for that, but when the whole meta was able to bypass those two for ones like Big Mana decks, or just two for one you back like Jund, those margins just weren't there anymore.

I considered switching over to UW, but it didn't feel like one of the decks that I would usually pilot. And so, I unsleeved Esper Spirits and put the cards in my drawer.

Maybe I could have pushed the deck to be good again for me, I had already done so in the past, maybe I could have tried harder, maybe, maybe, maybe. But the fact is: I didn't. I gave up on the deck hoping to come back to it one day, but knowing full well that I won't.

It's a shame really, for the longest of times, I had felt like I was doing something, trying to be the tip of the spear for Esper Spirits, always innovating with it. Maybe because I was one of the few people who tried to play it, and develop it, and talked about it. But for now, I think it's time to put the old souls to rest.

I have learned a lot playing with them, and fighting on the battlefield alongside them, maybe its better if I carry their legacy of sorts for the road, but I leave them behind.

And maybe one day, I'll come right back to them