Shuffleupagus is my favorite deck. I saw MaGo's preview for Psychogenic Probe back in the fall of 2003, and immediately went about trying to build a deck that would kill people via probe damage.
I took a UBR to a standard PTQ (Mirrodin-Kamigawa time) after a lot of work, hoping I would do well. I felt especially good against Tooth and Nail, due to my Cranial Extractions and Bribery. I faced Tooth in my first match, but stalled out after extracting the Tooth and Nails. I remember getting beaten up by a hard-cast Solarion. Ugh. I had a bunch of fun in the lower brackets from there on out, but I couldn't keep up with the middling aggro creature decks to get back into a good position. I did have some exciting moments. Since I was often going through my opponents' decks, I did well with Mindblaze. One time, I had it on the stack, certain death for my opponent. They responded with Twincast, but whiffed on the guess. Whew!
Mirrodin cycled out of standard, then later out of Extended. Thankfully, Modern arrived, happily going all the way back to Mirrodin. Psychogenic Probe is relevant again! And just barely. There are so many good colors to use the probe with in Modern, but I decided to go with UB. Here's the decklist:
Main deck:
4 Psychogenic Probe (obviously)
4 Cosi's Trickster (yes!)
0 Psychic Surgery (Why does this have to cost 1U instead of just U? Booo.)
4 Lantern of Insight
4 Serum Visions
4 Gitaxian Probe
3 Bribery
4 Remand
4 Bitter Ordeal
4 Cranial Extraction (I probably even know what's in your hand...)
4 Ghost Quarter (Combos really nicely with Bitter Ordeal)
4 Watery Grave
3 Swamp
14 Island
Sideboard:
4 Surgical Extraction
3 Blessed Reincarnation
3 Mimeofacture
1 Bribery
1 Counterbore
1 Acquire
2 Thada Adel
(I probably need some Learn from the Past in here...)
Modern is tomorrow! We'll see how the new Shuffleupagus does! I'm expecting there to be lots of Tron, so maybe I can Bribery up an Emrakul.
