Modern disruption.

Once upon a time before Modern creation T1 Thoughtseize followed by T2 Bitter Blossom was one of the most powerful combinations. Now things have changed and most frightening form of discard come from Grief and some form of Ephemerate effect. Is more popular to use some black “blink” effect like Malakir Rebirth, the point is the same.

You should know that once you cast your elemental creature using evoke you can put the sacrifice trigger on the stack and resolve first the ETB trigger, see your opponents hand take something like a removal and then cast Ephemerate or similar effect to blink your creature and keep it in play; pure power creep.

More than ever Modern is full of creatures that are good on their own, you don’t need to enable synergies to get the most of them and sometimes is hard to try to disrupt strategies using spells like Thoughtseize. That's why is becoming harder and harder, to control opponent’s hand based only on discard effects. If you are running only discard or disruption spells eventually both players will be on top deck mode, so the quality of your top decks is crucial. Grief is a great disruption and a reasonable top deck that can represent a clock, disruption with pressure.

After disruption Grief player will get a 3/2 menace body, while this is not impressive by any means in some scenarios can be enough to put enough pressure on opponents. Advancing a plan a disrupting at the same time, this is the idea that you should keep on mind while building a deck based on discard/disruption spells. Just by this interaction players are forced to interact in some way, combos will be disrupted and you must be prepared to kill a 3/2 menace as fast as you can.

Discard effects typically are sorcery speed spells; that means that you will lose a mana on your turn to disrupt opponent's plan and you will lose a mana to advance yours, you are loosing tempo and a card. In other words, you won't be wining any game just by disrupting opponent's plan. You need to advance your actual plan some way. This is the reason why a pure disruption strategy is not feasible.

Waste Not is an interesting option to win the game while you disrupt your opponents plan. Waste Not is and amazing card; sadly there isn't another card with similar effects to Waste Not. Trying to win with only four cards in your 60 cards deck won't work most of the time, trying to get this card on your opening hand is not as probable, just about 40% of chance. Plus the fact that you need to play Waste Not while you still have some discard effects in hand. In other words Waste Not is a bad top deck. Also if your opponent is already in top deck mode Waste Not won’t be enough to win the game, since your opponent won’t discard cards any more. Waste Not has a really narrow window to be effective.

If you insist on playing something like this, you should consider a more aggressive mulligan tactic if you are willing to mulligan to 5 you can get away with a 78.3% of chance to get Waste Not on your opening hand. Not bad at all, just keep in mind that every card that you are giving up, will increase the chance for your opponent to keep theirs.

As conclusion I think that Waste Not is an acceptable card that eventually can be very playable if we get a similar effect, or a new exciting synergy. Maybe a little short for modern but excellent to brew around in spacy tournaments. Keep and eye on Burning Inquiry for maximum spiciness.

Reference: The london mulligan rule mathematically benefits strategies that rely on specific cards