Sultai Midrange - New weapons for meta-frustrated midrange players (Modern)

I've been slowly building up my experience levels with Modern towards playing a more complex and powerful deck.

At heart, I am a midrange player. Siege Rhino is, for me, one of the most satisfying cards you can play.

So for a long time, I had my sights set on Abzan. But with the change of the metagame towards a large share of combo and control, Abzan seems less of a fit right now. As far as my impression goes, you have to either play combo or control yourself, or very fast aggro, OR (and this is where this deck comes in) play counterspells able to disrupt combo and control enough so that you can get a foot in.

I got my hands on a playset of Snapcaster Mages, and developed a (not really competitive, but fun) deck with counterspells in it, and in the matches William Jensen played in 2017 worlds, got a deep appreciation for a midrange deck able to jump into the control role without losing its main win condition of beating down with efficient creatures.

From those experiences, I built this deck. The main shell is solid, but as you will see, I am including a lot of one-ofs, since there are many cards I have not played with personally, so I need to build up a working experience and tune it towards what works and what creates a gameplan I am comfortable and intuitive in executing.

So, what is the idea of the deck?

1. Be a midrange deck at heart.
   This means playing efficient beatdown creatures with CMC 2-4 that, in the end, are the sole win condition, and having a removal and (since we are in blue) protection against removal

2. Be able to disrupt combo and control decks.
   This means CMC1 counterspells against non-creature spells as well as hand disruption. In a perfect world, the same of my spells can counter a game-winning combo piece and a removal spell for one of my big creatures

3. Generate direct card advantage with as many cards as possible.
   This means prefering card advantage over raw power, if in doubt

The card choices I made that best reflect this gameplay are:

• Tireless Tracker. A creature that can grow to be a real threat by turn 5, and that usually at least replaces itself. If this can get in two hits and generate two cards, that's exactly where I want to be
• Tasigur, the Golden Fang and Dark Confidant. I don't think it's possible to play both, since Tasigur's CMC is so high, but I am including one each to try them out (as I said, many of these cards I have never played myself)
• "Only" one Liliana of the Veil and one Liliana, the Last Hope. Two expensive cards I have not played before, so I need to test it before I get more copies
• 3 Spell Pierce, 2 Stubborn Denial. This is the counterspell suite that hopefully gets me that one spell of Storm, or Valakut, or Tron, or Counters Company countered so I have a chance of winning the game
• 3 Thought Scour, 2 Serum Visions. I play 4 Snapcaster Mages, 1 Tasigurs, and 4 Tarmogoyfs, all of which lean heavily on my graveyard. The two Serum Visions should allow me to play 22 lands instead of 23, and find answers when I need them

The sideboard is rudimentary as yet.

If you have comments, please do write them!