It's a dangerous business, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.
without any knowledge of what deck your up against, it is very hard to help with a sideboard. Look at the decks that you play against, then find cards that are really good against those specific decks. for instance, engineered plague is great against any sort of tribal deck, and surgical extraction works great against combo decks and decks that abuse their graveyard.
as for sign in blood, just try taking them out for the weaker cards in your deck. funeral charm could go down to 2 copies, and maybe the same for nocturnus.
It's a dangerous business, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.
Dark confidant is legal in all formats, including legacy. That being said, he is $50 a pop, and not wanting to drop 200 bucks into some cardboard is understandable. Phyrexian arena is similar but a little worse if you want to spend a little less money. sign in blood is fine if you don't want either of the two above options.
You could drop either a nocturnus or the guiltfeeder for the raven's crime. Guiltfeeder is decent, but at 5 mana he is awfully slow and if your opponent exiles/reshuffles their graveyard into their library then he is literally useless outside of chump blocking.
It's a dangerous business, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.
The first time I thought on Nyxathid but after that I thought on nocturnus because with scepter is a 4/4 "unblockable" (Nyx doesn't have evasion), and also if I use hymn to... Is a party for my opp :).
Anyway,,, what money option do you thought?
However, that requires you to not only have sceptre out, but for your opponent to still have a hand. If you think about it, you want to spend your first few turns dropping your discard. by turn 3 or so, your opponent should be in top deck mode, provided they havent draw a ton of cards somehow. nyxathid would come down on say turn 4 as a 6/6 or 7/7, where nocturnus would stick around as a 2/2, even with the sceptre, because most opponents in topdeck mode will just be playing the card they draw every turn. Neither card is bad, and you can most certainly get away with running either card. The evasion is nice on nocturnus, i just think that nyxathid will be more consistent of a card.
As for more expensive cards, liliana of the veil is probably the best. Inquisition of kozilek and thoughtsieze are the slightly better versions of duress. Mind twist is old but can be really powerful when backed with an early dark ritual. Dark confidant has nothing to do with discard but is just an all around amazing card. Demonic tutor/Vampiric tutor you can put in any deck to make it better. Adding strip mine, sinkhole, and wasteland can really screw over a lot of decks. Urborg, tomb of yawgmoth helps fix your mana base when running lots of nonbasic lands. None of these cards are cheap, or easy to find sometimes. Mishra's factory is a tough to kill creature because its really a land.
Another card I forgot to recommend: raven's crime. Its deceptively awesome. It doesn't look like much, but when it turns all your top-decked lands that you don't need into useful discard spells, you would be surprised how well it works. Usually 1 or 2 copies is all you need if you want to run it.
It's a dangerous business, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.
Thanks for your answer, squira13!
I didn's see like that the caress-megrim, you're right. Also, abyssal nocturnus makes, virtually, the same thing.
So... with your tips i could make something like this.
More changes?
EDIT: Should I use ghastly demise as removal'?
Not over victim of night. while ghastly is decent, it can struggle to kill certain creature early in the game. and there is a small anti-synergy with it and tombstalker. between disk, victim, nighthawk, and funeral charm you should be ok with dealing with what survives your discard.
The only card that is not terribly great s the nocturnus like you said. many times hes just a 2/2 for 3, and rarely a big creature when you need one. nyaxthid would be better, or up the numbers on some of the cards your already running. Other than him though your list looks pretty good. There are, of course, some money options if budget isn't an issue, but stuff like liliana of the veil is usually out of people's price range.
It's a dangerous business, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.
Its a good start, but there's plenty of room for improvement. The most glaring thing is the 6 enchantments. Megrim and caress have, for a very long time, been considered bad strategies for discard decks. Its weird, because that seems like their only purpose, but the ultimate failure of these cards is they are too slow (even at 2 mana) to come down when you need them. Basically, on turn 2, you can either play your caress, but give them another turn before getting hit with hymn to tourach, or just play the hymn, but then your caresses won't be getting much usage. It goes along with discard's one weakness, its great early on, but really struggles to be worthwhile once your opponent gets into topdeck mode. Moral of the story, these cards aren't good, and should be cut. you can just run more untility/discard spells in their place.
Your creature base is solid, and doesn't need much touching up. possible additions would be solid utility creatures like vampire nighthawk and gatekeeper of malakir to add some killing power as well as beats. neither are needed, but are some of your best options to replace the enchantments.
Other decent cards to consider are funeral charm, for cheap utility and discard in one, or ravenous rats as a cheap chump blocker with discard. the rats become real good of you have ways to reuse it, like unearth. unearth can also bring back all your other dudes so its not a bad idea as well.
EDIT: of and the ghost quarters are meh. If you can upgrade them to something like strip mine, great, but if you cant i would just replace them with swamps or something. heck even bojuka bog can give you deck great matchups against decks with graveyard shenanigans.
It's a dangerous business, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.
@Squira12: I was pretty sure about that (concerning equipment).
You make some good points. I put that deck list together because I had a lot of the cards, and other then the Necro and Sol Ring, the ones I don't are all cheap.
However it has it's weaknesses, which make's me wonder if I should just abandon it and focus on my other decks; like The Gate which is similar but probably better, lol.
Not that I don't appreciate the ideas, I do. They just have me thinking; what's the point of two almost identical decks? I already have a Mono-Black deck so do I really need 3 or 4?
Then again; Cz's deck list is pretty cheap so maybe I'll go for it anyways.
A while back I was in the same exact boat as you. I had 3 black decks that, as I tried to improve them, all converged toward the same sort of deck. And after a while I found myself playing with one significantly more than the other two. It's not that when you play one black deck you've played them all, but they do get really repetitive from deck to deck. I later scrapped the other two decks and ended putting all my focus onto my one Mono-B deck left; Pox.
If you are looking for a slight bit of fresh air from the gate then you could try and build pox. Of course, Pox ain't cheap, but at least it is pretty different from the gate. There are lots of variants of pox and none of them are significantly better than the others, so if you still wanted to try out a discard deck you could go for Rack-Pox. Here's the list I run;
It's a dangerous business, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.
Can I sacrifice the Augur of Skulls in response to him having a Toughness of 0 from the Skullclamp? And can Skullclamp be attached during my upkeep?
Just wondering why only 2 Ravenous Rats and 4 Augur's.
It looks like a good deck, but my only other concern is I don't want this to be to close to my Gate deck I want to build.
No, you cannot equip during the upkeep because you may only equip as a sorcery. And no, your augur would die as a state based action and you would never get the opportunity to active his ability. This could be wrong, but from what i understand of the rules thats how it is. You would have to ask the judges over in Magic Rules http://forums.mtgsalvation.com/forumdisplay.php?f=28 to get a 100% certain response.
As to augur vs rats, the augur sticks around for a bit as a drudge skeleton, and then hits for 2 cards instead of just 1. its a little better as a creature and a little better as a discard spell, so it seems better in general to me.
As to similarities between this and the gate, it is somewhat inevitable. Mono-black a has a slew of powerful cards that are useful in just about every deck you can fit em in. Phyrexian Obliterator, for instance, is just a better creature than most of the discard themed creatures that there is little reason to not run him in their place. You could cut Nyxanthid for instance, and put him in, and you pay 1 more mana for a much more reliable creature that doesn't depend on their hand size, and has a sort of evasion. Not that he is necessary, but marginally better. And Black's discard is what makes Black, well, Black. Its one of the defining features of the color that you can't find in other colors. so you will see a number of them repeat from deck to deck. Gatekeepr, for instance, is just a excellent all around creature that there is little reason not to run him when you can.
It's a dangerous business, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.
Hmmmm..... never knew about spinning darkness before, that is a nice fit for both necropotence and getting rid of the fast aggro creatures that tend to be this deck's downfall. The only thing I see it hurting me for is making the yawgmoth's will slightly less powerful, but I think that will be so minor it shouldn't effect any games.
It's a dangerous business, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.
Yeah I thought about all of those, but the decks im up against are rather fast, and pilling on all the mind twists slows it down too much.
and as much as I love sol ring, theres too much in the deck that costs specifically black mana, and the colorless mana from sol ring wouldn't help as much as I would like
demonic tutor is also a little pricey from my budget. I should have mentioned this earlier, all the above cards in the lost I already own, so thats why you will see things like only 1 demonic or only 1 yawgmoth's will. And dont quote me on this, but i thought demonic tutor was kinda pricey?
It's a dangerous business, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.
I am building a mono black discard deck to be used in mostly one on one matches, but will also occasionally see two-headed giant or emperor battles. The deck is mostly completed, but I have some holes hat need filling and a few too many cards to put in there. So basically ill just shut up and show you the cards already and hopefully you guys can help me out.
Note: my group plays by its own sort of format, basically vintage without restrictions, and a few other wierd things but thats mostly it. Oh, for budget reasons I dont really want to spend more than $5 ish per card, so things like thoughtseize are out.
It's a dangerous business, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.
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as for sign in blood, just try taking them out for the weaker cards in your deck. funeral charm could go down to 2 copies, and maybe the same for nocturnus.
You could drop either a nocturnus or the guiltfeeder for the raven's crime. Guiltfeeder is decent, but at 5 mana he is awfully slow and if your opponent exiles/reshuffles their graveyard into their library then he is literally useless outside of chump blocking.
However, that requires you to not only have sceptre out, but for your opponent to still have a hand. If you think about it, you want to spend your first few turns dropping your discard. by turn 3 or so, your opponent should be in top deck mode, provided they havent draw a ton of cards somehow. nyxathid would come down on say turn 4 as a 6/6 or 7/7, where nocturnus would stick around as a 2/2, even with the sceptre, because most opponents in topdeck mode will just be playing the card they draw every turn. Neither card is bad, and you can most certainly get away with running either card. The evasion is nice on nocturnus, i just think that nyxathid will be more consistent of a card.
As for more expensive cards, liliana of the veil is probably the best. Inquisition of kozilek and thoughtsieze are the slightly better versions of duress. Mind twist is old but can be really powerful when backed with an early dark ritual. Dark confidant has nothing to do with discard but is just an all around amazing card. Demonic tutor/Vampiric tutor you can put in any deck to make it better. Adding strip mine, sinkhole, and wasteland can really screw over a lot of decks. Urborg, tomb of yawgmoth helps fix your mana base when running lots of nonbasic lands. None of these cards are cheap, or easy to find sometimes. Mishra's factory is a tough to kill creature because its really a land.
Another card I forgot to recommend: raven's crime. Its deceptively awesome. It doesn't look like much, but when it turns all your top-decked lands that you don't need into useful discard spells, you would be surprised how well it works. Usually 1 or 2 copies is all you need if you want to run it.
Not over victim of night. while ghastly is decent, it can struggle to kill certain creature early in the game. and there is a small anti-synergy with it and tombstalker. between disk, victim, nighthawk, and funeral charm you should be ok with dealing with what survives your discard.
The only card that is not terribly great s the nocturnus like you said. many times hes just a 2/2 for 3, and rarely a big creature when you need one. nyaxthid would be better, or up the numbers on some of the cards your already running. Other than him though your list looks pretty good. There are, of course, some money options if budget isn't an issue, but stuff like liliana of the veil is usually out of people's price range.
Its a good start, but there's plenty of room for improvement. The most glaring thing is the 6 enchantments. Megrim and caress have, for a very long time, been considered bad strategies for discard decks. Its weird, because that seems like their only purpose, but the ultimate failure of these cards is they are too slow (even at 2 mana) to come down when you need them. Basically, on turn 2, you can either play your caress, but give them another turn before getting hit with hymn to tourach, or just play the hymn, but then your caresses won't be getting much usage. It goes along with discard's one weakness, its great early on, but really struggles to be worthwhile once your opponent gets into topdeck mode. Moral of the story, these cards aren't good, and should be cut. you can just run more untility/discard spells in their place.
Your creature base is solid, and doesn't need much touching up. possible additions would be solid utility creatures like vampire nighthawk and gatekeeper of malakir to add some killing power as well as beats. neither are needed, but are some of your best options to replace the enchantments.
Other decent cards to consider are funeral charm, for cheap utility and discard in one, or ravenous rats as a cheap chump blocker with discard. the rats become real good of you have ways to reuse it, like unearth. unearth can also bring back all your other dudes so its not a bad idea as well.
EDIT: of and the ghost quarters are meh. If you can upgrade them to something like strip mine, great, but if you cant i would just replace them with swamps or something. heck even bojuka bog can give you deck great matchups against decks with graveyard shenanigans.
A while back I was in the same exact boat as you. I had 3 black decks that, as I tried to improve them, all converged toward the same sort of deck. And after a while I found myself playing with one significantly more than the other two. It's not that when you play one black deck you've played them all, but they do get really repetitive from deck to deck. I later scrapped the other two decks and ended putting all my focus onto my one Mono-B deck left; Pox.
If you are looking for a slight bit of fresh air from the gate then you could try and build pox. Of course, Pox ain't cheap, but at least it is pretty different from the gate. There are lots of variants of pox and none of them are significantly better than the others, so if you still wanted to try out a discard deck you could go for Rack-Pox. Here's the list I run;
4 mishra's factory
2 bojuka bog
2 urborg, tomb of yawgmoth
3 strip mine
1 nether spirit
4 bloodghast
1 cursed scroll
2 ensnaring bridge
4 inquisition of kozilek
4 hymn to tourach
3 innocent blood
4 liliana of the veil
4 smallpox
1 raven's crime
1 mind twist
1 demonic tutor
No, you cannot equip during the upkeep because you may only equip as a sorcery. And no, your augur would die as a state based action and you would never get the opportunity to active his ability. This could be wrong, but from what i understand of the rules thats how it is. You would have to ask the judges over in Magic Rules http://forums.mtgsalvation.com/forumdisplay.php?f=28 to get a 100% certain response.
As to augur vs rats, the augur sticks around for a bit as a drudge skeleton, and then hits for 2 cards instead of just 1. its a little better as a creature and a little better as a discard spell, so it seems better in general to me.
As to similarities between this and the gate, it is somewhat inevitable. Mono-black a has a slew of powerful cards that are useful in just about every deck you can fit em in. Phyrexian Obliterator, for instance, is just a better creature than most of the discard themed creatures that there is little reason to not run him in their place. You could cut Nyxanthid for instance, and put him in, and you pay 1 more mana for a much more reliable creature that doesn't depend on their hand size, and has a sort of evasion. Not that he is necessary, but marginally better. And Black's discard is what makes Black, well, Black. Its one of the defining features of the color that you can't find in other colors. so you will see a number of them repeat from deck to deck. Gatekeepr, for instance, is just a excellent all around creature that there is little reason not to run him when you can.
so does +2 necropotence and +3 spinning darkness sound good to fill in the 5 card hole?
And for multiplayer I think I might put on the sideboard a few syphon mind just like you said.
and as much as I love sol ring, theres too much in the deck that costs specifically black mana, and the colorless mana from sol ring wouldn't help as much as I would like
demonic tutor is also a little pricey from my budget. I should have mentioned this earlier, all the above cards in the lost I already own, so thats why you will see things like only 1 demonic or only 1 yawgmoth's will. And dont quote me on this, but i thought demonic tutor was kinda pricey?
I am building a mono black discard deck to be used in mostly one on one matches, but will also occasionally see two-headed giant or emperor battles. The deck is mostly completed, but I have some holes hat need filling and a few too many cards to put in there. So basically ill just shut up and show you the cards already and hopefully you guys can help me out.
18 Swamp
Creatures
4 Vampire Nighthawk
4 Hypnotic Specter
Artifacts and Enchantments
2 Necropotence
4 The Rack
Spells
4 Dark Ritual
4 Funeral Charm
1 Vampiric Tutor
4 Duress
1 Mind Twist
1 Demonic Tutor
1 Yawgmoth's Will
3 Unmask
4 Hymn To Tourach
4 Drain Life
4 Diabolic Edict
2 Meekstone
2 Nausea
2 Leyline of the Void
1 Kaervek's Spite
For the keen eyed ones out there you will notice thats 5 cards short.
the other considerations are:
Note: my group plays by its own sort of format, basically vintage without restrictions, and a few other wierd things but thats mostly it. Oh, for budget reasons I dont really want to spend more than $5 ish per card, so things like thoughtseize are out.