Standard Report - Game Day Dragons of Tarkir

For a while now, I've been wanting to add a standard play section to this blog, and it seems like Game Day Dragons of Tarkir is a good place to start.

For the past year and a half I've been working with a three colour deck. I'm sure I'll post something about that here soon, but today I want to share my new creation.

My mono black is a home brew. I've played with net decks when I can afford the cards to build them, but for tournament play, I prefer to use my own builds. I went 3-1-1 for game day, which as far as I'm concerned is a respectable record. Today I'd like to take you through the intricacies of my deck, and explain how it all came together.

First, let's take a look at the whole deck. I couldn't get a good picture, so I had Tams make this lovely mock up!

As you can see, the curve is a little wonky, but it'll make sense as we go through it. This is my suite of creatures.

The one drops serve to hold down the ground and trade away while I build a more substantial board. I chose to put in one Typhoid Rats, one Pharika's Chosen, and two Ruthless Rippers. The Ruthless Rippers are there because if I draw them late, I might be able to deal some damage directly to my opponent by unmorphing them. I decided not to just run four of so that they can't all be taken out by a single Bile Blight.

My three and four drops work together to keep me ahead on board, and the Master of the Feasts may even kill my opponent before they get their legs under them.

The Fate Unravelers are there to take advantage of the fact that my opponents may be drawing extra cards, and they're big enough to eat or trade with whatever my opponents may be doing.

 

By the time a Gray Merchant  or two come down, it should be close to the end of the game, though if things go really long, I have my non-creature spells to help me out.

Most of my spells are functional removal, up until turn four when I drop a whip and start gaining life, and turn five, where I drop a palace siege. My first siege generally functions as graveyard retrieval, though if I've gotten my opponent down to single digits, I might consider using the Dragons clause to drain the last few points of life away.

You'll see that I count Merciless Executioner among my non-creature spells. With the Khans clause of Palace Siege, I can use him as a repeatable edict effect.

The first two turns will either go disowned ancestor, outlast disowned ancestor, tap land, typhoid rats, or typhoid rats, pharika's cure. By turn three, I should be able to cast any of my three drops, with the most important of which being my Master of the Feasts, though a removal spell is almost as good against some decks.

A deck isn't just creatures and spells, and even in a mono-black deck, having the right land is important. The great Scotty Mac convinced me to bump my lands up from 22 to 24, and he was right, but just as importantly is the type of land I decided to run.

Along with 16 basic swamps, I'm running two of Bloodstained Mires, two of Polluted Deltas, two of Temples of Silence, and two of Caves of Koilos. The fetch lands are there specifically to thin my deck and serve to delve out my Murderous Cuts, but the black/white lands are there for another purpose entirely. It would seem that there's absolutely no enchantment removal in black, and with all the premium playable enchantments running around, I had to take another tactic.

The pros will tell you that arguably the most important part of your deck is your sideboard, and I've chosen mine very carefully. With Erase as my insurance against enchantments, and an extra Palace Siege in case my opponents have their own Erase, much of the rest of my sideboard at the moment deals with token removal. I have two extra Hero's Downfalls against Planeswalker heavy strategies, and two Thoughtseize in case of anything I couldn't think of how to deal with (this turned out to be mostly counter spells), I was pretty much set. The only other thing I want to mention is Silence the Believers. It's rare to get an exile effect in black, and this is a pretty good one. If you come up against something indestructible, being able to remove it feels good.

That's all for now. If you have any suggestions on my deck, or questions about how it plays, feel free to comment. I'm always looking for ways to improve.

Thanks for reading,


-Step.