YOUR HAND.... WILL LAST... about four turns. Commander Twilight Sparkle got a deck, and I promised I'd do the rest of the new promo cards. What about a general that isn't half finished? One who is actually kinda ridiculous? (Actually Twilight is pretty badass too, more on that in a future deck though)
After much testing with various Luna ideas, I've come to the conclusion that trying to kill with commander damage by taking advantage of her menace ability at night never ends well, so I went with a slightly more disabling approach here. I say Luna because Nightmare Moon tends to last all of one turn before everyone collectively transforms her.
Little do they know that she's just as nasty with her wish board~ Especially when they have NO CARDS.
Onward to a deck people will probably ban you from playing in casual multiplayerland. Not because it is powerful, but because it shuts everything down. It also makes games last twice as long! That's alot of time for friendship. And evil. You are going to be s̱̘̩̖u͎͉͓p͇̥̯̻̬̼ͅér͞ ̨̩̘̣e̳̯͖ͅv̨͈̻͇i͠l͕͙̗̦̯̥ͅ.
Disclaimer blahblah:
These decks aren't meant for dominating in tournaments. In fact, their commanders alone make them banned in tournaments. It's just for casual MTG. Don't expect turn 3 wins, but do expect politics and fun for multiplayer.
Actually this one will make you target #1 for the rest of the night, so good luck!
LET THEIR HATE FUEL YOU
Card List:
Sorcery (24)
- 1x Ambition's Cost
- 1x Arterial Flow
- 1x Beseech the Queen
- 1x Cabal Conditioning
- 1x Damnation
- 1x Dark Deal
- 1x Demonic Tutor
- 1x Grim Tutor
- 1x Imperial Seal
- 1x Mutilate
- 1x Nightmare Unmaking
- 1x Night's Whisper
- 1x Read the Bones
- 1x Sign in Blood
- 1x Syphon Mind
- 1x Tasigur's Cruelty
- 1x Mind Twist
- 1x Exsanguinate
- 1x Torment of Hailfire
- 1x Unnerve
- 1x Vicious Rumors
- 1x Mind Shatter
- 1x Rise of the Dark Realms
- 1x Ashes to Ashes
Instant (6)
- 1x Dark Bargain
- 1x Doom Blade
- 1x Go for the Throat
- 1x Skeletal Scrying
- 1x Vampiric Tutor
- 1x Vona's Hunger
Creature (18)
- 1x Bloodgift Demon
- 1x Burglar Rat
- 1x Cackling Fiend
- 1x Crypt Ghast
- 1x Demonlord Belzenlok
- 1x Dread Presence
- 1x Liliana's Specter
- 1x Geth, Lord of the Vault
- 1x Plaguecrafter
- 1x Rankle, Master of Pranks
- 1x Sangromancer
- 1x Scythe Specter
- 1x Sheoldred, Whispering One
- 1x The Haunt of Hightower
- 1x Gray Merchant of Asphodel
- 1x Nightmare Moon
- 1x Lord of the Void
- 1x Vilis, Broker of Blood
Enchantment (5)
- 1x Exquisite Blood
- 1x Painful Quandary
- 1x Phyrexian Arena
- 1x The Eldest Reborn
- 1x Waste Not
Artifact (11)
- 1x Caged Sun
- 1x Gauntlet of Power
- 1x Gilded Lotus
- 1x Jet Medallion
- 1x Lightning Greaves
- 1x Mana Crypt
- 1x Sculpting Steel
- 1x Sol Ring
- 1x Swiftfoot Boots
- 1x Sword of Feast and Famine
- 1x Thran Dynamo
Land (36)
- 1x Bojuka Bog
- 1x Cabal Coffers
- 1x Geier Reach Sanitarium
- 1x Homeward Path
- 1x Cabal Stronghold
- 1x Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx
- 1x Rogue's Passage
- 1x Strip Mine
- 26x Swamp
- 1x Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
- 1x Wasteland
Wishboard (6)
- 1x Moonsilver Spear
- 1x Midnight Banshee
- 1x Blood Tribute
- 1x Black Sun's Zenith
- 1x Temporal Extortion
- 1x Harvester of Souls
The Breakdown
What do you do with a 6/6 evasive general? Usually you destroy people with commander damage. Unfortunately, this is mono black, so you are pretty much limited to artifacts to protect her and the high cost of 6 means a dead Nightmare Moon is going to be hard to replay multiple times.
To make matters worse, Nightmare Moon is pretty irrelevant as I mentioned above. She will almost always be transformed into Luna, partly because she's scary, but mainly because people just want to screw with you. It's a card with a built-in way to remove it with no way to counter that. Expect everyone chipping in 2 mana to turn your 8/8 flying deathball into a fuzzy little Woona the second she does anything threatening. Kinda like how I expect Celestia was around Luna when she first returned! How accurate.
So, lets ditch the idea of using her as beatdown general and just take advantage of her awesome 6 extra cards for the sake of utility. The deck itself can destroy people another way.
There are a very limited umber of "cards with a moon in their art" that are mono-black, but the ones you do have access to are pretty interesting. If your EDH games are anything like mine, people who transform your horse will probably want to play your cards over theirs just for funzies. We are sticking with ones we can actually use though, so here's the final list of those.
The Wish Dreamboard
(because Luna)
(because Luna)
Midnight Banshee makes things slowly melt and hates on token decks. It's not quite as direct as some other forms of black "AOE negative counter" cards like the Black Sun Zenith up there, but it has a moon so... yay?
Moonsilver Spear lets your newly transformed, 6 mana 4/4 flyer summon a few backup dancers to make her slightly less useless. Or if you are me, you can summon it, then realize Luna is your only creature and she's currently shrouded by Lightning Greaves which you can't move off of her, so your grand plan immediately dies and everything is terrible. It also costs 8 mana just to use, so it's very end-gamey.
Blood Tribute and Temporal Extortion are your "WHY does this guy have 100 life and why doesn't anyone run anything to do something about it??" answer. Usually you wouldn't bother with these cause we all like to pretend lifegain decks just don't exist, but now you can actually do something about it!
And of course, Harvester of Souls draws cards. Usually by turn 6 when you'd summon Nightmare Moon, you are probably running out of gas. Have some optional, albeit slightly low quality gas for turn 7. Unless no one has any creatures. Then you just cry in top-deck hell.
Regardless, you cant play any of this without protecting your princess! Get her some hoof boots and a sword. If for whatever reason they don't immediatly transform her, rogues passage for that hefty 8 damage commander hit. Plenty of your other minions can also take advantage of that one.
Now on to the actual deck.
COMBO BREAKER
FRIENDSHIP ENDER
You know that one guy that always comes to your nightly magic group with his brand new 30 step combo deck he can't wait to unleash on everyone? The one that thinks counter spells should be banned, hand cycling is the worst thing on the planet, and dependency on a single card held for half the game is the theme of most of his decks? Hopefully he was just a friend of a friend, cause he's going hate you once you get going. There will be no room for friendship. Ever.
This is you
Your mission is to absolutely murder people's hands. You want them so beyond crippled that they are topdecking for the rest of the game. Sit back and grin like the evil mastermind that you are as the blue guy that mind controlled your entire field last week spends the next 5 turns recovering from your overwhelming onslought. You're a regular nerd armageddon.
Almost all of these have no effect on you. Why destroy people's card advantage if you can't taunt them with your fat hand while they beg for scraps? Embrace your inner scrooge. You played that crappy Twilight deck a few nights ago. Time for some redemption!
Eventually that blue player up there will start drawing 3 cards a turn and laugh at your pitiful attempts at emptying his everything. Of course, he's still nursing a broken leg and missing eyeball while putting up a brave face, but lets go ahead and make sure he's really crippled by saving a few special presents just for him.
Assuming you don't get countered.
You are probably going to get countered.
It's the thought that counts.
Of course, we can't be completely creature-free in such a creature heavy meta. Luckily there are plenty of nasty flyers that also love them some well-cooked hands. For the sake of not creating a deck that can only do one thing though, we are limiting that to the best of the best like The Haunt of Hightower who gets stronger while healing you in a deck that loves to eat itself, along with Rankle and Plaguecrafter who has the secondary effect of sacrificing people's creatures.
Originally this deck ran Megrim, Raider's Wake, Lilianas Caress, and a host of other "When Player discards a card, they take X damage", but after many a game seeing how lackluster those effects are, I ditched all of it. In fact, this post originally existed in draft with those cards added.
The reality is, your goal is to empty people's hands as quickly as possible. The turns leading up to doing that don't have time to pay for cards that are only going to do a tiny bit of damage with no other effects at all. Commander is a format where people have 40 life. Doing 4 damage to someone for discarding 2 cards isn't worth it.
Waste Not on the other hand brings on a plethora of useful effects. It's something you might want to tutor for early on, especially if you have Dark Deal in your hand. The combo here can get absolutely ridiculous if used when people still have 3-4 cards available. Expect to have a field full of zombies, 6 extra cards drawn, and 8 mana to play said cards if you can drop this on turn 3-5. Unfortunately everyone will immediately hate you since they were probably saving their important cards compared to the ones you were forcing them to discard prior, so brace for impact~
Throw the Sanitatrium in there for some card cycling that also synergizes beautifully with Waste Not. Even if you have already emptied their hand, you can still get them to draw then immediately discard their new cards for zombies, mana, or extra cards.
That Good Kind of Burn~
Corruption runs deep in the castle of Nightmare Moon. While your enemies desperately try to recover from the plague you brought upon their respective kingdoms, your own is rife with back-alley dealings and more backstabbing than all 8 seasons of Game of Thrones combined.
We aren't going to have a terrible ending here in Evilquestria though. Our leaders kept the city going in the right path. Our leaders didn't drop the ball completely and ruin a perfectly good show so they could run off and write for Star Wars. Our leaders didn't rush to their demise for the sake of appealing to soccer moms or whatever the hell they were doing over there.
Uhh, anyway... Black has a lot of drawpower, but it tends to eat you alive in the process.
Especially if you plan on tutoring, which every black deck player absolutely will. These cards are lifesavers and one of the best things about having the color in your deck. Use them to pull out your Dark Deals and Waste Not combo, a healing card if you are getting low, a fatty creature if you have a bunch of mana reflects running, or anything else to fit whatever situation you are in. The blue guy is tapped out from casting Blue Sun Zenith? Demonic Tutor for a Mind Twist and bring him back down to poverty with the rest of your opponents.
This deck is slow, and slows everyone else down too. Expect long games. With all this self-harm we are doing, we need a way to recover. Bonus points for killing everyone off all at once with Exsanguinate.
Exquisite Blood is the card that both feels bad to waste a counter/removal spell on, and also ends up being ridiculously powerful as your life total can spike up to 100 fairly quickly. Do you take out the enchantment that is actively screwing your combo up? Or the one that is just letting someone heal. Most will pick the former.
Sangromancer blocks flyers while also keeping you healthy . If her effect only happened when cards were discarded, she'd be out. The extra effect of creature death makes her well worth a slot, especially since we are going to be running a ton of this stuff:
What happens when a someone slips through your overwhelming tyranny? You destroy them of course!
Removal is the most boring addition to any deck, but it's also the most important. All of these target different things, from indestructible and protection vs. black nonsense to weenies with big effects while sparing your good stuff. We can't do a whole lot against enchantments and artifacts, but at least we can lay waste to their armies.
While we do that, we build up our own. When running one color, mana reflection is much easier to get going. Double your rations and build up a nice healthy populace. These guys make your Exsanguinates turn into kill shots. They let you Black Sun Zenith even an Eldrazi down. Luna in particular has a bunch of high-cost cards in her dreamboard that love the extra mana to cast.
Or just drop a bunch of purple fireballs on everyone. What does purple fire mean? I have no idea.
We've starved them, plagued them, set them on fire, and slowly built up our little moon-cult into a bastion of all that is THE NIGHT. What other evil things can we do to them?
Plunder of course!
Look at all those overflowing graveyards! It would be a shame to let all those neat creatures and artifacts go to waste.
Steal their artifacts. Steal their big creatures. Or just build a zombified army out of their loved ones. If we go evil, we go full evil.
With only black, we run the Cabal cards. Nothing like tapping 3 lands for 9 mana. Urborg on the other hand is a little... risky? There are 9 lands in this deck that don't technically count as a "Swamp". If another player is playing black, you could potentially give them that extra mana they need to summon something nasty on you. It also causes Gauntlet of Power up there to let anyone tap their basic lands for double colorless. Personally I've had good luck with the risk and the reward has outweighed it in all but one game. Swap it for a swamp if you aren't comfortable with that.
The shrine is a given considering most of the stuff you leave on the field has 2 devotion to black. If you are recently wiped, it doubles as a colorless or extra swamp if you kept Urborg.
If everything goes perfectly, you should almost completely shut everyone else down to the point of barely being able to drop a land a turn, while simultaneously hoarding as much mana as possible for an explosive finish with a number of options. As with almost all casual EDH games though, it almost never goes exactly as planned. This deck hopefully gives you plenty of ways to deal with surprises while still aiming for it's overall goal of being the evil tyrant of the night Nightmare Moon always wanted to be~ Get revenge on those nasty cartoon horses for not appreciating such a deep and caring princess! The nerve!
If you would like to try this one out on Tabletop Simluator. You can download the file for that here.
I'll be tackling Rarity next. Keep an eye out for that one either next weekend or some time this week if I can find time to build something that isn't terrible.
(After eveyone teams up on you in game 2)
