I started Old-School at the end of 2016, early 2017 and as everyone who starts playing ’93/94, I was wondering : what deck am I going to play ?
There is 2 types of people : the first one owns a large collection of cards, the second one starts fresh.
For the first type, the answer is quite simple : you just browse a few blogs and find a deck that fits your mood < repeat every week >.
As for the second group, like myself, it’s a little bit more difficult, knowing that this year has been agitated with price spikes….
I’ve always had an attraction for the « dark side », or black side in MTG. The only Deck I knew in the format was THE DECK… and played it during few years in T1 – vintage, and didn’t want to play it again (that’s what my subconscious-wallet told me, truth is it’s f*cking expensive).
One of my first deck was mono-black, with French-Tourach-Rules, so Fallen Empire is IN. I didn’t have any goal in mind, except being annoying to my opponent.
I had fun playing this, first turns being swamp-darkritual-specter/sinkhole/tourach 🙂 Fast, simple, no mana problems, and could easily start playing with it.
I think it was missing Underworld Dreams :
This card allowed me to win so many games after changing my deck (see below), that’s insane !
I’ve never played it, but maybe skull of orm would be an interesting card to add, allowing to recast your Dreams (being disenchant) or Blight
So, if I had to build this deck again (with budget in mind), I would :
- Cut tourach to make it swedish legal
- Keep only 1 or 2 disrupting scepter
- Add 1 or 2 icy manipulator
- Add 4 underworld dreams (instead of tourach)
- Add 2 skull of orm (instead of kormus bell)
- Add 1 pestilence
- Side : 2 oubliette, 2 terror, 2 disk, 4 gloom…
Few months after this first deck, I was convinced to drop the tourach (because most of the times I wouldn’t be able to play them), along with attempts to make a land destruction deck… I wanted to try what a « almost-conventional » monoblack deck has to offer :
This one worked quite well, underworld dreams doing a very good job, dark knight sometimes doing 20 damage by himself because opponent couldn’t manage it properly, Su-chi resisting The Abyss, and drain life doing either creature removal, or great finisher.
I wasn’t convinced with Greed at first, but when your deck runs out of fuel, you need a drawing engine, and it works great with Drain life !
[twocolumns][/twocolumns]
Best Friends ever
But I was missing few control cards, most of them being creature removal, because I don’t remember exactly, but my sideboard wasn’t so great.
I would now do something like this for the sideboard :
- 2 oubliette
- 2 imprison
- 2 terror
- 2 pestilence
- 4 gloom
- 2 disk
After talking with the French crew, I decided to add a second color, I had choice between white, red and blue :
- Blue will cost me lots of money and I wanted to have more cards – less expensive so I can build more different decks
- White was the easy way in my head : like 4 swords, 4 disenchant : that’s too easy control, that’s not the spirit !
- Red : well, let’s find out.
I did some research and I felt on a post about some kind of black/red prison : void of the underworld
Decks runs around land destruction, lock with nethervoid/bloodmoon, go read the full story on the blog ! 🙂
Deck was nice, but did some changes and I wasn’t fully happy with it, mostly because I didn’t know how to play it well and didn’t know old-school meta . It’s also very meta-dependant, because centering your deck around BloodMoon is risky…
I decided to go back to a more « simple » deck, still with Black and Red.
So I took back my mono-black and put some red cards, like : badlands, lightning bolt, shatter, sedge troll and blood moon
=> Looks like we got a disco troll !
Below is the deck I played at Fishliver 2017, finished 18th / 3rd unpowered
The deck runs fine :
- fireball did a great job (creature removal & finisher) better than expected !
- I win some rounds with underworlds / wheel of fortune (fast enough to make my opponent think I was a Trick Deck)
- Sedge troll is really a pain for the opponent
It was also refreshing to have more choice of cards when trying to find solutions 🙂
But I could have done much better, n00b mistake : manabase. Not enough red mana, I should drop one (all?) mishra, and put 1 more city of brass, and maybe one more moutain : that makes 3 more red mana source, because half my deck (even more after the side) is red. This mana base mistakes cost me at least 1 decisive round, maybe 2.
First thing peoples ask me when seeing this : why 2 dreams & 1 blood moon in main deck ? you’re going nowhere, well, not exactly, you’re going everywhere. So for the next event, I changed few things, trying to follow a guideline.
And yes… I did some upgrades….[end of budget post]
So, one month after, during november, the French Tournament took place in Paris. I was willing to start from the fishliver deck, but did some changes :
- Remove the underworld main deck, put 4 in side only
- Remove the blood moon main deck, put 3 in side only
- Remove 3 fireball : replace by 4 chain lightning
- Only 2 disks in main deck, 1 in side
- Add few upgrades : Juzam, Moxes, Library
This deck was looking almost like this (side was like the fishliver cup) (a proxy was inserted, could you spot it ?)
<HatersGonnaHate>
</HatersGonnaHate>
What a pleasure to finally have some moxes and reliably cast Juzam on turn 1… 😀
Switching 1 Shatter for a Detonate was a great idea ! I didn’t received in time my Shatterstorms to put in sideboard unfortunately…
I think Fireballs were more useful to me during the Fishliver than Chain Lightning, even if they did a better job VS land destruction 😀
I miss my Underworld…. so much useful
Unfortunately, even if I had so much fun & talk during the tournament, I couldn’t make it to top8, maybe with a little more luck I could have done better 🙂
Right now… I’m keeping this « black base » and try to change few things here and there. I also try to learn from my mistakes and play slower 🙂
For more « standard » mono black decks, you could find what you’re looking for over there :
http://www.wak-wak.se/9394decks/mono-black
http://www.wak-wak.se/9394decks/br-aggro
http://oldschool-mtg.blogspot.fr/p/arvika-9394-top4-2015.html
