Hello there! My name is Shawn, and this is my mono black budget discard deck designed for casual play. My philosophy is that your opponents strategy means nothing if they have no cards in their hand. This deck utilizes discard spells, wheel effects, and enchantments that punish opponents for discarding to force your opponents to constantly rethink their strategy.
Overview: The point of this deck is to force your opponent into top deck mode as soon as possible and then kill them either with enchantments like Shrieking Affliction or Quest for the Nihil Stone or with one of the bigger creatures like Thought Gorger or Bloodgift Demon. There are only 20 lands in this deck, which, is rather risky, ofcourse, but that is what black is all about! More so, there are Dark Ritual in this deck for mana and Waste Not also produces mana when your opponent discards a land card. I ran 26 lands prior but I found that I had more mana than I was able to use. I faced the same problem when running 24 and 22.
Opening hands to keep: This deck is pretty flexible in terms of what you can keep for an opening hand. You'll be drawing lots of cards after you get your Waste Not on the field. With that said, though, a Waste Not is very nice to have in your opening hand, a you can start drawing cards, getting zombies, and mana quickly. A near perfect hand would be two Dark Ritual, a Liliana's Caress, a Dark Deal, and a Swamp even if you go last, and all your opponents play two spells turn one, you'll still deal 10 damage to everyone, turn one. If you go first, you can do 14 damage turn one.
Turn 1: Not much happens turn one unless you have a Dark Deal. So just play a swamp and Duress if you have it. You'll be able to see your opponents hand which is very nice.
Turn 2: Get your Waste Not or Liliana's Caress on the field. You should start making your opponent discard cards soon. If you do not have either one of those, start making your opponent discard their hand and slow them down a bit.
Turn 3: You should have either Waste Not or Liliana's Caress by now, so play it if you do. If not, your chances of losing start to increase. Keep making opponents discard cards if you do not have either one of these cards. Or play Vampire Nighthawk to help protect you/stall
Turn 4-5: Continue making opponents discard cards. Draw more cards, getting mana, and zombies with Waste Not and pinging opponents for 2 everytime they discard. (Liliana's Caress) It also would be great to have either Shrieking Affliction or card:Quest of the nihil stone on the field. As between your discarding and them playing spells, they should be in top deck mode by now
Turn 6: Play a Thought Gorger or Bloodgift Demon. Preferably a Thought Gorger as your hand should be pretty healthy because of Waste Not so even if you have only 4-5 cards in hand, you'll have yourself a 6/6 - 7/7 creature with trample. That is game ending. You may have even won by now XD
Side Board notes: a play set of Death Cloud is good to have if you are going against multiply people as ewll as having Bottomless Pit. Despise is good to have against creature based strategies, Sign in Blood or Read the Bones is nice if you find you aren't drawing enough cards as a lot of the discards spells in this deck make you discard as well. Umbra Stalker is another creature that can get really big as you will be discarding a lot of cards into your graveyard and you're monoblack, so every card in your graveyard will have a black mana symbol. Only downside is that it does not have trample.
