Oh how I love this deck.
Also, other people hate it.
This is what Black is to me. I got started a long time ago, in the simpler days of magic, when Black meant things were coming fast and you are going to be losing some cards.
The two main win conditions here are Megrim and The Rack. Everything else supplements those cards to let them do their job slowly, and painfully, to win the game. I don't want to rule out how disgusting Guiltfeeder is in this deck which functions as the executioner's axe that will destroy any hope of a comeback.
The idea here is simple. Play Megrim on turn one with Dark Ritual and then play anything else every other turn to follow and kill them with discard. At least one The Rack should be on the board, but at 1cmc and 4 in the deck it usually turns out that 2 or even 3 are on the board by mid game. It hurts. It hurts a lot. Your opponent is punished for losing cards and punished again for having lost them.
Fun!
To handle idle threats there are a few great chump blockers like the mighty Ravenous Rats which are amusing to play, discard, hurt, die, Stitch Together, discard, hurt, die, Unearth, etc... Fog of Gnats is also a humorous card to me as a cheap 1/1 Flying with Regenerate for so cheap it'll annoy the crap out of anyone hoping to fly overhead and beat you to death while you continue to torture them.
Calm down, Mantis Rider, you had your time.
Drain Life can be a fun way to do a lot of things like prolong the game for you with the life gain, kill bigger creatures to further discourage your opponent, or just euthanize your opponents final life points with a big push from Dark Ritual.
Diabolic Edict is so much fun to play right after your opponent finally draws a big creature they can play before they have to discard it just to be sacrificed before it can do anything.
Yay!
Bottomless Pit is one of those "insult to injury" plays for mid to late game just in case anyone gets any ideas like holding onto cards so they stop getting wrecked by The Rack. Total shenanigans in a multiplayer game. I revived this deck once at a home game against a bunch of friends that all said that "old cards can't keep up with new cards, they just aren't as good".
I shut them the hell up.
Finally, Duress
+
Hymn to Tourach
are ridiculous together since you can play them both on one Dark Ritual
+
Swamp
and cause 6 damage at the same time for each Megrim and typically let The Rack start doing it's thing.
I'm pretty sure this deck isn't legal to play anywhere other than home games (turns out it is Legacy Legal), but playing it too much will make it, or you, "illegal" there too...
Hooray!
Thanks for reading, let me know what your favorite classic Black discard combos are. This is my absolute favorite to dig out from time to time and show Standard and Modern decks what's up.
