First off I'd like to say, yes, I was playing a multiplayer game against 7 of my friends. It was my first time playing the deck, I rolled a natural 20, went first, played Shrieking Affliction turn 1 into Waste Not turn 2. Turn 3 I didn't have another mana but I played Smallpox and I drew a bunch of cards. Then I drew into another from all the noncreature nonland spells they discarded and played another Smallpox and drew into another Smallpox. After the third Smallpox, I was the only one with land and they all got mana screwed long enough for me to discard the rest of their hands. I simultaneously killed all of them off with the help of my Shrieking Affliction's. Some of them now refuse to play with me if I am playing this deck since it so consistently can win and goes so fast.
This deck is meant for multiplayer, it is very fast, and is very consistent. If you get Waste Not in your opening hand, and are able to play it and begin using its abilities in a mulitplayer setting, that's it, you've already won. Imagine a turn 2 Waste Not into a turn 3 Delirium Skeins you discard 3 cards as well, but depending on what our ex-friends throw out we will gain a lot of value, rather we will draw all our cards back, be given more mana to play more cards to discard the rest of their hands, or have a zoo of 2/2 zombies. I can say, that (especially for this price) this is the best modern multiplayer deck right now.
Another great thing is that everything in the entire deck can be played for 3 mana or less. With 22 mana in our deck we will rarely ever encounter mana problems in live play.
Oh... is our hand bad? If we have Waste Not as explained before we will draw to good, or if we have Dark Deal we can draw an entire new hand and screw up our opponent's hands. (Also Waste Not and Dark Deal in a table full of people is straight op).
Also before you go thinking about what creatures work well with this deck stop right there. Our deck is good because we don't rely on creatures other than a horde of zombie tokens. Basically we make almost everyone's creature removal against us useless. Also we have a new addition of Lurrus of the Dream-Den which adds a lot of raw power to the deck. (FYI Before Lurrus, the deck list was the exact same, so Lurrus is purely a free card that required me cutting no cards from the deck to make him work. And he has synergies with putting cards into the graveyard. Pretty sweet addition if you ask me!)
Once we have emptied their hands, we can begin to kill every single person off at once with Shrieking Affliction or Quest for the Nihil Stone.
Discard fodder(6): 4xRotting Rats | 2x Dakmor Salvage
Discard outlets(31): 4x Delirium Skeins | 3x Tasigur's Cruelty | 4x Burglar Rat | 4x Rotting Rats | 4x Smallpox | 4x Dark Deal | 4x Vicious Rumors | 4x Geier Reach Sanitarium
Win Conditions(11): 4x Waste Not | 4x Shrieking Affliction | 2x Quest for the Nihil Stone | Lurrus of the Dream-Den
If you have more money to spend you can add in cards like Liliana of the Veil for extra lockdown. Or make the deck Black/Red and add in some Burning Inquiry.
But other than that this should be the strongest multiplayer / kitchen table/ casual deck out there, and its price is damn nice.
Disclaimer
To be fair, when I first wrote this description the deck only cost around $50, obviously its almost tripled now, but I'm not changing the description.
Each Card Explained Show
Creature Spells
Burglar Rat : A great 2 mana spell to make only our opponents discard and chump block.
Rotting Rats : An easy 2 mana, everyone discard card. Helps if we have Waste Not but not enough mana for any of our 3 mana cards. Also we can use it as death fodder to block a big creature or sacrifice fodder to Smallpox and then bring it back for 2 mana to discard everyone again at any time we choose using the unearth ability.
Lurrus of the Dream-Den: Super great addition to the deck. Its literally free as everything is naturally under 2 CMC. Its great because it can repeatedly re-play our discard creatures, or our enchantments. Lurrus is literally too good because we discard our own cards and then Lurrus lets us get them back from the graveyard. This means you can discard a card like Shrieking Affliction early game, then get it back with Lurrus once it is active to close out the game.
Sorcery Spells
Dark Deal : Draw a whole new hand (-1). If we use this after Waste Not we will get too much value cause of all of Waste Not abilities. This means usually we will force people to discard lands and lands let us play more spells. Really good card.
Delirium Skeins : Everyone discard 3 cards! This is an amazing multiplayer discard outlet especially when comboed with Waste Not.
Vicious Rumors : A 1 mana spell where we can cause mass discard, and some other effects. A great thing to play following a Waste Not. Nice that its cheap because if you turn 2 Waste Not then you can follow with any 2 mana play and that (this assumes you don't have any of the 3 mana mass discards in hand. Those cards are great. The life gain and life loss might also be relevant sometimes as well.
Smallpox : Everyone discards, loses a life, loses a creature, loses a land. Good aoe board clear and if we do this early we can really mana screw our opponents. This card also combos extremely well with Rotting Rats since our opponents will usually not want to kill it since it gives us another card to use to make them discard, we just sacrifice Rotting Rats to our own Smallpox then we unearth Rotting Rats for even more value. We have Dakmor Salvage as a sac outlet for our land sacrifice/
Tasigur's Cruelty : Really great card overall. Since we put cards into our graveyard anyway, this card can help us potentially cast a 1 mana spell that makes all of our opponents discard 2 cards. Great since we keep those cards! (And we have little ways to interact with out graveyard other than Rotting Rats)
Enchantment Cards
Shrieking Affliction : Like Quest for the Nihil Stone everyone will now take damage for not having any cards in hand, 3 damage each turn! Only costs 1 mana as well.
Quest for the Nihil Stone : Kills them really fast and only needs two counters.
Waste Not : Probably the most important card in the deck and why this deck is so powerful. For 2 mana we will now draw a card every time an opponent throws out a nonland non creature. We will put a zombie token on the field if they discard a creature card. Eventually we will get so many zombies that they will be their own threat of their own and another way to simutaneously kill off all our opponents. Finally if they throw out land cards, we will get more mana and just make them discard even more on top of what they have already thrown out. If you get multiple ones of these going. You will be unstoppable. Such an amazing card and effect for only 2 mana.
Land Cards
Dakmor Salvage: We can discard it/ sacrifice it to Smallpox and get it back later. Fills graveyard for Tasigur's Cruelty and might put a Rotting Rats in there as well which is nice possible upside.
Geier Reach Sanitarium: This is an all star land that gives us Waste Not triggers and Quest for the Nihil Stone creatures even after our opponents have no cards in hand. It is legendary though, but we discard our own cards a lot, we can even cycle it away using one that is already on the battlefield.
Sideboard Show
So now I just want to address the sideboard for those who ask. The sideboard, if anything, is the maybeboard since usually in multiplayer you don't sideboard and the maybeboard does not go towards the price of the entire deck. But let me put how a potential sideboard would look: You evaluate what hate cards your friends will have against you. The only real thing they can try to do is destroy
Waste Not, because remember Turn 2
Waste Not -> Turn 3
Dark Deal /
Delirium Skeins = win in a table full of people. So to counter their hate cards the best thing to do is to bring in
Duress like cards such as
Inquisition of Kozilek to disrupt them from disrupting us. So my advice on any sideboard is to see what you are playing against, and just bring in whatever 1 mana cards you can get a hold of that let you just take out disruption spells like
Disenchant out of their hands. But I mean if it is multiplayer and all of them bring in disruption it is going to be a rough one to win no matter what.
Ravenous Trap is obviously prime hate against graveyard decks such as dredge which would hurt our strategy, and we can proc it ourselves with a Delirium Skeins or Dark Deal which is pretty sweet.
If you're against control extra 1 mana discard against them is good along with Shred Memory so we can search our library for a Waste Not and even use its normal ability if they flash in a Snapcaster Mage or something!
If your friends happen to be rich and have cards like Tarmogoyf we have some more hate such as Fatal Push which would be more effective than Duress at that point. (Also if Fatal Push is too expensive for you buy some Victim of Night which basically hits everything for an extra mana.)
Counters to this deck: 4 friends teaming up against you running counterspell decks.
Also please if you like this deck, shoot it a +1. If you think there is some other cards that I could add in (that still allow this deck to stay in the budget range) let me know.
Last thing, my friends and I play Modern multiplayer decks, so if you are your friends don't restrict yourself to modern cards you can look at adding in some other amazing cards such as Dark Ritual to speed it up even more. Otherwise I don't know of other cards that would work as well as these modern legal ones.
Wow, 100 upvotes!
Tl:dr Empty their hands, win game
