A budget deck focused around Gray Merchant of Asphodel. He will give you a great way to switch some life totals around and get far enough ahead that you can close out the game with your other creatures. Pack Rat can turn your late game dead draws (like lands) into creatures that can snowball out of control quickly.
This deck is a midrange deck and focuses on early board control and removal to stay ahead of your opponents during the later stages.
Gameplan
Its pretty simple, most games you just want to play creature on curve and overrun your opponent. When you are trying to get you board established you usually get your devotion pretty up there. That's when Gray Merchant of Asphodel comes down. Usually around 6 devotion is enough to swing the game to you advantage. Phyrexian Arena will keep your hand stacked and will keep you in the game against control deck. It will cost you life, but usually the lifegain of this deck will be enough to keep you alive.
If any difficult creatures come into play there is plenty removal in the deck. This removal is all up to how your meta is at the moment, and should be costumized to your own needs.
Mulligans
As for mulligans, i usually mulligan fairly aggresivly for 1, 2 and 3 drops. Cards like Duress, Bloodsoaked Champion, Pack Rat, Vampire Nighthawk and Geralf's Messenger are card to look out for against most decks. Obviously depending on the matchup, as against burn, don't want cards like Phyrexian Arena as they might kill you in the long run.
Combo's
The most game winning combo is to have both Lashwrithe and Whip of Erebos on the field. The constantly giant creatures + the lifelink means its pretty much game over. You can also just put Lashwrithe on something like a Vampire Nighthawk. Then there is Whip of Erebos + Gray Merchant of Asphodel to get Gary back to the battlefield and have his enter the battlefield effect trigger again. Also, it's not really a combo, but since we run Pack Rat, any land that you don't need can be discarded into a lovely rat that can turn into a quick beater real fast.
Replacements
If you don't fancy some of the card that I have chosen in this devotion deck you have some options to replace them!
Vampire Nighthawk >
Nightveil Specter
A matter of preference, both have good and bad things about them (although i think the lifelink is a big plus for this deck)
then there is plenty of option for removal. there is Go for the Throat that you can mainboard is you don't run in to many Affinity decks.
Devour Flesh
, Doom Blade, Murderous Cut (as a 1-off) and for the slow meta's out there Murder are all good option. This can be customized to your needs.
If you think Phyrexian Arena is too expensive you can replace it with Underworld Connections which does the same just worse. Geralf's Messenger is another expensive card that can be replaced with Desecration Demon or Abyssal Persecutor.
There are some obvious non-budget friendly additions that can be made to this deck:
Phyrexian Obliterator, Geralf's Messenger (a full playsete ofcourse) and if you really want to, you can replace Duress with Thoughtseize
An upvote is greatly appreciated, as well as comments and tips!
EDIT: trying out Arena currently, as I am playing against mono-black alot and it could be a potent source of removal if my creature(s) are bigger than my opponents. I am also currently working on replacing all Vampire Nighthawk's with Geralf's Messenger.
