This is a budget mono-black deck based around sacrificing your creatures, getting beneficial effects from their deaths, using Immortal Servitude to bring back all of your fodder, and then doing it all over again. It gains a huge amount of card advantage with the recursion of Immortal Servitude and the card draw of Dark Prophecy.
Sac Outlets:
Spawning Pit is the primary sac outlet. Sacrifice your creatures for no mana cost, then use the charge counters to generate creature tokens... then sac the tokens!
Plagued Rusalka
is the secondary sac outlet. Combos well with
Festering Goblin
and
Festering Newt
. He can also sac himself, so he serves as fodder as well once you have a pit on the field.
Fodder:
Festering Goblin
and
Festering Newt
(the festering duo) are the fodder of choice. When you sac them you get to pick off a 1/1 creature or at least weaken a blocker before you swing in. If you sac them in multiples or combine them with
Plagued Rusalka
you can pick off bigger creatures.
Death Cultist
is an expert chump blocker. Assign him as the blocker to a huge beater creature, then sac him before the combat damage step. You get all the beneficial sac effects, and the beater swings at nothing but air. It's also nice that he doesn't require an outside sac outlet.
Sac Benefit Cards:
Mortician Beetle
is your beater creature. Every time you sac (and that's quite often), he gets bigger. Not much else to say.
Blood Artist is an awesome card and I can't say enough good things about it. Every time you sac a creature you gain life and they lose life. He also triggers when you kill an opponent's creatures, nice bonus. Interacts nicely with Pawn of Ulamog and the hordes of self-sacking Eldrazi tokens it cranks out.
Dark Prophecy is your card draw engine. Whenever your creatures die, you get to draw at the cost of one life. I initially used Grim Haruspex, but it doesn't trigger off of tokens so I swapped it out. Blood Artist generally makes up for the loss of life. I also considered Deathgreeter to offset the life loss, but there just weren't enough slots for it.
Pawn of Ulamog is a beast in this deck (huge thanks to PoorSOB for suggesting him). Whenever you sac a non-token creature you get Eldrazi tokens that you can sac for colorless mana. Colorless mana that you can use to convert counters on Spawning Pit into 2/2 spawn tokens. Or you can feed them to the pit for more counters. Or you can chump block with them. Or you can just sac them to trigger
Mortician Beetle
and/or Blood Artist and/or Dark Prophecy. It gets pretty nutty.
Recursion:
Immortal Servitude is one of my favorite cards ever. It creates such incredible "gotcha" moments. Once you've filled your graveyard with one drops, cast this for four cmc and they all come back for more.
So there you have it. It will never be a tier one deck, but it's fun to play and cheap to build. I'm happy with it thus far. Still going back and forth between
Thoughtpicker Witch
and
Plagued Rusalka
. Suggestions welcome.
