Black Suicide - No Pain, No Gain!
Thanks for having a look at my suicide EDH deck. This deck has been changed a lot until now and I might still exchange some cards after further tests. However, the general strategy has worked well so far, actually better than expected. This deck works on the simple principle that paying life is never a problem with 40 starting life, if there is something to gain from the lifeloss.
The most prominent card for that purpose is surely Hatred and with a basically unblockable Commander it's 18 life for killing one opponent on the spot. There's also card draw in the form of Dark Confidant and Dark Tutelage, which puts the cards in my hand instead of drawing (which is great with Necropotence and Chains of Mephistopheles or even with Maralen of the Mornsong) for a bit higher risk than the usual pay 1 life, draw one more effects.
To use Xiahou Dun best, I go for massive discard, mostly double-sided effects such as Delirium Skeins, Mindslicer, Oppression, Bottomless Pit and Pox/Smallpox. I don't care about discarding my whole hand if it disrupts the other players in the game, because I can get the useful pieces back with the commander anyway. To repeat the recursion without having to cast Xiahou Dun from the command zone multiple times, I have lots of one-time and constant reanimation effects in the deck.
Even though I have some ways to quickly reduce everyone's life total (Pox, Sorin Markov, temporal extorsion,...) the deck is played as control. Combo should have a hard time with all the hand disruption and everything with creatures falls to the mass removals and sacrificing effects. In the late game the main win options are the life sucking effects like Grey Merchant of Asphodel, Exsanguinate, Kokusho, the Evening Star or the only inifnite loop Bloodchief Ascension/Mindcrank. I've tried the combo Helm of Obedience/Leyline of the Void here (as it's one of my favourite combos in EDH) but the parts of the bloodchief combo do something on their own, while the helm is useless and the leyline prevents me from stealing creatures out of my opponent's graveyard.
Another notable card is Chains of Mephistopheles. With Anvil of Bogardan I get the following sequence in each player's draw phase:
draw the regular card, discard a card, draw card for anvil and immediately discard again
This means no one will get additional cards in their hands as long as this lock is in play and with no cards left in someone's hand, that player may only cast instants and nothing else. The Anvil itself has the purpose of making everyone draw and discard, so that Liliana's Caress keeps triggering, even if people have no cards in hand left, that I get Quest for the Nihil Stone active even in the late game and that Waste Not continues to produce some value. Of course, drawing additional cards won't work for me either with the Chains but the point is I'm prepared for that and the opponents aren't!
If you have any suggestions as for how to further improve the deck, please leave a comment!
Recently switched the commander, following description is for the deck lead by Maralen of the Mornsong. Show
Maralen of the Mornsong was my second commander deck and has been awesome to play in 1 vs 1 games. I haven't touched it for a while because I like to play deck:augustins-t4ks-tournament-version more for duels at the moment and Maralen was absolutely awful to play in multiplayer games. The main problem is that everyone searches before you and with more opponents you can't consistently disrupt them all enough to make them search for lands or other useless stuff...in duels this was a quite solid plan and the kill usually happened with
Sorin Markov or
Hatred after searching once, sometimes I had to tutor up solutions or additional disruption from the toolbox-like deck before getting the winning card(s). Now for multiplayer you certainly need to play the deck differently because letting everyone search once or twice is no option. The changes I made to the deck are as such that I try to cheat in Maralen at the end of the opponent before me so that I can search first and maybe sacrifice Maralen again before I pass the turn, unless I have a lock piece available. This requires methods to exploit the possibility of either putting the commander into the graveyard or the command zone so that it can either be reanimated, returned to the hand or cast again, depending on the situation.
As the deck works as a Toolbox, I could run some colour hate cards, which can possibly shut down whole decks because they have such a huge Impact on a certain colour.
Gloom
and
Dystopia
would be such cards...
Infernal Darkness
(I choose it over Contamination for some reasons, mostly because I can still use my lands that produce more than one mana and it all goes black and also because I don't have enough creatures or token producing sources to Keep up the costs for contamination) punishes all nonblack decks and disables some completely. In 1 vs 1 games the power of my first version was the ability to always have better solutions to whatever the opponent might search. While I don't want to have the opponents search as much in multiplayer, I still want to keep up the plan of having very specific hate cards to respond but there is not much space here anymore.
The main combo in this build is Bloodchief Ascension + Mindcrank
. As mentioned above, I also have Hatred and Sorin Markov to hit unexpectedly and hard when the right moment has come.
I'm also testing Xiahou Dun, the One-Eyed as the commander instead of maralen. I'd like to hear your opinions on switching the commander here...I feel like both have their pros and cons and maralen is very situational
Help is appreciated!