Update:
Sup, people!
So I finally managed to reach Mythic Rank in best of 1, and I thought it would be a good idea to update this deck description. You can check my performance statistic here (https://mtga.untapped.gg/profile/a5e67683-4e19-4b85-8a5b-6b6f8faa1671/802FD42517632A74), I'm holding currently a winrate of 60%. The main idea behind the deck is to mill a bunch of stuff early and get value out of it with Necrotic Wound, Fiend Artisan and Unburial Rites. The deck is a bit high on the mana curve, so it's important to mulligan aggressively if you're stuck with 2 or more 4cmc+ cards in your opening hands, and any card that enables milling should favor you to keep the hand. Always mulligan assuming you'll face a gruul aggro! I'll go briefly into the reasons behind every card in the deck and then how to deal with common matchups.
Card choices:
- Knight of the Ebon Legion: underwhelming in the early game, but can become a serious threat once you have 3 lands on board with it. It's an invaluable tool against control decks, since you can just keep pumping it and beating, without the need to cast much stuff for the opponent to counter (and gain life with absorb). Once you have 6 lands on board, remember you can pump your knight more than once. You can also pump it to block against Questing Beasts if you're dealing with gruul.
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Stitcher's Supplier: great to mill when hitting the board or dying. You can make cute tricks with it, like saccing it to Fiend Artisan to fetch another Stitcher's Supplier, granting you insane amounts of mill in the early game (and up to a 7/7 Fiend Artisan on turn 3). Using it to block and then saccing it to Ayara is also a good one.
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Necrotic Wound: by far the coolest, most underestimated card in my deck. Once you get your milling going, you can easily exile anything with toughness 5 or even greater for just 1 mana. Use it to get rid of Heliod, Gideon Blackblade, Questing Beast or a Storm Herald before it resolves its trigger. You can even exile an Ulamog if the game goes long enough. No one suspects you can do much when you put a bunch of stuff on table and pass the turn with only 1 land left, so you can steal away a lot of games like that. It's important to run 4 of this so that at least 1 can end up in your hand, otherwise you'd be milling all of them.
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Mausoleum Secrets: it's kind of a flex spot in the deck. If you happen to have it in hand, you can basically fetch for anything in your deck at instant speed. The downside is that it's worthless if it's milled, and underwhelming in the early game.
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Mire Triton: grants you mill, a decent blocker and beater and gains you life. You definitely need it to help you stabilize against the most aggressive matchups.
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Fiend Artisan: one of the stars of the deck. You can use if to fetch for anything, be it an Obliterator, Ayara if you're kinda stuck without lands in the early game, Gary to close a game or Massacre Girl for a board wipe. Can also get huge easily, it's not uncommon to see it surpass the 9/9 mark or even 15/15 sometimes. Unfortunately doesn't trample, but can be a nice wall against gruul.
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Ayara: the main draw engine of the deck, specially in cases where you're missing your land drops. Use it to sacc one of your blockers before damage, or to make an opponent's Murderous Rider / Claim the Firstborn miss its target. Also, the life drain she has really adds up as the game goes on. Never forget to count that damage before doing a big attack or landing a Gary on board. She also counts as 3 devotion for Gary. Your primary target to fetch with Fiend Artisan if you're stuck with 4 lands on board and no Obliterator in hand.
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Murderous Rider: kills and gains you life, it's great. Different from other kill spells I don't run (such as Heartless Act), he counts as a creature in the grave, so that will still buff our Fiend Artisan or Necrotic Wound. If you're in a hard match against gruul, you can also play it as a creature immediately to gain some life and help you stabilize.
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Lurrus: it's cute when it works, can help you bring back a Fiend Artisan for a respectable body on board, or Mire Tritons to gain you life. Sadly it won't help bringing our most valuable creatures (Ayara, Obliterator, Gary, Massacre Girl), and it's pretty useless in hand in the early game, so I decided to only run 1 of it. You can still fetch it easily with Fiend Artisan with 4 mana if Ayara isn't necessary at the moment.
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Phyrexian Obliterator: the card that made me want to build the deck. It's so cool to put it on board! An intelligent gruul player will stop attacking immediately as you land this big boy. It also punishes your opponent for running stuff like Goblin Chainwhirler, or the not that popular now Legion Warboss. A giant Ajani's Pridemate only reason to stop on its tracks is if you have an Obliterator on field. Also remember that a trampling creature only assigns 5 points of damage to it, even if the trampling creature's power is greater than 5. Your main target for Fiend Artisan's effect or Unburial Rites. Use your Obliterator to attack an opponent with a full board before casting a second Obliterator or a Gary in the second main phase.
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Gary: welp, it's a famous win condition. Get your devotion high and drain the hell out of the opponent. It's our main way of winning against mono W devotion, and can help you stabilize against gruul. If you have both Gary and Ayara on board and an Unburial Rites available, sac Gary to Ayara and reanimate him to damage your opponent more than they would expect (don't forget to count with Ayara's drain triggers!).
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Massacre Girl: a card I overlooked in the first iterations of the deck, switching it for something else. However, having one copy of it is invaluable in matchups in which your opponent tries to overwhelm you with numbers. A nicely landed Massacre Girl means the end of Gruul, Mono W devotion and mono U tempo. Anything that makes creatures indestructible or gain protection won't work against her. After you're done wiping the board and only she remains (and potentially a buffed Fiend Artisan), she's still a nice attacker with menace.
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Unburial Rites: the sole reason we have a splash of white on this deck. Having two copies means you can potentially reanimate stuff 4 times! And even though it isn't a creature, it still rewards us for milling it in the early game. It's flashback cost is of only 4, so it can help you bring a Massacre Girl or Gary to the table even if you only have 4 lands. If you don't have one of those or an Obliterator on the grave, don't be afraid to use it to bring back an Ayara, Lurrus or Fiend Artisan if it would be strong enough.
Matchups:
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Gruul aggro (and mono red): by far the most popular deck in higher ranks. All you need to do is stay alive until you can land an Obliterator on your field. Don't dare to keep a hand with few early game plays, or you'll be stomped. Also don't be afraid of using your creatures to chump block stuff like Gruul Spellbreaker, and make use of every oportunity you have to gain some life. As soon as you have Obliterator on the field, things should go smoothly for you. If you manage to land a Massacre Girl, their entire board will surely be over.
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Mono W Devotion: this one is a grindy matchup and will require lots of patience. Try to land your Obliterator soon, as always, and keep it untapped to not let your opponent do anything. Keep your Necrotic Wounds and Murderous Riders for important stuff such as Heliod, Ajani, Serra's Ascendant or Resplendent Angel. Since that deck is light on removal, relying solely on Glass Caskets (if they run removal, that is), start accumulating black devotion on your side. When you feel comfortable, attack here and there with Obliterator (which should go unblocked) and cast a big Gary or Massacre Girl. Lurrus also helps a bunch in this matchup, reviving stuff to count towards your devotion and helping you fetch higher costed threats, since the game will probably be quite long.
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Mono U tempo: the ideal plan here is to have an early Knight of the Ebon Legion and start attacking like crazy, always buffing your knight. Don't let creatures stick on your opponents side of the field, kill every early creature to avoid them having a chance of sticking Curious Obsession / Sea-Dasher Octopus on it. Knight's and Fiend's abilities help greatly in this matchup since they bypass any counters your opponent may have.
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Control variants: quite similar to the logic of going against U tempo. Stick early threats and go attacking. Be sure to have at least 2 creatures early so you can kill any T3feri they may use to bounce your stuff. Keep pumping your knight and beating at their face until they're forced to use a board wipe, then you should have more creatures in your hand ready to be cast without having to worry about counters.
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Field of the dead / Bant / Sultai / Simic: quite the stressful matchups for us. Attack early as frequently as possible. If they cast an Uro and you have the chance to exile it with Necrotic Wound, do it. If you're against a field of the dead variant, as soon as they start flooding the board with zombies, switch to a more defensive stance and play as you would against mono W. Start accumulating devotion, possibly Ayara triggers, and go for a big Gary finisher.
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Rakdos Sacrifice: easy peezy. Exile the cat with Wound if you have the chance. Also don't let a Priest of the Forgotten Gods stick to the field unless you have plenty of creatures to dispose of. Also exile Kroxa before its trigger resolves if you have a strong Necro Wounds in your hand.
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Mono B devotion: mirror matches tend to be quite easy because no one is running a variant as optimized as ours, lol. Save your removal for Obliterators and you should be ok. Don't get too comfortable if your life is approaching 10 because they may take out a Gary from nowhere to kill you, so abuse your Mire Tritons and Lurrus to bring them back.
That's it! I'm not very used on making guides like that, but I hope this can be useful for you. The deck is very fun and I highly recommend you try it. Thank you for reading this far!
Original post:
Original post:
Sup, people! So I've always loved Phyrexian Obliterator. I thought about ways of making it work in modern, and it never seemed to have a shell to make the deck competitive enough. Pioneer came and brought the power level down, but there's no obliteration to be had in that environment. It's not until the advent of Historic in Arena that the perfect habitat for our favorite skinny roach of doom came to be. So, as soon as Historic Anthology 3 got available, I didn't waste time into brewing a functional deck with my pet card!
At first, I tried copying a multitude of other people's takes in mono B in historic. I've had some mixed results initially, stole some games here and there just enough to keep me invested. The deck still seemed far too slow and underwhelming with cards like Phyrexian Arena (which looks great on paper), discard stuff, Tymaret, Chosen from Death, Yarok's Fenlurker etc. I've seen people doing cute things with Fiend Artisan and Stitcher's Supplier, but that alone still wasn't good enough. That's when I decided to embrace the dredge spirit to the max, put on some Mire Triton and Necrotic Wound, which I surprisingly haven't seen anyone running, and got excellent results (I even managed to win a game in which my opponent had cast Ulamog by exiling it with necro wounds)!
Even though Necrotic Wound and Fiend Artisan benefit from having just creatures in the grave, a bit of a splash on white also granted me the ability to flash back Unburial Rites, and makes it so that milling non-creature spells isn't all bad. 2 Gray Merchant of Asphodel are enough to finish up the job, being searchable via fiend or a reanimation target for rites, and it's great to not have 4 of them clunking most of my opening hands. This off color seemed the most optimal in my tests, surpassing green in performance. Those green fight spells are cute to trigger obliterator, but seem too gimmicky and unable to properly work without the combo most of the time.
There's this forgotten card I'd like to mention, Mausoleum Secrets, that looks sweet on paper, but unfortunately performed more like a "win more" card, clunking my opening hands when the grave is still empty, being an useless mill and not justifying its spot in the deck. If you manage to make it work though, leave a message here, there's definitely some potential on it!
All in all, the deck became a lot more agile than what my initial iterations on mono B were (and most of other people's as well), previously heavily counting on cmc 3+ spells. Today I finally reached diamond 4 on ranked best of 1, so I feel at last I have some indicator of quality on this brew, and I'm pretty proud about the deck and the dedication I've put on it. If you have thoughts about it on best of 3 or any kind of feedback, feel free to answer. I hope you give it a try and have a blast obliterating!
