My one suggestion for you would be Collective Brutality, mainly for its first ability, which i have found to be FANTASTIC for removing their responses early on. Price tag's a little high, but WELL worth. LOVE to see a hand disruption deck in standard, had a TON of fun play-testing against this! +1 from me :)

Thanks for the comment!

Collective Brutality would be a great spell for this deck, but it's simply much, much too expensive. A playset would more than double the cost of the deck in paper and more than octuple its cost online. I'm also not entirely sure what to cut for it. Maybe Harsh Scrutiny?

Totally understandable. If you WERE gonna play it, cutting out 2 of your Harsh Scrutinys would be a decent trade for 2 Brutality's. So much value there, mainly as a good way to discard, possibly to fuel your Lupine Prototypes early on, as those can pose a HECK of a threat.

Gonna slot Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet into the SB as a 2 of over 1 Watchers and 1 Scarab. Seems super sweet, can't wait to take it to FNM!

What a fun deck!

I would recommend adding the Stax tag to your deck. It's one of my favorite styles to play and I would have found this deck far sooner if it was.

Thanks for the suggestion! I've added the tag.

Nice deck and guide! In this standard, I think its very likely that your opponent could be playing vampires. What is your strategy for combating their life gain? I played one and lost before I could start stacking punisher effects, which they don't really care about.

Vampires is a good deck to sideboard in Yahenni's Expertise since it kills everything they have except Sanctum Seeker. That might also be a good time to board in Gifted Aetherborn to kill their tokens.

That said, it's also possible that this deck should have two copies of Field of Ruin somewhere in the 75 to deal with the flippy lands.

Looks really good and fun more importantly!

Hey man, like your decks, I built your bad bogles 2 deck and I had some discard cards so I put this thing together yesterday. It worked out great and I went 2-2 but one game was really close. One suggestion is to remove 2 of the renegade maps for 2 more torment of hailfires. Torment destroyed energy yesterday and I think that making it a 4 of would make this deck way better

Thanks you for the kind compliment!

Hailfire is tricky. It's one of the cards we most want to draw as the game carries on, but it's really bad early on. That means we don't want a full 4-of; being Hailfire-flooded while our opponent builds their board is an easy way to lose the game. That said, it's possible that just 2 copies is too conservative and we should consider going up to 3. In that case, I'd suggest dropping one Implement of Malice. The Renegade Maps are basically lands for us, and dropping below 26 lands is tricky considering we want to be able to cast a 7-drop and rip huge Hailfires. Implement is still good but it's probably the most cuttable card, so start there and see how you like it.

Good luck!

There's a card from Kaladesh called Harsh Scrutiny where it's basically a Duress except it removes creatures, as well as also allowing you to scry 1. I know that my meta is incredibly creature heavy with energy and ramunap red running around everywhere, so I definitely think that it's worth running a few copies of.

Yep, I mentioned Harsh Scrutiny in the description as something that should maybe be somewhere in the 75. It's a good card but since we're already very well situated to deal with creatures via our removal package, I pointed our discard at other stuff. That said, I wouldn't fault you for running Harsh Scrutiny, probably in place of Fatal Push (you'd also save $20-$30 that way). That's a little riskier but the upside of preventing ETB triggers is certainly there, plus the Scry 1 is really nice.

Is the a reason you have Hour of Glory in here over Vraska's Contempt?Also you may want to fit in a couple Heartless Pillage instead of Renegade Map or Unburden to help fix your mana pool for a bigger torment or an earlier herald drop.

Im sorry I meant is there

Also, I personally run Lost Legacy main board in my discard deck. It is a sideboard staple in any deck with black, it suites the theme here very well and can be sbed out if your playing some jank that is running a bunch of 1 ofs. But I found there is always a card I can choose with it. For instance rouge refiner, refurbish, GPG, Glorybringer, Negate/disallow... it is really powerful to remove a playset of something out of a deck.

Thanks for your questions!

Hour of Glory is in over Vraska's Contempt as a budget consideration, pure and simple. I know we're running Fatal Push, but I consider that a necessary expense, whereas we can get by not running Contempt using Hour of Glory and Never/Return.

Heartless Pillage, meanwhile, doesn't work with this deck because we can't trigger Raid unless we already have a Herald out. In any case, I still prefer Unburden since being able to cycle it late is crucial to winning the card advantage game. Forcing our opponent to discard their hand early is all well and good but this deck plans to take things long, so we have to do everything we can to avoid ending up with a bunch of dead discard in our hand while our opponent is topdecking threats.

As for Lost Legacy, it's just not a good value play. It's strict card disadvantage since they get to redraw even if we hit their hand and most decks don't need a specific card to win -- they just cobble together 20 points of damage using a variety of creatures. Get rid of one creature and they'll simply use another; in fact, most decks don't expect to see their best creatures every match so there's a very real chance that whatever you exile was never going to end up in their hand in the first place. Unless they need a specific card to pull off their combo, you're better off not wasting your time casting Lost Legacy. (Also, God-Pharaoh's Gift is an artifact, so Lost Legacy can't hit it. You'd need Dispossess for that, but Dispossess is so narrow that it's not worth a sideboard slot.)

Well put and yes GPG is eaten by Dispossess which I sideboard sorry for the confusion there.

To clarify my purpose of lost legacy, it is a card I want in the late game, similar to a mana sink, your opponent is top decking and you have ample land reserve. They said I absolutely see how it wouldnt justify a slot in most any main decks.

+1

just a thought. but why not use Kitesail Freebooter i think its fits pretty well for the deck instead of using Wall of Forgotten Pharaohs ?

but ether way really like this deck +1

Glad you like it!

Freebooter could work here. My main concern is that the deck struggles most against Aggro and Wall of Forgotten Pharaohs does a great job of slowing that Aggro down. I'd suggest taking out Implement instead of Wall to make room for Freebooter, since Freebooter is kinda card advantage as well.

I'd replace the Renegade Map with a Traveler's Amulet if you really need it, (better remove it all the way.) But it's strictly better. It's either the same speed or it's one turn faster.

We need a critical mass of artifacts to enable Herald, so one of those two replacing lands is critical. There's an argument to be made for Travelers Amulet over Renegade Map but the extra activation cost makes it much more awkward to crack.

This deck looks really cool. I've tried building a mono black deck this current standard, and had many of the same cards. The description is excellent and thoroughly entertaining, thanks for that! +1 without any hesitation!