As we work our way around the color wheel, we next come to black. Black will always hold a special place in my heart because 1) I’m still a moody teenager at heart (you wouldn’t understand), and 2) it’s the iconic MTG color for my good friend Breymeyer and my brother James.
My brother taught me a lot about game theory and deck design back in the late ’90s. He understood the game far better than I did at the time, and helped me tune my decks to optimum efficiency. One of his favorite decks was a black disruption deck fueled by the busted beauty that is Necropotence.
He taught me that the best way to win a game is to not let your opponent play, and his deck did just that. On turn one, it comes out swinging with a Dark Ritual feeding into early hand destruction such as Hypnotic Specter or the one-two punch of Duress and Hymn to Tourach. Don’t have a Dark Ritual in your opening hand? Mulligan. Mulligan down to four cards if you have to. The important thing is that you hit your opponent like a freight train on turn one and they never recover.
But what if you run out of steam? Well, that’s where Necropotence comes in. Since your opponent won’t be doing anything to you, your life total is a meaningless number. But we can give it meaning by using it to draw more cards. My deck added Night’s Whisper as my near-basic card to increase the frequency of paying life for cards.
As a black disruption deck, this deck excels against combo decks, but can struggle against control. Stopping the initial assault on turn one with a Force of Will can absolutely devastate this deck. With that in mind, I built the sideboard to pivot into the raw aggro of suicide black. This version trades life for damage on the opponent, and can even pull off a turn-two kill with a one-drop, two Dark Rituals, and a Hatred.