Today, we're continuing our Mystery Booster Modern series. The point of this series of decklists is to provide you with a great launching point for getting into competitive modern at the shop with budget decklists comprised primarily of cards found in the Mystery Booster product. A lot of you have been buying boxes or packs from us and so we hope you have a lot of the cards in the decklists. If not, we're hoping that with such a mass reprinting, the prices on a lot of these cards will come down and help make the decks more affordable.
This deck might be my favorite in the whole group - Mono Black Death's Shadow, and the name of the game is self life loss. Sound a bit crazy?
Death's Shadow is a one black mana creature that was originally introduced in the set Worldwake. This creature grows in power and toughness the lower your life total is - as long as your life total is at 12 or below. At 12 life, it is a 1/1, but at 1 life, it is a 12/12! The whole purpose of the deck is to strip your opponent of cards in hand and creatures on the battlefield, while inflicting life loss on yourself and then swing in with a few big creatures for the win. Let's take a look at the deck.
The most important part of this deck is the spells package. We want to be stripping our opponent of any and all resources. We start with Inquisition of Kozilek and Collective Brutality to remove cards out of hand. And then for those pesky creatures we have cards like Fatal Push, Dismember and Collective Brutality again (it does double duty in our deck). Dismember is a great removal spell because not only does it cost a single mana while knocking our life total down by 4, it also helps get around indestructible.
For card draw, Mishra's Bauble, Read the Bones, and Street Wraith keep filling our hand with Read the Bones and Streeth Wraith having the added bonus of knocking 2 life off of our total. The card I may be most excited for in this deck is Castle Lochtwain, serving as a great source of card draw and life loss.
The creature suite - outside of the aforementioned Death's Shadow, has creatures like Gonti, Lord of Luxury to play some of our opponent's best spells, and make use of our graveyard filled to the brim with those instants and sorceries by reducing the cost of a big 5/5 Gurmag Angler to, hopefully, just a single black mana.
There is one copy of Liliana, Death's Majesty, a planeswalker that helps fill our graveyard and churn out 2/2 zombies or return an important Death's Shadow, Gonti, or Gurmag Angler from the graveyard to the battlefield.
The sideboard tries to tackle problem areas for the deck with Duress for control matchups, Diabolic Edict and Languish for pesky creature matchups, Damping Sphere for Tron, Amulet, and Storm matchups, and lastly Ashiok, Dream Render for dealing with opponent's graveyards.
This deck comes in right around the $165 mark. Most of the pieces in the deck, especially the more expensive ones, slot right into the full blown Tier 1 Grixis Death's Shadow list which clocks in approaching the $1,000 mark (https://www.mtggoldfish.com/archetype/modern-grixis-death-s-shadow-46465#paper). I would love to see someone come to our Monday Night Modern events with this deck! It looks like great fun and I hope you think so too!
Stay Super!
-Tim