Hello and welcome to my Mono-black
Liliana's Contract
actually Demon-Tribal deck, including the Guilds of Ravnica Demon
Doom Whisperer
!
So yeah, this is a true-to-form
Liliana's Contract
win-con deck -- none of this
Arcane Adaptation
shenanigans! And screw changelings (though
Cairn Wanderer
could fit in the deck, as a Delveless
Soulflayer
). The only not-really demon we're running is
Adaptive Automaton
, because obviously!
Having said that, we don't run like most "Tribal" decks like Elves, Goblins, Merfolk or even Dragons, since Demons are HUGELY mana-intensive, and can even come with abilities with hella-risky costs -- often paying life or sacrificing creatures ala
Griselbrand
or
Abhorrent Overlord
for a huge pay-off. We can't flood with 1 and 2cmc Demons like the other Tribal decks can, so instead we gotta tune our deck to a few certain wincons, and pray to Satan that we get the nut-draws!
This deck pulls from multiple meta-strategies, such as
Living End
and Delve, and even a bit of mill / selfmill with mesmiric orb, but ultimately I'd say that we're a weird Life gain-loss Delver beatdown deck, with a few backdoor wincons.
Tell us about your inner Demons!
First up is our cheapest Demons,
Baleful Ammit
and
Adaptive Automaton
. These serve as our early game blockers and attackers, pumpers and chumpers, and evem help turn on another of our creatures. Automaton needs no explanation, but Ammit is a.... Well a bad card. It's a 3/2 flightless Lifelinker for 3 most times, so it doesn't shine as a pushed-stat Demon like the others in the deck... But if it dies, we can feed it to
Soulflayer
to both reduce it's cost, and give it lifelink -- which is definitely meaningful to the deck!
Our other potential 2-drop Demons are also Delvers, in the form of
Necropolis Fiend
,
Soulflayer
and
Tombstalker
. Now these are more like it! Big Daddy threats that interact with your graveyard in meaningful ways to close out a game!
Next up is our more reasonably costed Demons, and our new must-have self-mill machine
Doom Whisperer
! The art is horrifyingly amazing, and the stats are CRAAAAAAZY! Pay 2 life: Surveil 2 is way too strong, and ultimately is the entire idea of the deck. If you have this beater and a
Whip of Erebos
on the battlefield, you're basically a Dredge-centric
Griselbrand
!
Archfiend of Ifnir
is here too, primarily to cycle himself away into the graveyard, but if he can stick on the board against a Jund player, you're sitting pretty comfortably. Lastly we have
Ob Nixilis, Unshackled
, a powerful Demon that aggressively turns off fetchlands, turns on our field of ruins, and hates out combo players!
As the big-Daddy Demons, we have
Ob Nixilis, Unshackled
,
Razaketh, the Foulblooded
and
Griselbrand
! These Dark Princes will close out games quickly all on their own, in their own unique way -- by either burying your opponent in card advantage, punishing them for tutoring for a basic land off of your
Field of Ruin
, or by grabbing the exact card you need whenever you want!
Speaking of princes, lastly we have
Ormendahl, Profane Prince
hiding in our landbase. Yeah it's unlikely to flip over, but if we have nothing better to do, we can poop out Cleric tokens, which can synergize nicely enough with Razaketh. Realistically, this card is just here for a tutorable target for
Expedition Map
when you're working towards a
Liliana's Contract
win.
What about the rest of the deck?
For a mono-black deck, over half of our lands are non-basic, and that's to overcome our decks sad lack of earlygame interactions. Turn 1
Expedition Map
into a turn 2
Collective Brutality
or
Mesmeric Orb
, setting up for some ramping with a tutored
Crypt of Agadeem
would be our best line of play, but our deck is very high variance, so don't count on it. We do run some disruption, carddraw, ramp and removal for the earlygame though.
The aforementioned
Mesmeric Orb
is a powerful stand-alone mill engine that works against your opponents and for you, but do not assume that it works in conjunction with your other self-mill engine
Doom Whisperer
, because they serve similar but very unique rolls.
Mesmeric Orb
can fill your graveyard extremely fast during the early turns of the game, milling 2, 3, 4 or even more cards each untap step. This is incredibly strong when paired with our Delving threats like
Necropolis Fiend
, because you can delve away your noncreature spells.
Doom Whisperer
is an explosive self-mill Demon, that can let you rip through your library until you Surveil
Yahenni's Expertise
and
Living End
. If you have either or both in your hand, then go ham on the milling until you have enough creatures in the bin for a MASSIVE
Living End
blowout.
As the combo suggests,
Living End
's Suspend requirement can be bypassed with spells like
Yahenni's Expertise
, allowing you to pinch it off right away! With a bunch of Flying, Trample, Lifelink, +1/+1 nonsense, all you'll need is one turn to swing in for massive damage!
Liliana's Contract
may seem out of place with this combo, but if you happen upon the Living End + Yahenni's Expertise
combo without this combo, then all you need is to wait until you can bring back enough Demons to meet
Liliana's Contract
's requirements to WIN THE GAME. The draw 4 / lose 4 is powerful all on it's own though!
What do we sideboard in?
This deck is... Probably not fast enough or controling enough for the Modern Meta environment, with things like Rakdos / Boros Burn, Humans, Tron and whatnot, so we'll see what we can do about that with the 15-card sideboard!
Humans is an insanely popular Tribal deck in Modern, and it gets within kill-range long before we can combo off, so three
Torpor Orb
s seem like an auto-inclusion.
Any sort of reanimator deck can be dealt with in many ways, either by targetting their graveyard directly with
Bojuka Bog
and
Surgical Extraction
, or by countering their reanimation spells with
Chalice of the Void
.
Death Cloud
can hit pretty much any deck really hard, but especially Tron. pairing this with
Liliana Vess
and
Liliana, Death's Majesty
that can dodge the sacrifice effects, and you habe yourself a decent one-sided boardwipe!