Simple description: get 2 blood artists in your graveyard, then win.
A couple of weeks ago, I put together a deck I called Immortal Ratastrophe'. I declared it to be fun in multiplayer, but to have no hope in standard duel matches. But I really liked the deck, so I built it in MTGO and started to play it, and I noticed something. It won a lot. An awful lot more than I expected. So then I did some analysis and came to some conclusions: Mostly, the rats were holding it back. Pack rat can be awesome, but ravenous rats is so-so, even when bounced, and gutter skulk was just a bear.
So what's the juice?
Immortal Servitude: This is really the central card of the deck, with a focus on creatures with a casting cost of 2, largely to enable Blood Artist.
Blood Artist: What was winning me my games was sacrificing creatures with a double-dose of Blood Artist on the table. However, Blood Artist needed some help.
Ogre Slumlord
: He's incredible, even if you don't have any rats in your deck, so I set out building a ratless rat deck. Mikaeus, the Unhallowed is almost as good. Basically, if you get one of these two on the table with 2 Blood Artists and a Bloodthrone Vampire, you will win.
Dawntreader Elk: The land needed just a little bit of mana juice to really get flowing. I considered several options, focusing on creatures that offered me mana. Gyre Sage was trash - not enough in the deck is big enough to grow it. Scorned Villager
is interesting, but is a human most of the time, so it doesn't benefit from Mikaeus, the Unhallowed. This left me with the Elk, which has several advantages: it offers me a turn 3 play (previously, turn 3 always had a wasted mana, due to all the 2-drops), it can be it's own sac outlet, if I need to do blood artist damage, it can fetch a swamp for Mutilate, and on top of it all, it's a 2/2, meaning it can swing for a couple points of early damage and/or kill a
Rakdos Cackler
if needed.
Elvish Visionary: This card ended up replacing
Ravenous Rats
- since this deck effectively revolves around me finding 2 Blood Artists and an Immortal Servitude, giving myself digging seemed more important than disrupting the other guy. I think if you decided to scrap the big creatures, you could possibly replace the elk with the rats.
Tragic Slip: Since I can sacrifice things almost at will, Tragic Slip is almost always ready for nuclear damage.
Mutilate: One big move was to go to 3 Mutilates. Quite frankly, I'm usually even happier to see a board wipe than a control deck, since if any blood artists in play don't kill you, I can just go get 'em back. And that's assuming Mikaeus or the Ogre isn't in play.
Mulch/Grisly Salvage: For loading the graveyard as fast as possible. The existence of these spells also let me go a little lighter on my mana base.
Increasing Ambition: Lets me treat the deck like a toolbox, I use this to go fetch Mutilate, Immortal Servitude. If I flash it back, it's almost always to go get an errant Blood Artist. This is why I can avoid running full 4-ofs of the big boys.
So how does it do? Well, this deck is in no way a tourney-caliber deck. I took it to FNM, and it got ROFLstomped by the standard assortment of decks. That being said, this deck cleans up in the Magic Online casual room. I'm estimating a win rating of about 80%.
Control decks that aren't packing Terminus have a nightmare dealing with this deck - I've now played multiple games where my opponent has had to cast two Supreme Verdicts a turn to get rid of all my creatures. Aggro Decks end up just being Mutilate fodder and stalling out. Midrange decks are tougher. On the flip side, Mill decks will just make you giggle to yourself.
