Introduction
“Black Hole” is the second mono-black deck in my collection, in addition to Swamp Thing. It’s an Aristrocrats-style deck that that seeks to sacrifice its own creatures, especially many low-cost and/or token creatures, to accumulate game-winning benefits. In addition to its own removal effects for use on opposing creatures, it employs a combination of sacrifice outlets and cards that trigger when their creatures enter and/or leave the battlefield. Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet is chosen as the commander as it provides a steady stream of Zombie tokens when opposing creatures are killed. These tokens are then used as sacrifice fodder for outlets that slowly and steadily drain life from our opponents.
Deck Elements
Broadly speaking, the deck has cards of seven different types that work together to generate a series of win conditions: either overwhelming opponents with combat damage from waves of Zombie tokens; draining their life from Aristocrats outlet effects; and direct damage from key impact cards.
We’ll look at each of these win conditions a bit later on, but first let’s go through the seven deck elements that lead to these win conditions. These elements are: (1) mana acceleration; (2) creature generators; (3) sacrifice effects; (4) sacrifice enablers; (5) card draw effects; (6) drain effects; and (7) payoff cards.
Taking each in turn:
1. Mana Acceleration: To help assemble our various deck elements on the board, we want to generate as much mana as possible. Mana rocks such as Sol Ring, Thought Vessel, Mind Stone and Jet Medallion help us do this, as well as potentially explosive lands like Cabal Coffers, Cabal Stronghold, Crypt of Agadeem and Phyrexian Tower. Sword of the Animist, Pitiless Plunderer and Crypt Ghast are also helpful for efficiency. Black Market is an all-star in this deck, as our creatures are dying left right and centre.
2. Creature Generators: As well as playing our own creatures to fulfill various roles in the deck, we want ways of generating expendable creatures that we don’t mind sacrificing. Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet is obviously our main option, but we have Bitterblossom and Cryptbreaker too. Some of our creatures also offer graveyard recursion – Gravecrawler, Nether Traitor and Relentless Dead for example - so we don’t mind sacrificing them if we know we’re going to get them back later. Phyrexian Reclamation and Whisper, Blood Liturgist can return any creature from the graveyard if we don’t mind paying a bit of life (or sacrificing creatures), which is usually easily gained back by our drain effects. Whip of Erebos brings our sacrificed creatures back again too, although they’re exiled after that.
3. Sacrifice Effects: As we’re a deck that doesn’t mind our less valuable creatures dying, we’re quite happy to see them go to the graveyard. We run numerous sacrifice effects to help them on their way. Bonus points if they help us do something useful too. We also want our opponents to sacrifice their creatures so we get extra Zombies when Kalitas is on the board. Standout cards here include Anowon, the Ruin Sage, Fleshbag Marauder, Gravelighter, Merciless Executioner, Plaguecrafter, Innocent Blood, Dictate of Erebos, Grave Pact and Vona's Hunger – basically anything that gets either us or our opponents sacrificing their creatures.
4. Sacrifice Enablers: Ideally we want to choose when we sacrifice our creatures, so we can get the best value out of them. Because of this, we run a series of sacrifice enablers that allow us to trigger our various drain effects (see #6 below). Examples of these are Viscera Seer, Whisper, Blood Liturgist, Yahenni, Undying Partisan, Yawgmoth, Thran Physician, Ashnod's Altar, Phyrexian Altar and Phyrexian Tower.
5. Card Draw Effects: We’re quite a resource-hungry deck because we cycle through creatures quickly and we want to assemble a number of key permanents on the board. To keep us in gas, we run various sources of card draw, either as one-time tools, or as repeatable effects. These include Sign in Blood, Necropotence, Night's Whisper, Read the Bones, Ayara, First of Locthwain, Grim Haruspex, Harvester of Souls, Undead Augur and Yawgmoth, Thran Physician.
6. Drain Effects: These are the engine room of our deck as they turn our creatures dying – normally a disadvantage – into potentially game-winning effects. These are commonly known as our “Aristocrat” effects, which gives the deck archetype its name. Having several of these cards on the board at the same time is usually back-breaking for our opponents, especially if we’re able to fuel them with our sacrifice fodder. As they’re so central to our strategy, we really want to see them throughout the game. They are Blood Artist, Falkenrath Noble, Syr Konrad, the Grim, Vindictive Vampire, Zulaport Cutthroat and Bastion of Remembrance.
A special mention here has to go to how well Mindcrank works with Syr Konrad, the Grim. Having both in play isn’t quite an infinite combo or instant win, but it’s absolutely lethal for our opponents. Usually we’re able just to sacrifice one creature to get things going and we can always send another creature to the graveyard if things grind to a halt, so we can start the fun again.
7. Payoff Cards: We run a set of high impact payoff cards that offer potentially game-breaking effects. Some of these are covered below in Win Conditions, but they include Panharmonicon, Exsanguinate and Gray Merchant of Asphodel. We often rely on these cards as finishers to help close out games and they’re often the targets we seek when we use our tutor effects like Demonic Tutor, Vampiric Tutor and Grim Tutor.
Win Conditions
Through different combinations of these individual elements, we have several ways to win the game. These are:
1. Combat Damage: Sometimes we generate so many creatures that we can overwhelm our opponents through sheer numbers. We’re often attacking into fairly empty board states because our opponents don’t have many creatures due to our sacrifice effects. Even if they have blockers, we don’t mind if our token creatures die in combat as they’ll usually cause damage to our enemies when they do so. Sometimes we want to hold out creatures back as chump blockers for opposing threats, but we’re quite an aggressive deck so we don’t mind attacking. Combat can also be helpful for forcing through the final few points of damage when our enemies’ life totals are low due to all our drain effects.
2. Aristocrats Damage: More commonly, we’ll slowly and steadily drain the life of our opponents through our multiple layered combos that we’ll develop throughout the game. The drain effects listed above are our tools to achieve this, which can either get the job done on their own, or soften up our enemies enough so we can win by combat damage or using our game-ending impact cards. And Gravecrawler goes infinite with Phyrexian Altar and another Zombie on the board, so all we need is an Aristocrat like Blood Artist for an infinite number of death triggers.
3. Key Impact Cards: Alternatively, once our opponents’ life totals are low enough, we have a several high impact cards that can finish the game on the spot. If we have enough mana – sometimes by sacrificing our creatures to Ashnod's Altar or Phyrexian Altar – we can cast a lethal Exsanguinate, killing all our enemies at once. If our devotion to black is high enough, Gray Merchant of Asphodel can often be game-breaking, especially if we’re able to play it with Panharmonicon on the board, and/or bring it back from the graveyard once it’s done its ETB drain effect and has been sacrificed to something.
All My EDH Decks
