This was an old deck I used to play casually and at local tournaments. I could pretty much control anyone and end the game within five turns. Anything I came up against, aggro, weenies or other control decks were pretty much defenseless. I haven't played magic seriously for years so I am curious what people think or if this would still stack up well.
Turn 1: Play Swamp Basically, you keep creatures off the board entirely with Innocent Blood
Turn 2: Play Chainer's Edict Especially handy if you use Chainer because of the Flashback. If you get it into your graveyard early, it'll be there again when you need it.
Turn 3 and beyond: Keep playing Swamp or Cabal Coffers - this will allow you play Phyrexian Arena or Diabolic Tutor and fetch for the Arena. This will seriously put you ahead in card pulling and by the Fourth or Fifth Turn, play Tainted AEther and let the wrecking continue.
Around Turn Six or Seven there are several ways to burn down an opponent and GAIN life back from the arena. Especially with the Mirari online, you can pull the X damage Soul Burn, copy it and then there are double life stealing spells coming at the opponent. Even for the most talented counter magic planeswalker, this is really hard to overcome. Mirari guarantees at least some damage is getting through. If you have a full board of mana out - you can easily get your opponent down to minus -100 life, because of the Cabal Coffers + Soul Burn + Mirari combo.
And my favorite combo of the entire deck - Crystal Quarry + Last Stand in a mono black deck (They almost never see this coming). Send them a copy of the spell and again, they are looking at a game ending amount of damage even if they are ahead in mana totals...but that rarely happens. Up to this point, you should have had no trouble keeping creatures off the board - and if they had Haste - chances are you Soul Burned them for whatever damage they came out swinging at you.
For fun, I would throw in some creatures like Nantuko Shade or the Hypnox. You can put any big stomping creature in here, and honestly, I think Bloodghast is the best one because he'd keep coming back.
I put the Planar Portal in there if there is any chance you are out of Diabolic Tutor options - you can substitute this guy in there and land him by turn five with swamps and Cabal Coffers online.
In order to deal with pesky enchantments or artifacts I couldn't directly destroy, I would just use the Crystal Quarry + Legacy Weapon for a little PEW PEW - but that's only if the game is in a stalemate and lasting more than 10+ turns.
