I managed to place 2nd and 4th out of two friday nights (3-1 both times) with this cute budget little pirate deck.
The goal of the deck is pretty simple, keep chipping away your opponents early game with small evasive creatures using Curious Obsession and Chart a Course to keep your and full and fixed. and mid-game using strong ETB effects such as Hostage Taker with Siren's Ruse and Endless Sands to cheat out those effects multiple times.
To explain the maybeboard a bit, this deck will struggle with most decks that are trying to drag the game out (or actual U/B control) so as a countermeasure I added God-Pharaoh's Gift. Gift decks are actually competitive decks, but they're way too easy to sideboard against so with Minister of Inquiries and Gate to the Afterlife in the sideboard you can completely change the theme of the deck to surprise your opponents if you're playing in a more casual format, just don't sideboard in Silent Gravestone in at the same time, it's just there because an actual gift deck will out-gift you. I've been running Search for Azcanta
in place of Chart a Course and it pretty much feels strictly better when it comes down, but it's an expensive card and I really don't think the difference is that noticeable.
And to the sideboard. Black and Blue doesn't have any amazing way to deal with The Scarab God outside of Vraska's Contempt (a $10 dollar card!) so Hour of Glory, Sorcerous Spyglass and Duress is probably the best, and cheapest way to take care him inside our colors and budget. Gifted Aetherborn is a really, really annoying card to deal with in mono red aggro, vampires, knights, or any creature-based deck, typically you opponent has to waste a burn spell on it and lose some of their pressure to take care of it. And finally Yahenni's Expertise, for some reason I'm expecting to be running into a ton of go-wide decks in my LGS, between B/W knights or vampire, and those new Mono green go wide decks enabled by Song of Freyalise so if you don't think you'll been running into many of those, I would consider 2 more Moment of Craving or another Sorcerous Spyglass (pithing needle in standard?! why isn't everyone using them?).
I would love to hear and suggestions on what to add/take out, just keep in mind this is a semi-budget deck.
