Ophiomancer and Abhorrent Overlord both synergize well with your deck when you are mainboarding Grave Pact and Dictate of Erebos. Like that, Contamination's upkeep cost is something your deck wants to do and does not inflate. Without them Infernal Darkness seems only slightly better, in some situations. Wound Reflection Head Games and Temporal Extortion seem like the easiest cuts, because of their ability to draw your foes together against you. Yes, there are times that these cards won games, but more often than not they win you more hate than you want to handle. IMHO.

What? Wound Reflection incentivizes your opponents to attack each other. Gunning for you is inefficient while it sits on the board.

Head Games might earn you the ire of your target, but not everybody else. It's a one time effect that indicates no additional threat to the other players.

Temporal Extortion I can see drawing hate, but those other two, really?

Besides that, Draw_Wurm was looking at removing Grave Pact and Dictate of Erebos because the creature base is too small for them to have much impact.

With only 19 creatures, none of which recur themselves (i.e. Reassembling Skeleton, Bloodsoaked Champion, Nether Shadow, Nether Traitor, Bloodghast ect. ect.) and no token producers, cards such as Contamination, Grave Pact, Eldrazi Monument, Smokestack and Dictate of Erebos lose all their appeal despite their prevalence in other Horobi decks.

My main gripe with Wound Reflection is that it feels more like a win-more card. At 6 cmc you're most likely going to spend that sort of mana recasting Horobi or using it to cast some other win condition. However, nothing is quick with Horobi, he likes to slow everything down a bit. But to make more use of WR, we'd need big stompy (preferably indestructible) things or massive non-combat damage spells which Horobi typically lacks (since creatures are destroyed easily due to Horobi's ability).

Head Games is amusing but not as useful in a multiplayer game.

Temporal Extortion is good enough, 1/2 a players life or an extra turn for 4 cmc is pure value. Extra turns are always a good thing.

Different play styles for different playgroups. Everytime I have dropped Wound Reflection, everyone focused me. Anytime I take extra turns, I get focused. Anytime I remove someone from playing the game(as Head Games does for a few rounds), I get focused. Not because it was an efficient play, but because most EDH(casual) players make decisions with their heart not their head. 4 out of 5 times the bully will be bursted down on principle alone. This is just my view from my experiences, though. What do I know. . .

It probably does come down to what a playgroup sees as a threat. In my playgroup something usually has to be a continuous threat to create focus. Ironically cards that would seem like they deter focus, such as Propaganda, usually get you focused in my playgroup. At least as much as they can afford to. Whereas something like Wound Reflection or Curse of Shallow Graves that creates an incentive to focus another player usually works. They want to net as much of that advantage as they can.

It may have to do with how competitively minded the group is. See, in my group, there's basically nothing I can do to become a "bully", because we're all playing to win. Obviously we want it to be fun and interesting, but I'm not going to become the focus until it becomes clear that I stand in a position where I have a significantly better chance of winning than everybody else.

Hey rob_shifflett, Tyrant-Thanatos, Flagellum. Interesting discussion! I guess the first thing is that this is a 'Political' deck, rather than a pure 'best Horobi' deck. It's kind of evolved over time from mono black good stuff into its current form. When I kicked off I was running Bloodghast, Nether Traitor, Nether Shadow, Reassembling Skeleton, Abhorrent Overlord etc. along with the dual Grave Pact\Dictate of Erebos package. Now it's paired back so that each creature we drop is either a rattlesnake or makes people think before attacking like Havoc Demon.

We play a lot in 3-4 person groups. No Mercy\Dread, Noxious Vapors and Spreading Plague make people think about attacking while Maze of Ith, Crawlspace etc. provide defense. We don't worry about building a board position of creatures, but build up our enchantments, all the while keeping the wider board state in check. Head Games is a way of reigning in somebody (especially combo players) who begin to pull ahead. It can also be used as a tutor to bring a struggling player, such as somebody who's mana screwed, back into the game. There's also a cool "woah" effect on people who've never seen the card before. But I take the 'only affects one player'.

We play a bit of a Fabian Cortez role. Sometimes we use things like Dauthi Embrace to boost other people's creatures or Maze of Ith to protect them.

Wound Reflection works really well with Polluted Bonds, but it also affects damage that other people are inflicting on each other. We may become a target, but that often means people attacking into the rattlesnakes. I've also acquired a Sorin Markov as another political card, with the ability to instant kill off Wound Reflection by dropping somebody's life. We're never going to tutor to drop it early, but it's about disguised power. My 2 cents anyway. Cool to see different peoples build ideas! Makes it a great format.

If painful enchantments that you build up over time is what you want, then Painful Quandary is a wonderful little fella! Haven't seen him mentioned here yet.

Flagellum painful quandary is a good shout. I've got Bloodchief Ascension in as well. May trial Infernal Darkness.

This looks interesting. If you want everyone to play politically, you need to have cards that drastically lower everyone's life total very quickly. At 40 life I don't think people are trying to negotiate their way out of bad situations.

Pox is a great card to make everyone come closer to 0 very early in the game. I would also say an early Sorin Markov bringing one player down at 10 is a method to have that player on his balls for the rest of the game. It may not be fun for that player in particular, but the other players will all try to use his low life total to convince him to work for them in certain situations.

Hey Winterblast. Thanks. forgot about Pox!

Awesome deck list! +1. I've been working on a version of Horobi for some time and want to know if you could take a look at it and give me some feed back. Here's the link Don't Touch Anything! (Horobi EDH).

This is actually kinda interesting, I've never seen a commander deck with this guy before. I'm not sure how to perceive your build, as I'm not prone to mono black or control schemes, but it looks solid enough. My only thoughts truly are that you might consider splashing red for the extra control effects over the opponent like Blood Moon, Stranglehold, and War's Toll. The second one in particular combos nicely with a Maralen of the Mornsong since between the two you may only get one card per turn, but it is whatever card you want and your opponents get nothing.

If you don't splash colors any, I'm not really sure what I could say though as, again, I'm less experienced with mono black than I am splashing other colors. Maybe you could run "Newmarkul" or something?

Splashing a color would require a different commander TheRedGoat. With the whole deck built around Horobi, switching commanders at this point would require a complete overhaul of the deck.

I can understand that, I was just giving my thoughts on it. I've been fiddling with a Mogis build that would work similarly to what you have here and it sorta bled over.

However, given you have a relatively low creature base, and many of the creatures don't need to be under your control to be useful to you, why not consider Endless Whispers? Also I've seen Necrotic Plague and Last Laugh are cards that if I'm not mistaken do fit into your "play politics/ or hat everyone" style. If I have that wrong I am sincerely sorry for being dumb.

Necrotic Plague fizzles with Horobi on the board. Endless Whispers has been tossed about a few times, I think Draw_Wurm finally decided that it didn't quite fit the vision. Last Laugh looks pretty amusing though.