The goal of this deck is to assemble the worldgorger dragon combo as soon as possible and push it through as soon as we see an opening, have a protection spell, or have pressured our opponents hand size enough that there is unlikely to be interaction.
There are two main wincons in the deck. The first and most typical line is to get WGD in the grave, reanimate to make infinite black and red mana and then cast our commander repeatedly to first make our opponents hellbent and then force them to lose three life each time Kroxa enters the battlefield and triggers. Kroxa supports this plan in a number of ways. Firstly as I already mentioned he serves as the outlet, secondly, Kroxa enables very early wins that may not be possible with other WGD decks by letting us reliably have a creature to put into the graveyard (Kroxa himself) to end the WGD loop. Lastly, Kroxa helps contribute to pressuring our opponents handsize and thus potential interaction by serving as one of a few other discard spells that hits each player/opponent.
The second line to win is the LED/underworld breach/wheel combo. Underworld breach let's us repeatedly cast LED and wheel of fortune and wheel of fortune provides a continuous supply of card to exile to pay the escape cost for both. This loops nets us extra card in the grave per cast of WoF allowing us to continue to cast until we find another spell we want to cast in between loops. The loop is often paused to cast chains of mephistopheles to keep our opponents from drawing interaction or praetors grasp to search out a spell such as silence from our opponents decks to shut off interaction. Once we have a safe opening either due to one of the above mentioned cards or one of our single target discard spells (duress, collective brutality, thoughtseize) we can go for the WGD combo. If WGD has been removed our backup line is to continue to cast WoF and prior to decking ourselves cast and active cranial archive to shuffle our grave back into our library so our opponents are milled out first. Starting of the combo can also been enabled through wastenot netting us mana to cast rocks to filter into red to get a few more cast of WoF to eventually find the combo or LED.
Individual Card Discussion:
Stax:
Blood Moon
Magus of the Moon
Stranglehold
Cursed Totem
Leyline of the Void
These are pretty self explanatory as just generally good hate pieces.
Chains of Mephistopheles - another great stax pieces that strongly supports the goal of this deck keeps opponents hands as empty as possible. Additionally, when looping through LED and Underworld breach, we want to get this into play as soon as possible to keep our opponents from drawings into interaction.
Oppression
Widespread Panic
Liliana of the Veil
Strionic Resonator
These ore our "card disadvantage engines". The goal is to get at least one of these in play with our commander in play in order to have our opponents at a net loss of cards per turn.
Mass Discard Spells:
Mind Rake - This can be cast to be one sided, or help us pitch a WGD/ get to five cards in grave to escape Kroxa
Smallpox - great early spell which can disproportionately set opponents back on mana by clearing early dorks and land drops.
Card Advantage:
Bomat Courier - this little guy actually does a lot for the deck, providing an early card advantage engine. Providing escape food for Kroxa if needed by discarding our hand, and providing us protected cards through symmetrical hate pieces such as liliana.
Ad Nauseum - Little explanation needed here. We often will just use this as a draw ten when the opportunity is there.
Azra Oddsmaker
Dark Confidant
Removal:
Ratchet Bomb
Engineered Explosives
Praetor's Grasp
All behold the beauty of "catch all" removal in Rakdos. Ratchet bomb is pretty terrible, but we still run it because graveyard hate is so rampant. Praetor's grasp is great as it offer us interaction we wouldn't normally have.
Cranial Archive - This came into the deck after I was able to get the LED/WoF/Breach combo off but with an exiled WGD dragon and thus no notable way to win. I considered a number of different cards for this such as platinum angel to keep from losing when all opponents have empty libraries or aetherflux reservior to laser our opponents. However, this option seemed like the most slot effecient card serving as a way to protect our WGD from being exiled from the grave, serving as grave hate AND thassa's oracle hate, and a cantrip along the way.
Payoff:
Waste Not is really the only discard payoff card currently being run and it has been great so far acting as both a great draw engine/mana engine/army creater with our discard spells and helping enable breach turns.
Notable Exclusions:
I am currently not running necropotence. I found I would frequently search for necro to dig for my combo pieces, however, the exile discard requirement proved detrimental with LED/breach or worldgorger in hand.
A separate reanimator package such as reanimate+villis is not included but is something I may test out in the future.
Maybeboard:
There are a number of options in here if you want to power down your deck to get more use out of Kroxa and go an even grindier route (which was my initial approach to this deck). Ultimately, have Kroxa on the board and attacking is great if we can do it, but it's not worth running slots that actively are trying to enable this. However, if that's what you want to do all the power to ya and here are some cards worth considering:
Blade of Selves - making everyone discard three for each attack plus sending in for 6 feels pretty great.
Fever Charm and Claim the Firstborn - Both were initially included as haste enablers with upside when the initial intent of the deck was to power out an early attacking Kroxa.
Chaos Wand and Null Brooch - These were both attempts to put some stack interaction into rakdos, again going for more of a slow grindy control build. Ultimately, they never came up before I cut them and I would be curious to see how it works out, but my thought is that these are just too slow and mana intensive for most cEDH tables.
Bloodchief Ascension and Mindcrank - I have these this combo in other builds and it may be worth considering. I didnt choose it because I favor a wincon that lets me win on one turn from no boardstate. This again goes along with a more grindy gameplan where ascension may just help us kill opponents by itself and mindcrank could help serve as a win by itself with by helping mill opponents during a breach turn.
