Hate drake, tron, and bogles? Love it when an opponent gets salty and disconnects game 1 turn 3? Tryout Rakdos land destruction tempo.
We all know land destruction is bad. It just annoys an opponent until they drop their 2nd or 3rd land and they crush you while you sit with dead land hate cards that don't matter anymore. This was my experience playing 4-8 land destruction spells in a mono-black shell.
In its extreme, however, the story changes. Playing 8 ritual effects and 16 main deck land destruction spells means you can consistently crush lands starting turn 1 or two and keep their board clean until you've put down large creatures which can quickly steal the game. This makes for a mean and fun deck... especially in the current meta dominated by two types decks that are easily dismantled by land destruction.
Good matchups:The deck is really strong against two types of deck (which fortunately make up a lot of the meta):
1) Decks that need 3+ lands to do ANYTHING (drake and tron)
- These decks can remove our creatures, but cannot present any serious threats of their own when faced with persistent land destruction.
2) Fast decks that play very few lands. (bogles, elves, stompy, burn, affinity, infect)
- Sometimes these decks can get a few spells out early, but as their first land or two ends up in the graveyard they will very rarely draw replacement. This prevents them from reaching critical creature/spell mass causing them to fail. Bogles struggles especially due to its dependence on easily interrupted land enchantments for ramp / fixing.
Bad matchups:Some decks in the format play many lands and can make plays with very few:
Teachings... Can counter early land destruction and keep the lands coming in. Worse yet... counters and cheap removal make it very hard to get in any creature damage of our own.
MBC... Also runs many lands and tons of cheap removal, as well as many powerful cards at 2-3 mana. Can even sideboard in wrench mind and duress to grab our the land destruction spells.
Angler-Delver... Similar to above: many creatures, cheap removal, and counterspells. In addition, once their graveyard is full of lands they can drop anglers for next to nothing.
White weenie... Packs tons of strong 2 power creatures for 1-2 mana which overwhelm our sparse removal. Does not need a bunch of spells to get damage as in our good-matchup decks. Journey to nowhere costs next to nothing and makes short work of the delve-fish.
