Hey Folks, its brewing time again! I am constantly thinking about the sweet Archon format, for which I shared some ideas on a discard aggro deck last time. Today I am doing the inevitable, which is, brewing something mono black. I can’t help it, maybe it is because I learned magic in the 90s, but somehow I end up testing mono black in every format I play. Matter of fact, I have produced a video deck tech on a modern deck a few months ago that is not unrelated to today’s Archon deck – Necrodominance!
I have, and that is also species-typical behavior for me, tested various mono black archetypes before, mainly aggressive aristocrats variants with Sephiroth and Braids, but none of them really worked out well. So I ended up with a deck that I tried a few years ago and that I could never get out of my head. A creatureless control deck around Sheoldred, the Apocalypse that tries to survive until it can combo off by drawing the entire deck, following the popular formula: draw entire deck + ? = profit
First things first. How to achieve the draw-entire-deck thingy? From modern you might know the Shelly and Necro combo, which, alas, does NOT let you draw the entire deck, but rather a bunch of cards where bunch = as many life points as you dare to spend in your end step, to a maximum of current life total -1. This results in a bunch of new cards and in a bunch x2 life gain. Which in turn means that this potent draw engine scales with the life total you have available once you get going. As a result, this is, in modern, the core for a good grindy mindrange / control engine, which generates a lot of value, which we will discuss later. Since Archon is not modern, we have two advantages and a disadvantage in our deck building restriction. The disadvantage is that we can only sport one copy of Necrodominance in our 99. Advantages are the constant availability of Shelly from the command zone and the access to some nifty cards that are unavailable in modern:
Bargain is the real shit. That card plus Shelly is what we are looking for. Both on the board means instant access to your entire deck, as long as your life total is >1. Necrologia basically is another copy of Necrodominance, as the life has been paid up front as a bunch, still a good card to add redundancy. The one Ring facilitates midrange grind and is also insanely good with Shelly, but does not give instant availability to as many cards as we want. Good ol‘ Necropotence is not in the deck atm, as the wording is not „draw card“ but „put into hand“ which makes Shelly sad. So, to conclude, Bargain is what we wanna go for, and Necrodominance, Ring or Necrologia are sidekicks we can use when the former is not available. Keen observers note at this point that this is not a lot of cards hidden somewhere in the 99, which means we run a selection of the best tutors in the game to find our pieces:
So, lets shed some light on the ? part in the formula. The modern deck, once Shelly and Necro are on the board, has one neat line to close the game, which is drawing into four copies of Soul Spike to deal 16 damage to the opponent’s head, which is usually enough to win a modern game. This is not something that we can do in Archon. What we can do instead is draw into Tendrils of Agony, several variants of Dark Ritual and Yawgmoth’s Will to finish with a neat little black storm.
So, that is the core idea of the deck, now we need glue to get these pieces together. In general, I assume the deck to be very mana-hungry, so I add a selection of mana stones to ramp up. Furthermore I assume that we need to kill a good deal of creatures to survive, so I add a lot of removal as well. As this part is very generic, I will not go into more detail here, but you can have a look at the deck list for reference.*
One final aspect that deserves some attention is what puts the „pitch“ into the deck’s name. While we have only one copy of soul spike available, we have more black cards that let you „pitch“ (i.e. remove) black cards from your hand to pay the costs. And many of them actually are quite useful, as they tend to either destroy something, provide hand disruption, or gain life, and sometimes several of these things at once!
The idea would be that these cards can be used when either we have assembled a lot of carddraw but not a lethal combo, or while we are searching for our combo pieces and have redundant, or situationally useless cards in hand that we can get rid of to pay for the costs.
As always I am happy to hear your feedback and encourage you to try out lists like this for yourself! Take a look at this preliminary decklist and enjoy some quirky cards that I have included for testing 🙂
Enjoy and don’t forget to mark May 31st in your calendar, where you can win an OG Dual land by playing Archon at Bielefeld University!
BlutzollFeuerball 