Some decks are brought together through powerful synergies that make it tough for opponents to stop them. They’ll play powerful cards, but their true strength is the way each effect plays off of the others. And then, there are decks that slam a bunch of powerful cards together into a strong mana curve and win through the sheer value generated by each card.
That’s what we’re playing today: Mono-black. A deck that comes together through the simple fact that each of its cards is individually worth incredible value.
There’s no real way to get around it: A lot of the power of this deck comes from the fact that black has access to many incredibly powerful value pieces like Invoke Despair, The Meathook Massacre, Sheoldred, the Apocalypse, and Liliana of the Veil. Each of them either creates a massive tempo swing/card advantage or presents an inevitability that our opponent must answer or otherwise die.
Even the lower end of our curve represents value, with beaters like Evolved Sleeper, Tenacious Underdog, and Reckoner Bankbuster. All of these cards are great plays in both the early and late game, presenting cheap threats that can draw us additional cards as the match goes long.
Each of the cards is powerful in a vacuum. Put enough of them in the deck and get them to stick on the board, and it’s easy to outvalue the opponent.
And yet, my heart yearns for blue, my true love. I’ll need to work on building one of those mono-blue counterspell piles.
(PS: It’s hilarious that Meathook Massacre got banned in the time since I recorded this. I don’t think it hits the deck too bad because we can find replacement cards, but it *is* a hit.)
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