Card/Deck Mono Black Devotion/Control

[ravnic]

When the 11 year old me bought his first magic cards ever, it was the 9th edition starter deck "dead again", including two rares that really impressed that young, innocent man ...



When my buddy and me started building our cube some years ago, it was clear to me, that I wanted to include some mono black control strategy. After all, mono black was a classic archetype, that made some waves multiple times in magic's history.

In the last few years, I'd say I gathered quite a bit of experience in and knowledge about cube design. But the mono black deck is still something, I try to support. And still, I am not quite happy with the execution.



I'm running a full-art alter of this guy, because he has no business in ever leaving our cube. He is a great argument to draft a mono-black deck while still actually be playable in other black strategies like Lifegain or Sacrifice. I wish, there were more payoffs like this guy though. Besides him I'm currently running:



Nightmare is still in there, mainly for nostalgia reasons (and a 7/7 flying for 6 is still a good deal in my format, especially when backed up with recursion). The other two are really good cards, but only in mono black.

I'm alwas looking to add more payoffs and turn this deck into an appealing archetype - rather than a strange outsider that happens three times a year and isn't even guaranteed to be good then.

Is anyone else running a similar theme in their black section? If so, how is it performing? And how did you get it functioning?

 

[Velrun]

I used to but for me it was either “Guys we have to go further into mono-colored” or “Guys we have to keep supporting multicolored” because both can’t be done properly in my cube (even though I have tons of way to enable archetypes that most cuber owner’s don’t and then I went and ditched all the mono-black support. I miss it but it was never winning anything because it was very difficult for the mono black player to find good black cards because many packs would have 0 good black cards left when there are 7 cards left in the pack.

 

[inscho]

Devotion seems like an easier option to explore as hybrids have crossover appeal, and can keep it from being an instantly draftable archetype. You'll likely be guaranteed to wheel the swamp matters cards as they have less utility in multicolor archetypes. On the surface, that doesn't add up to a very challenging or interesting draft experience...it's more of a novelty. I've thought about what it would mean to have a draftable strategy built around cards that are very likely to wheel, as my cube has a couple archetypes that are borderline. I am interested in the idea of an archetype that plays a unique role in a cube's meta being drafted from the dregs of packs...but I've haven't gone much deeper on the idea.

 

[dbs]

I've found mono-color to be pretty bad both in my traditional cubes in the past, and with my current combo environment. It comes down to a couple things:

1) It's fundamentally less interesting to draft a mono-color archetype. You have far fewer choices. Mono-color deckbuilding is interesting in Constructed because you're making trade-offs by cutting yourself off from other colors. In limited (in my experience) it just means being on rails.

2) It limits the scope of decks in the environment. When you have cards that are based around being in a particular color, it not only pushes the drafting process to be more linear, it also has an affect on how archetypes emerge. One thing I've really been striving to achieve is to have archetypes not necessarily tied to color combinations. That's not to say that all decks end up being 4-5 colors. Rather, it means that when you're drafting an archetype you end up getting pulled in different directions as you choose from the colors that have support for that archetype, which constantly creates fresh takes/directions. It makes drafting/deck-building feel like a puzzle you have to solve, and helps stop things from getting stale. Maybe this is a consequence of how my particular cube environment works, but I've had players try to force mono-color as an experiment and across the board they said it made their deck bad and the draft boring.

Devotion as a concept partially gets around these problems by being stronger the more of a particular color symbol you have (a drafting trade-off) while still letting you play 2 or 3 colors. However, I've started to find that even this gets uninteresting fast. Because of the inherently limited card pool of a cube, there are only so many permanents that have a bunch of black symbols on them... so once you grab Gary the drafting process gets warped towards just building the exact same shell over and over again (even if you change which colors you happen to splash).

 

[anotak]

clearly the answer is to break singleton

Spoiler

ok sorry
more seriously a difficulty is making sure the intersection of black's weaknesses (unable to deal with artifacts, enchantments, and perhaps certain green creatures), still leads to interesting games for both players when those issues come into play.

 

[ravnic]

Yeah, supporting a linear mono color matters strategy is definitely bound to some downsides from a gamedesigner's point of view. It gives less choice options to the drafter and has some slots being blocked by payoffs, that lose quite a bit of value in other decks, making them pretty narrow.

On the other hand, mono black is just damn cool and I love it for some mostly irrational reasons. Back on topic, I found another payoff I really like, because it additionally has applications in Orzhov lifegain:



I'm also considering Tendrils of Corruption and the narrow but powerful Lashwrithe.

However, on the weekend I got to do a draft my under-construction cube and this beauty just came together:

Mono Black Devotion from CubeTutor.com

It was a blast to play. I rocked and won the first two rounds, then lost match 3 and 4 due to stupid misplays, but the deck performed well, somewhere between grindy midrange and control. Crypt Ghast was one of the MVPs and led to sick plays when I could stick him on the battlefield. Only thing that makes me sad: I never saw Gary or Nightmare the whole evening ...

Also, positive side note: The draft didn't feel like on rails, cause I had the option to go Orzhov lifegain pretty much the whole time, than just left the white stuff in my sideboard, because the monoblack payoffs seemed stronger and were more plenty.