We are less than two weeks away from the digital release of our new set of animal friends, and WOTC has done an excellent job of making sure that this set is packed with as much excitement and innovation as possible for the unique plane that we are visiting. Upon first glance, it appeared that it was going to be overshadowed by some of the high-powered Duskmourn Cards that were previewed. They took us for a spin with that, because there are some absolute bombs in Bloomburrow. Naturally, I have found a few powerful black cards that I think can give us a new archetype within my favorite color. We are going to look at playing a decent amount of these new cards, and we are going to see if we can fall into a pretty fun and valuable sacrifice combo to showcase one of the new Calamity Beasts from the Bloomburrow Plane.
With this deck, we are doing what we can to play Rottenmouth Viper as quickly as possible. We will play permanents and spells that give us other permanents that are easy to sacrifice, and in some instances we will get rewarded for doing so by some of our other permanents. Even if we don't see value, we can use these permanents to reduce the cost of our Calamity Beast, and start to amass some pretty ridiculous value. Our sideboard is also equipped with many different ways to deal with creature and control decks. We also have a couple of finisher spells if the Viper is not enough to get the job done. The deck also has a few tutors, because we have some pretty good answers within the deck, and just overall very powerful spells.
Relevant New Cards
The class enchantments are back with a vengeance! It appears that in this set, each color will have a good class enchantment that should help out the given archetypes. In this case, we are able to amass value from sacrificing creatures, also making our opponent mill cards to disrupt curve and playability, and then finally we can reanimate with this spell by doing its final level. The residual value that it provides can really help us get ahead in the game, and if nothing else will help us gain plenty of life.
This is basically a power creep Hero's Downfall. It gives us the option to sacrifice a food, or exile three cards from our graveyard by using the forage ability. This allows us to reduce the mana cost by one black mana, thus allowing us to cast a spell that destroys target creature or planeswalker at instant speed for only two mana. Since we will be sacrificing plenty of stuff, it is not out of the question that we are able to get extra value out of this card. We will also be generating food tokens with some of our spells as well, so this card appears to be the perfect removal that we need.
This is the bomb that I've been waiting for since the ban of my beloved Invoke Despair. It is a phenomenally designed spell, because it doesn't get too out of hand by allowing you to do everything on the card. You have to choose five paw prints worth of casting cost in this individual card (no, the paw prints do not carry over like energy - they can only be used as the spell is being cast). Since we are sacrificing a lot of cards and have a decent amount of creatures, we can get some pretty good value off of the final mode of this card. If nothing else, we can also make an opponent sacrifice a bunch of creatures. We can also use it as a post-combat method by drawing tons of cards after a bloody creature battle. Using the final mode on this with a card like Bloodletter of Aclazotz in the late game can really help us close things out, or just put our opponent in a position where they better win the game on their next turn, or we are simply taking over.
Maha is the legendary Calamity Beast from Bloomburrow. She is an owl that takes no prisoners. If the keywords alone on the card aren't impressive enough, how about we just make the base toughness of all opponent's creatures one. We have cards like Glistening Deluge in the sideboard that can combo with this that would basically be a one-sided board wipe. Not to mention, she automatically is a three-to-four turn clock just by being on the and attacking. I thought she was better served in the sideboard because she does really well against creature decks. I like having Aclazotz, Deepest Betrayal // Temple of the Dead in the main deck because Aclazotz can make tokens, which help us to decrease the casting cost of the best card in our deck. Aclazotz also helps us draw cards, which always proves to be relevant.
Rottenmouth Viper has what some of the boomers call a "punisher" effect. I think that nomenclature is apt for this scenario because we are punishing our opponents who do not have permanents on the board, or cards in hand. If we do what we are supposed to do, we should keep their hands relatively empty, and the board relatively clear. This allows the blight counters on the Viper to accumulate and effectively force the opponent to either play to the board, or hold cards in their hand to discard if they do not want to die. This can effectively soft lock out our opponent and make it so that we can win with the Viper in just a few attacks!
This is my first look at what a fun mono black deck would look like after rotation. I wanted to get a good bit of new cards in there, and I think that these work pretty well together. It remains to be seen if this will be any good at all, but you can bet money that I will be trying this out as soon as I can burn my wildcards to make this deck on the 28th!
