Rottenmouth Viper is a card that captures the imagination right away for folks who love powerful black effects that drain your opponent out. At first glance, it resembles a Torment of Hailfire on a body, and it has a cost-reduction ability that encourages players to run lots of sacrifice fodder like Hopeless Nightmare or Forsaken Miner. These decks are powerful, but they're also straightforward, so I decided to take a different approach with my build of this big calamity snake.
Maximizing the Snake’s Potential
Other synergy points of note are the use of bl counters, which could be proliferated, and the fact that the first instance of its effect is an enter trigger. Given that Rottenmouth Viper is at its best when our opponent has minimal resources, rather than rushing it out before they can establish those resources, I decided to deny their onboard resources with sweepers and targeted removal such as Temporary Lockdown, Sunfall, and Get Lost.
Get Lost might seem like an odd choice as it gives our opponents two tokens that could be sacrificed to the viper's trigger. While this is unfortunate, I found the majority of threats in Standard today are creatures and enchantments, so the flexibility to hit so much of the meta results in this card still being worth it, even if the maps slow down our viper's grip a bit.
Once the board has been stabilized and we're ready to execute our game plan, the method we use to turn the corner is simple: Smuggler's Surprise. For the low-low price of six mana, we can drop Rottenmouth Vipers from our hand at instant speed. If we do this on our opponent's end step, we will get the enter triggers and they will have very few opportunities to interact before it starts swinging at them and triggering again. Obviously, Surprise can drop two vipers, but we have a few other bombs that can show up as well to drive the punishment home.
Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines is excellent against a lot of triggers in the current meta due to the popularity of Deep-Cavern Bat, Leyline Binding, and Caretaker's Talent, but she also gives us an opportunity to double the Viper's ETB trigger. When a viper triggers twice, the first instance goes off with one blight counter and the opponent is hurt, then the second trigger puts another counter, and they have to resolve it again. It's a brutal sequence when it lines up.
It wouldn't be a Smuggler's Surprise deck without Vaultborn Tyrant. The card is nothing short of spectacular and is only held back by its high mana cost. Fortunately, Surprise doesn't care about that and also spots Tyrant another creature that's usually big enough to double the trigger. There's also a fun interaction in rare cases where you can sacrifice the tyrant to help pay for a viper and get another trigger off of the artifact tyrant entering the battlefield. This is usually only good if it's a close game and you desperately need the life to survive against an aggressive strategy, but having the option is handy.
We do want to fire our big monsters relatively fast, so we do have a few pieces of ramp in the main deck. Heaped Harvest is useful because it can get us two lands and also be sacrificed to Rottenmouth Viper without additional mana investment and still trigger to get us a land. Some builds have used Carrot Cake to similar effect, and it was a consideration here, but I elected not to include it because of the Temporary Lockdown plan.
Trailblazer, however, fits any Smuggler's Surprise deck like a glove. Being able to plot it early means you'll have access to one extra mana on a later turn while also establishing a card draw engine. This ensures a turn-five Smuggler's Surprise or Viper without having to sacrifice anything. Playing Surprise in this way does require you to cast it at sorcery speed, but on most boards that's absolutely worth it.
The Best-of-One Ladder
The sixty cards shown here were selected with Best-One in mind. A popular archetype right now is mono-black discard featuring Bandit's Talent. While that deck can be powerful, especially against late-game combo and value decks, Obstinate Baloth stops it dead in its tracks. The talent itself, Liliana of the Veil, or Hopeless Nightmare all give you the chance to throw it directly onto the battlefield and start wrecking their day. It's not uncommon for them to have removal for it, but it puts them on the back foot and forces that removal out before you get a Trailblazer or Viper online.
Elspeth's Smite is an amazing card because at only one mana, it can answer threats as early as turn one, and it exiles the target rather than destroying it. This is very relevant with cards like Heartfire Hero running about that are very aggressive and have a death trigger that needs to be addressed. Any white deck should consider this card for the foreseeable future as it also cleanly answers Slickshot Showoff or even Monastery Swiftspear if you time it right and your opponent swings before pumping.
Overall Impressions
I've played this deck for over forty best-of-one games and have won 60% of them. Piloting this deck correctly requires a fair amount of situational awareness, which is true of pretty much every controlling deck, but especially one like this that has many slots dedicated to threats. Mulligan decisions are also critical as a missed land drop can often mean missing the game-defining sweeper and simply folding. The deck has merit, though, and I think it has a chance to shine in the current metagame.
If you want to see more decks like this, keep an eye out here for future articles and check out the videos of my recent games that are uploaded here. I run CardFlow for all my matches, so you can see my latest brews and iterations even if I'm not live streaming on Twitch.
Thanks for reading, and happy brewing!