[Deck] Red Death (B/r Suicide)

[AnwarA101]

The deck is an evolution of my work on Suicide Black. At the last Duel for Duals I placed 9th with Suicide Black. The discussion for that deck can be found here in the New and Developmental Forum. Feeling that the deck didn’t perform as well as I hoped I moved on in the months following the event in February to try other decks, but I kept this deck in the back of my mind. I knew that there were at least two problems with the deck, as it existed in February one it lacked reach meaning that if your creatures were stalled that you would just lose and two that the deck often times had too many dead cards specifically Vendetta, Diabolic Edict, and sometimes Duress. I searched for answers in Black because I really felt that splashing a color would not only wreck the consistency of the mana base but would also turn a strength of the deck into a weakness. Without too much success in Black I opened my options up to different colors. Red seemed the most natural fit because it allowed me to play removal without it being dead against decks without creatures. I worried about Duress being dead against aggro, but decided to keep it because of its incredible power against combo and control. I do want to thank Powergamer1003 and ObfuscateFreely for both encouragement on the original deck and for always offering good ideas. Evil Roopey also suggested adding Red to the deck when he was working on a similar deck.

Red Death

//Disruption
4 Duress
4 Hymn to Tourach
4 Sinkhole

//Creatures
4 Phyrexian Negator
4 Nantuko Shade
4 Hypnotic Specter
3 Rotting Giant
1 Wretched Anurid

//Removal and Reach
4 Lightning Bolt
3 Chain Lightning

//Mana and Lands
7 Swamp
3 Badlands
4 Bloodstained Mire
3 Polluted Delta
4 Wasteland
4 Dark Ritual

//Sideboard
4 Infest
4 Dystopia
4 Cabal Therapy
3 Meltdown

Most of these card choices are explained in the older Suicide Black thread so I won’t restate them, but I will go over most of the changes and how some of them impact the way this deck plays. The main difference ofcourse is the inclusion of different removal spells.

Lightning Bolt – This card represents pretty much everything I want in a removal spell. It costs 1 and kills almost every turn 1 play in the format except Nimble Mongoose. It also doubles as reach against all decks especially control decks.

Chain Lightning – This was a much tougher choice mainly because it is sorcery. The fact isn’t an instant is a big deal, because you aren’t able to take down something like Goblin Warchief immediately or even catch a control player who has tapped out to play a spell. I looked at something like Magma Jet, but I decided that playing something that again costs only 1 mana for 3 damage was too good of a ratio to turn down. Since there were only 7 spots for removal in the orginial deck and so this one is only run as a 3 of since it is worse than Lightning Bolt.

Rotting Giant – I was never quite happy with my 4th creature. I jumped back and forth between Wretched Anurid and Flesh Reaver. I was never satisfied with either but with the addition of both fetchlands to support Red and the additional burn in the new version Rotting Giant became a great alternative to either Anurid or Flesh Reaver. There are only 3 in the deck to prevent drawing too many of them at the same time and thus the 1 Anurid is included to round out the creatures. Playing only 3 was Powergamer1003’s idea. My original list had 4. I remember asking ObfuscateFreely if he thought I could run Rotting Giant in Suicide Black, but he told me I would need to run fetchlands. Looks like he was right.

The sideboard can obviously vary based on a metagame, but I did decide to run Meltdown as a way to answer artifacts as well as a way to beat Affinity if necessary. After watching Powergamer1003 play Rise/Fall against Solidarity and finding that it seemed less than stellar I decided to look for a replacement. I was going to run Distress but was unable to find any and instead opted for Cabal Therapy and it turned out really well against combo.

I finalized this list only a few days before the Duel for Duals so we did not have time to test it. We also realized that while it was untested it could definitely be a big surprise. Though its similarity to my Suicide Black list made me feel pretty comfortable.

The name for this deck is inspired by the short story “The Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allan Poe. That could be the name for the deck (and if you want to call it that I like that as well), but I know that long names rarely ever catch on. Red Death is succinct enough while still being descriptive.

I will post a brief tournament report as well later. But I did want to kick off discussion of this deck and hope to see everyone’s input.