Fish Five-0: Mono Black Discard (Standard, Magic Arena)
A while back I took a mono-black discard list into the best of one world but I wanted to see if M20 brought enough new cards to bring the deck into the world of best of three!
Gameplan
The general gameplan is to eat the cards in your opponents' hand and run them down on resources so that Davriel, Rogue Shadowmage can close out. We have other cards that deal damage along the way in Raiders' Wake and Dread Presence
These two cards will be our main payoffs for all of our discard effects. Davriel is one of our main pieces which is why I have three copies. Raiders' Wake though another way to deal damage, it doesn't do enough when the opponent is empty-handed. M20 Gave us a new card Dread Presence and is a potential way to draw cards and deal damage to help us when we're flooded with mana. The card is sweet but easily dealt with so I didn't want to put a full playset, but it is has enough upside to where I'd throw a few copies in.
M20 does bring us another two drop to attack the opponent's hand. Though it doesn't trigger Raider's Wake it is nice that it exiles the card and can pump itself to be a threat at a later point in the game.
After a certain point, our deck will have some small creatures that have already helped us enable our gameplan but their stats don't quite hold up so you can sacrifice them to the Cavalier. Because of how slow our deck is and how few board wipes we run, the lifelink from Cavalier is huge and helps pull us back into the late game and potentially reanimates cards like Knight of the Ebon Legion and Plaguecrafter.
Conclusion
Even with the cards that M20 gave us, I feel the gameplan is fun but not powerful enough as we don't have anything like an Ensnaring Bridge to reward us for dumping our hand super fast. Maybe more Arguel's Bloodfast and Dread Presence can help us draw enough cards to grind. I also feel like I should have 25 lands as we don't have many ways to fix our draws in this list. Have you been playing your own version of Discard? Feel free to share as the archetype is a blast and I'm always interested in seeing how people built their versions!
Thanks for watching and I'll see you at the next one!
-Your Friendly Neighborhood AsianAvenger
Twitter: @TheAsianAvenger || Twitch: twitch.tv/TheAsianAvenger || Email: theasianavenger@mtggoldfish.com
