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Welcome back to today’s article, the fourth of five that I am writing about playing each color in multiplayer. Whether it’s Commander or sixty-card Chaos or anything else, there are a lot of things that you can do to enhance whether color you rock at the kitchen table. After all, who doesn’t want a better deck for his or her next multiplayer night?
Enter this series. In the first three entries, I looked at blue, red, and white in that order. Next up is green, which will conclude this series next week. I hope that you’ve gotten some ideas from each of these articles.
- Red
- Blue
- Green
- Black
- White
That is my order of the colors in multiplayer, from worst to best. Today, we are looking at the second-best color for multiplayer. Like all colors, it has some holes, and it has some strengths. What can you do to become better?
To begin with, let’s look at black generally. What does black like to do?
First of all, black has a lot of creature removal. It has a ton of pinpoint removal, although most of it has a restriction (such as destroy target nonartifact, nonblack, non-Spirit or nonsnow creature). If you want to blow out one creature, this is the best way to just destroy it. Black also has the edict ability to force someone to sacrifice a creature of his or her choice. This can often be used to hit something that is indestructible or untargetable if you kill everything else that he or she has. Let’s not forget that black is the second-best color at mass creature removal. From Damnation to Life's Finale, black has a good number of options to smash everything at the table. Black also has the ability to shrink power and toughness and thereby kill creatures that could regenerate or are indestructible. It can do this both with targeted spells and sweepingly. Don’t forget that you are the second-best color when it comes to burn, and you can drain creatures or players for life.
Black can destroy lands in a pinpoint manner. It has cards such as Rain of Tears. However, it lacks the ability to destroy them en masse. Black is infamous for being unable to handle enchantments or artifacts much. This is one of its dominant weaknesses; it simply cannot deal with a large chunk of permanents. If an opponent plays a threatening artifact or enchantment, you cannot bounce it, counter it, destroy it, or steal it. Black just has to suffer through.
Reanimation is another strong tool of black. Black’s ability to bring a creature straight from the graveyard to play without spending mana replaying it is incredibly game-shifting. Decks are built around black’s tools to reanimate things, and some of the most powerful black spells of all time revolve around reanimation.
While black has some flyers of notable size, such as Demons and Vampires, they tend to be overwhelmed by the size of the red, white, and blue flyers. Your guys can’t stand up, in the long term, with the Dragons or Angels running around. However, you do have enough quality flyers to give yourself some options in the skies without embarrassing yourself.
In terms of raw card advantage, black is the second-best color after blue. It almost always exchanges cards drawn for life lost. This Necropotence ability is quite powerful because it gives black multiple forms of card advantage. Black gains cards by drawing them in the raw, it gains cards from discarding its foes’, and it gains cards from sweeping removal. As a result, black is the single best color when looking at card advantage overall.
Despite the occasional card here and there, black isn’t really a strong defensive color. Black wants to kill and smash, just like red, but it has better kill spells. Black has some mechanics, such as regeneration and the shade ability, which are not super-strong in multiplayer. Regeneration is good because it can keep a creature around post-removal, and intimidate/fear is pretty useful to slip creatures past some defenses. However, at the end of the day, black’s keywords and creature abilities aren’t as good compared to red’s haste, flying, or first strike or white’s vigilance, first strike, or indestructible.
Overall, black does a lot really well, but it has some major weaknesses. How does this play out in multiplayer?
Discard is different in multiplayer than it is in duels. First of all, remember that you are being outdrawn one-to-four at a multiplayer table with five players, and your foes will begin with twenty-eight cards (assuming normal rules are in place, but you could be playing with Vanguard cards or Magic: The Role-Playing Game or something else). There are a lot more cards out there, so a simple discard effect doesn’t translate as well. Hymn to Tourach is a powerhouse in duels and almost worthless in multiplayer—playing it still is card disadvantage. However, unlike duels, players hold onto cards for much longer. Therefore, you are likely to have more targets for discard later in the game. Expensive discard still can hit for its full power. This is why I like a card such as Liliana's Specter. All opponents discard, so in a five-player game, you get four cards from it. If you draw it late, you are still likely to get cards from it.
When someone plays an enchantment or artifact that could win him or her the game, you cannot lay off that player. If you can kill that player before he or she wins, you end the threat. Therefore, I recommend turning any player who drops something that could win the game—such as Mirari's Wake or Future Sight (in the right decks)—as your sole enemy. It’s as though you suddenly moved into a duel with that person, ignoring the rest of the table. Take that player out, and you conquer your major weaknesses.
A lot of black’s top cards require you to have some fuel for them. You need to sacrifice a creature, lose life, or discard a card. That cost must be paid, so make sure that you have the cash for it. Play things that make multiple creatures (such as tokens) or pad your life total with draining effects. Prepare for that Bitterblossom or Graveborn Muse.
Ensure that you play the best flyers your color has—you can’t play the small stuff and hope to survive up there.
Now that we have looked at the multiplayer ramifications of black, let’s look at the core strategies to win with black.
Strength #2: Card Advantage – As I mentioned earlier, card advantage is your subtle power. Sure, you can’t draw cards at the pace blue does with Tidings and Mind Spring, but you do have Ambition's Cost and Skeletal Scrying. You also have discard such as Unnerve that you can force on others, and you can blast multiple creatures with something like Mutilate. When you add the discard you have to the raw card-drawing you harness and the sweeping removal, you are the king of Card Advantage Mountain. When building your deck, look for cards that will encourage this, such as Syphon Mind and Decree of Pain. This is your other primary strength, so ensure that your multiplayer deck has all three routes to Card Advantage City covered: discard, card-draw, and sweeping removal.
Strength #3: Reanimation – Every color out there can return some cards from its graveyard to its hand. Green can hoist up anything, blue and red can return spells, and white can return artifacts and enchantments. But you are the king of bringing back creatures directly into play. Only white has some cards on that level. You can bring back one creature (Rise from the Grave), a few (Victimize), or many (Twilight's Call). This enables you to keep pushing after a few of your creatures were offed or to regain the upper hand after a Wrath of God. Everybody will lose their best creatures to removal, but you are the best-equipped color to bring your creature back.
There is a reason that black is the second-best color when going against more than one foe. You have the ability to answer the biggest threat (creatures), another threat (lands), and you have a lot of trickery cards that play well at the table. You are the best color at exiling cards from someone’s graveyard. You have cards such as Withered Wretch and Suffer the Past. Don’t forget that you have cards such as Vampire Hexmage and Aether Snap that play with tokens and counters. You also have a few cards to speed up mana production like Cabal Coffers and Nirkana Revenant. You have some nice tricks to pull.
When combined with some of the classics of multiplayer (Avatar of Woe, Living Death, Buried Alive, Yawgmoth's Will) alongside the best cards of black, you have the ability to answer some threats while making many of your own. You can stand toe-to-toe with other players for the whole game in terms of creature removal and card advantage, and you will hopefully overwhelm anybody who plays something you can’t answer.
Black has a lot going for it. Take it, and win with it!
See you next week,
Abe Sargent
