Forgive me if you already know the story.

Liliana Vess—necromancer, Planeswalker, heretical healer—really, really, really doesn’t want to die. So much so, she was willing to make deals with four different demons to extend her lifespan far beyond that of a normal person. She’s paying the price now, but whatever. More important to us is that one of those demons was Kothophed, Soul Hoarder.

This is a demon who likes to make deals—and who almost always comes out on top. Ask Kothophed for a favor, and it will bite you back—“Sure, here are more spells. With them, kill more things, and gain more power! (Oh, and, by the way, give me all your life.)”

From a flavor perspective, this could be fun. Black is chock-full of spells that demand a payment other than mana, so perhaps there’s a super-flavorful deck in which every play feels like making a deal with a demon.

Forgive me if you already know the story.

A friend walks into your local game store for Commander night. A slight smile crosses the face as the stack is pulled out. The commander is flipped, and you groan, because you know . . . this friend is a mono-black control player. And MBC doesn’t let anyone play with creatures—anyone else, anyway. It’s mean.

The days of competitive MBC in Standard have been gone for quite a while (sigh), but it’s alive and kicking in Commander. Big mana, card-draw, spot removal, Wrath effects, and excellent win conditions—MBC can do almost everything. (Enchantments and artifacts can pose a problem, but we just kill them before that, right?) Let’s see what we can do when our leader rewards us for doing what we want to do anyway: kill everyone else’s stuff.

So we have two decks. One of them is a flavor build: a series of risky plays with every move a moonlight bargain, and our end can come at just about any time. The other is an MBC good-stuff build—flavor is gone in favor of strong cards that win games. The cool thing is that the cards are all interchangeable, and each of our final decks can be fine-tuned to each of us: flavor vs. power.

A Deal with a Demon ? Commander | Mark Wischkaemper

• Commander (0)

• Creatures (19)
• 1 Abhorrent Overlord
• 1 Artisan of Kozilek
• 1 Baleful Force
• 1 Blood Artist
• 1 Bloodgift Demon
• 1 Chancellor of the Dross
• 1 Dark Impostor
• 1 Demon of Wailing Agonies
• 1 Desecration Demon
• 1 Havoc Demon
• 1 It That Betrays
• 1 Kuon, Ogre Ascendant
• 1 Reiver Demon
• 1 Smothering Abomination
• 1 Vulturous Aven
• 1 Woebringer Demon
• 1 Anowon, the Ruin Sage
• 1 Endrek Sahr, Master Breeder
• 1 Sidisi, Undead Vizier

• Planeswalkers (1)
• 1 Liliana of the Dark Realms

• Spells (39)
• 1 Dark Banishing
• 1 Dark Betrayal
• 1 Dark Ritual
• 1 Feast or Famine
• 1 Grasp of Darkness
• 1 Ambition's Cost
• 1 Ashes to Ashes
• 1 Blood Tithe
• 1 Consuming Vapors
• 1 Corpsehatch
• 1 Curse of the Cabal
• 1 Damnable Pact
• 1 Dark Offering
• 1 Dark Petition
• 1 Demonic Collusion
• 1 Essence Harvest
• 1 Extinguish All Hope
• 1 Infernal Contract
• 1 Sign in Blood
• 1 Syphon Mind
• 1 Syphon Soul
• 1 All is Dust
• 1 Blood Reckoning
• 1 Breeding Pit
• 1 Call to the Grave
• 1 Curse of Shallow Graves
• 1 Dark Prophecy
• 1 Demonic Pact
• 1 Demonic Rising
• 1 Enslave
• 1 Phyrexian Etchings
• 1 Sanguine Bond
• 1 Unhallowed Pact
• 1 Altar of Shadows
• 1 Coercive Portal
• 1 Druidic Satchel
• 1 Lashwrithe
• 1 Mortarpod
• 1 Trading Post

• Lands (40)
• 38 Swamp
• 1 Crypt of Agadeem
• 1 Lake of the Dead

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Kill All the Things ? Commander | Mark Wischkaemper

• Commander (0)

• Creatures (20)
• 1 Artisan of Kozilek
• 1 Avatar of Woe
• 1 Baleful Force
• 1 Bane of Bala Ged
• 1 Bloodgift Demon
• 1 Butcher of Malakir
• 1 Crypt Ghast
• 1 Deathbringer Regent
• 1 Demon of Wailing Agonies
• 1 Disciple of Bolas
• 1 Dread Cacodemon
• 1 Harvester of Souls
• 1 Magus of the Coffers
• 1 Nezumi Graverobber
• 1 Puppeteer Clique
• 1 Reiver Demon
• 1 Sepulchral Primordial
• 1 Shriekmaw
• 1 Geth, Lord of the Vault
• 1 Sidisi, Undead Vizier

• Planeswalkers (1)
• 1 Liliana of the Dark Realms

• Spells (38)
• 1 Hero's Downfall
• 1 Hideous End
• 1 Murder
• 1 Scour from Existence
• 1 Silence the Believers
• 1 Tragic Slip
• 1 Ashes to Ashes
• 1 Consuming Vapors
• 1 Dark Petition
• 1 Decree of Pain
• 1 Diabolic Tutor
• 1 Disturbed Burial
• 1 Dregs of Sorrow
• 1 Extinguish All Hope
• 1 In Garruk's Wake
• 1 Increasing Ambition
• 1 Mutilate
• 1 Necromantic Selection
• 1 Plague Wind
• 1 Profane Command
• 1 Promise of Power
• 1 Read the Bones
• 1 Sever the Bloodline
• 1 Sign in Blood
• 1 Syphon Mind
• 1 Zombify
• 1 Animate Dead
• 1 Altar of Shadows
• 1 Caged Sun
• 1 Charcoal Diamond
• 1 Crystal Ball
• 1 Druidic Satchel
• 1 Hedron Archive
• 1 Lashwrithe
• 1 Mimic Vat
• 1 Mind Stone
• 1 Phyrexian Totem
• 1 Seer's Sundial

• Lands (40)
• 32 Swamp
• 1 Arcane Lighthouse
• 1 Blighted Fen
• 1 Bojuka Bog
• 1 Encroaching Wastes
• 1 Myriad Landscape
• 1 Rogue's Passage
• 1 Tectonic Edge
• 1 Temple of the False God

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The first deck was built almost exclusively with flavor in mind. There are a few attempts to make the deck work—Druidic Satchel, for example, can make creatures to pay sacrifice costs, and Sanguine Bond attempts to gain some life back from all the loss—but for the most part, it’s about playing risky cards. We even have the new Demonic Pact and no way to remove it or give it away—play it out, and win in three turns or lose. Such is the case when you make deals with demons.

The control deck, on the other hand, is designed to make life miserable for opponents. Normally, we go through mana, draw, threats, answers, and synergy, and we will, but first, I’d like to give a breakdown of how I created this deck in the first place. Especially when themes or combos aren’t guiding me, I’ll sometimes give myself rough guidelines like this to help construct the deck. Here are the categories and numbers my experience suggests with an MBC good-stuff deck:

• 1 Commander
• 40 lands
• 7 ramp/mana effects
• 10 spot-removal spells
• 7 Wrath effects
• 4 tutors
• 10 card-draw/card-selection spells
• 6 reanimation/recursion spells
• 10 win conditions/threats
• 5 miscellaneous

Without this kind of constraint, it’s easy to neglect important elements of the deck from excitement over powerful cards in other categories. However, using this method can seem a little weird because a lot of things fit into multiple categories. Altar of Shadows, for example, is both mana and removal. Baleful Force is a threat and card-draw. In my list, I assign a single category—in this case, Altar of Shadows is removal and Baleful Force is a threat—and if the spell helps out with another category, great! Bonus uses for cards are good.

Mono-black is great at making mana. Cards like Crypt Ghast are absurd in Commander, and opponents have to use their limited removal on it or be buried under the sheer mass of mana produced. We still want to hit our land drops—hence the forty lands—but Magus of the Coffers and Caged Sun make our mana explode. A few rocks join the party for some early acceleration. We also have a bit of utility—opposing lands can really cause a lot of trouble, so a couple ways to get rid of them are helpful. My editor keeps telling me Arcane Lighthouse should be in just about every deck, and he’s probably right, so there it is. [Ed. note: 14 spells target opponents’ cards.] Rogue's Passage is sometimes the win con. Bojuka Bog is solid graveyard hate, and the new Blighted Fen could come in useful, especially when someone plays Phyrexian Rebirth or something.

We have four tutors. One of black’s strengths is its ability to find what it needs. We have no combo here, so they’re just there to fetch answers when necessary or threats when it’s time to bring the beats. Feel free to take them out if your playgroup doesn’t like them.

The threats in the deck almost all play double-duty—the previously mentioned Baleful Force, but also things like Reiver Demon and Avatar of Woe. Butcher of Malakir is a solid creature control spell, and Deathbringer Regent doubles as a Wrath. Demon of Wailing Agonies is the only kind-of-simple beater and even he makes your opponents sacrifice creatures. Don’t neglect Kothophed either—a 6/6 flying commander gets there in four hits, and Rogue's Passage can help those hits connect.

There are also a couple of Eldrazi, just to keep things interesting. Artisan of Kozilek doubles as a reanimation spell. Bane of Bala Ged is a bit of an experiment—it’s pricey, but its version of annihilator is permanent, and it’s a reasonable size to tangle on the battlefield.

We do a great job of keeping creatures off the field—Wraths like Extinguish All Hope and In Garruk's Wake will reset when Butchers and Avatars can’t keep things under control. Dregs of Sorrow is just amazing in Commander—it’s expensive, but it sometimes winds up being a one-sided Decree of Pain, and it always has at least a few targets. Spot removal like Silence the Believers and the old-school Ashes to Ashes solve specific problems (Arcane Lighthouse can be helpful here). Hero's Downfall is now cheap enough to be included, and Tragic Slip is almost always Path to Exile without a downside.

Lashwrithe can get out of hand; combine it with Kothophed and Rogue's Passage, and it can be a one-hit kill. Mimic Vat gets lots of value when everything keeps dying, though eventually opponents wise up and stop playing things. We have a few ways to grab things from graveyards—Animate Dead is the classic; Profane Command is cheap because it was reprinted; and Disturbed Burial only returns our things to our hand, but it does it as many times as we want for . Puppeteer Clique is great, too, and it has also dropped in price due to reprinting. Liliana of the Dark Realms is really great even if we just use her +1 twice, and she’s even better if we get more out of her. And Geth, Lord of the Vault can do great work for us if our opponents let him live for a little while.

Both decks are missing some great stuff due to price. The flavor deck really wants Liliana, Heretical Healer, Grave Pact, Slaughter Pact, and Choice of Damnations. Good-stuff is desperate for Cabal Coffers and Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth with its average converted mana cost of 4.85. Beacon of Unrest is great in decks like this one. Erebos, God of the Dead and Sheoldred, Whispering One would also be awesome.

So there we have it: two decks, one all flavor, one all business. How do you prefer to play? Flavor all the way? Nothing but good cards? Or a mixture of the two? Please let me know in the comments!

With both of these decks, you’ll pay for the power you wield. What you choose to do with that power is entirely up to you. Or is it?

A Deal with a Demon Total Cost: $69.40

Kill All the Things Total Cost: $73.50