Most people will tell you that the best color in magic is Blue. Most people are wrong. Drawing cards without paying life? Sounds like communism. Countering spells? Ain’t nobody got time for that. Jace? Nice 2UU Brainstorm...for an idiot! And what about this so-called “victory condition” Tinker? Sounds like a ballet move.
The most powerful spells in the game are black. Necropotence. Yawgmoth’s Will. Dark Ritual. Tendrils of Agony. A dazzling array of tutors with Demonic Tutor, Vampiric Tutor, Imperial Seal, Demonic Consultation, and even Grim Tutor. My president is black, and so is my deck.
On the shoulders of giants...After the printing of Lodestone Golem, Dark Ritual nearly disappeared from the metagame. The release of Laboratory Maniac managed to return Rituals to semi-relevance with Doomsday. Then, the unrestriction of Burning Wish (in concert with Oath/Griselbrand) put Rituals back into the spotlight as a top tier contender. Even now, TPS pops up from time to time. What I’d like to focus on is the disappearance of Bob Tendrils, which was an extremely powerful deck from 2007-2009. Between Forino Suicide Black and GWSx, the case was made for Dark Confidant in storm decks. I've always been enamored with both of those builds. Following their footsteps, I’ve played countless permutations of Bob Tendrils for the last four years. When I last left off with this deck, it looked something like this:
http://www.themanadrain.com/index.php?topic=43750.0Two years later, and it’s still rough out there for Ritual decks that don’t want to run Oath. Creature based decks are on the rise, and they are either extremely fast (Delver/Bolt) or extremely disruptive (Caverns, Thalia, hate bears). Decks like BUG Fish have a suite of counters that can incapacitate nearly everything you want to do. However, even with the omnipresence of Misstep and Flusterstorm, Ritual decks do become better positioned in a format with this many "fair" decks. While you can no longer ignore a board of beaters while sculpting a winning hand, the increased presence of beatdown has slowed down everyone else. This is a good thing for people wanting to cast Tendrils of Agony. Every slot your opponent spends on Tabernacle, Stoneforge, Toxic Deluge, etc. is one less card for you to worry about before storming out.
Card choicesAll decks are an ecosystem. Changing 5-10% of a list makes the way it plays completely different, but this is especially true for midrange combo decks. On one extreme end of the spectrum, you have extremely aggressive combo. Something like Ad Nauseum Tendrils. On the other end, you have Force of Will decks that fall under combo control. Falling somewhere in the middle is hard. The defining card of this archetype is Dark Confidant, and building around him is what shapes the deck.
4 Gitaxian Probe/ 4 Duress/ 4 Cabal Therapy/ 3-4 Mental Misstep
A heavy discard package is essential. It’s nice to discard counters and then go off with a juiced hand of mana/tutors, but that isn’t plan A. First and foremost, you want to strip their hand and start riding Bob.
Gitaxian Probe does a lot. Again, a hand that has a fast path to victory benefits a lot from Probe. Not only does it let you check if the coast is clear to go off, but it also provides free storm. You can squeak through some very early Will wins with Probe due to this. It also enhances Imperial Seal/Vampiric Tutor. All of that is nice, but its real role is to make Cabal Therapy into a consistent play. With eight ways to see their hand between Duress/Probe, Therapy is rarely a blind call. This is especially relevant against creature heavy decks that will often play 3-4 copies of most cards.
Much like Probe, Therapy is able to add to your storm count for 0 mana. In a field loaded with graveyard hate for Dredge, it’s important that you are able to cast a lethal Tendrils without relying on Yawgmoth’s Will. Formerly, midrange combo accomplished this by swinging with Bob and/or casting multiple mini-Tendris, but Bob is no longer facing down an empty board. Being able to ramp up your Storm count with Probe/flashbacked Therapy is invaluable.
Mental Misstep is a necessary evil. You do not want your own spells to be hit by Misstep, so you have to run them yourself. Hitting their other non-Misstep one drops is just a bonus. Being able to pop your Rituals early for value is a primary advantage of midrange combo over purer combo decks. Instead of solely enabling your finish, they power out your early game like the Suicide decks of old. Your ideal opening play is Dark Ritual, Duress, Dark Confidant. More commonly, T1 Duress (or Therapy/Probe), T2 Dark Confidant will happen. Either way, an opposing Misstep is going to greatly impede on your plans of clearing the way for Bob. It’s best to fight fire with fire here.
That package of one drops anchors the gameplan around Dark Confidant and sets the general tone for the deck. You maintain explosiveness, but have the flexibility to grind out a midgame kill. None of this is particularly new. From there, my most successful innovation has been the inclusion of a somewhat counterintuitive card.
Deathrite ShamanThis style of combo has never wanted artifact acceleration. Playing an off color Mox on turn one doesn’t enable extra plays of Duress or Therapy. Dropping a turn one Bob without protection is a bad play. Furthermore, ramping up with stuff like Mana Vault, Mana Crypt, and Sol Ring is unnecessary. When your primary role is to ride Bob, you don’t have have the space to cast a bomb like Yawgmoth’s Bargain or Mind’s Desire. So at first, Deathrite Shaman seems misplaced. A glorified Birds of Paradise doesn’t seem to do much for a deck that doesn’t run all the jewelry. However, all of the interactions in this deck lead to something far more than the sum of their parts.
Deathrite Shaman adds a sliver of resilience against Shops. Having mana acceleration of any color that ignores Null Rod and Chalice at zero is nice. Deathrite Shaman also speeds up your clock. In a game where you’ve mucked up their hand/board, each DRS activation is one less storm count you’ll need for the final Tendrils. These incremental pings of two life are fantastic for the more grindy matchups. Besides speeding up the kill of your Tendrils, DRS allows you to cast a smaller Tendrils with the knowledge that he can close the game out. On top of all this, he provides another body to flash Therapy on your kill turn. Similar to Misstep, he has some interactions that are pure gravy, such as annoying Snapcaster or impeding their Will.
All of these expected interactions were found to be legitimate in testing. What I didn’t foresee was how much the inclusion of DRS would actually go on to inform the rest of the deck’s identity. Even with a high fetch count, I wanted some more ways to feed him. I started out with a Strip Mine, which has various tempo implications aside from guaranteeing two lands for DRS to eat. The tempo plays from Strip Mine turned out to be so useful that I added additional Wastelands. Again, this can seem counterintuitive at first. I often questioned the inclusion of Waste/Strip in older Bob Tendrils lists, but the ability to set them back a turn (with total knowledge of their hand) proved to be strong. When taking into account the synergy with Deathrite, their inclusion was a no brainer. From there, scenarios started to arise where Duress/Strip effects would slow the game to such a crawl that assembling a winning hand was completely inevitable. Rather than using disruption to protect my victory conditions, I was using it to stop the opponent from winning while I casually found a way to kill them. This led to the complimentary mana denial plan of Null Rod. The deck already shifted between a Suicide Black deck and a combo deck quite easily, and Null Rod in the board just opened up an entire new layer of flexibility. DRS went from a multifaceted Mox/body for Therapy to something that shaped the entire feel of the deck.
Remaining card selectionsMana: 4 Dark Ritual, Mox Jet, and Black Lotus all go without saying. Lotus Petal is often included, and you can make a case in some builds for LED and Sapphire. 3-4 copies of Deathrite Shaman rounds out your mana acceleration. As a deck that is at its heart Mono Black, a light but solid base of 3 Swamps is a standard starting point for your land configuration.
Disruption: Aside from Probe/Therapy, Duress, and Misstep, you some kind of maindeck bounce or removal. Hurkyl’s Recall, Echoing Truth, and Chain of Vapor all have different pros and cons to consider.
Tutors: To maintain the ability to win on the spot in certain matchups, a robust tutor package is mandatory. Vampiric Tutor, Demonic Tutor, and Imperial Seal are complimented by some amount of Grim Tutor and possibly Demonic Consultation. Consultation requires you to run a higher Tendrils count, but drawing and playing a smaller Tendrils is tune with what you are doing anyway. When running multiple copies of Tendrils, Cabal Ritual becomes an attractive option.
Draw: Aside from Dark Confidant, some more draw power is needed to recoup the card disadvantage of an early Dark Ritual. Ancestral Recall is an obvious inclusion if you invest in blue, and possibly Brainstorm. Night’s Whisper is a faster Dark Confidant, which is often useful when you see an opening with Probe or Duress. In general, Night’s Whisper feels like the glue that bridges you between disruption and comboing out. Bazaar of Baghdad is another interesting option. It builds Threshold for Cabal Ritual, can pitch Therapy for value, and easily digs through your deck to assemble a kill. If Bob is active it is a pseudo draw engine, but most of the time it will just chuck dead cards from your hand after you’ve put the game into topdeck mode. Even with the massive amount of life loss from other spells, Necropotence is still the cheapest game winning bomb that you can reliably cast.
Fool’s Gold: As mentioned earlier, off color Moxes do not contribute much to your gameplan. I’d run Sol Ring before any non-Jet Mox, since the only thing artifact acceleration does for you is pay for Sphere effects. Again, bombs like Mind’s Desire and Bargain have no place in the deck either. Timetwister is at odds with your disruption plan. Rather than refilling their hand and hoping you can go off, you’d be better served casting Grim Tutor and winning the game outright. Thoughtseize is outclassed by Therapy when you have Probe, and Probe is so good with Rituals that it would be in the deck even if Therapy wasn’t. Taking that into account, there’s no need for the extra life loss of Thoughtseize. Time Walk is entirely unimpressive in a deck that often misses land drops and doesn’t have much of an attack step. It’s a total blowout if you have Bob active, but not worth the slot overall.
Before taking supplementary colors into account, there are a fair amount of sideboard options. The only automatic inclusions are Null Rod and Snuff Out. Dismember and Darkblast are worth considering, but I have found Snuff Out to be the best choice. Adding even more life loss to the deck is nearly unbearable, but a 0 cost answer to Lodestone that ignores Chalice is great. Yixlid Jailer and Leyline of the Void are answers to Dredge, though I’d rather attempt to outrace them than play more graveyard hate. Extirpate and Surgical Extraction are more flexible options. Defense Grid adds to your multitude of T1 plays off a Ritual. ESG and SSG both function under a Null Rod and help push something through against Shops. More copies of Wasteland is also a viable option.
Through all of that, I found most of my builds looking something like this:
9-12 draw/ filter effects chosen from:
4 Dark Confidant
3-4 Night’s Whisper
0-1 Necropotence
0-1 Ancestral Recall
0-2 Bazaar of Baghdad
18-19 disruption effects chosen from:
4 Duress
8 Gitaxian Probe/Cabal Therapy
3-4 Mental Misstep
1 Strip Mine
1-2 Wasteland
1 removal/bounce
9-12 tutors/bombs chosen from:
1 Demonic Tutor
1 Vampiric Tutor
1 Imperial Seal
0-1 Demonic Consultation
2-3 Grim Tutor
1-3 Tendrils of Agony
1 Yawgmoth’s Will
22-24 black mana producers chosen from:
6-7 Fetches
3 Swamps
2 Duals
3-4 Deathrite Shaman
3 Black Lotus/Lotus Petal/Mox Jet
4 Dark Ritual
1-2 Cabal Ritual
Within these ratios was where I found the best balance and success. Some alternate configurations were promising, but I didn’t fully explore them. For example, a build with 4 Bazaar/4 Cabal Ritual could have merits. At one point I even thought of maindecking the Null Rods with Death’s Shadow in a more aggro orientation.
Splash colorsFinally, back to the point of the thread. As a nearly mono black deck, it’s easy to find room for a splash color. The natural pairing is with blue, and I’ve played with x2 Underground Sea, Ancestral, and Hurk’s in the maindeck with the sideboard containing an Island, Chain of Vapor, x2 more Hurk’s, and Rebuild. Yet I’m questioning whether or not mass bounce is the best way for this deck to win against Workshops. Public enemy number one in your Workshop matchup is Chalice of the Void. Lodestone must be answered immediately, but it’s doable. On the other hand, Chalice can single handedly lock you out of the game, even with a varied CC bounce package.
Since Chalice became my main concern, I started questioning if blue was even needed in the deck at all. Between your own Null Rods and Wastes/Strip, you can jam up Workshops a little. It sorta made more sense to try destroying artifacts instead of bouncing them. Meanwhile, I tried out both red and green splashes. Red has Ingot Chewer, which is the best possible answer to Chalice. It also opens up some sideboard Bolts and REBs, but those are secondary considerations. Green brings Abrupt Decay, which is another nice answer to Chalice that does double duty against Aggro. Green also adds a marginal amount of utility for DRS activations vs. Dredge.
Cutting blue completely didn’t sting as much as I thought. Leaving the maindeck mono black with 2 Badlands and a SB Mountain was enough to support the 4 Ingot Chewer and various other artifact kill spells I tried. Combined with the Wastes/Null Rods, this was enough to kinda slow down Shops and stabilize. Similar experience for BG with 2 Bayou and a SB Forest. Either way, making one for one trades doesn’t really get you anywhere. Being able to kill Chalice is nice, but at some point you need to bounce all the Spheres and win with Tendrils. A UBR or UBG version is possible, but it does stretch the mana base more than I’d like. That being said, I’m leaning towards sticking with an UB configuration, possibly with the addition of 1-2 Energy Flux as a side compliment to the pseudo-denial aspect vs. Shops.
Anyway, that’s the main thing I’m tweaking at the moment. A mix of denial + bounce is strange, but passable. I’ve tested with this deck online a lot, and I’m really happy with where it has come in the last few months.
