Somehow, Mardis Gras and Magic: The Gathering just don’t seem to go together. How do you compare wandering around the streets, partaking in things that shouldn’t be discussed in front of children…and trying to break the metagame for the upcoming Extended PTQs?

Still, New Orleans, home to great pleasures and even greater sins, hosted the last Pro Tour event, and more importantly to those of us who are not named Finkel, Budde, or Ruel, the last major Extended tournament. New Orleans spawned the current metagame, and strong teams and determined individuals are working on beating that metagame.

I don’t proclaim myself to be the guru of the new Extended; no, a little piece of me died with Demonic Consultation in the last round of bannings. However, I’m nothing if not a gamer, and I’ve certainly been working just as hard as everyone else. Hours of hard work and dedication, dismissing food and rest, working tirelessly in the trenches of playtesting…it netted me two decks. Two frigging decks. People have built houses in less time than this. To show for everything, I managed to produce…TWO DECKS.

Sometimes I wonder why I try.

Wait, what did all those positive reinforcement tapes tell me to do at this point. Oh, right. “I am a good person. My ideas are worthwhile. ANNIE ARE YOU OKAY, ARE YOU OKAY, ARE YOU OKAY ANNIE!”

Oh, heh, must have taped some Alien Ant Farm over it. So I have two decks, my self-help tape contains half a remade Michael Jackson song, and I’m about to be mocked by readers of this article for using basic Swamps in a deck.

Huh? Oh, you want to know about the Swamps.

One of the staples of Extended up until a couple of years ago was Suicide Black. Built around cheap and efficient Black creatures, with the big BOOM coming from a well-timed Hatred, it was truly a deck to beat, and the disruption that it could cause made it a force to be reckoned with. Often opponents would find themselves with one or two cards in hand and sitting on zero life…somewhere around turn three.

Suicide Black caught the ax thanks to the incredibly broken nature of Trix, however. To slow down the combo, the DCI banned Dark Ritual rather than banning Necropotence or rewording Illusions of Grandeur. This didn’t work out quite the way that they expected. Trix showed up the next season sporting Mox Diamonds and proved itself to be just as dominating as ever, and the loss of Dark Ritual nearly killed Suicide Black entirely.

However, the OMS brothers brought Suicide Black back the next season. In place of Dark Ritual was Lake of the Dead, and low and behold, it wasn’t half bad. For reference, here’s the decklist for the Suicide Black build that both Dan OMS and Alex Shvartsman played at GP: Buenos Aires at the tail end of 2000:

4 Demonic Consultation
4 Unmask
4 Duress
4 Sarcomancy
4 Carnophage
4 Dauthi Horror
4 Dauthi Slayer
4 Phyrexian Negator
3 Hatred
1 Kaervek's Spite
3 Lake of the Dead
4 Wasteland
17 Swamps

Sideboard
4 Cursed Scroll
3 Forsaken Wastes
3 Spinning Darkness
3 Perish
2 Snuff Out

Quite a beating stick, isn’t it? Even without Dark Ritual, it still plays like the incarnate of Lucifer himself with a good draw. Fast, redundant in a good way, and still fast enough to compete thanks to the Lakes. Demonic Consultation was the family dog of the deck, fetching whatever-

Oh crap, Demonic Consultation is gone, isn’t it? That…well, that just sucks ass.

True, Suicide Black has fallen on hard times these days. Most people simply write it off as not being viable. I, however, am not “most people”. I’m the senior editor of The Tome. I’m a proud individual who has had success with Extended. I’m…

…a total scrub that will try out just about any deck.

If Sol Marka is the People’s Champion, and I stake no claim to that title, I’m the Ohio Rattlesnake, which means just a little more than jack shit since Ohio doesn’t have rattlesnakes. Tim 3:16 says I just whipped my credibility’s ass.

Give me a hell yeah.

STONE COLD
4x Carnophage
4x Sarcomancy
4x Dauthi Slayer
4x Dauthi Horror
4x Phyrexian Negator
4x Duress
4x Unmask
3x Funeral Charm
4x Contagion
1x Kaervek’s Spite
4x Wasteland
20x Swamp

No Hatred?

What?

No Hatred?

What?

All right, enough with the Steven Austin allusions for a bit. The loss of Demonic Consultation really made me sit down and think about if a Hatred “combo” kill was really the way to go nowadays. There’s an awful lot of blue out there, and Hatred is not really up to taking on Force of Will. It’s nowhere near as attractive when it reads, “Pay 18 life: Target opponent pays 1 life, puts Force of Will in the graveyard, and removes a blue card from the game”. Not exactly broken.

The beauty of the Hatred plan has always been that you could Consult for the piece of the “combo” (Hatred and Lake of the Dead) that you were missing and pull it off on turn three. That gave your disruption enough of an impact to win games. However, that just doesn’t work anymore. The closest things to Consult are Vampiric Tutor, which sets you back a bit and doesn’t allow you to Hatred out your opponent right away (you lose the two life, which means that you can’t pay 18 into a Slayer and such to kill on one turn), and Tainted Pact, which at two mana again sets you back.

So obviously the game plan has to be changed a bit.

Hence, the added disruption in the form of Funeral Charm, and some actual real removal in Contagion. This version of Suicide Black hasn’t been tested much, but in the few games that it has been, it’s been a stick. A beatstick, if you will. Fast efficient threats combined with disruption and removal is the way to win games; I think I read that in InQuest once.

Is this build optimal, however? Nah, not in the least. Sure, it beat up on Three-Deuce in testing, but shouldn’t Suicide Black do that anyway? Perhaps something more like:

4x Carnophage
4x Sarcomancy
4x Dauthi Slayer
4x Dauthi Horror
4x Phyrexian Negator
4x Duress
4x Unmask
3x Rain of Tears
4x Choking Sands
1x Kaervek’s Spite
4x Wasteland
20x Swamp

A bit of mana denial thrown in to cause further disruption?

And wasn’t this deck on Beyond Dominia in the Type One forum a while back?

Yeah, it resembles the Type One version, which packs Sinkholes and a buttload of disruption while it smacks around the opponent with random stuff. Negators, Flesh Reavers, Skirges, what have you. I actually had Flesh Reavers in my first build, but that’s not such a good idea when you’re putting yourself into burn range against decks like Three-Deuce and Sligh, and they’re pretty damn crappy against Reanimator.

Hell, this entire deck is pretty crappy against Reanimator if Reanimator gets a good hand.

Lots of testing behind this? Nah, not much at all. Too busy on Lain, my other Extended project, to really worry about this too much. Something to think about, though. After all, it’s got all the makings of a high-quality deck design. And shadow critters and Negators tend to punch holes through a lot of things.

All that I’m trying to do is get people thinking. Is that too much to ask?

Try Suicide Black again. This is all preliminary decklists and rantings; I’m going to go against the field to get more detailed schiznit. Should you respect decks with Swamps but no Entombs?

Oh hell yeah.