Before I start: A short time ago, there was an article at Wizards' website about a mono black deck and playing rogue mono black decks. That article has some similarities with mine below. I'm aware of this. But believe it or not, this below article was under construction for a very long time and just so that someone posted something similar somewhere else, will not cause me to throw all this information out of the window. For your information...

It is very hard to be a Necromancer. You are all alone. No one likes you. You don't have any friends. All those who obey you, are actually waiting for the day when they will have the chance to stab you on the back. You have to be scary all the time and put fear in everyones hearts around you. You always have to be strong. Anyone and everyone can make mistakes; but not you. You don't have that luxury. Ah well, it really is hard to be a Necromancer. Especially these days...

But what is doing the Necromancer in M:TG at the moment? Does anyone is scared of his mono-black magic?  Is he still powerful? Let us try to answer these questions.

What I most probably should say at the end of the article, I will say now... No dear Necromancer. I'm afraid no one is scared of you. Actually it is worse; no one is taking you seriously. Although people are asking for your help in different formats from time to time, no one is willing to use you alone. No one but me. I took your black magic and played it in many different formats. And here are the results.

MONO-BLACK IN EXTENDED

Such a thing does not exists. The deck options in this format are almost endless and there are so many super-uber decks around and mono-black is only a joke against them.  But in the casual room, mono-black is not that bad actually. Here is what I've played recently in the casual room.

If you play a lot in the casual room then you know one thing; that place has its own unwritten rules. For example, when CHK block was in standard, Umezawa's Jitte was almost banned in that room. But three of the most important unwritten rules are the following; no ld, no counters and no discard.

As I was going to play mono-black in the casual room, discard as a strategy was not an option. No matter if I win or lose, at least I wanted to finish my games and with a discard deck in the casual room, that would have been very unlikely.

So I choose control as a strategy. As you see, the deck has only 8 creatures and early game, Twisted Abominations act more like a mana source.

Although nowhere near even tier-2, I like the deck and the results in the casual room were not that bad. Any creature based deck was an easy prey. I even won many games against control decks. The main reason is, as you can also see from the list above, the deck has so many different win conditions. Kokusho, the Evening Star is the most obvious one but there were many games I won with Consume Spirit, Corrupt, Phyrexian Totem or with that lone Tatsumasa, the Dragon's Fang. I even won a game with my Stalking Stones!

If you are a member of the casual room population and if you like playing extended games for fun, I strongly recommend you trying this deck. Any enchantment/artifact heavy deck will give you hard times but other than that, you'll be more than fine. And if you don't have any Damnations don't worry; they can be replaced. Rend Flesh could be an option for example.

 MONO-BLACK IN STANDARD

Mono-black in Standard has unfortunately the same fate as it has in Extended; that is being out of order! But again in the casual room, where there are no Dragonstorm decks or Dralnu du Louvre decks or Angelfire decks, mono-black is a good choice.

I build the below deck for Standard fun.

Although it has similarities with the extended version, the above deck plays differently. I tried to replace the most important cards of the extended version with standard legal options.

becomes

AND

turns into

Of course Stronghold Overseer is no Kokusho, the Evening Star but I needed a fattie as a beater and this guy was the closest I could find to that mighty dragon.

If you had a chance to read my previous article, you then know that I'm in love with Extirpate. To those who have doubts about the card; just play it in the main deck and you'll see the power of it. Combine it with Stupor and it works wonders.

One last card I want to talk about is Temporal Extortion. I actually don't like giving my opponent options to choose from but I added one copy of this card to the deck to see how good/bad it is and all I can say is that it is an interesting card. Half of your opponent's life is nothing to be laughed at or you get one extra turn which is always useful.

And finally in my opinion the most important card of mono-black decks;

As in Extended, mono-black in Standard is also fun to play but you get nowhere with it if you are a Spike-type player.  But if you are looking for fun games, the above deck is very satisfactory.

MONO-BLACK IN CLASSIC TRIBAL WARS

I like playing this format. As it is mostly about creature fights, you don't have to worry about getting your spells countered or your lands destroyed(well, at least most of the time). And the deck building in this format is also very challanging because no sideboarding is allowed. You have to do everything with the main deck.

When it comes to playing mono-black in Tribal Wars, the most obvious choice is of course the Zombie tribe. Or perhaps Rats. But you don't need someone to show you how to build those decks or how to play them, so I choose something different; Assassins!

The most important part of Tribal Wars is to find answers to your opponent's creatures. And with 20+ lands and at least 20 creatures, this gives us less room to add removal cards into the deck. And this is the best part of the Assassin tribe; all of the tribe members are actually removal spells!

Here is my build.

You may wonder what Distorting Lens does in a deck like this. Actually it is pretty obvious; there are so many "protection from black" creatures around and we are all "Men in Black", so the lens negates this problem. Also it is needed when you have Tsabo's Assassin on table and black is the most common colour.

The tribe's most important problem is that it is slow. You can never win a race against those well-known tribes such as Soldiers, Elves, Goblins or alike. And this is the reason we have Damnation in deck. If they are multiplying like rats, then unleash your horrible black magic upon them and damn them!

I choose Gravestorm over Phyrexian Arena for this deck because I am not allowed to use sideboard and with the main deck I must find a solution to those graveyard manipulating decks. Gravestorm is therefore a better card and it works better in this deck. 

And finally a few words about Visara the Dreadful. Visara may not be an assassin but it perfectly fits into the whole "destroy target creature" theme. And as a 5/5 flyer, it is also the beater we don't have among the assassins.

MONO-BLACK IN VANGUARD EXTENDED

Now this is fun. Actually this is ridiculous. I will say no more about it and will first give you my Nekrataal Avatar deck's cardlist.

Yes the deck has some green in it and yes this should have been mono-black. But hey, I'm the Necromancer remember? I am not your true-to-his-word white mage, so I can cheat! And I cheated. To me, this deck is mono-black.

I will not explain the deck but instead of it, I will show you a picture which is worth a 1000 words.

I told you, it is ridiculous.

A personal note: I am not the inventor of this deck so all credits go to him/her.

MONO-BLACK IN TSP BLOCK

And this will be our last deck. Actually I should have said, these will be our last decks, as I have 2 decks for this format.

Mono-black in all the formats has a very important feature; to be able to draw cards. It could be Phyrexian Arena or Gravestorm; in either case we are drawing cards. But in TSP Block, we just can't (and no I'm not considering Null Profusion as an option).

Here is my first TSP Block mono-black deck.

This is almost exactly the same deck I suggested for STD format, only with a few differences here and there. We don't have Phyrexian Arena and we don't have Consume Spirit in this format and I tried to fill those slots with Enslave and Tendrils of Corruption. Other than these two cards, nothing new here. 

So let me move forward to the final deck.

Yes I remember that I said I will avoid discard in the casual room. And I cheated you again! Well, normally I wouldn't build such a deck but I just couldn't resist the beauty of this doll torn in two:

Although both decks I suggested are strong decks(at least in the casual room), they lack the ability to "reload", meaning card drawing of course. If the next set called Future Sight can solve this problem, perhaps they can then also be considered as tourney decks one day, who knows!

Okay dear readers. I think we have seen enough of the miserable life of a Necromancer in different formats. All of the decks are fun to play but that's it; don't expect to win anything with them or you'll be dissapointed. I like playing those decks in the casual room because while playing those decks, I can have great time and break no one's heart in the meantime. As I said earlier, you have to be careful about what you play in that room or you'll stay all alone and blocked by all.

Thank you very much for reading.

Take Care,
Nafiz ERMAN, a.k.a. Lord Erman