One of Magic: The Gathering’s biggest strengths is the wide range of competitive decks that are available. You’ve got your traditional creature-based Aggro and Midrange decks, of course, but you also have Combo and Control lists. Somewhere on the darker side of Control you have Discard decks: lists dedicated to slowly stripping your opponent of life and resources for a grindy win. This archetype, the 8Rack variant in particular, was a big deal in early Modern, but it has largely fallen out of favor. This week, however, a new take on Mono-Black Discard took down an MTG Online Modern League.
This deck comes to us via Soggymeatball, and it’s a bit of a banger. It pairs the classic Discard concept with a powerful graveyard hate package. The result is a deck that can win via the traditional Rack method, or through a secondary Midrange plan. Modern is actually in a pretty great place at the moment, with new lists being tried regularly. This list is another fantastic string in the format’s bow.
Mono-Black Discard In MTG Modern
As the name suggests, Mono-Black Discard is a deck all about attacking your opponent’s hand via discard spells. To that end, all of the classics of the genre are here. You’ve got full playsets of Thoughtseize and Inquisition of Kozilek, of course, and also a three-of Raven’s Crime. While this doesn’t let you pick what gets discarded, it is easily recurrable via Retrace. This makes it fantastic in drawn-out games, which is exactly where this deck wants to be.
Once you’ve brought your opponent’s hand down to size, Mono-Black Discard shifts gears into win mode. It does this primarily through Rack effects, or cards that damage your opponent each turn for having a low hand size. The original Rack gets a full playset here, and it’s just as effective as ever. It’s cheap to play, and you can even tutor it up via Urza’s Saga for extra redundancy.
8Rack decks used to run a full playset of Shrieking Affliction, too, as the other four Racks, but Soggymeatball opts for a single Bandit’s Talent instead. This is a full mana more expensive than the other Racks, but it makes up for it by also being a discard spell itself. It can even become a card draw engine for four mana, if you have some breathing room later on in the game.
A couple of copies of Liliana of the Veil round out the deck’s discard package. If you draw enough of these cards early, they can very much win you the game on their own. Discard is deadly in high quantities, as your opponent runs out of fodder they can toss to get around it.
‘Yard Work
Unlike most Mono-Black Discard lists in MTG Modern, Soggymeatball isn’t all-in on the Rack plan. They also run a package of graveyard hate creatures that can easily win the game in their own right with all the fuel the discard effects provide.
Emperor of Bones is the best of these. It’s one of the better two drops in Modern overall right now, honestly, but it’s extra-good in a deck like this. Your opponent will pretty much always have something to reanimate here, which makes it a solid threat once you’ve stabilized. Emperor is also boosted massively by perhaps the deck’s spiciest inclusion, Hex Parasite.
You can use this forgotten gem to remove the counters from Emperor, which will let you Adapt it again for more reanimation. This is a powerful interaction, and you can easily find Parasite via Urza’s Saga if you’re in a position to make use of it. Alternatively, you can pick up one of the deck’s hate pieces, like Pithing Needle or Shadowspear.
On top of this, Soggymeatball also runs a pair of Graveyard Tresspassers to further the Midrange plan. This, again, is just a solid on-rate creature in most decks. Here, it gains two big benefits: it always has targets to exile, and it can often flip easily since your opponents are less likely to have spells in hand to cast. This means you’ll see Graveyard Glutton here far more than usual, which is a terrifying prospect for your opponent.
Throw it all together with some of Modern’s best removal in Fatal Push and Toxic Deluge, and you have yourself a deck. With the options of Rack-based attrition or Midrange beats, this is a list that can thrive in a wide range of situations. Which is good, given how diverse Modern is right now.
Oldie But Goodie?
In terms of how Soggymeatball’s Mono-Black Discard matches up against the rest of MTG Modern right now, it’s very much a mixed bag.
Boros Energy, the current top dog in the format, is an atrocious matchup for the deck. It’s fast enough that it can get key threats out underneath your discard spells, at which point there’s little you can do to hold them off. Some of its cards, Phlage and Seasoned Pyromancer, specifically, even have use from the graveyard. This makes your discard spells less effective here than usual. Throw in a sideboard that can easily deal with your key artifacts and enchantments, and this is a nigh-unwinnable game.
Thankfully, Eldrazi Tron and Belcher are significantly better. Tron is slow to get going, which gives you ample time to hit its key pieces with your discard spells. It’s also not particularly creature-dense, so if you take out a couple in the hand, you’ll likely have clear horizons for a while. Your Midrange plan will suffer a bit here, but it’s hard for Tron to do anything about The Rack once it’s up and running.
As a slow Combo deck, Belcher is naturally pretty susceptible to discard effects. If you can get rid of Charbelcher itself, then the deck is pretty much stranded. You can easily outmatch their small creatures on board, too. This is probably the deck’s best matchup in the top tiers of Modern right now.
While Mono-Black Discard definitely has game in Modern, the Boros Energy weakness is too glaring to ignore. That alone will keep it from the top tables for now, as interesting as it is.
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