4 Elves of Deep Shadow
3 Thoughtpicker Witch
4 Nether Traitor
4 Nantuko Husk
4 Stinkweed Imp
3 Skeletal Vampire
1 Liege of the Pit
4 Golgari Germination
4 Putrefy
3 Moldervine Cloak
2 Dread Return
1 Traitor's Clutch
13 Swamp
10 Forest |
  Growing
Shadows.
Description of deck by its author (quoted):
For the past several weeks, I've been building
a lot of decks with Pandemonium. Is it my fault that it combos with half
the cards ever made? To avoid repeating myself too much, I promise I
won't talk about the card again for at least the middle third of this
article. So forget the “Pan-”. Forget the “-ium.” I want to cut to the
heart of the matter and talk about the “demon.”
One of the earliest “combos,” whispered about in dark
alleys and high school lunch rooms alongside such venerable duos as Royal
Assassin and Icy Manipulator or Merfolk Assassin and War Barge, involved
four Nether Shadows and Lord of the Pit, a sort of 7/7 flying trampling
Michael Flatley of the Underworld. Basically, the “combo” allows you pay
Lord of the Pit's upkeep. I have no idea why this seemed so cool at the
time. No one thought that combining Force of Nature with four Forests was
particularly neato (Take that, upkeep payment!).
I'm not even sure if this ever actually worked quite the
way people thought it did (just check out the archives of various judging
resources – many of the Nether Shadow questions involve the phrase “a
billion times” which is usually not an amount of times you can sacrifice
one of your Shadows during your upkeep). I never actually used the “combo”
myself. It seemed like a long way to go just to avoid a little bit of
damage. Besides, Nether Shadow was a piddly 1/1 (Why would I play that,
when I could play Sengir Vampire?), and it was rare. Like most people, I
used Breeding Pit to feed the demon instead.
Ah, the Golden Age of Magic! Royal Assassin, Sengir
Vampire, Lord of the Pit, Nether Shadow. We'll never see the likes of
those cards again. Except, the first two of those cards are in Ninth
Edition, while the last two have been given the Time Spiral makeover and
appear in that set disguised as Liege of the Pit and Nether Traitor. I'll
leave it up to you to figure out which card is an update of which.
That was a bit of a roundabout way of saying that Dan
Sale sent me a very spicy Nether Traitor deck. The cool thing about Nether
Traitor (versus Nether Shadow) is that once you have one in play and one
in the graveyard, along with a sacrifice outlet, you can sacrifice them “a
billion times” as long as you have a billion black mana. Of course, you
don't need to sacrifice them a billion times, especially if you're
sacrificing them to, say, Nantuko Husk. Unless my math is off, you'd only
need seven mana to make the Husk a 20/20 creature (all of your Nether
Traitors would end up in the graveyard). You'd need even less mana if you
also have a Golgari Germination on the table.
I made a couple changes to Dan's deck. First, I swapped
out Stonewood Invocation for Moldervine Cloak. The Invocation is a great
card, one of my favourites from Time Spiral. It does some things that the
Cloak can't do, like thwart opposing removal spells. However, dredging
back the Cloak fuels the deck's game plan by putting Nether Traitor,
Stinkweed Imp, Dread Return, and Traitor's Clutch into the bin. The other
change I made was suggested by Michael Pape. In response to my Wizard Week
article, in which I used Endrek Sahr, Master Breeder, his thrull minions,
and Thoughtpicker Witch to effectively determine the card my opponent
would draw for the rest of the game, Michael wrote in to tell me that he's
been having a lot of success with the Witch in conjunction with a pair of
Nether Traitors. Here's where I ended up:
There are a number of different directions you could
take this deck. Since most of the key cards are black, you could ditch the
green altogether and run a mono-black version of the deck. Efrén Ramirez
wrote in suggesting a B/W variation on the deck that used Nether Traitor
alongside Nantuko Husk, Grave Pact, Fallen Ideal, Sengir Autocrat, and
Teysa, Orzhov Scion. |
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