Right now, Throne of Eldraine Standard is divided into Food decks and non-Food decks. If you’re playing any non-Food deck, it’s important that you have game against Food decks and also that you don’t get splash-hit by the hate cards that everyone is forced to play.
The combination of these two factors means that black decks are uniquely well-positioned in this metagame. First, they have access to Noxious Grasp, which is one of the best cards against the Food decks and one of the few ways in the format to beat an early Oko, Thief of Crowns or Nissa, Who Shakes the World, as well as cards like Rankle, Master of Pranks which are hard for a Sultai build to deal with. Second, the black creatures are immune to Aether Gust and Noxious Grasp, which are frequently seen in maindecks at this point. A deck like Gruul Aggro, for example, wouldn’t dodge either Grasp or Gust, which means it wouldn’t be a good choice right now.
One potential shell for black-based decks is Sacrifice, whose main engine is Witch’s Oven and Cauldron Familiar. If you have both on the battlefield, you can sacrifice the Cauldron Familiar for a Food token and then immediately sacrifice the Food token to return the Cauldron Familiar, which drains your opponent for one and gives you a free blocker every turn. The goal of most Sacrifice decks is to exploit this interaction even further by using it to constantly trigger Mayhem Devil, Trail of Crumbs, or Korvold, Fae-Cursed King.
There are four different approaches you can take with Sacrifice decks: Sultai, Four-Color, Jund, and Rakdos. Here’s crokeyz’s Sultai list:
Creatures (14)
Planeswalkers (8)
Lands (24)
Spells (14)
I think this list is certainly cool, but I can’t pass up on Mayhem Devil in this kind of deck; it’s just too good here. If you have the Cauldron Familiar and Witch’s Oven combination, you get to deal two damage every turn – one for the Cat and one for the Food. The deck can also run a lot of other sacrifice effects, like Priest of Forgotten Gods, Fabled Passage, and Rankle, Master of Pranks. It’s also very relevant that, if they sacrifice a card, you get the trigger as well, as in a world of Gilded Geese and Wicked Wolves, it comes up a lot. I think that, if you’re playing a Sacrifice-based deck, you must play Mayhem Devil; otherwise you should just be playing regular Sultai or Simic Food.
Then, we have a potential four-color version that includes Oko, Thief of Crowns:
Creatures (22)
- 4 Paradise Druid
- 4 Mayhem Devil
- 4 Gilded Goose
- 2 Korvold, Fae-Cursed King
- 4 Wicked Wolf
- 4 Cauldron Familiar
Planeswalkers (6)
Lands (24)
Spells (8)
Sideboard
Once we’ve established we want Mayhem Devil, we can’t play the Sultai version, but we can still play Four-Color. Oko is unbelievably good in this deck – even more so than in other Simic decks – because it’s so synergistic with the rest of your deck. Not only do you have more uses for Food than a normal list, but you also have more cheap cards to turn into Elk.
That said, I think the mana just doesn’t work. Oko is 1UG and Mayhem Devil is 1BR, and that’s too much discrepancy early-game. Fabled Passage helps, but not as much as you’d think because it still just adds one color (it’s not Mana Confluence). I’ve tried really hard to make the mana in that deck work, even including Golden Egg, and it just hasn’t.
This, to me, means we unfortunately cannot play Oko. This leaves us with my two preferred variants. Here’s a Jund Sacrifice list from the Magic Online PTQ:
Creatures (27)
- 4 Midnight Reaper
- 4 Paradise Druid
- 4 Mayhem Devil
- 1 Massacre Girl
- 4 Gilded Goose
- 2 Korvold, Fae-Cursed King
- 4 Wicked Wolf
- 4 Cauldron Familiar
Planeswalkers (3)
Lands (22)
Spells (8)
Sideboard
The mana in this deck isn’t perfect, but it’s a lot better than the Four-Color version and in fact might be better than the Rakdos version. A lot of the cards in the deck are very synergistic with what you’re doing, such as Wicked Wolf, Korvold, Fae-Cursed King, and Vraska, Golgari Queen. I like the above list very much if you’re looking for a Jund version, though I worry that, between Paradise Druid, Gilded Goose, Witch’s Oven, and Cauldron Familiar, the deck has a lot of dead air (though Vraska helps with that). I also think the deck is a little land-light – you have four Once Upon a Time, but you don’t want to have to get land with those all the time, so I would probably cut one Paradise Druid for a 23rd land.
Then we have the straight Rakdos version, which is the one I like the most. This is Andreas Ganz’s Top 4 build from MagicFest Lyon:
Creatures (23)
- 4 Midnight Reaper
- 4 Gutterbones
- 4 Priest of Forgotten Gods
- 4 Mayhem Devil
- 3 Cavalier of Night
- 4 Cauldron Familiar
Lands (25)
Spells (12)
Sideboard
I like the straight Rakdos version the most for a couple of reasons. First, it makes great use of Castle Locthwain. This deck has a lot of very cheap cards and a decent number of ways to gain life, so Castle Lochtwain is an all-star here. In fact, it surprises me very much that Andreas Ganz only played two copies despite playing 25 lands – personally, I like four copies, and I would never play less than three, since the cost is so small and you activate it a lot. In fact, don’t be afraid to activate it with three or four cards in your hand, because in a lot of matchups the damage doesn’t matter.
Second, I like four copies of Claim the Firstborn. You have several ways of sacrificing the creature you steal, and it’s the best card for dealing with Hydroid Krasis, Voracious Hydra, and animated lands from Nissa, Who Shakes the World. The Jund versions can play Claim the Firstborn as well, but they’re already packed with cheap cards that aren’t great in certain situations, so it’s hard to add another one.
The other omission that is weird to me in Andreas Ganz’s list is Rankle, Master of Pranks. This deck uses all the modes of Rankle very well – it has spare creatures to sacrifice, it often has redundant cards to discard, it is looking for specific synergy pieces, and it has enough of an aggressive component that the three (or four) points of flying damage every turn will add up. On top of that, Rankle is excellent with Claim the Firstborn, since you can steal their creature and sacrifice them. I think I like at least three Rankle, Master of Pranks in that deck.
This is how I would build it:
Creatures (25)
- 4 Midnight Reaper
- 4 Gutterbones
- 4 Priest of Forgotten Gods
- 4 Mayhem Devil
- 2 Cavalier of Night
- 3 Rankle, Master of Pranks
- 4 Cauldron Familiar
Lands (24)
Spells (11)
Sideboard
If you’re interested in playing this deck, it’s important to know that it’s a very tricky deck to play. It’s not hard in the sense that you need to be extremely experienced or a very good player, but it is hard in the sense that you need practice with this deck specifically because you can do a surprisingly high amount of damage in one turn, and a lot of the interactions and lines you take are not obvious. For example:
- You can cast Cavalier of Night, stack the trigger, and sacrifice it to Witch’s Oven. You’ll then return a creature and be able to sacrifice it to Cavalier of Night. This can be useful if you have no other creatures but need to kill something.
- You can cast Claim the Firstborn on your own creature to untap it and give it haste. It’s especially relevant on Priest of Forgotten Gods.
- You can also target yourself with Angrath’s Rampage. This could be relevant if you’ve cast a Claim the Firstborn or if your opponent has no creatures and you need a Mayhem Devil trigger.
- You can target any number of players with Priest of Forgotten Gods, including yourself. You can do this if you need a Mayhem Devil trigger or if you Claim the Firstborn their Priest of Forgotten Gods (which can sacrifice two other creatures but not itself).
- In this deck, you should always save Fabled Passage for later because it triggers Mayhem Devil.
- You should be careful about Veil of Summer, as it stops Mayhem Devil and Priest of Forgotten Gods.
Overall, I’d say this is a very fun deck that you should definitely check out if you are tired of Food mirrors. It’s got a reasonably even matchup against Food decks (it’s definitely better against Sultai Food since Noxious Grasp doesn’t do anything) and a good matchup against all the Adventure decks, and a bad matchup against things like Temur Reclamation or Jeskai Fires, so it can also be pretty solid depending on what you expect the field to be.