Pestilence
Do you hate Elves, Goblins, and other low to the ground decks? Do you want to fear for your life against Burn, only to pull out the most satisfying win of your life? Do you like watching Phyrexian Dreadnaughts get sacrificed? I have a deck for you. Let me introduce you to Pestilence.
A former Pauper all-star, Pestilence is traditionally a Black-White attrition-style deck where you get into a position where only you have cards in play or in hand and then slowly kill them with the namesake. Pauper classic Guardian of the Guildpack formed the backbone of the deck because it could not die to Pestilence. In Premodern you run into a few issues. The first of which is that a lot of your powerful hand attack and creatures were printed outside of Premodern legality. Actually if you look at historic Pauper decklists, your Edicts and Pestilences were the only Premodern legal cards. Good news for us: there is a lot of room for exploration.
But before we get into brewing, why should we play this deck? In comparison to other Black control decks such as Deadguy Ale, Pestilence presents itself in a situation where you pick off their cards in play instead of the hand, making it harder for a top-deck blowout to happen. All of the damage is able to bypass creatures and ruin their clock by gaining life. A 12/12 is only an issue when you have 20 life and most other decks aren’t ready for massive life swings. While not top tier, this deck can absolutely catch people off guard. It being Mono-Black also means that you can leverage Lake of the Dead to its fullest potential by either playing double removal in a turn, or just crack out a massive Drain Life out of nowhere.
Wow! A deck that can attack the hand and board while creating a widening life gap, this deck must be unstoppable! You would be right if Pestilence didn’t have that first line of text on it. It requiring a creature to be in play leaves you with a need for a creature that won’t die to it. In White there are plenty of creatures with protection from Black , but unlike our Pauper counterpart, we are playing only Black because we need all the Black mana we can get for your Drain Lifes and Pestilences. This leaves us with 3 options: a 9 drop, a 7 drop, and this gem of a card . That’s right, you are playing a 3 mana 0/5 with defender. Cemetary Gate is probably the worst card involved in a 2-card combo and never feels great to play. However if we wanted to play only good cards we probably would not be playing Premodern (I am looking at you Sligh). While a downside you don’t live or die on whether you get the combo pieces or not.
What to play in it?
Removal
As mentioned previously, outside of a handful of cards, you can tailor this deck to your meta. Starting with the removal you should play 4 copies of: Cemetary Gate, Pestilence, Chainer’s Edict ,and Diabolic Edict as your main pieces of removal. The first two deal with any go-wide decks and the Edicts take care of everything else. Depending on your meta you may want to go lighter on the Edicts and replace them with Crypt Rats. These can act as additional copies of Pestilence if you are really afraid of things such as Goblins and Elves. While it may seem good against things like Sligh you may want things like Vicious Hunger instead; lowering your life total in the face of a Burn deck doesn’t seem like a smart move.
As you move into the late game removal like, Evincar’s Justice and Morbid Hunger, work great with Lake of the Dead to either sweep everything away or just constantly make the life differential even higher. I wouldn’t recommend maxing out on either of these just because 7 mana is a doozy in this deck no matter how many Lakes you are playing.
Hand Attack
Just like your removal, this is very meta-dependent. This past weekend I faced Storm twice in a row and I was only playing 3 copies of Unhinge. With Storm being on the up and up, packing some copies of the Duress in the main might not hurt. I prefer Unhinge versus Stupor just because this deck has very little draw and being able to use it to cantrip into some much needed removal always feels great.Ultimately it is a matter of preference. Due to the slower nature of this deck, your sorcery speed removal will not work well against decks like Control or Lands. Swapping those out for hand attack will allow you to play your instant speed removal in either Pestilence or Diabolic Edict.
Finishers
Pestilence is absolutely your main win condition: nugging your opponent for 5 every turn while clearing their board is an absolute game finisher. The issue is a lot of the time you will find yourself at parity when it comes to life and your only creature cannot attack. This is where you can try to use Crypt Rats or a Spawning Pool as an attacker to get in on those empty boards and slowly chip away for lethal. As long as you have at least one more life than your opponent, you are in a winning position. Spawning Pit also has the added benefit of kicking around because “until end of turn” happens during clean-up which is after the Pestilence trigger to remove itself. Outside of dinky 1/1s you should absolutely be playing Drain Life and Corrupt as ways to just drive those life totals further apart. These are often more important than Pestilence when it comes to winning the game, just because widening that gap is nearly just as important as clearing their board and life with Pestilence. Any opponent who thinks that they have you on a clock will nearly immediately fold after a 12-point life swing.
Lands
For lands we are just jamming as many Swamps as you want to play. Since this is a lower-curve deck, not as much as an aggro deck, you are going to want to be land light but I like 23 lands as a nice happy number. Make as many of these Swamps as possible because you will be feeding a lot of these to Lake of the Dead. Speaking of Lake: I like playing only two because you rarely want to see more than one until the late game, but playing the full four can be relevant if you feel like you need to be closing out the game as quickly as possible. One thing I would avoid is playing too many Spawning Pools in the main. I prefer these in the sideboard because they don’t fit into the core goal of the deck. Entering tapped and costing 3 mana (two to animate and the third is the cost of not being able to tap the land for mana) is a largely tempo negative play. Instead of activating Pestilence three times you have put an admittedly uncounterable Drudge Skeleton , but one with permanent Echo. Do not get me wrong, the deck wants the body and any way to speed up the clock, but by entering tapped and being such a huge mana investment, you are removing your ability to clear the board early on and in the late game. A similar thing can be said for Mishra’s Factory . For the same mana investment you can Pestilence twice, but by playing a land which doesn’t tap for Black, that is one less Lake or Pestilence Activation on following turns. If you are going to play any Spawning Pools, play no more than two and no Factories, the body is not worth the tempo loss.
Sideboard
In my sideboard I started off with copies of Engineered Plague for the Elves,Goblins, andRebels matchups. Regarding Rebels you have an interesting choice to make: everything in the deck is a Human aside from Defiant Falcon and everything but Mother of Runes is a Rebel. It acts as a nice counter to any anthems they may have and it also puts Lin Sivvi, Defiant Hero within Vicious Hunger range.
Ebony Charm is my preferred graveyard hate because it also allows for those tiny life differentials which will make or break the deck. This is one of the few sideboard cards you never mind having multiples of because it can just finish a close game.
Against Control decks I had four copies of Duress, two Defense Grids, and two Spawning Pools in the sideboard. Those two are there because you need to make sure that you can resolve all of those finishers. Most of your cards are sorcery speed, which means that the Grid does little against you. If I ever expect Storm at an event, I would swap the Grids out for Sphere of Resistance as your creature hate is never going to come up so being on curve is not as relevant. Spawning Pool is just a way to make any Lands and Control players get mad that you have a body that they can’t do much about. It doesn’t come up all the time, but when it does, it is relevant.
Gameplan
The short and sweet of it is to make sure a creature never sticks on board and then slowly burn them out while creating that life differential. In a format full of Bolts and Swords , two mana removal spells don’t feel great, but you have a high enough density that instead of surgical removal of threats you kill off anything that is looking at you funny until nothing is left to stare. Unless it is a Black heavy matchup such as Deadguy Ale or against a Control deck, attacking the board should always be the priority. In the former, you blank a lot of the creatures and removal with Gate, and for the latter, any deck with a Wall of Blossoms allows you to Pestilence for 3 every turn and don’t have to worry about having your pro-Black creature. Once you get to a point where your opponent is running out of cards in hand you can start to develop the core combo.
Speaking of the combo: you should not be afraid to let it die. Your Pestilences will die. That is just a fact; making the most out of them is vital. You have many wincons in the deck, but nothing can really claw you back into a clogged boardstate besides a Pestilence! Do not be afraid to cast it, wrath with it, and then let it die during the end step. You should also be looking specifically at how much damage you can do across the entire long game. Using Lake of the Dead for massive Drain Lifes, seems all fine and dandy, but you have to remember that Corrupt looks at the number of Swamps. So you should Corrupt for the larger number first before its equity goes down the more you use Lake. Outside of that, you just need to know what to hit and when; for your edicts to be at their best, you have to scorch the earth and make sure that there will only be one thing to hit.
- Step 1: Kill everything
- Step 2:
- Step 3: Profit
So why should I play Pestilence?
Well the card has killer art on all of the printings so that is a plus. Outside of that this deck has a pretty solid spread against most of the field. Turns out mono-Black removal wrecks most creature decks that exist, and even against control your slow burn keeps them on their toes most of the game. Being a rogue strategy your opponents never know what you are packing; you can catch them off-guard with solid removal that they haven’t had to play around before (they seldom remember that Chainer’s Edict has Flashback). Sure you have to play a few bad cards, but nothing feels better than winning against top-tier decks with the wildest amalgamation of mono-black ok-quality cards. This is a deck that not everyone can pickup and play, you need to know how to pilot it and know each matchup as well as you can. No matter how much I write I cannot teach that knowledge: but this deck is incredibly rewarding. Every win you get feels better and as you start to play tighter and tighter you feel the best you have ever felt playing Magic. This deck isn’t for everyone, but I love it and I think you should take it for a spin.