Lands:
4 Blood Crypt
1 Kher Keep
2 Mountain
13 Swamp
4 Terramorphic Expanse
Creatures:
4 Korlash, Heir to Blackblade
1 Nihilith
3 Tombstalker
Other Spells:
4 Bitter Ordeal
3 Boom // Bust
4 Coldsteel Heart
4 Damnation
4 Darkblast
2 Darksteel Garrison
3 Rakdos Signet
4 Rough // Tumble |
  Boomstalker.
Description of deck by its author (quoted):
Conveniently, Bitter Ordeal is in one of the
two main blowing-stuff-up colours. With its ability to destroy opposing
creatures and sacrifice its own, black is quite willing and able to
cause permanents to go to graveyards from play. The other colour is, of
course, red. (The judges might have also accepted "white.") Red can
destroy artifacts, creatures, and lands in great numbers with cards like
Shatterstorm, Pyroclasm, and Wildfire. Since it's likely that lands will
be the most abundant permanent type at any given time, at least more
abundant than enchantment or, for all I know, planeswalker, it seems
that the most sure-fire way to play Bitter Ordeal with a high gravestorm
count is by using a card like Boom // Bust. As The Ferrett mentioned in
his column yesterday, this couple is absolutely nasty, provided you can
hit nine mana. If you get to nine lands, and your opponent has, say,
seven lands in play, you can unleash your Bust and follow it up with a
Bitter Ordeal copied sixteen times. If, at this point, you decided to
extract lands from your opponent's deck, there's a very good chance that
you will leave your opponent with no land at all. Having no lands in
your deck makes winning the game quite a, uh, bitter ordeal, let me tell
you. I (inadvertently) tried it once with my Golem deck, so I have some
experience with this sort of thing.
Of course, you don't need Armageddon to make Bitter
Ordeal better. Rough and/or Tumble will also do the trick against certain
kinds of decks, as will Damnation. You'll need a fair amount of mana to
play both a sweeper and Bitter Ordeal, so it makes sense to include some
artifact mana (which will also come in handy post-Bust). In multiples,
Korlash, Heir to Blackblade can quickly get you to nine, but he isn't
particularly fond of mass land destruction. Darksteel Garrison's ability
to Fortify a land and make it indestructible not only works well with
either half of Boom // Bust, but it also helps you to keep Korlash on the
board if you play your Armageddon.
If you don't feel like using your B.O.'s to help run
your opponent out of cards and allow you to win by decking, all you need
now is a quick way to win. It's just a courtesy in this type of deck.
There are a couple of finishers that I think are ideal. The first is delve
poster-boy Tombstalker. With a Bust, Tombstalker is reminiscent of
Desolation Angel. Sure, it requires two cards to achieve the same effect,
but that just makes it much more versatile. You can Armageddon one turn
(with the aid of artifact mana), and play Tombstalker the next, for
example. Just remove all of those recently destroyed lands to reduce the
demon's mana cost.
The other obvious finisher is Nihilith. It's not
timeshifted, but it definitely fits right in. It's cheap to suspend, it
has a nice evasive body, and it'll probably pop hastily into play when you
lower the boom (or, I guess, the Bust) on your opponent. |
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