Trick or Treat: The Halloween Deck

It’s the spookiest time of the year, Halloween is finally here!

From Oko we hide in terror, surely they know he was an error.

But do not give up, don't despair! There is still mischief in the air:

A master of pranks surrounded by jank will surely scare him away.

And if you don't succeed, there's no need to concede! You dressed up like an Elk for the day.

In order to celebrate the most blood-curdling of all sorta-holidays we have brought in the freakiest fairy, the frightening flier, and horrifying haster: Rankle, Master of Pranks

Oooh... bone-chilling. Gaze upon its lines of text and despair, for the Prankler is here to make your opponent’s life that much more mildly inconvenient! With a mono-black commander (the spOwOkiest color!), we have an arsenal of disruptive and very thematic powerful cards at our disposal. Beat your opponents in style this Halloween while we wait for the scariest realization that after this, you can only queue up next Wednesday! BOO!

Building a Prankler deck is a bit more complicated than one with a more straightforward commander as Ayara, First of Locthwain. If you are looking for a truly competitive linear mono-black aggro deck, I’d recommend the 3 mana commander over ours. What the Prankler does bring to the table though, is flexibility. And you know what that means: more ways for us to make the wrong decision and throw the game! So let’s look at all three lines of text and see how we can mold our deck to make the SCARIEST possible combinations. In reverse order, because everyone knows that's way scarier:

“Each player sacrifices a creature”: Did you ever have that nightmare where a creepy fairy shows up at your door with a friend, kills it and then forces you to kill your friends? No? Just me? Nevermind. The Prankler lets us get rid of our creatures that have outlived their usefulness in order to force our opponents to choose which of their precious children they must sacrifice. Dastardly!

The fodder:

These are the expendables, the cards that give us value upon entering the board or dying. We start off with the cat everyone loves to cook: Cauldron Familiar. This would make the deck if it were a vanilla creature due to being a black cat, but any little point of damage helps in our deck that is all about winning on small, incremental steps. Foulmire Knight is a fantastic card all around, and Gutterbones is a spooky scary skeleton that just doesn't know when to stay dead. Lazotep Reaver, Dreadhorde Invasion, and Vizier of the Scorpion make up the "zombie apocalypse" portion of our deck, giving us more undead to make dead again. Orzhov Enforcer will haunt your opponents after his death, and Piper of the Swarm will scare any opponents with musophobia you might face.

The sacrifice outlets:

These are you cruel devices, the executioners and murderers ready to make your creatures useful once again. Witch's Oven can provide us with quite a bit of lifegain and even fizzle spells targeting our creatures with secondary effects. It's also great for cooking up cat pies, which we feed back to our kitten to bring it back from the dead. As a side-note that is the most cat-like behavior I have ever seen depicted in a card, 10/10 - would only come back from the dead for snacks. Priest of Forgotten Gods and Ayara, First of Locthwain are our consistent sources of sacrificw value, refueling our hand and slowly torturing our opponent to death. Cavalier of Night gives us more direct removal and allows us to bring back a valuable low drop on death. Finally I'm running Ob Nixilis, the Hate-Twisted because I rarely get to see that card get run, and his ability can be used quite flexibly in our decks. Need cards? Target your own creature? Need to hit face, kill what you need? Need the opponent to have more cards in hand to force them to discard? The options are limited but varied, and I always like making opponents pay life for their cards. So evil!

The sacrifice payoffs:

These cards are how we get our opponents. Vindictive Vampire lets our opponents feel the pain our creatures feel while dying, and Syr Konrad, the Grim allows us to machinegun our opponents with both the sacrifice and the discard side of the Prankler(more on that later). Sorcerer's Broom provides a way to generate more board presence and sacrifice fodder, giving you an army to sweep the competition with. Liliana, Dreadhorde General is just a busted "I win" 6 mana planeswalker in black, what's scarier than that? 

“Each player loses 1 life and draws a card”: Rankle likes to have a good time, no matter the cost. Unfortunately for our opponents, Rankle loves sharing, both the pleasure and the pain! This is the mode you are most likely to be using once you've dumped your hand, giving our opponent a little treat! Isn't sharing fun?

The gas:

Even with Rankle's card-drawing ability, our deck plays best when it can be liberal with how it uses ita resources. Dumping your hand of small creatures on the board and sacrificing them will usually have you in a dominating position, but we need to make sure we stay there! Eternal Taskmaster, Order of Midnight, and The Cauldron of Eternity are here to Lazarus back our creatures for them to contiune eternally serving their faerie-god. Tome of Legends should be easy to activate multiple times with a hasty commander, and Order of Midnight and Dread Presence both bring us potential card draw and more. Finally we have a Bolas's Citadel because we are an edgy horror movie bad guy who isnt afraid to bleed to get what they want.

“Each player discards a card”: What do Magic playerd hate even more than being forced to sacrifice creaures? Being forced to discard cards from their hand! There's a real sick pleasure in staring straight at your opponent's face as it contorts in discomfort while they're choosing which card to discard. I HIGHLY recommend it.

The pain:

This is how we bring on the pain for our opponents. While Knight of the Ebon Legion and Spawn of Mayhem allow us to strategically inflict damage to our opponents, the rest of these cards are here for the psychological pain. Burglar Rat and Yarok's Fenlurker both do similae things, with the rat being sacrificeable to Piper of the Swarm and the fenlurker exiling a card for good. Plaguecrafter is a way to gey rid of a single annoying creature or planeswalker, or to simply force your opponent to discard more cards. Legion's End, Murderous Rider, and Price of Fame are some of our most consistent removal, and it still baffles me to see black Brawl lists not running Price of Fame. 2 mana kill your commander (Oko laughs) with surveil 2 is quite good. We round out with a cheeky Davriel, Rogue Shadowmage, who seems to have finally found a good home in Brawl. Use him to keep your opponent low on resources, forcing them to play the game on your conditions. Jeepers!

The mana base:

Hooray, it's a monocolored deck! The mana base in this case is oozing swamps, with the two nonbasic black lands letting us squeeze extra value from our land slots. Since sacrifice is quite core to the deck we have 3 lands that sacrifice for extra effects, could be used to trigger a Sorcerer's Broom or two in edge cases. And yes, even though this is a mono-black deck, we still run Arcane Signet. Even I am too scared to try building a deck without it.

Happy Halloween folks, have a safe n' sane one :)