Midnight Pact

J

jorael

Guest
The new Pacts from Future Sight looked very cool to add to a deck with Nightly Disease: for 4 mana you can tutor for one of them, without any counters on the enchantment, and play it immediately!

This is the deck I played:


Deep Im-Pact
16 Swamp
4 Mountain
4 Rakdos Canarium

4 Rakdos Signet
4 Night Dealings
4 Slaughter Pact
4 Pact of the Titan
4 Breath of Daarigaz

4 Slith Bloodletter
2 Keldon Vandals
2 Pyre Zombie
2 Maga, Traitor to Mortals
2 Reiver Demon
4 Korlash, Heir to Blackblade
Korlash was a last minute change and they replaced 4 Sedge Trolls. I wanted to add some toolbox utility, but searching multiple Korlashes for mana acceleration also seemed very nice. The deck certainly needs mana.

The tutoring
As said, the pacts have a cmc of 0 so you can always search for them and play a surprise blocker or removal. This makes it worth to pay all that mana for Night Dealings. Breath of Daarigaz has a cmc of 2 so is also easy to search for. And when you play it kickered it garantuees you have enough counters on Night Dealings :). Maga needs only 3 counters and avoids any damage prevention your opponent may have.

The beating
-Slith Bloodletter is an early defender that can get bigger on occations. With enough mana you can play Breath of Daarigaz and regenerate it. I'm the only one playing this creature in our group. Guess I'm the only fan...
-Pact of Titan is a great suprise blocker or attacker (play it at the end of turn of your opponent).
-Korlash is a true beatstick. With Night Dealings you can search for more copies and use the Grandeur ability that requires no additional mana. That gives you even more mana to search nice stuff and pay your upkeep triggers (you don't want to lose the game, do ya?).
-Maga and Reiver Demon let you make good use of all that mana!

The only creature I consider dropping is Pyre Zombie. It's a recursive thread, but I dropped some mountains, so 2 red mana might be too hard to obtain regularly. Do you have any suggestions what may be interesting creature to replace these 2?
 

Ransac

CPA Trash Man
Wow, I never thought of using Night Dealings to play them..... mostly because I never knew what "Night Dealings" was.

I like the deck, and am curious to build a 5-color version to play all of the pacts and use Upwelling to stockpile mana.


Ransac, cpa trash man
 
J

jorael

Guest
Tnx!

A 5 color approach might be interesting, if you manage to have enough black mana to support Night Dealings and play spells of 4 other colors. Hmm... Korlash tutors for swamps so you can use the Ravnica multi-lands to fix your mana. If I had the Rakdos one, it would have been in this deck.

The green Pact might not be that usefull with Night Dealings: you would pay 4 mana to tutor for the Summoner's Pact, then tutor for a green creature, pay the cost of the creature and 4 mana during your next upkeep. That seems a lot of effort when you might be able to tutor for the creature straight away if you have enough counters on Night Dealings.

You already divide the mana costs over several turns, so Upwelling might not be necessary?

That said, adding blue and white for those Pacts seems very cool!
 
E

Ephraim

Guest
If you do, in fact, want to include the blue or white pacts in the deck, I would recommend that you find room for Paradise Mantle in the deck. You would be able to tutor it up with Night Dealings without removing any counters. My biggest concern with that plan, however, is that both the white and blue pacts require you to pay two coloured mana next turn. If you're only splashing blue or white, that seems like a large and unnecessary risk to take. One other potential solution to this problem would be to play with dual lands (either old or new) so that when you search for swamps with Korlash you can fetch Godless Shrines or Underground Seas.
 
L

Limited

Guest
I think splashing for blue would be an option, if only the Pact of Negation wasn't so expensive :(

But splashing for the white one? The double mana cost will kill you (literally!)

Jorael, did you consider adding a way to shuffle cards from your graveyard back into your library? It seems that, in multiplayer, you might want to recur those Slaughter Pacts..

If you splash blue, you could add Mnemonic Nexus (two copies would do). Or, if you don't want to another color (because you want a lot of swamps?) you might even consider Junktroller.. its not really removal (so might not be the best replacement for the Pyre Zombies) but it does allow you to stock Slaughter Pacts back into your library. Furthermore, it survives the Breath of Darigaaz and can mess with an opponents graveyard-foolery.

Just a thought.
 
J

jorael

Guest
Recurring the pacts is interesting. Not sure the deck needs that to win tough.

That said, Junktroller is an excellent suggestion! It foils its fair share of graveyard strategies and is a great blocker!
 

Shabbaman

insert avatar here
Night dealings is brilliant! The one card (one, because you can get it with Summoner's pact) you missed is Djinn illuminatus. With the Djinn you can replicate the pacts infinite times. If you have a way to win with infinite giant tokens right away (dunno, Goblin bombardment perhaps) you're golden. Otherwise you're screwed. Unless you can pay for infinite Pact upkeep ;)

I found an article by Chris Millar (unfortunately he stopped writing) on this combo. He suggests Angel's grace (W, you can't loose this turn).
 

Shabbaman

insert avatar here
If it's only been dead for a year, you can easily tie it together with ducttape. Haven't you seen my front page necro? I'm on a necro spree ;)
 
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