Colors of MTGO pauper: BLACK. (Tortured Zombies)

When I started playing MTG, black was among my favourite colors. I used to look at cards like terror or dark banish and think "so, you can destroy a creature that costed like, six mana with a 2 mana spell, this is simply amazing!".

Now, many years later, I will talk about a deck that has almost no removal at all (at least for a black deck).

I know... MBC is probably the most powerful monoblack deck you can build in pauper. Abusing the power of cards like chittering rats and liliana specter brings joy to the thoughts of any darkmage.

But, one thing I am trying to bring here are decks that aren't played so often. I am pretty sure you can find great articles about MBC on the web already.

I want to talk about another monoblack strategy: ZOMBIES!

Yup, maybe our little putrid friends aren't so disruptive, but they do have some perks.

First, lets talk about the KING OF ZOMBIES, mister gray merchant of asphodel.

Yup, this is one of the staple pieces on MBC decks, well it is one of the central pieces in my zombies list as well. The idea here is to play merchant, and possibly recur it as many times necessary to drain the opponent.

Another great card for zombish draining is good old gempalm polluter. For 2 mana you can draw a card and cause some damage to your opponent life total, again, you can rinse and repeat many times with this deck, until the job is done.

The rest of the deck is basically trying to survive or trying to recur the graveyard, one of the central recurring pieces in the deck is good old tortured existence because of that, I am trying to use as many creatures in the deck as I can, because tortured existence is a better card when you have a decent share of creatures to select with it.

Because we need to reach 5 mana to put gray into play I also added 4 dimir aqueduct, this will slow down the pace a bit in the early game but I feel reaching 5 mana is more important than having a superfast start with this deck. (This is not a suicidal version of zombies)

The current list:

Lands:
16 swamps
4 dimir aqueduct (could be any karoo land)

1 mana:
4 Putrid Imp
4 Carrion Feeder
4 Shambling Goblin
4 Tortured existence
4 Ghoulcaller's Chant

2 mana:
4 Nameless Inversion

3 mana:
4 Ghoulraiser

4 mana:
4 Grave Scrabbler

5 mana:
4 Gray Merchant of Asphodel

6 mana:
4 Gempalm Polluter

Total creatures: 28
Total non-creatures: 12

Draining outlets: 8
Recurring spells/creatures: 16
Removal spells/creatures: 8

I don't have a sideboard for it yet.

So, the deck isn't very easy to play, but it is superfun, feels nice to hold and grind, until you gempalm for 7 on the EOT and gray for 8 on your turn.

We have 12 small guys to flood the field with little zombies, this will help gempalm to be more effective on the early turns. Also those little guys have some utility attached to them: Carrion Feeder let's you send whatever zombie you need back to the graveyard, so you can return it to hand and re-use it, this works nicely with Gray Merchant or Grave Scrabbler. 

Putrid Imp is an alternative way to discard Grave Scrabbler this can be useful if you have no tortured existence in play. Shambling Goblin is a great blocker, also it can kill small guys and be recurred sometimes. Nothing feels better than killing a recently played delver with our little goblin.

Ghoulcaller's Chant is great in this deck, not only it will recur creatures, it can bring back Nameless Inversion. For only one mana, you get to re-use 2 cards.

Ghoulraiser doesn't give you much control over the card that is coming back, but he is a pretty powerful card in this deck. Don't forget he can also return Nameless Inversion to hand.

I am sorry, I don't have a sideboard for this deck yet. I would guess it could have problens against fast hard to block combo decks, like izzet-fiend, selesnya-hexproof-auras and infect. So some of the sideboard could be dedicated to address those.

Also, graveyard hate is a problem. If you can't recur the graveyard, the deck is left with a bunch of bears that will probably be outsized by 4/4s and 5/5s. It is possible that some sort of defense against graveyard hate or some sort of alternative plan to put some pressure could be nice there.

We could go more beefy/aggro using bigger or evasive zombies and less graveyard recurring. Or splash some color to offer artifact removal. I guess I would try the first option, I guess there are some beefy zombies out there to abuse. (Embalmed Brawler?!)

That's it, cya! =)