MtG: Threats and Answers

Erebos, God of the Dead (Career of Evil)

A Magic deck boils down to two things: threats and answers.  Everything else in the deck is merely there to get to those threats and answers.

The best threats and answers are cheap to cast, either due to the card's actual converted mana cost (CMC), its alternate casting cost, or due to other cards accelerating or cheating its casting cost. 

Commander is a format with 100 card decks, each a different card title (given that functional copies of cards exist, just with different names, you can end up with multiples in a deck).  Subtracting land, alternate mana sources (artifacts and ramp spells), and draw spells, a deck should ideally contain between 40-50 threats and answers.

My decks rarely hit that number, because another bad habit of mine is to run cards based on art, subjective flavor, or because the ideal version of the card is $$$$$ and I refuse to pay that, so I run a substandard version (typically having a higher cmc and probably a worse, although similar, effect).

Still, my recently built Erebos deck pulls this off, perhaps better than anticipated, and despite the large amount of cards in the deck that have cmc of 7-9 (good deck theory is maybe less than five of these cards, because for that much mana, you should win, but you don't want these cards in your opening hand).

Harley played its inaugural game, then its second game.  It turns out that sticking to one color results in some unintended synergies that forced answers.  In the case of this monoblack deck, this is without the use of its trademark tutors (currently in my BW deck) or a dedicated graveyard theme (though that IS there in bits and pieces).  As a whole, this deck would benefit from my adding Conjurer's Closet, Cloudstone Curio, and Skull Collector, and not just because of Gray Merchant and Rune-Scarred Demon.  Black simply has too many delicious enter the battlefield abilities to not run them.

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Yet, adding those three cards would mean pulling the two artifacts from my Norin, the Wary deck, which needs them far more.  Skull Collector may yet make it in, only time will tell.  I would have to start making flavor-based cuts and that is always difficult for me - Nightmare is sweet art and loves a monoblack deck, but for 6 cmc, there are stronger choices, both in and out of the deck. 

I needed Harley to make that cut - he doesn't let flavor affect his card choices all that much.

And sometimes, that is what people need - a second set of eyes.

Decklist.  Suffice it to say, Gray Merchant shenanigans are guaranteed.