Old School MTG: Mono-Black Yawgmoth Reanimator

It's Rocktober! Let's reanimate some robot corpses.

I'm playing this deck all month, just for casual games. It's quite fun!

It's heavy on mana sources, probably too heavy. Basalt Monolith is good with Priest of Yawgmoth for ramping to 6 mana to cast the robots. It even gets to 9 mana with relative ease for Colossus of Sardia, although untapping it is a challenge. Still, getting in there with one big attack isn't bad and then saccing the Colossus to the Priest to cast a huge Drain Life is a neat trick.

Going up to 4x Animate Dead is probably right, more right than running Skull of Orm in that slot. But the skull is so cool! Another little book is probably also right, shaving a monolith. Otherwise, the play pattern seems fine. Drawing cards is an issue, but that's true of most non-blue decks. The pair of Howling Mines is symmetrical, but this deck wants to tap out with threats every turn so they work better than big books. Against a competitive deck, they would be a liability.

I tried running Su-Chi in an earlier build of this deck thinking that saccing it to the Priest would be neat. It would produce 4 black mana from the Priest's ability plus another 4 colorless mana from the Su-Chi's ability. But more often than not, the Su-Chi would die at an inopportune time and I would take mana burn. There's probably an even more over-the-top version of this deck that maxes out Priests and Colossus. Colossusi? Colossuses? Colossuses. We'll go with that.

Running Yawgmoth Demon is a powerful one-of in this deck. There are usually plenty of artifacts on the board to sac. If the skies are clear, a 6/6 flying first-striker can make quick work of the opponent. If the skies are not clear, the demon can make quick work of almost anything in the way up there and blocks angels and djinn like a champ.

As you might expect, sticking an Abyss and playing a critical mass of artifact creatures will eventually grind out any opponent that doesn't have a way to stop it. That's not exactly what I was going for here, but it's won me a couple of games I had no business winning otherwise.