Hero's Downfall

Mono-Black Devotion

Owen Turtenwald

1st Place at Super Sunday Series Championship on 2/9/2014

So the first ever Super Sunday Series Championship has come and gone with no surprise that Owen T was able to walk away victorious. He has become something of the authority on Mono-Black Devotion with previous wins at GP Albuquerque and most recently SCG Indianapolis. This iteration of the deck hasn’t changed much from when we last saw it in action at the SCG tournament with only a few updates from new Born of the Gods offerings.
Lands (26)• 18 Swamp• 4 Mutavault• 4 Temple of Deceit
Creatures (16)• 4 Desecration Demon• 4 Gray Merchant of Asphodel• 4 Nightveil Specter• 4 Pack Rat
Spells (18)• 4 Underworld Connections• 4 Bile Blight• 2 Devour Flesh• 4 Hero’s Downfall• 4 Thoughtseize
Sideboard• 3 Lifebane Zombie• 2 Dark Betrayal• 2 Devour Flesh• 1 Doom Blade• 2 Erebos, God of the Dead• 2 Drown in Sorrow• 3 Duress
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The creatures all remain the same with Pack Rat into Nightveil Specter into Desecration Demon into Gray Merchant of Asphodel working up the curve. The manabase also remains entirely unchanging with full sets of Mutavault which double in the deck as rats to bolster Pack Rat and Temple of Deceit the chosen Scry land although the deck doesn’t run any blue spells per se. The draw/discard package again is no different with Underworld Connections to not only fuel the hand but also devotion count and Thoughtseize which is perhaps the most powerful turn one play in Standard at the moment. Now where we find the changes are in the removal suite that still has a full set of Hero’s Downfall but has eschewed Pharika’s Cure and scaled Devour Flesh down to two in order to squeeze in Born of the Gods new offering Bile Blight.

Now as the tournament was a multi-format event the win does speak more volumes to the talent of Owen as a whole more then the power of this deck. But you can rest assured that he puts more then the average players time in testing and tweaking so you can be sure that if this is his weapon of choice for his perception of the current meta then you would be wise to take his advise and try to dominate with it yourself.
Eric J Seltzer
@ejseltzer on Twitter