Post Rotation Decks Episode 8: Who turned out the lights?

Blah blah introduction blah blah, here's the decklist:

4x Vampire Hexmage
4x Gatekeeper of Malakir
4x Skinrender
3x Grave Titan
2x Geth, Lord of the Vault


4x Grasp of Darkness
4x Deathmark
4x Mind Sludge
2x Painful Quandry
4x Sign in Blood

4x Verdant Catacombs
4x Marsh Flats
17x Swamp

How many times have you been to a standard event, let's say FNM and across the table you were looking at swamps? Probably not recently. The big decks that used black were:

Jund
Esper Control
Vampires
Grixis Control
BR Aggro

Now, with the exception of Mark making his UW Control deck go Esper for one event, I haven't actually seen any of those decks played in an incredibly long time. All the other colors, on the other hand, have seen heavy play. Naya, Bant (Mythic), UW Control, Primeval Titan decks, Stompy (Zoo), and Mono-green have all seen incredibly heavy play. Hold the phone, those all include either green or white! Just like when Jund was the boogeyman and anti-jund decks were GW or Naya, causing every blue player to play 4x Flashfreeze, I feel theres a dis-porportionate amount of GW decks making Deathmark a maindeck-able card.

This is basically an aggressive control deck. only 10 non-land cards in the deck don't directly hurt your opponent. Planeswalkers are taken care of by the Hexmage, creatures are removed by the Gatekeeper, Skinrender, Grasp, and Deathmark, and their hand is attacked with Mind Sludge and Painful Quandry. Once everything is locked down, Grave Titan can win the game by itself. If that's not enough or if you don't draw it, we have another 6 mana finisher in the form of Geth, Lord of the Vault. Geth can make any board position good by building an army by himself helping to stabilize during any weak board position.

One important thing to note before I end this installment, be weary when using Skinrender. If there are no other creatures in play, you can't play him because he is required to put the -1/-1 counters on a creature when it lands. That means if he is the only one in play, he must kill himself so you payed 2BB to discard a card.

I like this deck, and I look forward to going into the red zone with an army of zombies soon