by Johnny Cycles, December 12th, 2025

Death and Taxes got a new toy from Avatar: The Last Airbender and I’m super excited to punish my opponents for playing all those Ephemerates, Lightning Bolts, and Teferis! In my experience, Death and Taxes is an Orzhov deck centered around land hate as much as anything. And while I think that deck has plenty of fun cards (looking at you White Orchid Phantom), I’m eschewing altogether in favor of a Mono Black version that is playing one of my guiltiest of guilty pleasure cards.

I played this card when it was legal in Standard and let me tell you, it is the epitome of both jank and being tantalizingly powerful, yet persistently disappointing. But I just can’t quit trying to make it work.

Before I break down the deck and how it is (and isn’t) a Death and Taxes strategy, let’s take a look at the list!

Decklist – Mono Black Taxes

by Johnny Cycles
Format: Modern

Creatures (17)

4 Dauthi Voidwalker
3 Mai, Scornful Striker
4 Orcish Bowmasters
2 Phyrexian Obliterator
4 Sheoldred, the Apocalypse

Enchantments (6)

4 Waste Not
2 Phyrexian Arena

Spells (15)

4 Fatal Push
4 Thoughtseize
3 March of Wretched Sorrow
4 Dark Deal

Lands (22)

2 Bloodstained Mire
1 Cabal Coffers
1 Castle Locthwain
3 Field of Ruin
1 Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx
1 Phyrexian Tower
4 Polluted Delta
6 Swamp
1 Takenuma, Abandoned Mire
2 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth

Sideboard (15)

4 Damping Sphere
3 Crypt Incursion
3 Force of Despair
3 Toxic Deluge
2 Flare of Denial

Deck Tech

Primary Game Plan

We are looking to tax our opponent in a variety of ways, first and foremost for drawing and discarding cards. Sheoldred, the Apocalypse and Orcish Bowmasters are our two ways of punishing our opponent for drawing cards. The current meta has a variety of decks looking to draw multiple cards in a turn, so these two creatures should be good all on their own.

But we’re hoping to really get our opponent with Dark Deal. This 3-mana sorcery bridges the gap between our two strategies of gaining value from our opponent drawing and discarding cards, since it does both. Many of the top decks in the format are there because they rarely run out of cards. This puts Dark Deal in a unique position to shine, as long as we have one of our other pieces out.

Waste Not is our chief payoff for when our opponent discards cards, but we’re also playing Dauthi Voidwalker. This former Modern all-star has fallen out of favor in the current meta, but it still does a whole lot for our deck. It hits hard, first and foremost. It hates on graveyard decks, secondly. And, most importantly for our plan, it gives us another way to take advantage of forcing our opponent to discard.

Our second means of taxing our opponent is much more straightforward and requires no other pieces on our battlefield. Obviously, Modern is full of noncreature spells and we’re hoping to play this unfairly by including a variety of sources of lifegain to counterbalance the damage we may take from this Human Noble Ally. Sheoldred, the Apocalypse is our most powerful and synergistic card that gains us life, but we’re also playing three copies of March of Wretched Sorrow to help pad our life total.

Rounding out our 60 is another guilty pleasure card, albeit one with more stand-alone power than Waste Not. Phyrexian Obliterator is both a great attacker and a way to stop combat altogether. As a pseudo Ensnaring Bridge, we can sometimes hide behind this Phyrexian Horror while Sheoldred, the Apocalypse and Mai, Scornful Striker drains our opponent out and stops them from playing noncreature spells.

Phyrexian Arena gives us a bit of card draw, which can end up gaining us 1 life a turn, if we have Sheoldred, the Apocalypse out.

Otherwise, we’re playing a bunch of utility lands alongside a healthy number of basic Swamps.

Sideboard

There are lots of options in Mono Black to choose from to shore up some of our matches. On the graveyard front, I’ve gone with Crypt Incursion, mainly for the lifegain it gives us. Damping Sphere gives us some hate against Tron, Storm, and Amulet Titan. Toxic Deluge is a nice catch-all boardwipe, while Flare of Malice and Force of Despair impressed me in Rat Tribal as good answers to many problematic permanents.

Match 1 vs. Affinity

Match 2 vs. Airship Affinity

Match 3 vs. Boros Energy

Match 4 vs. Tron

Match 5 vs. Mono White Stoneforge

Overall Record: 2-3

Impressions from Game Play

Well, that went about as well as I expected it to. Being in Mono Black means we have the tools to compete against most decks, which should translate into a few wins. However, given that we’re a Midrange deck with little card draw and essentially eight potentially dead cards in our deck, we should expect our fair share of losses.

Overall, I was once again super excited about Waste Not, only to be once again disappointed. Too often it was totally unimpactful. And even when we curved out with a turn 2 Waste Not and turn 3 Dark Deal, the results were…underwhelming. Some of this is variance, of course. Surely if we managed this 10 times, at least some of the time would see us find mana and action to cast with that mana. We did it about three times and never go so lucky.

Dark Deal, on the other hand, surprised me with its effectiveness. There were multiple games in which my opponent tutored up something that we then made them discard with Dark Deal. I don’t think this is the most efficient way of interacting with our opponent, but it was a nice plus to a card that otherwise doesn’t do much.

But let me say something else about these two cards and how they work together. On curve, it takes five cards to resolve this combo. If we mulligan and/or play Fatal Push or Thoughtseize on turn 1, then we’re often left drawing one or zero cards off of our own Dark Deal. Thus, if our opponent has a hand full of lands and creatures, we are way behind on resources.

All that being said, the deck felt clunky and played clunky. With 22 lands, we managed several games where we couldn’t find a fourth land AND several games where we flooded out. In one game, we drew 14 of our 22 lands. Again, variance, but it was super frustrating to feel that poor luck was hindering us from playing to the deck’s potential. And when that potential is already not as powerful as the meta, not being able to execute our game plan led to some very painful losses.

Mai, Scornful Striker was rarely super impactful, unfortunately. In the one match we had against Storm (not posted), we didn’t draw it in three games. Sigh.

Otherwise, she was mildly annoying, but not game ending.

What’s really ironic about all the matches I played is that I didn’t run into Jeskai Blink or Orzhov Blink a single time. These were precisely the decks I thought we could punish. Instead, we played aggressive creature strategies more than any other, with a few Midrange combo decks, as well.

Finally, we managed to win enough games against the decks we encountered to convince me that we can compete, but we need more tools to make our deck more consistent.

Different Direction?

Well, this isn’t so much a new direction as it is what I played in my Tinybones Waste Not deck awhile back. We need more impactful cards and an alternative way to win the game. The well-known Urza’s Saga plus mana silver bullet artifacts does just this. Meanwhile, The Rack speeds up our clock.

We need more card draw and Sign in Blood is one of my favorites. At 2 mana, it allows us to resolve it before our opponent has pulled too far ahead on board if we play on turn 2. It gives us a powerful spell to cast off of the mana we get from forcing our opponent to discard a land with Waste Not. And, in the right spot, it can function as a lethal burn spell, with the potential to deal a whopping 8 points of damage if we have both Sheoldred, the Apocalypse and Orcish Bowmasters out.

Ensnaring Bridge could buy us enough time to burn our opponent out, while Karn, the Great Creator can find it (and other powerful artifacts) from our sideboard.

Update

I managed five more matches with some of the changes I detail above. I cut Dauthi Voidwalker, Mai, Scornful Striker, and Phyrexian Obliterator for four copies of The Rack, the usual suspects of silver bullet artifacts, and a couple of copies of Nethergoyf to give us another potential threat. I’d love to report that the deck really hummed, but our record ended up being 2-3.

We got the Urza’s Saga win, as expected, and we got a win with The Rack, but the other problems still persisted. We got mana screwed and flooded and our four copies of Sign in Blood just weren’t consistently enough. I will say that when we had it on turn 2, our deck ran much better.

The problems of Waste Not and Dark Deal also continued.

One other note of irony…our first match was against Jeskai Blink. We won 2-0.

Conclusion

I wish I could claim some sort of supernatural ability to see the future, as I said before playing a single game that I thought our build wasn’t the best for Mai, Scornful Striker and that Waste Not would need to go to make the deck truly competitive. Alas, I’ve just played Waste Not enough to know the heartbreaking reality of its mystical allure.

Still, I do think a Mono Black burn deck can use Mai, Scornful Striker to help kill our opponent. And I do think it would involve Sheoldred, the Apocalypse and Orcish Bowmasters. Perhaps Ensnaring Bridge and Karn, the Great Creator really is the key to making her work.

For now, I’m moving on from Waste Not. I need to give my janky heart some time to recover before moving on to my Rakdos Steal and Sac deck! I built this deck before I saw Phoenix Fleet Airship in action, but having lost to that mythic artifact now a few times, I think it’ll fit perfectly in our brew! I can’t wait!

Thanks for reading and watching!