What I'm doing, and what I'm doing it with.

The Project:

Forging your own path to success is hard.  It's even harder in a game like Magic, and especially in a well-established, well-researched format like Pauper.  It's a long, long way for any homebrewed deck to go... but it's a path I don't just walk, but a path I relish walking.  I'm ShatteredSphere, and I'm a pauper brewer with, possibly, delusions of grandeur - I think I can take a deck that's not a variant on an established archetype (that I know of, anyway) and make it work well enough to go 4-0 in multiple daily events.  This is my captain's log, my record of what I've done and how I've done it.  I'll take it one game at a time, and one day I'll see my name on top of a decklist on the Mothership that nobody's ever seen there before.  And first up, my own pride and joy: Rakdos Nightmares (list after break!)

About the Deck:

Rakdos Nightmares is a deck I've been tinkering with for months, ever since a friend of mine asked if it was possible to build a pauper version of a deck he had built years ago--a B/R control deck built around the Nightmare creatures from Torment.  Being a fan of the idea--since I had had a ~30% win rate versus his original with even my best same-format builds--I brewed up Pauper version 1.0, which was basically a straight port of his old deck, minus rares/uncommons.  It functioned about as well as you'd expect a 1.0 port of a strange deck type to: not well.  My tinkering and rebuilding has pushed it to places I'd never expected, because they radically changed the character of the deck.  I only recently took to calling it version 2.x, but I'm now at version 2.5 (which could almost be called 3.0, at this point), and it works well enough that I think I can stop the major tinkering and only deal with minor tweaks from now on... I may be wrong, but for now.....

Pauper: Rakdos Nightmares (v. 2.5 - the first Grim Harvest build)

 

Creatures (23):

4x Carrion Feeder
4x Mesmeric Fiend
4x Fume Spitter
4x Petravark
4x Faceless Butcher
3x Bleak Coven Vampires

NonCreature Spells (17)

1x Diabolic Edict
4x Lightning Bolt
4x  Echoing Decay
3x Grim Harvest
2x Sylvok Lifestaff

Lands (23):

4x Rakdos Guildgate
4x Great Furnace
4x Vault of Whispers
1x Forgotten Cave
2x Barren Moor
4x Swamp
4x Mountain

Sideboard:

3x Choking Sands
3x Echoing Ruin
4x Electrickery
2x Terminate
3x Diabolic Edict

This is the build I'll be working off from now on.  DE grinding (won't be every day, but often) starts on Saturday, so come back then for a tournament report!