Historic Mono-Black Aggro by Martin Juza

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Hypothetically speaking, if the metagame were to change and suddenly the Pact Oracle combo became the most played deck in Historic by a lot, what would be a good counter deck? One of the decks that can beat the Pact deck pretty badly is Historic Mono-Black Aggro. A fast clock combined with discard spells to disrupt the opponent is a great way to fight against the combo strategy.

Relying on lowering your own life total to enable Death’s Shadow and Scourge of the Skyclaves isn’t an issue here because the Pact deck doesn’t pressure you at all; they almost always win just by decking themselves with Tainted Pact and then using Thassa’s Oracle trigger. 

The one problem is that this Mono-Black deck has extremely polarized matchups. While decks like Pact, other combo decks and slow ramp strategies are a great matchup for you because they generally can’t punish you for aggressively lowering your life total, you don’t really want to get paired against aggro decks like Gruul or Mono-Red where starting the game by taking 10 damage from your own cards. You’ll just play right into your opponent’s game plan. 

Use this deck only if you expect Pact and decks like Bant Ramp or Azorius control to show up in big numbers. If you get the metagame right, you can get rewarded with a lot of really good matchups!