Mono-Black Skeletons Deck Guide For MTG Standard

Not all Magic: The Gathering decks are built the same, and this Mono-Black Skeletons deck takes a different approach to victory, putting up its owner’s life points as collateral to win by any means. However, this means you need to tread carefully, as you’ll be leaving yourself open to a quick loss.

Difficulty-wise, this deck can be quite tricky to get a grasp on, but its win rate sits just below 60%, meaning that it’s a highly successful archetype once you get the hang of it.

Mono-Black Skeletons Deck List

While not entirely stripped back to just creatures and the odd spell, this Mono-Black Skeletons deck list also isn’t spread out and complex to the point where it’s overwhelming. However, you’re going to be working with just two copies of a lot of cards, which means you’ll need to stay on top of where they are to avoid accidentally discarding your final copy of an important card.

How This Mono-Black Skeletons Deck Works

This deck breaks a match down into phases, where in the early phase, your goal is to try and get a copy of Cecil, Dark Knight on the board and do damage while you protect it enough to transform. This is difficult because it would take five unblocked attacks to get you below half health so that it can transform.

You can speed up the life loss by casting Timeline Culler for its Void cost, which is two life and one black mana. Between incoming attacks, Cecil doing opponent damage, and Timeline Culler’s Void cost, you could feasibly transform Dark Cecil after three turns and move onto the next phase, building up your battlefield and starting to pull back some of the life you lost.

If you want to play more conservatively, you can look to slowly build your creature presence and use spells like Case of the Stashed Skeleton and Corpses of the Lost to get some token creatures out and buff their power too.

Ultimately, you’re going to win using creatures, but there’s a decent diversity of spells to frustrate your opponent, regardless of which deck they’re using. You need to be careful, given the life cost of some actions in the game, so you don’t leave yourself defenseless.

Ideal Starting Hand

While there isn’t an entirely regimented best starting hand that there can be for other decks, you absolutely want a copy of Cecil, Dark Knight in hand, and a copy of Timeline Culler is also hugely helpful if you want to go for the aggressive strategy of transforming Cecil as soon as possible.

Otherwise, you still want the Cecil in hand at the start, since it’s a great one mana creature to have at the start of the game, but you’ll want cards like Forsaken Miner, Stab, and Case of the Stashed Skeleton alongside at least three lands instead.

Changes You Can Make

One card you may want to consider adding to this deck is Unstoppable Slasher. While it isn’t a skeleton, it’s become a huge card for black decks, given that it can halve your opponents’ health with each attack. It’s a great card for leveling the playing field, should you be taking the life-loss approach and need to even things out, or just generally against life-gain decks.

Any further changes could impact the balance of this deck, but once you’ve tried it out, you’ll know exactly what changes need to be made to mold it to your play style.

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