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Peasant Magic Decks

UB Ritual Agony
June 07

First, I do not take credit for this deck. I found it on Frederic Meurin's Peasant Magic blog. It may not be his design either, but nevertheless it is a very powerful Peasant Magic deck.

This deck is a combo deck built around abusing the Storm ability of Tendrils of Agony, often dealing 20 or more damage in a single turn and early at that. Tendrils of Agony is a sorcery that costs 2BB to cast, and reads:

Target player loses 2 life and you gain 2 life. Storm (When you play this spell, copy it for each spell played before it this turn. You may choose new targets for the copies.)

4 Dark Ritual
4 Cabal Ritual
4 Lotus Petal
4 Chromatic Sphere
4 High Tide
1 Demonic Consultation (U)
4 Tendrils of Agony (U)
4 Sleight of Hand
4 Words of Wisdom
3 Ideas Unbound
2 Compulsive Research
4 Frantic Search
18 Island

SIDEBOARD

4 Hydroblast
4 Hindering Touch
3 Deep Analysis
4 Swamp

As you can see, the main deck runs no Swamps despite quite a few black spells. Lotus Petal and Chromatic Sphere provide eight sources of the one black mana you'll need to set this dynamite off (and activating the Sphere allows you to draw a card as well). Dark Ritual and Cabal Ritual will provide all the black mana you'll need to cast Tendrils as well as the spells you'll cast preceding it. High Tide doubles your blue mana on the turn you go off, especially if played before casting Frantic Search (which allows you to untap up to three lands). Sleight of Hand, Words of Wisdom, Ideas Unbound, Compulsive Research, and Frantic Research all provide card drawing (and ultimately, card searching). Demonic Consultation will let you search for that one card you need to fire off the combo.

Here's a potential turn four with three Islands in play:

Draw a card
Tap Island, play High Tide (Islands now produce two blue mana each until end of turn)
Tap Island, Tap Island, play Frantic Search (Untap three Islands, draw two cards, discard two cards you don't really need such as an Island or another High Tide)
play Lotus Petal, sacrifice it for one black mana
play Dark Ritual (three black mana floating in mana pool)
Tap Island
play Ideas Unbound, draw three cards
play Chromatic Sphere (two black mana floating in mana pool)
pay one black mana, sacrifice Chromatic Sphere (add one black mana to your mana pool, now total of two black mana floating in your mana pool, draw a card)
tap Island, play Compulsive Research (draw three cards, discard an Island, one black mana still floating in your mana pool)
play Island
tap Island, play Cabal Ritual (as you've now put ten cards in the graveyard this turn alone, you have Threshold so add BBBBB to your mana pool, one blue and five black mana floating in your mana pool)
play Sleight of Hand (draw two cards & put one of them on bottom of your library, five black mana still floating in your mana pool)
play Tendrils of Agony - nine spells cast before Tendrils allows you to place nine more copies of it on the stack...do twenty damage to your opponent, gain 20 life!!!

So on this turn, you've essentially drawn 12 cards, discarded three of those and put one other on the bottom of your library so you've netted eight cards to the six or seven you probably started the turn with. With all the card drawing the blue in this deck provides, this really isn't a "god hand". Just having some combination of High Tide, Frantic Search, and one of the Rituals can probably produce enough mana to get the whole thing started and with any decent draws from the blue spells, get you enough other cards to keep it going until you can cast a fatal or near fatal Tendrils.