Dark Helix - Jacob Hughes

Creatures
2x Kokusho, The evening star
3x Twisted Abomination

4x Putrid Imp

9 Total
 
Spells

4x Raven's Crime
2x Barter in Blood

3x Spellweaver Helix

2x Promise of Power

4x Diabolic Tutor

2x Decree of Pain

1x Plauge Wind

2x Corrupt

2x Welding Jar

3x phyrexian arena

3x insidious dreams

Total 28
 
Land
23x Swamp

Total 23
Total Cards 60

So this deck revolves around gettin raven's crime imprinted on helix along with another powerful sorcery and keep retracing raven's crime.  It's been doing ok but seems slow and pretty easy to disrupt.  It does great mid to late in the game when i can trigger multiple sorceries off one raven's crime retrace.  Kokusho, corrupt, and promise of power are the only win conditions but kokusho's hard to deal with when they keep getting thier hand removed.  So i was wondering what your thoughts are and if there's better cards/win outlets?  should i go to straight discard?

Nice deck idea I must say.

You got some good ideas and generally good deck construction, so I’m just going to give you a few suggestions.

The first piece of advice I’m going to give is to try and play sorceries that you will be able to cast even without the Helix, while you technically can cast every card in your deck, it could take you awhile to build up to plague wind etc. In the place of some of the more expensive (mana wise) sweepers and perhaps barter in blood I’m going to suggest Damnation, I realize it is expensive $$ wise but it is the best card out there for this purpose. You need it to keep of early creature rushes and it is easily castable without the helix. **

The second reason for this is that you also won’t have to wait for a discard outlet to get the spells into the grave, you can simply hard cast them.

If artifact removal is prevalent in your area then by all means keep the welding jar. The helix demands an investment of 3 cards, you don’t want it all to go to waste from a stray destruction spell. However I think your best defense is the discard in this case.

The dreams is a nice card for both discard and tutoring.

I’m going to advocate corrupt to a 4-of. It is an awesome card, especially in Mono-B and will win you the game within a few turns. Cruel Ultimatum from the new Shards Of Alara set is also a nice card, although you wont be able to hardcast it, perhaps a 1-of?

I’d also say move the arena to a 4-of. I’ve never been disappointed with this card when I’ve played with it and in this case it will draw you into more lands much faster to allow you to retrace ravens crime.

Lastly you may want to add in some targeted discard (distress etc0 just to be sure it is safe to start your combo.

Beyond that this deck came to me pretty well built already and congrats to Jacob I say.

- BeJoSe

**NOTE**

I may advocate playing expensive ($$) cards but I will only do this when necessary. However I believe there are 12 cards everyone should try to obtain n their collection.

The first 10 are a set out duals lands. They can be any duals: the original, the painlands, shocklands, filterlands being the best. I say this because they are extremely good at fixing your colors. JMS wrote an extremely good article detailing the reasons and I recommend everyone read it http://wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtgcom/daily/jm133