So, for those of you keeping track at home you will know that our little website is just over a year old. We have grown quite a bit in a very short time, building links with other UKMTG content creators and even starting our own YouTube channel. We have even started a new day of content on Saturdays bringing you Guest, Commander and Fan Fiction articles. For my part I have begun to engage more with the community on Twitter, in order to bring you the content you want to see.

You see, a few weeks ago I asked you guys to vote on with card I should base a new Modern deck around. However, I decided not to go with ‘good’ cards, but instead dredge up cards from the void of unplayable nonsense I saw in my early days Magic. The reason I did this? Well if I had done a poll with good cards, would my Tweet have been as popular? No, because you all wanted to see me be miserable didn’t you. That brings us to today, and the moment you have all been waiting to see. Me playing One with Nothing.

Who wants me to be miserable?
Well pick one of these bad #mtg cards and I’ll do a deck tech based on the winner.#ukmtg @Wizards_MagicEU @ChannelFireball

— James 'The Owl' Wise (@MTGTengu) February 18, 2018

Now I know you wanted me to be miserable, playing a janky pile of trash that has no place in a civilized of Magic the Gathering. You wanted to see me lose and possible rage quit, selling my collection to go and live in the hills of a distant land to become a Deranged Hermit with my army of Squirrels. Well sorry Ladies and Gents, that’s didn’t happen. As it turns out I not only managed to brew a fairly competent deck, but I managed to beat some real decks online with it too. Don’t believe me? Well read on and I will enlighten you to the power of nothingness.

Hellbent for Leather

Before we get to the deck, let us first have a look at the card the deck is based around, and see why it is so ‘terrible’. An instant for a single Black, One with Nothing has only a single line of rules text. Discard your hand. Not discard the cards you want or discard a card at random. All of them. Every card in your hand goes to the graveyard. While the card is universally considered to be a bad card, it is unusual in the fact that it does its function so well.

Most ‘bad’ Magic cards are considered to be so because they do there job poorly. Cradle to Grave is bad because Doom Blade is so much better. Extinguish is considered terrible because Negate exists. But One with Nothing fulfils its role better than any other card, both in terms of its mana cost and the flexibility of been an instant. It has also been likened to the Impossible Game, been a card that many Johnny’s try to ‘solve’ and make good. If you want a to know more about this I would highly recommend checking out the Rhystic Studies episode where Sam talk at length about the card far more eloquently than I could ever hope to. I’ll provide a link here for you all.

So, what could I do to make the card work for me? I wasn’t going to just put a single copy into the sideboard of a tier one deck, where would be the fun in that. No, I had to run a playset, and base the deck around it’s effect. Unearth and Flashback where the first strategies to come to my mind. Although I had some luck with Faithless Looting and Lingering Souls, the Unearth creatures just seemed to be weak in most match ups. The strength of a creature is not in it’s raw power, but that it can be used to provide repeated damage or defence should the need arrive. Sadly, Unearth creatures do neither of these well. So instead I tried something different. I decided to go Hellbent.

Creatures like Lupine Prototype, Bloodhall Priest and Hazoret the Fervent are powerful threats if you have nothing in your hand and can outclass some of Modern more potent creatures. With a few of these on the board you can pitch your hand with One with Nothing and swing in for lethal from out of nowhere. So that is our battle plan, but we need some more ways to empty our hand other if this is going to work. Two copies of Collective Brutality, plus playsetset of Cryptbreaker and Zombie Infestation will allow us to get cards out of our hand while also giving us some upside.

Since well will be wanting cards out of our hand, we also want to make use of the graveyard some we don’t just fall behind in card advantage. To go along side our playsets of Faithless Looting and Lingering Souls, we will also throw in four copies of Gravecrawler (since we seem to be getting a bit of a zombie subtheme going on here). Finally, three copies of Fatal Push will provide our mainboard removal package.

Playsets of Dragonskull Summit and Foreboding Ruins go with two Canyon Slough and some basics to form our land package. Our mana base is fairly budget in order to keep the cost of the deck down, but I have rarely found it to be an issue since we are basically two colours. You could always improve your mana with fetches and shocks if you so desired.

The sideboard is full of answers to different strategies we my come across. Three Duress for control matches, three Lightning Bolts and two Terminates for extra removal, and two Smash to Smithereens for artefact hate. We also include two copies of Sweltering Suns to handle go wide decks, and three Tormod’s Crypts to take care of opposing graveyards.

Creatures (18)
4 Cryptbreaker
4 Gravecrawler
4 Lupine Prototype
4 Bloodhall Priest
2 Hazoret the Fervent
Non-creature Spells (21)
4 One with Nothing
3 Fatal Push
4 Faithless Looting
2 Collective Brutality
4 Zombie Infestation
4 Lingering Souls
Lands (21)
4 Dragonskull Summit
4 Foreboding Ruins
2 Canyon Slough
9 Swamp
2 Mountain
Sideboard (15)
3 Duress
3 Lightning Bolt 
2 Terminate 
2 Smash to Smithereens
2 Sweltering Suns
3 Tormod’s Crypt

And there you have it, One with Nothing in Modern. The deck looks interesting, but is it any good? 

You might be surprised at how well we did, and might even be tempted to take the deck out for a spin yourself. If you have enjoyed todays article then let us know about it in the comments below, and don’t forget to like a subscribe to keep up to date on all the goings on here at Master of Magics. If you have any ideas for crazy or bad decks you want to see me try then you can find me on Twitter @MTGTengu, and who knows we might do a deck tech on it in the near future.

Before I go I want to give a huge shout out to fellow UKMTG content creator Vince, also known as PleasentKenobi, for loaning me his Collective Brutality s to playtesting with. If you love banter, Death & Taxes, or memes about sonic the hedgehog then I would recommend checking out his YouTube channel and showing him some love. But until next time everyone remember, Good Luck and Have Fun.

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