Against the Odds: Rakdos Mean Girl Sac (Standard)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Against the Odds! This week, we're heading to Standard to play one of my favorite decks of Duskmourn Standard: Rakdos Mean Girls Sac! The idea is simple: plot a Pitiless Carnage, get some random permanents on the battlefield with the help of cards like Hopeless Nightmare and Case of the Stashed Skeleton, and then play a couple of our "mean girls"—Popular Egotist and Sawblade Skinripper—then sacrifice all of our non–mean girl permanents to Pitiless Carnage, and burn our opponent out of the game with drain from Popular Egotist and Sawblade Skinripper! Is sacrificing all of our lands a legit plan for winning in Duskmourn Standard? How good are the mean girls? Let's get to the video and find out on today's Against the Odds!
Against the Odds: Rakdos Mean Girl Sac
Wrap-Up
- Record-wise, Rakdos Carnage has been great! I've been playing it for a while now for fun and am currently 18-8 with the deck, good for a very nice 69% win percentage. The deck has actually felt surprisingly competitive!
- A couple of quick notes on the deck. First, the most important cards in the deck are Pitiless Carnage, Sawblade Skinripper, and Popular Egotist. The rest of the cards in the deck are there to support those three cards and the combo finish they enable. In general, we need two of Sawblade Skinripper and / or Popular Egotist to win the game. They both work the same way—dealing a damage to our opponent for each permanent we sacrifice—although each has a twist. Popular Egotist has the upside of making itself indestructible and gaining us life, but it needs to be on the battlefield to trigger as we sacrifice permanents. Meanwhile, Sawblade Skinripper is weird. It has the downside that it needs to live until our end step to deal damage, but being able to hit creatures is a nice upside. More importantly, Sawblade Skinripper doesn't need to be on the battlefield when we sacrifice things for it to trigger—all it cares about is the total number of permanents we sacrificed before our end step. This opens up a pretty sweet trick: if we are desperate, we can float all of our mana, sacrifice our entire board to Pitiless Carnage, and try to draw into a Sawblade Skinripper to play and (hopefully) burn our opponent out of the game on our end step!
- Rottenmouth Viper is in the deck as a backup sacrifice outlet (which sadly can't sacrifice lands), but it has been pretty hit or miss, to the point where I'm not sure if it's worth keeping in the deck. There are games where it basically snowballs into a win on its own, which is great. But a lot of times, it just dies without making a huge impact. So far, it has been just good enough to avoid getting cut, but it's the most likely card to leave the deck in the future if something better comes along.
- The other weird quirk of the deck is that, outside of Sawblade Skinripper, we don't have any removal in our main deck. We're a combo deck. Our plan isn't to kill all of our opponent's stuff but to stay alive just long enough to plot a Pitiless Carnage, play a couple of mean girls, and win. That said, we do have a bunch of removal in the sideboard, so we can bring it in as necessary. But don't plan on killing things with the main deck; it's not really built to do that.
- So, should you play Rakdos Mean Girls Sac in Duskmourn Standard? I think the answer is yes! The reverse flawless victory "sac all your lands" combo kill is hilarious, the mean girls are surprisingly strong, and the deck wins way more often than it should! It's been one of my go-to Standard decks for playing for fun when I'm not recording combat, and it has a bunch of sneaky lines and synergies. If you like sacrifice decks or weird combo decks, give it a shot!
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
