Rats in Standard

The purpose of this deck is to overrun opponents with Pack Rat based on the power it gains from other rat creatures. There are currently 4 different rat cards in Standard. There is Drainpipe Vermin (RTR), Typhoid Rats (Innistrad), Ravenous Rats (M13), and Pack Rat (RTR).

  

  

Deck List

Creatures 4x Drainpipe Vermin 4x Typhoid Rats 4x Ravenous Rats 4x Pack Rat 2x Griselbrand Artifacts 2x Ring of Xathrid Land 20x Swamp Other Spells 4x Tragic Slip 2x Undying Evil 2x Murder 2x Ultimate Price 4x Stab Wound 2x Sever the Bloodline 2x Destroy the Evidence 2x Exquisite Blood

Sideboard 2x Undying Evil 2x Ultimate Price 2x Murder 2x Destroy the Evidence 3x Killing Wave 2x Ring of Xathrid 2x Elixir of Immortality

So the primary win condition is to overrun your opponent with the Pack Rats. Pack Rats, of course, allows you to discard a card and pay three mana to put a token of Pack Rat onto the field. This means you could have an absurd number of rats, because even with just two Pack Rats on the field, you'd be able to put down two tokens since the abilities would activate separately, leading to a total of four Pack Rats existing, then 8, then 16, et cetera and so forth since the tokens copy the entire card, including the discard ability.

A secondary win condition is Griselbrand, which allows you to draw cards and deal 7 damage with lifelink. I know I should also include Reliquary Tower for the "no maximum handsize" based on having Griselbrand, but by the time I get Griselbrand out and deal damage, I doubt I would want to keep more than 7 cards because I could play at least one or two of them or discard them and create more Pack Rats with them. Plus, by then I believe gaining life would be a priority over card draw.

Speaking of life gain, that's why I included Exquisite Blood so that when your opponent loses life, you can gain life. Unfortunately, with mono-black decks, life gain is a problem. With both Griselbrand and Exquisite Blood, life gain shouldn't be much of a problem.

I included Undying Evil to keep more important creatures alive, such as Typhoid Rats, Griselbrand, and Pack Rat alive.

Destroy the Evidence is included in order to, hopefully, take away an opponent's ability to cast some spells and also mill out some of the creatures or spells that an opponent may be able to take further down the road.

There's a control suite in place in this deck that included Tragic Slip, Murder, Ultimate Price, Stab Wound, and Sever the Bloodline. That way hopefully your opponent's creatures can be eliminated while you put out more creatures, and with Sever the Bloodline, stop any mass of tokens from populate decks. Stab Wound will specifically help to bring down an opponent's life to help the win conditions succeed.

The sole artifact in the main deck, two copies of Ring of Xathrid, is only in place in order to allow for an increase in power and toughness of creatures, as well as hopefully keep them around longer through regeneration.



The sideboard is essentially everything that couldn't fit into the main deck (complete playsets of some cards) while there are three copies of Killing Wave and two copies of Elixir of Immortality. Killing Wave is only in place in the even that opponents put out too many creatures, and Elixir of Immortality is in the sideboard in the event that you need to recycle your graveyard because your opponent is running a blue control and/or blue mill deck.