“Mono-Black Midrange aims to disrupt the opponent's hand early through Duress, Cabal Therapy, and Ravenous Rats while deploying efficient, threatening creatures that demand an immediate answer. Dark Ritual enables explosive early plays — landing a turn-one Hypnotic Specter or Nantuko Shade puts the opponent on the back foot before they can establish their gameplan. Nantuko Shade and Mishra's Factory serve as resilient, scalable win conditions that are difficult to answer cleanly, closing out games that the disruptive engine opens up.”
Missing sideboard cards? The full 15-card sideboard runs about $190.
Buy sideboard on ManapoolEngineered Plague naming Goblin shrinks nearly their entire board by -1/-1, turning off Goblin Piledriver's attack trigger value and killing off 1-toughness Goblins like Mogg Fanatic and Siege-Gang Commander's tokens. Duress comes out since this is a fast creature-based aggro deck with little targeted disruption worth stripping, and Withered Wretch loses value since their engine (madness) casts from exile, not the graveyard. The extra Diabolic Edict and Vendetta give more unconditional removal for Goblin Piledriver and Siege-Gang Commander, which are hard to race otherwise. Graveborn Muse is too slow and the life loss too risky against a deck built to burn you out, so it stays sideboarded. Keep the core engine of Cabal Therapy, Dark Ritual, Hypnotic Specter, Nantuko Shade, Ravenous Rats, and Mishra's Factory intact to pressure their clock while Engineered Plague stabilizes the board.
The matchup is decided by whether we can kill Phyrexian Dreadnought before it attacks twice; Smother destroys it outright since its mana value is 1, and Diabolic Edict forces a sacrifice even through Stifle protection since Edict doesn't target the creature itself. Vendetta is another unconditional kill on the Dreadnought, costing only life since it's nonblack. Discard-based disruption (Ravenous Rats, Graveborn Muse's card draw) is weaker here since the opponent only needs two cards to combo, so we trim slow or passive cards for more hard removal. Keep Duress and Cabal Therapy in to strip Stifle/Vision Charm protection before the Dreadnought resolves.
Dystopia punishes the Replenish player every upkeep by forcing a sacrifice of a white permanent, directly attacking Opalescence, Parallax Wave, and other combo pieces they've worked to assemble. Spinning Darkness can kill an animated enchantment creature (once Opalescence makes them creatures) and gains us life against their Swords to Plowshares-heavy removal suite. Ravenous Rats is weak here as a one-time discard against a combo deck with Intuition and Frantic Search to dig past it, and Smother rarely has a legal early target since their creature count is minimal before Opalescence flips enchantments into creatures. Keep Duress and Cabal Therapy in as top priority disruption to strip Replenish or Opalescence before they resolve.