Death and Taxes

Most recent deck lists: here.

How does Death and Taxes work?

Death and Taxes is a “fair” deck if there ever was one. No cheating on mana and playing creatures on curve. Don’t be fooled, though. D&T is a dangerous deck even though it’s always considered the budget deck. This deck proves you don’t need reserved list cards to win. So how does it work? There’s a couple of elements to this deck that explain both how it works and where its name came from.

Disruption

The “Taxes” part of D&T comes from effects like Thalia, Guardian of Thraben’s. Imagine this: you’ve got Thalia, Guardian of Thraben in play and then start Wastelanding your opponent and locking them out of colors with Rishadan Port. These are classic Death and Taxes play patterns and though it seems innocent enough, a 2/1 first striker can get pretty dangerous over the course of a few turns. In addition to mana denial, you’re also packed with removal because you’re not only running 4 Swords to Plowshares and 4 Solitude, there’s also ways to ‘flicker’ (exile target creature and return it to the battlefield again) your creatures with Enter-the-Battlefield effects. Most commonly this is done through Flickerwhisp, but there’s also Yorion, Charming Prince, Eldrazi Displacer.

Hatebears

Cards like Thalia, Guardian of Thraben are called “hatebears”. This is because they have an effect over them that hates on a specific element an opponent tries to do, and though not all of them are 2/2’s, they are still called bears. Some examples:

• Thalia, Guardian of Thraben
• Ethersworn Canonist
• Spirit of the Labyrinth
• Lion Sash
• Sanctum Prelate
• Phyrexian Revoker
• Loran of the Third Path
• Kataki, War’s Wage
• Peacekeeper
• Archon of Emeria
• Tomik, Distinguished Advokist

With this suite of hating bears, you’ll disrupt most opponents enough to beat them down before they can execute their plan. You can tutor for the hatebear you need with your ‘tutorbear’: Recruiter of the Guard.

Beatdown

Besides disruption and hate, Death & Taxes has a pretty solid beatdown plan. Stoneforge Mystic has long been one of the pillars of this deck, and Batterskull and Kaldra Compleat create insane beatsticks. Pro tip: if your Germ tokens get removed, you can flicker your equipment to get a new one. Or, if you have the mana, re-equip it to another creature. Besides those two Living Weapons, Umezawa’s Jitte is an amazing equipment that does well on any creature. Some people like to take advantage of their position as a creature deck and play the one white Initiative creature that’s still legal: Seasoned Dungeoneer. The initiative mechanic, for those unaware, seems a bit underwhelming on paper but it’s pretty insane in practice.

Acquiring Death and Taxes

Death and Taxes is a pretty tightly built deck with few flex spots. As mentioned above, the Yorion version is the concencus players agreed on. That doesn’t mean the 60 card version is bad, it’s just agreed that the 80-card version is better. That said, it makes a lot of sense to buy into the 60 card version first if you want to build this deck from scratch. At the current price level, the difference between the 60 and 80 card version is around 350 EUR/USD. When you’re building from scratch, that’s quite some money and there’s no reason not to start with the 60 card version if you want to save that money at first. Playing with the 60-card version might be less strong than the 80-card version, but there’s so much to learn about this deck that it’s never a bad idea to pick it up and start playing. Below is an example of a 60-card version of the deck that got a 5-0 in a Legacy League on Magic Online. This version plays no Kaldra Compleat, which I find odd, but I can see Sword of Fire and Ice being good in a Delver-heavy meta. Before Kaldra was printed, SoFi was the go-to third equipment besides Jitte and Batterskull.

Upgrade paths

Once you own either full version of D&T decks, you have some staples that can go into other decks. Since you’re mono colored in your card pool, there aren’t many obvious choices, but here are some things to consider.

• You own the Stoneforge package. This slots well into Maverick-esque builds, and if you enjoy playing Death and Taxes, chances are you’re going to love Maverick as well. Maverick plays a lot like D&T, but it’s heavier on the utility land-axis and less heavy on the taxes. Also, your creatures are bigger. It’s worth checking out and if you’re looking for some content, check out DougesOnTwitch and their website GreensunsZenith.com.
• Since you own Stoneforge Mystics and Aether Vials, it’s worth it to take a look at Cephalid Breakfast. Don’t be stumped by the dual lands you see in those lists, there’s always a way to replace that or buy into it in phases.
• Wasteland, Aether Vial and Rishadan Port all go into many tribal decks like Goblins. Thought Rishadan Port is left behind, the others also go into Merfolk. This is still a bit of a stretch since you’ll also need Force of Will, Force of Negation, Cavern of Souls and Chalice of the Void to play this deck. That said, if you buy into Merfolk, you’ll also get a lot closer to 8-Cast.

Additional Resources

• Phil/ThrabenUniversity is one of the big content creators for the Legacy format. They even built a website to spread the love for D&T. There’s a lot of information on it. Also, sub to their Youtube channel, there’s an uncomprehensible amount of cool stuff.
• Though they’re currently hooked on Initiative, John/xJcloud is someone with a lot of knowledge on D&T and they Tweet quite frequently!
• The deck discord can be found here.