DekTek: Thief's Punishment

Time for another DekTek and this time it's Legacy. Here's my list for Thief's Punishment, an 8-Rack variant.

4x Augur of Skulls 

4x Bloodstained Mire 

1x Bojuka Bog 

4x Cabal Therapy 

2x Cursed Scroll 

4x Duress 

4x Hymn to Tourach 

1x Liliana of the Veil 

3x Mind Swords 

3x Mishra's Factory 

4x Polluted Delta 

4x Rotting Rats 

4x Shrieking Affliction 

4x Smallpox 

8x Swamp 

4x The Rack 

2x Waste Not 

Sideboard

2x Ashen Rider 

4x Deathrite Shaman 

3x Drown in Sorrow 

3x Ensnaring Bridge 

3x Surgical Extraction

As you can probably tell, this deck is meant to go extremely fast and ruin my opponent's early game. Ideally, starting turn 2, I can keep my opponent from pretty much doing anything. I have 11 cards in the deck that force a double discard, which is very powerful and even moreso now since Treasure Cruise has been banned. I don't really need that many creatures either, since my opponent probably won't get the chance to play them. If necessary, I can swing for beats with my Factories and hastey Rats. The Cursed Scrolls are there for topdeck situations wherein my Racks or Afflictions aren't killing the opponent for some reason. 

The sideboard is definitely something that catches people's attention, for two cards in particular. The first is the pair of Ashen Riders. A few people think that, because I have Deathrites in the sidebaord, I'm going to be stupid and attempt to hard cast them, but that will never happen. They are in there purely for two match-ups: Show and Tell and Dream Halls. Nothing is more satisfying in Game 2 to see the look on an opponent's face when I exile their Emrakul, the Aeons Torn with my Rider. The other odd card is the trio of Drown in Sorrows. I had Bile Blights in there originally, but I thought that it wasn't working out the way I wanted. It dealt with Young Pyromancer tokens, but not with the Pyromancer itself. Same with Elves and Goblins. Then I thought: what do I care about that has 3 toughness? Not much it turns out. Even though it's one turn slower, I think Drowns work better than Blights simply because, in the games that I bring them in, it's a 3 mana Damnation with a Scry 2 trigger.

So that's Thief's Punishment. It's probably my favourite of my current Legacy decks to run just because it's so consistent and has a decent win ratio. It presents my opponents with some tough decisions sometimes (especially control players) and it's just a fun deck to play.

Oh, if you didn't get the reference, thieves historically lost their hands in some Arabic countries. So there you go.