With Ravnica Allegiance fully spoiled, we’ve seen a handful of new legendary creatures emerge, and there are a couple of those that I felt were deserving of their own decks. Some look to be better in the 99 of existing decks as well, but I’m going to focus on one of the new legendary creatures in particular today: Judith, the Scourge Diva.

There are two reasons why I chose to brew a deck around this particular creature. The first, is because I haven’t really brewed a proper Rakdos deck before. There was that Grenzo budget build I put down on paper but never actually built, so I’m not going to count that one. The second reason I decided to roll with Judith is because she lends herself quite readily to an “aristocrats” theme, which typically revolves around sacrificing creatures to drain out your opponents (among other variations). Let’s take a look at her abilities. She’s a 2/2 for 3 CMC which is in “hate bear” territory (this card would also be a solid add to Alesha and Marchesa Decks (both of which I have)). She buffs our creature’s power by 1 each, but that’s not really a big deal. What really matters here is her second ability, which reads “Whenever a nontoken creature you control dies, Judith deals 1 damage to any target.” It would have been nice if that line of text didn’t contain the word “nontoken” but it is still powerful, particularly because you’re able to target anything with this ability. So this means we want to sacrifice creatures often and bring them back from the graveyard to make loops if possible. Here are some creatures that can make these loops possible:

Recursion Loop Creatures:

With Reassembling Skeleton, for instance, you can sacrifice him to your favorite sac outlet, and for the low cost of 1B, you can bring him back to the battlefield to do it again. With Phyrexian Altar you’ll only need one colorless mana to do this. If you have Ashnod’s Altar you’ll instead need to come up with the black mana to recur. There are ways around these mana limitations, but we’ll get to that later. Each of the above creatures can be brought back from the graveyard to the battlefield once particular requirements are met, and it’s not difficult to do so. As long as we have one of these creatures, a sacrifice outlet and our commander on the board, we can theoretically ping players to death, but it will take some time. Speaking of sac outlets, let’s get to those:

Sacrifice Outlets:

These are the majority of the sac outlets I’ve included in the deck. The two Altars I mentioned in the last section, along with Viscera Seer (allows us to Scry), Yahenni (gives himself indestructible), Sadistic Hypnotist (causes an opponent to discard two cards), and Attrition (allows us to destroy target nonblack creature). There are also two lands that help us out, Phyrexian Tower (gives BB) and High Market (gain 1 life). When you need a sac outlet, this many packed into the deck should assure you can find one quickly. But is it enough to just rely on our commander and sac outlets to win games? I think we need some added insurance.

Death Triggers:

Each of these cards has a trigger on the death of one of our creatures. So when we sacrifice something with our commander on the board, we get extra value, and if she has been killed off and we can’t afford the commander tax, some of these cards will do similar things. Blood Artist, Zulaport Cutthroat and Vindictive Vampire will all drain our opponents when creatures die, along with gaining us some life. Grim Haurspex and Harvester of Souls will both draw us cards on deal. Pawn of Ulamog and Pitiless Plunderer will get us tokens to sac for mana (and can aid in those mana costs for our loop creatures from earlier. Grave Pact and Dictate of Erebos will cause our opponents to sacrifice creatures when we do, and can be basically board wipes for us. Lastly, Black Market can get us some serious mana, but it will have to be used each turn before combat (which shouldn’t be a problem).

Cannon Fodder:

Despite the fact that Judith wants nontoken creatures to die, there’s no reason why we can’t use other token creatures to feed our altars and make us some extra mana! These three cards were added to the deck to do just that, because each will create tokens for us to use for mana. I didn’t want to include too many of this style of card but a few seems just right.

Other Recursion:

Because not all of our creatures can be recurred from the graveyard so easily, I’ve added some redundancy here. Balthor and Garna can single-handedly bring back a swathe of creatures at once, which Whisper is good in conjunction with the cannon fodder above. Sac two tokens and return a creature directly to the battlefield (and if it’s a token producer, even better!). Mikaeus is a great card that will give nearly everything in this deck undying, so expect him to be a target. Palace Siege will recur once a turn, and Phyrexian Reclamation can do multiple creatures in a turn provide you have the mana (and life) but each will only get those cards back to your hand, so it’s sort of slow (still welcome).

Other Fun Stuff:

This last section is some “good stuff” in these colors. The couple of bits of equipment that give deathtouch are meant from Judith, as her pings can kill anything with one damage. Nim Deathmantle is great for graveyard shenanigans and this is well documented. I added Mogis because he forces more damage or sacrifice down opponent’s throats and that felt on theme. Captive Audience is a new card that is simply fucked and I can’t wait to use it. I also added Sower of Discord just as a nice way to ping two opponents at once instead of just one, so it should help to speed things up, particularly if you get a loop going.

So that’s that. I’ve added a pretty standard Rakdos removal package (the new Bedevil, Terminate, Dreadbore, Hero’s Downfall, etc) otherwise. I think it will be a fairly decent build but nothing top tier. What do you guys think? What new legendaries are you excited from from the new set?