Clerics

Game Plan

Clerics is a mono-black tribal combo deck that converts a critical mass of cheap Cleric bodies into a recursive drain engine. The opening turns are dominated by hand disruption: Duress and Cabal Therapy clear the path before any threat is committed, while Dark Ritual and Priest of Gix, which enters generating three black mana, compress the mana curve enough to land Cabal Archon and Rotlung Reanimator ahead of schedule. Once both are in play the engine is live: each Cleric sacrificed to Cabal Archon drains the opponent for two life and simultaneously triggers Rotlung Reanimator, producing a 2/2 black Zombie token that grows the board and fuels Shepherd of Rot, which taps to make the opponent lose one life per Zombie in play. Cabal Therapy flashback off a sacrificed Cleric body provides another free Rotlung Reanimator trigger without spending a card, while Withered Wretch adds a Cleric body and incidental graveyard disruption to blunt opposing recursion.

The primary win condition is Cabal Archon's accumulating drain amplified by Shepherd of Rot, but Dark Supplicant offers a faster path: tap and sacrifice three other Clerics to put Scion of Darkness onto the battlefield from hand, bypassing its eight-mana cost and threatening a lethal attacker with on-hit reanimation. When the opponent answers Rotlung Reanimator, Unearth recovers it from the graveyard, restarting token production and resetting Shepherd of Rot's reach. The deck's priority throughout is consistent: disrupt first, sequence the engine pieces in order, and maintain enough Cleric bodies to fire Dark Supplicant's ability the moment the opponent's defenses thin.