My name is Anthony Lee. You may know me from my podcast with Javier Dominguez and Andrea Mengucci, “Competitive Magic with the Karnies,” from my World Championship 2023 run to a semifinals finish with Golgari Midrange, from winning the first Australian Regional Championship, as the team captain of Handshake Ultimate Guard for the latter half of 2024, or as a clown who enjoys impersonating Lee Shi Tian at premier events. You may also not know me at all, which seems fairly reasonable. 

Either way, I am writing this quick overview the Dimir Demons deck which won World Championship 30 in the hands of my closest friend and teammate, Javier Dominguez. This deck was a brew that I built and worked on early on in our testing process and later championed alongside Javier, who as always worked closely with me to bring the deck to the tournament winning level, with key contributions from Christoffer Larsen.

Naturally, in light of Javier's second World Championship victory, and no less with an unusual deck, there has been a lot of interest in said deck. It works rather unintuitively, but I think it's also a lot of fun to play, as well as quite strong, so I will try to illuminate our thoughts and choices that went into this deck. I also hope that explaining these things also helps people understand our thought process in general. But if you just want to quickly get some tips on playing the deck, you can skip down to the sideboard guide, where I will list how we sideboarded in the tournament and provide a rough outline of how to play those matchups, which will also give you an idea of the metagames in which this deck is most suitable. After that, I will write a little about cards from the upcoming Foundations set that could be included in this deck.

Standard Dimir Demons: Decklist | Magic: The Gathering

First of all, here's the decklist for easy reference.

Dimir Demons: How the deck works and was built

At the most basic level, Doomsday Excruciator represents a game-ending combo: pair it with a milling effect, usually Jace, the Perfected Mind or Restless Reef, and win the game due to your opponent drawing from an empty library. This is particularly powerful because it is difficult to interact with and can seize games even from positions where a player is far behind (indeed, it can sometimes be actually easier to win from bad positions, as boards like multiple Unholy Annexes or an Abhorrent Oculus turn to your opponent's disadvantage against Excruciator). 

The natural question on identifying such a powerful combo is how one can build with it. The most appealing thing about building with this combo is that it is very compact (requires relatively few card slots) as Restless Reef is a land you would play anyway in most Dimir decks, and Jace is independently a very much playable card already. The most restrictive thing about building with this combo is of course the deckbuilding restrictions that come with needing to support Blue cards alongside a card with mana cost BBBBBB. The latter didn't seem like a particularly severe constraint in practice, however, as there are enough dual lands to let you play whatever Blue cards you want alongside such an apparently demanding Demon. The fact that Excruciator represented such a powerful and unique angle of attack for relatively minor commitment (meaning greater flexibility in building and playing, which we value especially highly) made it the focus of a lot of my deckbuilding efforts.

The best approach by far, we found, was to build the Excruciator combo into a midrange shell. The approach that it seems many individuals and other teams tried first, and couldn't make work, was to build Excruciator combo into a controlling shell. This approach, however, has multiple problems. First of all, there is a lack of effective card advantage engines available to Dimir-colored control decks, which makes it hard to play control decks in the first place, but also makes it much more costly to be stuck with the Excruciator in hand, Secondly, it is not leveraging one of the best strengths of the Excruciator, which is that it presents multiple angles of attack; your opponent needs to not lose to the milling combo, but they also need to not lose to the giant 6/6 flying Demon, and it's much harder to make the latter a game-winning threat in a control deck that doesn't have other removal targets and doesn't apply pressure to life totals. Excruciator being a compact way to add another angle of attack fits perfectly into a midrange strategy, which relies on being able to adapt its plans against various opponents, as opposed to a controlling strategy, which is much more concerned with the ability to answer incoming threats than finding win conditions. 

On top of this, Unholy Annex naturally plays much better in midrange strategies than controlling ones, and suits Excruciator very well as the card advantage is needed to support a resource-intensive combo – and that's before even considering that Excruciator is literally a Demon.

Many people, including ourselves earlier in the testing process, have referred to Excruciator as a “Splinter Twin” combo because once you assemble two specific cards through disruption you win the game. In practice, this is slightly misleading, and it's actually closer to being a “Scapeshift” - this realization unlocked much of this deck's potential once we found it. If you slam Excruciator as though it were a Scapeshift (that is, an expensive spell with taxing deckbuilding constraints that rewards you with a one-card win condition) rather than a Splinter Twin (a combo piece where you need to assemble two pieces to win the game) you will win a lot more than you will lose. This is both because you might randomly find a milling effect in the last six cards of your library, and because the 6/6 Demon drawing you extra cards often finishes them off before you would lose to it. Obviously you should be use some discretion and not cast Excruciator if you are far enough ahead that it's the only way you might lose, but you should be simply slamming it a lot more often than you might first assume. You will lose some of the time to your own Excruciator this way, but you win much more often than not, which is what actually matters.

So, ultimately, this Dimir Demons deck is a midrange deck that features a combo angle. It's important to recognize that it primarily isn't a combo deck, and that the strength of the deck is in its flexibility since after the first couple of turns you can reasonably play aggressively or defensively and either way will be backed up by the looming threat of the Excruciator combo.

Dimir Demons: Specific card choices

Creatures

Faerie Mastermind is particularly well-positioned in the current Standard format. We felt that it was a particularly strong draw to playing Blue in general, because we considered it to be the best 2-drop creature in the format outside of the Red aggro decks, and cheap creatures are fairly important to midrange decks which need them to be able to pressure opponents when necessary. Something that is worth calling out about Mastermind in this deck is that when you are adopting a very defensive position and/or playing towards an Excruciator combo, you want to use Faerie Mastermind to draw cards very aggressively.

Caustic Bronco may seem a strange inclusion. It may seem dangerous to play it alongside Unholy Annex, but we felt that risk was worth it because whenever that happens you at least get an Unholy Annex in your hand anyway (the card really is that good) and Bronco's average case is very good for you. We simply needed more cheap creatures and Bronco is the most threatening option, especially against our expected metagame which featured a lot of Golgari and Oculus. Those decks didn't turn out to be as popular as expected, and you could reasonably change the Broncos into other cards.

We tried various 3-drops, and although they were not quite consistent enough for us to prefer them over Bronco, they are overall reasonable on power level and you could substitute them in many metagames. Preacher of the Schism was the best overall one – although it can be unreliable, because it sometimes only makes 1/1s when that is not useful, the ceiling is very high and the combination of defensive utility and card drawing that just gets you the resources you need to function is more valuable than anything else other 3-drops can provide. If Bronco is poorly positioned, the default replacement would probably be Preacher.

Removal suite

One of the key points underpinning this deck's construction and viability is that spot removal effects are particularly good in Standard right now. There are popular decks such as the Red-based aggro decks that pressure you to play a lot of creature removal, and removal is important against the midrange decks as well. There is a relative lack of control decks that punish you for overloading on spot removal, and the controlling decks that do exist are Caretaker's Talent and Domain, which are so vulnerable to the Excruciator combo that it doesn't actually matter much that you have many removal spells in your deck. Hence we have built a deck with an unusually high number of spot removal spells, both because they are well-positioned and because Excruciator compensates the deckbuilding cost of doing so. If the metagame shifts such that spot removal becomes much worse, you can adjust accordingly.

Cut Down is easily the worst removal spell that is popularly played, and we felt that it was an advantage of all of our Black midrange lists relative to stock versions that we played minimal copies of this card. We found the games are decided by whether answers lining up against threats far more often than by tempo, and patience is often rewarded, which makes a cheap spell less appealing. 

In general we considered it far inferior to Anoint with Affliction, which is the primary point of comparison as the shared and defining feature of these cards is that they are the removal spells with the most limited range. Cut Down is slightly better against Dimir Midrange and perhaps Red aggro decks (we think that contrary to popular opinion that it is not clear which removal spell is better there, as experienced Red players can exploit Cut Down's conditionality very well, and Anoint has a significant advantage against key play patterns where they need a Heartfire Hero to get the last points of damage against large demons) but Anoint with Affliction is still fine in those matchups yet vastly better against Azorius Oculus, Golgari Midrange, and Caretaker's Talent decks (because of Enduring Innocence). The first copy of Cut Down still has value in giving your opponent something else to play around, and its conditionality is somewhat mitigated by Jace, so it is a fine inclusion, but the bar for adding a second copy over anything is very high and generally not recommended.

Duress is an outstanding card in the current Standard format, and it typically hasn't been the case that you want to maindeck a full playset of them, so it seems worth explaining. First of all, it fits with one of the premises of our list, which is that spot removal spells are very good in the format because they are important against both aggro and midrange – being a midrange deck, you want to be able to deny your opponent spot removal because the Unholy Annex core features a relatively unusually high number of expensive and powerful threats. Secondly, the aggro decks in this format use noncreature spells heavily because of the valiant mouse creatures, making Duress actively good against them, so the most common way in which Duress can be a liability (being weak against aggressive decks that are largely built of creatures) doesn't apply in this Standard format. Finally, many decks in the format lean on card drawing enchantments as their primary source of card advantage and the slower ones are genuinely reliant on them (i.e. the decks with Caretaker's Talent and Up the Beanstalk) so the relative lack of redundancy in these decks makes Duress have more backbreaking potential than usual.

Spell Stutter is the best overall soft counterspell, and we did try each variant in the format (Phantom Interference, Reasonable Doubt, and Don't Make a Sound) but found Spell Stutter's upside to simply be more often relevant than the others and often more impactful as well. It's worth noting that many Blue (especially Dimir) decks have defaulted to Phantom Interference as their soft counterspell, but we found the other variants to be compelling enough that often a split between variants was best. 

Manabase 

Obviously, you need virtually all of your lands to tap for Black mana when you have Excruciator in your deck. Thus the Fountainports may look strange, but they are actually critical to the deck: although they will occasionally trip you up casting Excruciator, in the matchups where Excruciator is your best plan, the ability to generate treasures with Fountainport in order to build up to combo in one turn is important, which is most relevant when facing a potential opposing Jace, and in the matchups where Excruciator is secondary to your midrange role, having access to Fountainport in a deck full of removal is even more important. Javier realizing that Fountainport was not only playable in the deck, but in fact necessary, was one of the breakthroughs that let us find a version of the Excruciator deck that works where others had not been successful before. Other than that, the severe constraints of Excruciator's mana cost limit what you can do with this manabase – for some metagames, you can consider adding a Demolition Field or Cavern of Souls, but in general we felt it was much better to optimize for consistency casting early interaction (mainly Duress and postboard Cut Down). 

Sideboarding 

Although the format is about to change with a new set, I'll share with you our sideboarding plans for World Championship 30 which should give you a starting point for what to do in these or similar matchups. I wouldn't expect decks to radically shift as a result of Foundations, and they should at least function similarly. 

Gruul Aggro 

Out: 4 Faerie Mastermind, 2 Caustic Bronco, 2 Jace, 1 Excruciator 

In: 2 Liliana, 2 Cut Down, 2 Dreams of Steel and Oil, 1 Anoint with Affliction, 1 Gix's Command, 1 Withering Torment 

This is a slightly favorable matchup, with the preboard games not being so good (though still being clearly winnable) and the postboard games being a significant improvement. In general, the games are defined by you answering whatever they have and then closing the game quickly with a Demon. The cards that aren't answers or Demons don't matter so much and although the actual steps might be tricky – you need to dance against the aggro deck's different possible lines – the fundamental plan is at least straightforward. You do need to proactively close the game once you have stabilized, as the Red deck has an uncanny way of finding ways to steal games if you give them time. 

It's difficult for your opponent to get through your Demons preboard, but they should have some answers such as Pawpatch Formation postboard, so you might want to hold Duress accordingly. 

If you are playing against the Leyline of Resonance version of the deck, you'll want Deadly Cover-Up instead of Withering Torment. That might seem odd as Torment can target Leyline, but you are usually better off targeting the cards around the Leyline, and Cover-Up can bail you out of their best counterplay to that which is a copied Turn Inside Out. 

Dimir Midrange  

Out: 2 Jace, 2 Excruciator 

In: 2 Cut Down, 1 Anoint with Affliction, 1 Liliana 

This is a decidedly unfavorable matchup, and the main reason not to play this deck would be if Dimir Midrange is popular. 

You want to fairly aggressively target your opponent's creatures, as they're all going to be good once they stick Enduring Curiosity. If they have Gix, you want to save removal for that, but otherwise spend your removal freely (yes, even on Spyglass Siren). Your best win condition is to stick an Unholy Annex and simply run them out of resources, but it won't be easy to keep a Demon in play (and if you do, you just win anyway) so preserving your life total is critical. Your opponent might have an awkward draw and happen to lose to a big Demon or the combo, but it certainly isn't an easy or common route to victory. 

If your opponent has Kaito in their deck, you are going to have to even more aggressively kill every creature you see if possible, because a Kaito coming in with ninjutsu is often effectively game-winning for them. 

Azorius Oculus  

Out: 4 Archfiend of the Dross, 4 Unholy Annex, 1 Cut Down 

In: 2 Dreams of Steel and Oil, 2 Negate, 1 Ghost Vacuum, 1 Anoint with Affliction, 1 Withering Torment, 1 Jace, 1 Deadly Cover-Up 

This is a slightly favorable matchup.In general, your expensive Demons are a liability against Soul Partition and Into the Flood Maw. You might be able to win games due to the 6/6 flying bodies outclassing their creatures, but they are also the easiest way to fall behind on tempo and lose. Your best cards are your answers as your opponent's interactive cards are much worse without having a threat in play. Your opponent is trying to win by overwhelming you on tempo within a specific window, and your task is to not let that happen. In both preboard and postboard games, Excruciator is fairly threatening for your opponent, and there is some burden on your opponent to act and lock up the game before it appears. Remember that an opposing Abhorrent Oculus manifesting dread each turn is a way that they mill out before you do once you have resolved Excruciator. 

In postboard games, you have the tools to take on a strongly controlling position. Because their deck lacks card advantage, long games favor you as once they run out of gas they struggle to get back in the game. Focus on not giving any opportunities for them to get a foothold and you will eventually win with Jace milling them out, the Excruciator combo, or a pair of Faerie Masterminds eventually pecking them to death as you simply draw cards with it run them out of relevant threats. 

Domain Ramp 

Out: 3 Anoint with Affliction, 1 Go for the Throat, 1 Cut Down, 1 Spell Stutter 

In: 2 Negate, 1 Jace, 1 Outrageous Robbery, 1 Withering Torment, 1 Deadly Cover-Up 

This is a very favorable matchup. Most of the games you lose involve being overwhelmed by Domain's very best draws with Up the Beanstalk into Overlord of the Hauntwoods and then more action to follow it up before you can find your combo pieces. That isn't too many games, however, and your opponent generally lacks ways to pressure you as well as ways to interact with Excruciator combo. You often don't even need the Excruciator combo as Jace and/or Restless Reef can also mill them out, just as in previous Standard formats.

Preboard, you want to play very defensively (bordering on pretending your opponent has infinite life) and focus on finding an Excruciator combo or multiple Jaces. Here, Faerie Mastermind might as well have defender in preboard games, as losing it to Elspeth's Smite is unacceptable, and in fact you want to default to keeping it in your hand to safely draw cards with it. Postboard, you can be more aggressive as they need to make their deck relatively vulnerable to that in order to not just die to Excruciator, and you want to threaten them from multiple angles to put them in difficult positions. 

Your opponent is often taxed on answers to Restless Reef, with only Get Lost to handle it which has no shortage of targets already. Being mindful of this with Duress and/or Deadly Cover-Up can leave your opponent on a surprisingly short timer. 

If your opponent has Jace in their list and your opponent is not pressuring you, you can work towards casting Excruciator and Jace in a single turn by using Fountainport to build up to 9 mana. 

Golgari Midrange  

Out on the play: 1 Cut Down, 1 Spell Stutter 

In on the play: 2 Liliana 

Out on the draw: 2 Caustic Bronco, 1 Jace 

In on the draw: 2 Liliana, 1 Cut Down 

As with most midrange matchups, it's very close and either side could reasonably claim to be ahead depending on factors such as particular decklists, and the games can play out in many different ways. 

The most important card on either side is Unholy Annex, as with all Black midrange matchups in the current format. Golgari's advantage is that it can directly destroy Annex with enchantment removal; Dimir's advantage is that it can keep up with opposing Annexes using Faerie Mastermind and that it can use Excruciator to nullify any games where it falls behind against opposing Annexes. 

Other than games revolving around Unholy Annex, the most common way for games to be decided is a player simply failing to have a removal spell for a Demon and quickly succumbing. Although you generally want to try to hit Unholy Annex with your Duresses, once you've reached a stage of the game where your opponent would have played an Annex in their hand, you want to save your Duresses to be best positioned to take removal spells right before you drop an Archfiend of the Dross or Ritual Chamber unlock. 

If you feel that you are beginning to fall behind on resources, start playing towards an Excruciator combo. 

Convoke  

Out: 3 Anoint with Affliction, 2 Jace, 

In: 2 Dreams of Steel and Oil, 2 Cut Down, 1 Gix's Command, 1 Deadly Cover-Up 

This is also a decidedly unfavorable matchup. Fortunately, it's not a deck that is particularly popular, but if that changes that would be a significant strike against playing Dimir Demons (or any Black midrange deck, really). 

Your interaction is mostly not good – this is the one deck that does consistently punish an excess of spot removal whilst not being weak to a slow and inevitable combo – and your small threats are not good. It's conceivable but very unlikely that you would get to win with the combo against them. Thus your only good plan here is to hope that your disruption lines up well enough against their draw that you can beat them with Demons in the air, which admittedly Archfiend of the Dross is quite good at doing. Mulligan and play (and pray) accordingly. 

Caretaker's Talent Control  

Out: 4 Go for the Throat, 2 Shoot the Sheriff, 1 Cut Down 

In: 2 Negate, 1 Jace, 1 Withering Torment, 1 Outrageous Robbery, 1 Deadly Cover-Up, 1 Anoint with Affliction 

This matchup is extremely favorable. Your priority is simply to not die and draw cards to get to the Excruciator combo as your opponent can't really interact with it. Throw your removal spells at tokens, as card advantage doesn't really matter here, only time; if you have to block a Fish token with Faerie Mastermind to buy more time, do it (and apologize to Yuta Takahashi later). The games you lose involve your opponent getting to establish some tokens, then playing Caretaker's Talent and levelling it up all the way to finish you in one or two attacks. Things are slightly trickier if they have a Blue splash, but not very much so, and you will still be a heavy favorite. The postboard games are different, like with the Domain matchup, where the combo is still excellent but you want to use your other angles too. 

Dimir Demons: Possible additions from Foundations 

Foundations is upon us, and it seems that it's more likely to create a lot of updates to decks rather than massive metagame shifts. Here I'll list some cards that I think could potentially fit into this deck, though by no means is it exhaustive, because the nature of Standard is such that it's extremely hard to predict and evaluate things early on. 

The uncommon cycle of color-based hate cards in Foundations (Devout Decree, Flashfreeze, Deathmark, Mindsparker, and Mold Adder) are reprints designed to enable decks to have straightforward responses to whatever becomes popular at any given time. These aren't equally powerful, however; in particular, the answers are distinctly better than the creatures, because answers are less fungible than threats. Of the answers, Flashfreeze is more significant than Devout Decree and Deathmark; this is both because Blue decks are more often reactive than other colors, so a better answer is more frequently useful, and because Flashfreeze is broader relative to the playable answers existing in the color than Deathmark or Devout Decree. In other words, Deathmark isn't that big an upgrade over removal spells that destroy most creatures, but Flashfreeze is a big upgrade over whatever answers you would use to cover alternative threats out of Red or Green decks. I'd expect to play a lot of Flashfreezes and not very many Deathmarks over the next years. 

It seems a natural question to consider whether this Demon could go in our Demons deck, but unfortunately it doesn't seem very likely that this is better in the foreseeable future than Archfiend of the Dross, and there's a limit to how many creatures like this (somewhat expensive and vulnerable to the same play patterns) that you can play at once so it's also unlikely we'd play both at once. Interestingly, however, Desecration Demon is good in converse positions to Archfiend of the Dross, because it is better when your opponent has few or no creatures, and Archfiend of the Dross is much better when your opponent is going wide with creatures. This doesn't quite balance out, because decks that tend to have few creatures also typically feature many removal spells, which punish either demon, so the ceiling on Desecration Demon is lower than that of Archfiend of the Dross. It's important to note, however, that Archfiend being better on average doesn't mean it will be better every time, so look out for a metagame with the right conditions for Desecration Demon to take its place.

This is a difficult card to evaluate; although it could easily just be an unplayable card due to being frail and somewhat conditional and slow, it could also be very good because it offers such a potentially powerful effect and the Demon typing raises its floor somewhat as an Unholy Annex enabler. I would expect to target your opponent's cards more often than your own, though the ability to create an Archfiend of the Dross or Doomsday Excruciator (you won't get the combo trigger, but you will get the rest of the card which is still very threatening) can also be valuable. Maindeckable graveyard hate is very useful in the current metagame, with cards like Mosswood Dreadknight, Helping Hand, Enduring Innocence, and Enduring Curiosity all being popular; and this actively punishes opponents playing threats into it, as they often need to answer this first lest you have a removal spell that then gives you a Glissa Sunslayer or Abhorrent Oculus. It also works with your milling effects, and that is potentially very dangerous for opponents since a Jace or Reef flipping an Overlord or an Atraxa could be devastating. My guess is that the combination of all these factors – graveyard hate being good, relevant typing, and synergy with both milling and removal effects already key to the deck – makes this card more likely to be good than not, and possibly outstandingly so. 

This is potentially a good way to access Doomsday Excruciator more consistently, as you don't want to play many copies of that card despite it being critical in some matchups. A different tutor that seems like it might fit, Demonic Counsel, isn't actually very flexible because you don't necessarily get delirium easily, and only searching for one of two different kinds of threats doesn't really give you the breadth necessary for a tutor in a deck that so often plays reactively; thus Wishclaw Talisman is meaningfully different in a way that makes it a plausible addition. It's convenient that Excruciator removes most of the downside of using Wishclaw Talisman simply because it removes most of their library so your opponent's ability to tutor after you use it is severely limited (especially because taking a card out of their library takes away a turn they normally get if you combo with Restless Reef). I think this could be a good sideboard inclusion to bring in for matchups where Excruciator is particularly strong whilst not fully committing you to that plan. 

This is too passive to be particularly compelling as a maindeck card, as an important part of this deck is to be able to apply pressure from multiple angles and Tome doesn't play very well with that plan. It could be a good sideboard card for postboard games in some matchups that naturally go very long and where life total pressure is not a very promising angle. 

Conclusion

I hope this has been helpful in giving you not only an overall understanding of the Dimir Demons deck, but also the way in which we build and think about decks like this. There's a lot to learn playing with hybrid-strategy decks, and there are many different kinds of games, so it can teach you a lot as a player whilst providing novel experiences. 

Finally, you might notice that between Caustic Bronco and Doomsday Excruciator, and to a lesser extent a lot of the games with Unholy Annex, this deck involves a lot of calculated risk. It is truly a fitting deck to win in Las Vegas of all places. Embrace the odds and remember that dealing with demons is not for the faint-hearted!