Captive Rakdos (Standard)

Captive Audience is an interesting card to build around, since it has a couple of weird requirements. First, since it's seven mana, we need some sort of ramp to cast it consistently, so one of the biggest challenges of building around the card was figuring out the colors. Going three or four colors offers more ramp options but less consistency. Thankfully, mana rocks like Chromatic Lantern and Gilded Lotus give us good ramp spells that can fit into any deck, which allowed us to end up with a straight Rakdos deck. Second, the fact that Captive Audience puts our opponent down to four life means that there isn't much value in dealing damage to our opponent in the early game, since all of that damage sort of goes to waste once our opponent has to chose the "your life total becomes 4" option on Captive Audience. As such, instead of playing any early-game creatures, we're overloaded with card draw, card filtering, ramp spells, and removal. In the end, Captive Rakdos is basically a weird hybrid of Rakdos Control and Rakdos Ramp, with Captive Audience being our primary way to win the game.