Infectious Nightmares (PDH) (EDH / Commander)

Pauper EDH is an alternative format that uses any uncommon creature as the commander and the 99 are commons.

This is a mono-black combo deck helmed by Ashiok's Adept. It has the neat keyword Heroic which triggers whenever you cast a spell that targets it.

This version of heroic is quite nasty, it makes your opponents discard a card every time Ashiok is targeted by its controller. Why stop the nastiness there? Our wincon is Infect on top of that, yikes!

The spells we run to trigger heroic are all as cheap as possible with some upside. It's worth noting that Aura Enchantments target as part of the cast and also trigger heroic and it's worth noting the spell doesn't have to resolve in order to trigger.

There's a focus on protection as the deck will definitely make some enemies.
The protection amounts to regeneration, indestructible and 'reanimation' along the lines of Feign Death, so exile effects and bounce effects still remove our commander. (Which is why I decided on Infect over Voltron).

Infect creatures in general are quite weak however that's a requirement for Thieves' Tools and we have a fair amount of cards that buff creatures so infect should be a realistic way to win.

The deck is fairly low to the ground (avg. CMC 2.08) so we don't run a lot of ramp, only mana rocks that enable a T3 Ashiok's Adept -> 1CMC targeted spell. There's also Dark Ritual to get Ashiok's Adept out T1 and Unearth to bring them back from the graveyard or an infect creature.

While the deck is good at emptying our opponets' hands it still needs to deal with creatures already on the board as well as commanders. We run a suite of removal spells as well as Crypt Rats and Gangrenous Zombies which synergize well with our deathtouch & lifelink buffs, also does well with Tainted Strike and Phyresis.

The crux of the deck is most likely resolving the commander on T3, counterspells we can't deal with and as mentioned exile / bounce effects we can't prevent, Frogify effects require us to kill our commander or to draw Feed the Swarm.

Thanks for reading. If you have any questions or suggestions, leave a comment!