"During each player's upkeep, that player discards a card at random."
Yes, the fact that Bottomless Pit forces you to discard a card during your upkeep at random kinda sucks, unless you don't have any cards in your hand at that time (or you want to discard.) Bottomless Vault is an incredibly cost-effective means of whittling away your opponent's hand in a few turns. All you got to do to make this card a killer for you is either
Make sure the discard is more painful for your opponent than you,
Ensure you won't be effected by the discarding (drain your hand every turn), or
Turn that discarding thing for you into a good thing.
How can your accomplish any of these things? Read on:
Teferi's Imp
This rather cool card from Mirage has phasing, and every time it phases out, you discard a card. Neat part is when the imp phases in, you draw a card. If you have no cards in your hand when you would normally discard due to the Imp, nothing lost. The only "cost" will be having to burn up the extra card you draw for free when the imp comes back into play. If all of your decks have "costs" like that, you'll be sitting in the winner's chair more than often. This idea was sent into us by Sebastiaan.
Megrim
Just like adding a Dingus Egg into a deck chock full of land destruction, Megrim should probably be put in most discard decks as a new standard along with The Rack. This blasted combo not only helps run an opponent's hand into oblivian, it'll quite possibly win the game for you often enough.
Ensnaring Bridge
Each creature with power greater than the number of cards in your hand cannot attack while Ensaring bridge is in play. If you don't prepare your deck very well for Ensnaring Bridge, this mean artifact will bite you back. On the other hand, it sure isn't hard to build a deck around Ensnaring Bridge. With lots of discard in your deck, an Ensnaring Bridge is an adequate replacement/compliment to such cards as Wrath of God or Fog. It's up to you to find another means of winning once you've emptied your opponent's hand and stopped all creatures in play....that isn't too hard to do if you think of it (I smell Millstones.) This idea was sent to me by Dave Sutter.
The Rack/Pauper's Cage
When you are fairly sure your going to be able to keep an opponent's hand size to a minumum, these two cards can be real killers. Bottomless Pit is a little dangerous, yet very cheap to use in the long run.
Fool's Tome
Fool's Tome is an incredibly cheap means of drawing cards, yet it can only be used when your hand is empty. Seeing as Bottomless Pit works particularly well when you have no cards in your hand (during your upkeep at least.) This almost turns Fool's Tome into a twisted version of Library of Alexandria. I know it's no LOA, but you can cheaply draw 2 cards a turn with Fool's Tome.
Animate Dead/Dance of the Dead...+Gustha's Scepter
Bottomless Pit is a great way of helping your big creatures you'd like to animate into the graveyard quickly. Only problem with using Bottomless Pit for this idea is you tend to have some of your animator spells go into the graveyard sometimes too. You can easily avoid this by tucking some animator spells into Gustha's Scepter early in the game (the scepter does cost 0), then letting Bottomless Pit hurl everything else in your hand into the graveyard. Pull out one of those safely hidden animator spells later in the game and go to town with your modestly stocked graveyard.
Barrow Ghoul/Circling Vultures...
There are quite a few really neat creatures that really need a few creatures to be hanging out in your graveyard. The two I listed are just some of my favorites. Lhurgoyf and Necrotog are a few other similar cards work quite well with Bottomless Pit.
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