Death’s Shadow

How does Death’s Shadow work?

The first thing I’d like to address is that there are quite some flex slots in this deck. There’s the “classic” variant that runs Street Wraith. On the other side there’s the “wow, fuck combo!” variant of the deck that runs 4 Grief and 4 Reanimate to do the insane “you mulligan to 5 and I select your mulligans” package. Depending on your preferred playstyle or the metagame you expect, you can choose either version because both are putting up proper results.

How the deck works is basically what I described in the introduction earlier. While the Grief version is a little more unfair, both decks are at its core tempo decks that disrupt the opponent while applying pressure on the board. If you are up against a combo-heavy meta, Death’s Shadow – whatever version you enjoy – is a great deck to play and a solid meta call.

Acquiring Death’s Shadow

Let’s talk about the elephant in the room here: Underground Sea. Do you really need it? Well, no. But your deck improves a lot if you can play them. Underground Sea gives you the choice to go low or not. The deck has a pretty stock mana base, consisting of 17 to 19 lands:

• 1 Island
• 2 Underground Sea
• 3 Watery Grave
• 3-4 Wasteland
• 8-9 Fetch lands

You could opt to replace 1 or 2 Underground Sea with a Watery Grave and/or a Swamp. Depending on your preference, you could also let the Swamp go and build a list with 4 Wasteland and 9 Fetch lands. That brings you to 18 lands, which is the average for this deck. If you really enjoy this deck, you could upgrade your mana base by purchasing Underground Sea later. I feel obligated to mention that historically, the best time to buy a reserved list card is yesterday, and the second best time is today.

Budget replacements

In the creature base, there aren’t many concessions possible. Death’s Shadow used to play 3/4 Gurmag Angler before Murktide Regent was printed, but Murktide is significantly better due to having flying and the Delve-growing mechanic. Additionally, it’s blue so it pitches to Force in the worst case. Looking at the spells, Reanimate is somewhat optional although very much adopted. Losing life is just that good. Cycling and Reanimating a Street Wraith on the first turn after fetching allows you to play a Death’s Shadow as early as turn 2. Force of Will is a must-have. I like long shots, but I’m not debating this. Everyone who tells you Misdirection does a good Force of Will impression is wrong. You could opt to not play Force of Negation in the sideboard. Flusterstorm is a perfectly fine alternative and even Mystical Dispute plays pretty well into blue decks. At the time of writing this, Surgical Extraction is not that expensive but it has been historically, and despite Phyrexian mana being extremely good in a life-loss deck, you could replace it with Faerie Macabre.

All in all, I think the framework of the deck consists of the following cards:

• 4 Death’s Shadow
• 3 Murktide Regent
• 4 Force of Will
• 4 Polluted Delta
• 2 Additional blue fetches of your choice
• 4 Watery Grave
• 4 Wasteland
• 4 Daze
• 4 Brainstorm
• 4 Ponder
• 4 Thoughtseize
• 3 Reanimate

All the other cards are either flex slots or cards that have and have not been in the deck at some point, so you can tool around with these. Personally, I think it’s absolutely great to run the pack of Orcish Bowmasters, but if you want to put off buying those, you could try to replace them with other threats, such as additional Dauthi Voidwalkers or perhaps Delver of Secrets. Depending on the meta you can also play Baleful Strix, although I wouldn’t play that card in a Bowmasters-infested metagame. The cyclers are great too, and they aren’t much of a budget issue since they are rather cheap (Street Wraith and Troll of Khazad-Dum). The free counterspells in conjunction with Wasteland allow you to play the traditional tempo game. They way I usually go about this is checking out MTGtop8.com, going to the deck section and compare the decks to see what works and what doesn’t for those who put up results.

A budget list could look something like this:

Upgrade Paths

This is where buying into Death’s Shadow really shines. Since you’re a blue deck, owning Death’s Shadow opens many doors to other decks:

Upgrade path (deck)	Most expensive additional cards required
UR Delver	4 Volcanic Island
Cephalid Breakfast	2/3 Tundra
8-Cast	4 Chalice of the Void, 4 Mox Opal, 4 Ancient Tomb, 4 Urza’s Saga
Doomsday	2 Underground Sea, 1 Lion’s Eye Diamond, 4 Personal Tutor
Ninjas	Nothing > 30-ish EUR/USD per card

Additional Resources

• Usea/iKhada is the carry in the Death’s Shadow Discord.
• There’s a Discord. It’s a great source of information and the atmosphere is very inviting.
• Here is a primer for the deck written by Usea/iKhada (linked above) – it’s unbelievable that this incredible resource is available for free, so huge shout out!