Justin Brickman: Building a Better Death’s Shadow

By now it’s old news that Death’s Shadow is the best deck in Modern.

However, that leaves a lot of room for creativity and innovation, even in how to build the best Death’s Shadow deck. I was listening to an episode of “The GAM Podcast,” featuring Gerry Thompson and Michael Majors, and they made claim that was both bold and correct: If you want to play a Death’s Shadow deck, you can literally have the same 20-card core and fill in the rest of the slots with any color.

Because Death’s Shadow is a black creature, it’s a no-brainer that we want to be base black in any version of the deck. This means that our deck is always going to contain the following cards:

The second color of the deck is really where you set the overall tone of the deck. The mana bases for each version of the deck follows roughly the same format, so it is fill in the blank for the most part. The mana base usually is as follows:

  • 11-12 fetches
  • 4-5 shocks
  • 1 basic Swamp
  • 1 other basic

It’s at this point where you’re usually choosing between either green for Tarmogoyf and Traverse the Ulvenwald or blue for Stubborn Denial, Serum Visions and Snapcaster Mage; a third color splashed in opens up more options as well.

Jund Death’s Shadow, by Matt Stankey
2nd Place, NRG CT+, April 2017

 

Grixis Death’s Shadow, by Chris Pikula
5th Place, GP San Antonio

 

At GP San Antonio, it seems most teams came to the conclusion that a Death’s Shadow deck should be the starting point for their Unified Modern plans, and built the rest of the decks around that. The choice of the secondary color is evident in these two particular versions because of the secondary threats they offer.

If you choose to play green, you are leaning on Traverse to provide you an extra four copies of any threat in your deck. The deck naturally fills its graveyard fairly quickly due to all the free cyclers, cheap interaction and fetch lands; turning on Delirium is usually pretty simple, and can allow you to tutor up a  Death’s Shadow or Tarmogoyf on turn 2. In addition to being a tutor for your Death’s Shadows and Tarmogoyfs, it’s completely in the realm of possibility that you traverse for a Street Wraith or even a fetchland when you already have enough threats in play and need to lose some life.

If you lean towards blue, then you choose to have access to Serum Visions and Thought Scour in place of Mishra’s Bauble and Traverse. This version of the deck is essentially an evolved form of Grixis Delver. By swapping out Delvers for Death’s Shadow, you get to present more powerful threats against the fair decks, while still providing ample pressure and disruption for the unfair decks.

This version gets to continue to abuse Thought Scour plus Fetchland into Turn 2 Tasigur or Gurmag Angler. Grixis is the favored choice if you expect your opponents to be trying to partake in the unfair acts that Modern can offer. In a deck where you have twelve 4+ power threats, Stubborn Denial is almost always a one-mana Negate. The non-blue variations are only able to disrupt the opponent through discard spells. Having access to both discard and counterspells allow for more flexibility in how you want to approach each specific game. Snapcaster Mage is always a card you want to be playing if you are in blue, and when paired with either form of disruption and a quick clock in Death’s Shadow, it puts a limit on how much resistance your opponent can put up. However, the downside to Snapcaster in these decks is that they typically only play 6-7 mana producing lands, so unless the games go long, mana is sometimes at a premium. A key thing to remember with Thought Scour is that once you mill your mana producing lands, they are gone for good.

Now that we have our core two colors, it’s time to look at how we want to fill out our flex spots. The typical choices at this point are red and/or white. Red gives us access to Tarfire, Temur Battle Rage and Kolaghan’s Command. Tarfire is rather low-impact in a fair amount of matchups, so lists have slowly been cutting down to a single copy in order to help fuel delirium and Tarmogoyf. Temur Battle Rage is important against the unfair decks, as discard spells have a ceiling to the level of disruption they provide. Because of this, it is important to have access to a combo kill in these matchups and to maximize every point of damage from your Death’s Shadows.

I’m sure I don’t need to explain how good Kolaghan’s Command is in a midrange deck, but when Street Wraith is in your deck, there is a new dimension of flexibility by making them discard and buying back a Street Wraith. Since these decks are light on actual creature threats, the raise dead ability really is key in giving Death’s Shadow enough ways to win the game when fighting against non-exile removal and sweepers.

The white splash gives access to an assortment of cards that are just there to grind such as Lingering Souls and Ranger of Eos, as well as one of the best hate cards out of the sideboard in the form of Stony Silence. Unfortunately, Rest in Peace is a definite non-starter as a sideboard option.

Ranger of Eos is a huge addition to this deck, as it’s always a three for one. As a four-drop, it is going to be coming in for the grindy matchups where the games are going to be long, so there is no rush in getting your life total low enough for a Death’s Shadow as they will always be lethal at the stage of the game where it matters.

Ranger, Lingering Souls and Stony Silence are good enough that they make Death’s Shadow viable even when one of its best cards is unavailable, as our next deck shows.

Abzan Death’s Shadow, by Reid Duke
2nd Place, GP San Antonio

 

 

Since this was a Unified event and Reid’s teammate Owen Turtenwald was playing Grixis Control, this meant Reid wasn’t able to play Kolaghan’s Command, Blood Crypt or Surgical Extraction and had to get a little bit creative. His conclusion was a mainly Black/Green deck with the white splash in the sideboard. I don’t believe this build will stick outside of the Unified format only because of how free playing three/four colors in Death’s Shadow decks is. The cost of a fetch/shock mana base isn’t really a cost, but rather an engine.

White also gives Path to Exile, which is a critical piece of interaction in the mirror; however because it is a card you’d like to be playing as many of as you can fit into the main deck, it mean your deck has to be more heavy in white. This opens up the possibility of Esper Death’s Shadow.

Esper Death’s Shadow

 

This version is similar to Grixis that it is trying to be the on the more controlling end of the Death’s Shadow spectrum. This makes the deck naturally slower, which makes the shortcomings of the deck a little more apparent. Since this deck wants to see more lands per game than any other version, it makes milling lands off Thought Scour an even greater cost, and Delving Lingering Souls isn’t maximizing resources effectively. While this version might be better in the mirror, I find it to be weaker against the field and much less consistent.

Because this is Modern and we love to get all the value we can, sometimes we like to get a little greedy. Nerd Rage Gaming’s in-house Death’s Shadow expert Tommy Tomsovic has been putting a lot of work into his own version, which is base Sultai splashing red.

4C Death’s Shadow, by Tommy Tomsovic

 

This deck is basically a mash-up of the most powerful cards that each color brings to the archetype as a whole. This allows the flexibility to have answers to different types of strategies without giving up any consistency. While splashing a fourth color in the sideboard might be nearly free, when you play the splash in the main deck, sometimes you have to fetch in awkward ways to facilitate a specific hand.

What stands out to me about this list is that the combination of Traverse the Ulvenwald and Snapcaster Mage allows Tommy to basically tutor for a copy of any spell in his graveyard or flashback Traverse to grab another threat. This helps the deck balance the appropriate amount of pressure and disruption.

Death’s Shadow certainly isn’t going anywhere any time soon, and now that we have some more events with the deck at the top of the format, we have a lot more data on how the deck has evolved in the month since it first broke out at GP Vancouver. As for what the best version of Death’s Shadow is, the jury is still out, but the most consistent and best performing lists are those playing Traverse the Ulvenwald.

Justin Brickman is an SCG Tour grinder from suburban Chicago who began playing Magic during Innistrad block. His Magic accomplishments include an SCG Regionals Top 16 and a Super Sunday Series Top 4. He can be reached on Twitter @BrickerclawMyr.

Sharing is caring!

Comments

comments

Justin Brickman