ah yes, I am very familiar with ol nicky B. I've had my opponent steal/flip him too. Much hilarity ensued, lemme tell you. (it's the pause-hover over-pause-quit timing that's so good, imho
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I've had a lot of mileage out of my BUG zombies in historic, but I kind of feel the time has come to find some other pet deck, for now. The Zs are cool, but the prevalence of control in the meta just now is really hard on them. I've tried putting some Rise of the Dread Marn in the sideboard, but so far I havent had the chance to come back from a board wipe with a bunch of angry draugr. The problem is that the control decks will happily shoot individual zombies like cryptbreaker with a fatal push or similar, long before he gets going tapping Zs for value. So my first few Zs get shot individually, then once you hit turn 3 onwards, their doomskar is loaded and ready, and I have maybe 1 dude on board. Best case scenario I can dreadmarn a single dude back, which isnt really worth the spot in the deck. I did manage to squeak a win with Gary against a big Teferi control deck, and it was by punching him in the face repeatedly for 2 damage a turn until he was dead. Very satisfying, so it was. So I'm resolved to find a new deck to build, and Death's Shadow looks like it might be the one. I tried Grixis at first, and didnt do well, then shifted to Esper, then Mardu (the board wipes and Adanto Vanguard in white are really good for the deck) but eventually I swung back around to Grixis because the deck really, really needs blue for the counterspells (to save the Shadow from getting removed) and red for doublestrike and trample/haste (because the likelihood of a Death's Shadow surviving more than a single turn after hitting the board is verrrrry low, and there's no point if some wee 1/1 is going to get in his way every time he swings.) I'd love for there to be a card in historic that provided some combo of doublestrike, trample and haste, but sadly, there aint. At the moment I'm compromising with a red spell for 1R that gives doublestrike, and footfall crater, which enchants a land for R then allows it to tap to give a creature haste and trample till end of turn. The mana cost is a problem (it takes 3 to get the Shadow tooled up and ready to go) but the real killer is the slots the cards take up in the deck. If I could just trim it down somehow I reckon it might be a goer, but at the mo, I keep finding myself coming up slightly short.
Also, there was one horrible game when I was playing Death's Shadow and my oppo put down Blood Sun, which just shafts my whole deck so hard. I mean, who the heck is playing Blood Sun? What are the odds I come up against the one card that cuts off my access to haste, trample, and self-burn in one card? Needless to say, I lost that game
Still, it's all valuable learning experience, aint it
*edit* interestingly, the card that modern DS decks use is called Temur Battle Rage, which gives it double strike and also trample for 1R at instant speed. What's interesting is that it was first printed in Fate Reforged, but was also reprinted in Double Masters, Commander Legends, and will be again in Time Spiral Remastered. The point being, that's a LOT of recent reprints. Clearly they're aware of its use in DS decks. So why isnt it in Arena? Hmmn? Riddle me that...
