Interesting Shadowmoor Cards and Combos

by Robert McKay

I’ll start this article by saying that I’ve only just recently gotten back into Magic: the Gathering again after a long hiatus. So, almost all of my focus will be on the newest sets starting with Lorwyn as those are the cards I will deal with most frequently.

Now, onto the fun stuff-Shadowmoor is an interesting new set of cards that focuses a lot on enchantments and giving/removing counters. In this vein I think there are two cards that stand head and shoulders above the rest and surprisingly enough neither of them are rare! Not to mention that they are amazing together. The first card I would like to focus on is: Blowfly Infestation

In this format with persist and wither this card will be doling out LOTS of –1/-1 counters and it works on both sides of the board! Your opponent loses a creature that you’ve already shrunk and YOU get to place another –1/-1 counter on a creature. Say goodbye to weenie swarms! Now comes the board wiping combo. Combine with Incremental Blight.

You should be able to wipe just about any board playing these two cards together. Sure you may lose/shrink a couple of your own creatures due to the Infestation being required, but it will be worth it. I know some of you right now are shouting about how this isn’t constructed worthy, but I mainly play sealed and draft; there these are awesome.

Speaking of draft, I drafted Shadowmoor a while ago, the first draft at my local store where it was legal. The turnout was pretty huge compared to what I’ve seen there before. We had 36 people and I did miserably with what I thought was a pretty decent deck until I started playing with it. I just didn’t have enough creatures to play the agro deck I had tried to build.

The last round I played against a rather interesting little UB deck. It delivered a pretty good beat down one game, but what intrigued me was that I got DECKED rather quickly by a combination of 2 cards. Memory Sluice and Drowner Initiate.

The Mind Sluice with the conspire cost and 2 Drowner Initiates in play wrecked my deck. The guy playing had decided by the end of the tourney that he would be building a mill deck with those cards in it and while looking for things to include in this post I ended up piecing one together myself.

Spells 16
4x memory sluice
3x ghastly discovery
3x aethertow
3x crib swap
3x oblivion ring

Creatures 22
3x drowner initiate
4x grimoire thief
3x ink dissolver
4x stonybrook schoolmaster
2x merrow reejery
2x merrow harbinger
4x drowner of secrets

Planeswalkers 2
2x Jace Beleren

Lands 22
16x island
6x plains

This deck still needs a decent amount of tweaking, but it’s fun as is. It starts off pretty slow, but when you start conspiring to tap a Grimoire Thief/Stonybrook Schoolmaster or two it starts to get pretty rough. I thought about throwing in Memory Plunder, but I like that the deck only runs 6 rares and I didn’t want to run the UUUU casting cost. If you have any comments about what could be done differently in it feel free to speak up. I’d prefer if it stayed LOR-SHM block, but any comments are welcome.

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