(No longer up to date, but still mostly relevant)
Grixis Spellshaper is a grindy control deck that is based around the neat interactions of spellshapers, which are a creature type that grant you a reasonably strong effect by discarding a card as a downside, and madness cards, which can be cast while being discarded. This gives the deck a weird built in card advantage engine. Most of the other cards let us build up a strong board state and hang back as we chip the opponent down or start eating through their creatures with
Bloodmad Vampire
, or grind it out with
Urborg Syphon-Mage
. The deck makes extensive use of the madness mechanic, so there are two main components to the deck: discard outlets and things to discard. Ill go over the outlets first, as thats where most of the decision making happens.
Starting from low to high CMC, we have Insolent Neonate. He does work by adding early pressure with menace, and his discard ability is useful because it can be activated at any time. This is helpful at many stages of the game, as he can help us hit an expensive madness cost early on or get rid of our excess lands later. Being able to play him on turn 1 is good, as it can easily lead to a turn 2
Bloodmad Vampire
.
Up next is
Trickster Mage
. This is useful for controlling the board early on, either through messing with the opponents lands, letting us use our lands better, locking down an opponents creature, or giving one of our guys pseudo-vigilance. Its not an incredibly powerful card, but it gives us precise control over a lot of cards. Another two-of is
Tortured Existence
, which simultaneously helps us trigger our madness cards cheaply and recycle others from the graveyard. On its own, it doesnt do much, but if the game goes long it provides a ton of value.
Merfolk Looter is a straightforward card that digs into our library with repeated activations and gets madness cards online (notably, the discard happens after the draw so it is possible to draw into a madness card). Nice and simple card selection/advantage.
Waterfront Bouncer
is an insane card in the right matchup, as the effect is strong enough to warrant discarding a card even without the madness value. He can lock out an opponent from casting large creatures repeatedly, as well as protect our guys. He does great work against Delve-enabled threats like Gurmag Angler, Hooting Mandrills, and
Sultai Scavenger
(not to mention Stompy decks), but he does not do much against Affinity and Izzet Drake as they can cast things cheaply and gain from repeated ETB effects.
Urborg Syphon-Mage
is key to the deck, as he provides inevitability. When paired with even one
Sanitarium Skeleton
and some protection, he can grind out games from a stalled board state that is clogged with our little guys. He can easily be dealt with, but if left unchecked he runs away with games. Recurring him with
Tortured Existence
is also important for this reason, and
Circular Logic
helps with this.
Now lets talk about some of the things we will try to be chucking to the graveyard. The aforementioned
Bloodmad Vampire
is a cheap threat that pressures our opponents early on, something that this deck lacks with its other creatures. While it can be easily chump blocked, even after 2-3 hits on the opponent, it is a threat that must be dealt with, and can put them in easy range of
Urborg Syphon-Mage
and our cheap weenies.
Bloodmad Vampire
also trades nicely with Gurmag Angler and other large threats with a small number of +1/+1 counters.
Brain Gorgers
works as either an edict or a low costed 4/2, which helps against aggressive decks or Voltron style decks like Delver and Izzet Blitz. While giving the choice to our opponent is not a great place to be, but any value that we get out of discarding a card is useful and
Brain Gorgers
can be a blowout with setup from
Waterfront Bouncer
. Grave Scrabbler functions similarly to
Tortured Existence
, in that it helps us chain together madness cards with just one discard outlet. Scrabbles is also a body, which is needed to stand in front of cards like Merfolk Looter,
Urborg Syphon-Mage
,
Trickster Mage
, and
Waterfront Bouncer
. Scabbles also easily picks one of them up out of the graveyard if they get killed.
For removal, there are 4 copies of Fiery Temper and 4 of Murderous Compulsion. Fiery Temper, is great, as 3 damage anywhere at instant speed is good, and Lightning Bolt with discard is almost always doing something relevant. Murderous Compulsion is excellent removal, and is more consistent than
Dark Withering
, as its hardcasting is far more reasonable. The interaction with
Trickster Mage
is generally good (doesnt work with discarding Murderous Compulsion) as it helps get around the downside, while
Dark Withering
can just blank sometimes.
Speaking of complete blanks, this deck runs 2 copies of
Circular Logic
in the main and 2 in the sideboard. Towards the late game as our graveyard fills up, it can become a hard counter for the low cost of one blue mana. However, against decks like Tron and Peregrine Drake decks it can be really bad, due to the excess mana they are often sitting on. 2 copies of
Obsessive Search
help to get us value out of our discard outlets when there arent good targets for the other madness effects. The manabase is straightforward, but basic lands are important as this deck can fall behind extremely fast when relying on comes-into-play-tapped lands.
This leaves the single most important card in this deck, which is
Sanitarium Skeleton
. This dude is a machine. He pops into the early game to slow down aggressive decks trying to runs us over. He comes back to our hand from the graveyard at a delightfully reasonable cost, and this lets us use our discard outlets over, and over, and over again.
Urborg Syphon-Mage
becomes a house and difficult to deal with as we can just activate it without losing card advantage as long as we have the mana. Without
Sanitarium Skeleton
, this deck would not function nearly as well as it does, as it is resilient to many effects and useful from almost any zone, be it in hand, in play, or in the graveyard.
The strategy of this deck is relatively straightforward. Play the discard outlets early and then just start rolling in the value of the spellshaper effects with the madness effects tacked on. It is important to kill early threats your opponent plays, as it is easier to win once the game gets drawn out and you start digging deep with Insolent Neonate, Merfolk Looter, and
Obsessive Search
. Then you can focus on punching through with
Bloodmad Vampire
and draining your opponent with
Urborg Syphon-Mage
.
Sideboarding with this deck is difficult, as many sideboard cards that are helpful dont slot easily in with the madness and spellshaper cards. Still, theres plenty of good stuff to help in these colors. Bojuka Bog takes care of any deck that wants to take advantage of their graveyard, while Earth Rift can slow down Tron quite a bit. Given how long games go with this deck, it is not unreasonable to hit the flashback cost, which also nets some value off of discarding it.
Electrickery
takes down decks with tons of X/1s like White Weenie, which can steamroll this deck with its speed.
Gorilla Shaman
helps against the Affinity matchup, and Raven's Crime is useful against control decks, as this deck often ends up drawing a bunch of cards off of Merfolk Looter, so its a great place to utilize them.
Waterfront Bouncer
is again useful against decks that play large creatures like Tron and Stompy.
Circular Logic
is pretty poor against Tron, but it excels against matchups with a tight curve as it can often be hard counter that can get online quickly. Gurmag Angler can give the deck some power when it is lacking, but it is important to not run it and
Circular Logic
at the same time, as it is quite the flop.
So thats the deck! Thanks for reading and feel free to offer your own advice or ask me a question about it.
