Shirei, Shizo's Caretaker

[Aggro_zombies]

I've wanted to build a proper Aristocrats deck for a while, and the reprinting of Shirei and the associated drop in foil prices made it seem like an obvious time to put together a new deck.

Commander: Shirei, Shizo's Caretaker

Blood Pet
Carrion Feeder
Fume Spitter
Hope of Ghirapur
Martyr of Bones
Plagued Rusalka
Viscera Seer
Abyssal Gatekeeper
Blood Artist
Doomed Dissenter
Myr Retriever
Mesmeric Fiend
Tattered Mummy
Zulaport Cutthroat
Big Game Hunter
Bone Shredder
Bottle Gnomes
Cadaver Imp
Corrosive Mentor
Pilgrim's Eye
Soot Imp
Weaponcraft Enthusiast
Mindless Automaton
Pitiless Plunderer
Marionette Master

Bontu the Glorified
Yahenni, Undying Partisan
Falkenrath Noble
Sifter of Skulls
Sadistic Hypnotist
Sidisi, Undead Vizier
Harvester of Souls

Attrition
Hero's Downfall
Damnation
Ritual of Soot
In Garruk's Wake
Grave Pact
Dictate of Erebos

Sensei's Divining Top
Necropotence
Read the Bones
Reprocess
Entomb
Vampiric Tutor
Demonic Tutor
Diabolic Intent

Mind Slash
Phyrexian Altar
Open the Graves
Torment of Hailfire

Phyrexian Reclamation
Malevolent Awakening

Lightning Greaves
Ring of Xathrid
Swiftfoot Boots
Darksteel Plate

Mana Vault
Sol Ring
Coldsteel Heart
Jet Medallion
Unstable Obelisk
Hedron Archive

Bojuka Bog
Cabal Coffers
Cabal Stronghold
High Market
Myriad Landscape
Phyrexian Tower
Scrying Sheets
Thawing Glaciers
Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
Volrath's Stronghold
26 Snow-Covered Swamp

There are a couple of quirks about Shirei worth mentioning:

1) Shirei has to live the entire turn in order to bring your minions back. Even if he dies but is then brought back within the same turn, his trigger will not go off because he is considered a new object.

2) Shirei only cares about the power of your creatures when they died and does not check their power again while they are in the graveyard. If you have a way to shrink your own creatures, he will revive men with 2+ power provided they died with power 1 or less.

Like I said, I wanted to build an Aristocrats deck but did not want to shell out for 20+ Shadowborn Apostles and build that nonsense, so here we are. I've gotten a few games with this deck under my belt and it is hilarious and fun but not very powerful, mostly because of Shirei's poor cost-to-stats ratio and lack of survivability options in black. I'm really hoping there's a 1-power, mono-black creature with Afterlife in Orzhov because it probably gets auto-added here.

[H]

Wow, I didn't realize they had reprinted Shirei. I used to play this a long, long time ago. Looks like they printed some pretty neat things for the deck.

I had found Blood Pet pretty underwhelming back then and I did like Thoughtpicker Witch, but that card tends to get you targeted. I think I also ran Scarecrone but I'm not really sure why.

The deck was super fun, but people sure hated that I often had more to do on other people's turns than they did.

[Aggro_zombies]

Yeah, I'm kind of surprised to see him back too, it wasn't a card I'd thought there would be much of a reason to reprint outside of maybe a precon of some sort.

I need to pick up a Witch. Blood Pet has been okay so far.

I'm considering giving the deck slightly more direction right now, with the two options as "-1/-1 counters" and "discard". There are a few discard cards I'm not running - Disciple of Phenax, Fell Specter, Burglar Rat, and Black Cat notably - but most of them aren't that great. The counter theme is slightly more interesting, but the options are more limited and I'm not sure I need oodles more creature control - but on the other hand, I've wanted to run Midnight Banshee in a deck for a long time, and this is a nice spot for it.

[Aggro_zombies]

Bump for an updated version of the list I'm running here (https://archidekt.com/decks/3067#Shirei,_Shizo's_Aristocrats), now with correct versions of the cards I'm running.

This list is proving to be a lot of fun to play but has a nasty habit of stalling out hard if Shirei isn't in play (and will sometimes stall anyway even if you have him). I'm not sure how to correct for that. Most of the Aristocrats-style cards that reward you for killing your own stuff require you to have a board first, so if you're flooding out or mana-starved, you're kind of just screwed. Flooding in particular is brutal because Shirei is so personally pathetic as an attacker.

Priest of the Forgotten Gods seems pretty tailor-made for this deck, and Orzhov Enforcer might not be bad either. I'll try them and see. Vindictive Vampire feels like a pretty free upgrade on Falkenrath Noble.

[schweinefettmann]

I saw a shirei deck once that ran heartless summoning with x/1s that had a etb/ltb effect in combination with grave pact like effects. Was pretty scary when it all clicked, but like you said, quite durdly otherwise.

Makes your game plan jump forwards quite a bit!


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[Aggro_zombies]

Yeah, Summoning is pretty solid. It pushes the deck in a different direction, I think. You can afford to run more high-end haymakers and use Summoning to accelerate them out while giving you board control with death triggers on the little guys. It also allows you to Shirei back 2/X creatures, since Shirei only checks power at the time the creature dies, and that opens the deck up to a lot more effects. My one gripe about it is that building around it ups the number of cards you have to tutor for, since I almost always end up burning a tutor to find a protection effect for Shirei early to make sure I don't get shut down by creature removal (Shirei has to survive an entire turn to work).

I think Blood Funnel is another interesting option. There are a bunch of expensive spells in black that get a lot better if you can throw away a spud to ramp them out.

The other Shirei build I was considering was Shadowborn Apostle, with probably around 25-30 of them and 10ish demons, but Shadowborn is about $4-5 per copy and I did not want to pay that much money for a bunch of duplicate commons. It does seem like a pretty beastly way to build Shirei, though.

Back on topic: I really wish black had more Scry options. Shadows of the Past might be worth it here to dig to important cards, and Barrier of Bones and Doom Whisperer might also be worth it. I just need ways to scrape junk off the top of my library so I can dig for important cards when I start to stall.

[Davran]

The other Shirei build I was considering was Shadowborn Apostle, with probably around 25-30 of them and 10ish demons, but Shadowborn is about $4-5 per copy and I did not want to pay that much money for a bunch of duplicate commons. It does seem like a pretty beastly way to build Shirei, though.

Back on topic: I really wish black had more Scry options. Shadows of the Past might be worth it here to dig to important cards, and Barrier of Bones and Doom Whisperer might also be worth it. I just need ways to scrape junk off the top of my library so I can dig for important cards when I start to stall.

Wow, Apostles are $5 a piece? Time to see if I've got any laying around...

As for scry, I've been sticking Crystal Ball in more and more decks lately for the same reason. It's not a creature for Shirei, but it is pretty non-threatening so it should stick around for a while. Could try Isolated Watchtower too. The "downside" might not actually be a downside if you regularly play vs. a ramp deck of some kind.

There's other random cards that might be useful too, like Read the Bones or Price of Fame. Neither one is really flashy, but I always find myself reaching for stuff like this when I'm building decks.