As we look ahead toward Eldritch Moon, and the great unveiling of the force behind the madness and insanity plaguing the plane’s inhabitants, we have one last mystery of our own to solve today: how can we improve the Unearthed Secrets Intro Pack?

In this series, we look to take an Intro Pack, strip it down to its bare essence, then rebuild it from the ground up to be a stronger, tighter, and more consistent deck around its theme. Thus far we’ve tackled all of the decks but one, and today we’ll going into the mysterious world of Clue tokens and the Investigate mechanic.

As always, there are two “golden rules” we’ll be adhering to. First, we can only add uncommons or commons to the finished deck — no rares or mythics. This helps keep it budget-friendly and in the spirit of the Intro Pack itself. Once you open up the gates to adding any card you like, what you end up with probably won’t look a whole lot like Unearthed Secrets.

Second, to make sure we’re only using cards readily available to most players, we’ll be limiting ourselves to sets represented by the deck itself. In this series of five decks, that means only Shadows over Innistrad, but it’s worth noting that when we Meddle the five decks from Eldritch Moon, we’ll be able to use Shadows over Innistrad there as well.

So let’s jump right in to Innistrad’s mysteries, and see what we can uncover. Let’s start with the stock decklist.

Unearthed Secrets ? Shadows over Innistrad Standard | Wizards of the Coast

• Creatures (21)
• 1 Gloomwidow
• 1 Nephalia Moondrakes
• 1 Pack Guardian
• 1 Tireless Tracker
• 1 Watcher in the Web
• 2 Briarbridge Patrol
• 2 Byway Courier
• 2 Drownyard Explorers
• 2 Erdwal Illuminator
• 2 Graf Mole
• 2 Quilled Wolf
• 2 Stitched Mangler
• 2 Thornhide Wolves

• Spells (14)
• 1 Aim High
• 1 Jace's Scrutiny
• 3 Confront the Unknown
• 1 Press for Answers
• 1 Root Out
• 2 Gone Missing
• 1 Ghostly Wings
• 1 Ulvenwald Mysteries
• 2 Ongoing Investigation
• 1 Magnifying Glass

• Lands (25)
• 12 Forest
• 13 Island

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Breaking Down

Looking over this list, the first question to ask is, what is the deck trying to do? In this case, it’s similar to what Head Designer Mark Rosewater calls an “A/B” mechanic. This mechanic is comprised of two separate components that must come together for the mechanic to work. For instance, the madness mechanic, which requires both discard outlets as well as cards with madness.

In the case of Unearthed Secrets, you have a deck that loves to spawn Clue tokens through Investigate, and then has a number of cards that care about Clue tokens. That, in a nutshell, is the essence of the deck. Make Clues. Then make Clues count.

This means we’re going to have to cull out cards that aren’t central to this objective, or could be replaced by cards that simply do it better.

First on the chopping block is the Quilled Wolf. Creatures carrying mana-intensive activations are often included in Intro Pack decks as a way for players to make use of all that mana they’ve assembled in the later game (the modern-day Intro Pack deck tends to be a little heavy in land content). Unfortunately for the Wolf, it’s not a terrible beater, but cards not contributing to the overall theme will only be considered if they’re just too good to pass up. You’d have to be in a very generous mood to say that about the Wolf.

Next cut is the Stitched Mangler. The Mangler represents a component of the deck’s objective in that it exists to help slow down your opponent. It has a decent toughness, and freezes one of your opponent’s creatures when it enters the battlefield. That makes it a nice speedbump, helpful for buying you time to get your Clues in order. However, let’s compare it side-by-side with the Graf Mole, a card we’re going to keep. They both cost three mana, and the Mole can act as a blocker as soon as it touches down. Not so the Mangler, which enters the battlefield tapped! And even though there’s just one point of toughness separating them, the difference between 3 and 4 is substantial. Not only does the Mole have the potential to be a better roadblock, but it also synergizes with the use of Clues. Goodbye Mangler, hello Mole!

The Gloomwidow is another example of a card that’s “decent, but not good enough here.” A 3/3 for 3 mana is a good deal, even with the minor blocking limitation (can’t block groundlings). For a similar reason, it can head off into the sunset with the Watcher in the Web. Blocking loads of creatures is a clever Fog-like effect, effectively blanking your opponent’s entire attack at the cost of a card, but this is a card that costs five mana. Somewhere out there is a tribal Arachnid deck whose fear-of-being-swarmed prayers have been answered by this card, but it isn’t ours.

The next cut is the Drownyard Explorers. What, but they investigate! This is true, but we already have the synergistic 2/4 spot lined up with the Graf Mole, and for one mana cheaper. I’m not big on cards that offer lifegain for lifegain’s sake, but the Mole comes down at least a turn earlier than the Explorers, and often more than that. By the time we’re done, we’ll have loads of ways to make Clues, so no need to include the mediocre ones.

I’m also going to be drafting a pink slip for the Briarbridge Patrol. The problem with the Patrol is while the ability to repeatedly Investigate is useful, it’s only effective when you connect with a creature. That makes him more useful on the defense than offense, as your opponent will generally have some say as to whether or not they want to give you a Clue token by blocking. Unless they’re at 3 life, of course, but at that point one more Clue token probably won’t make much difference.

The Pack Guardian is another card that doesn’t quite bring enough to the table here, but isn’t necessarily a bad card. There aren’t a ton of Delirium enhancers in Green, but the Guardian’s ability to put a land into your graveyard (for added value, no less) makes it a useful design. Being an ambush creature doesn’t hurt, either. Finally, the vanilla Thornhide Wolves can go with it.

So where does that leave us?

Rebuilding

The first thing we want to do is round out to a full playset the Erdwal Illuminator, because that guy is almost everything you’d want from a card for this deck. 2-drop. 3-toughness. Flies. And, yes, offers free Clues! This makes them useful in multiples, too, since you’ll get a free Clue for each Illuminator when their ability triggers. These guys are a slam dunk.

Another slam dunk here is the Daring Sleuth, a double-faced card not found in the original deck. We’ll want four of these as well, since they’re almost guaranteed to transform into a 3/2 with Prowess, and a Curiosity-like ability to give you more Clue tokens. That’s a bargain for the cost, and they activate from something we’re going to want to be doing anyway.

The next card to fill up on is the Byway Courier. A 3-mana 3/2, it has nicely offensive stats and gives you a Clue token when it dies. There will be many times you’ll happily hurl this guy against your opponent’s defenses or trade him on the defense, since you get a lovely consolation prize. This card is very similar to the Briarbridge Patrol, but it packs a little more punch for the mana.

We mentioned the Graf Mole above, and we’ll add one more to the deck for a total of three. The Mole is a very strong speedbump that synergizes well with the deck, but it’s easy to limit to three since it’s so defensive in nature. We don’t need to see the Mole in our opening grip, since we typically won’t be popping Clue tokens early. Rather, the Mole comes into its own in the mid-to-late game, where it can hold off some offensive threats and keep our life total padded.

There’s also no way we’re parting with the Tireless Tracker, which is so good that it’s seeing play in Constructed. The Tracker effectively reads Landfall: Investigate, and has the option of growing when we start going through our Clues.

Next up is a playset of Uninvited Geists. This is a card that has really impressed me, but it works best in certain deck types. Thus far, we’re looking at a deck that likes to congest the red zone, making it difficult for our opponents to get enough damage through. We have ways to bloat our life total, with the Mole. Clues will let us burn through our library faster than our opponent. All we really need from here are some closing options.

Once transformed, the Geists are up-jumped Phantom Warriors, eating away at our opponent’s life total each turn. Unblockable, they demand removal, making them a priority target and taking the hit for the rest of your creature apparatus. All you need to do is hit your opponent once to flip them, and as we’ll see, we have a few ways to help that along. If it comes to it, we can always turtle behind our defensive options, and grind our opponent down with these.

In addition to the Geists, we can also accomplish the same with a pair of Aberrant Researchers. As you’ll see, we’ve cut some of the enchantments out of the deck, letting us focus more on instants and sorceries. A 5/4 flying Perfected Form will handily speed the game towards it conclusion while we hold off our opponent on the ground, and 3 power in the air is perfectly useful if we never hit a transformation.

Finally, the Nephalia Moondrakes are a keep. I’m actually not very fond of this card, since it’s terribly expensive, but it’s rare to cut our bombs out during a Meddling —they’re just too much fun. Since this deck has some ability to stall out the board state through speed bumps in the red zone, that can help buy us the time we need to bring the Drakes on-line. Once we do, our opponent has two issues to solve. First, a 5/5 evasive beat-stick, and second, the ability to give our entire team flying and alpha strike for the win.

Like all Intro Packs, Unearthed Secrets packs a ton of disparate effects in the non-creature support suite. We’re going to narrow this down to a handful of spells in the name of consistency.

First, we’ll take a pair of Confront the Unknowns. These Giant Growth variants make for useful combat tricks, and at the end-game came even act as a Might of Oaks for some lucky recipient if the rest of the deck has done its job. This won’t be an aggressive deck that loves the versatility of combat tricks to power over its opposition, so we’re content with a pair here. Enough to be able to keep our opponent wary.

We’ll also take a pair of Ongoing Investigation. The Investigation has the ability to offer some extra Clues if any of our creatures connect (o hai Unimpeded Trespasser), as well as letting us mine the graveyard for corpses to offer up for lifegain and additional Clues. We’re limiting to two here because they are a nice-to-have, not a need-to-have. The same goes for a pair of Magnifying Glass. These make for great mana dumps late in the game, but we won’t benefit a lot by seeing more than one in play.

We will, however, take a full set of Rabid Bite. We’ll want some solid removal, and there aren’t a lot of options for that in this color combination. This should help us thin our opponent’s herd a bit, particularly of any nettlesome utility creatures that they might not be committing to combat.

Press for Answers is a useful ‘freeze’ card that temporarily locks down an opponent’s creature. These are here to help slow our opponent’s tempo, as well as help us get some of our benefit-on-damage creatures in to hit our opponent (thinking Uninvited Geists and Ongoing Investigations here). Finally, for a dose of protection we’ll take a pair of Broken Concentration. With few closing options, we’ll want to borrow a page from the control archetype and have a splash of countermagic to protect our investments from pinpoint removal.

Here’s how our final deck shakes out.

Meddled Unearthed Secrets ? Shadows over Innistrad Standard | Jay Kirkman

• Creatures (23)
• 1 Nephalia Moondrakes
• 1 Tireless Tracker
• 2 Aberrant Researcher
• 3 Graf Mole
• 4 Byway Courier
• 4 Daring Sleuth
• 4 Erdwal Illuminator
• 4 Uninvited Geist

• Spells (14)
• 2 Broken Concentration
• 2 Confront the Unknown
• 2 Press for Answers
• 4 Rabid Bite
• 2 Ongoing Investigation
• 2 Magnifying Glass

• Lands (24)
• 12 Island
• 8 Forest
• 4 Woodland Stream

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As it turns out, there are some very fun build-arounds in this color pairing. An Autumnal Gloom Delirium deck and a Fleeting Memories mill deck both piqued my interest. What direction would you have gone? Let me know if the comments below!