Welcome to the Undead Edition of Ertai’s Meddling! This week, we’re looking at the heavily-Zombie-themed Shallow Graves Intro Pack from Eldritch Moon. The Meddling series is where we take a preconstructed deck, strip it down to its essential, then rebuild it subject to two Golden Rules.

1. We can only add commons and uncommons.
2. The cards we add must be from the same sets found in the deck (in this case, Shadows over Innistrad and Eldritch Moon)

This keeps the deck affordable and easy to assemble. Let’s begin with a look at the stock decklist, then we’ll start making our cuts!

Shallow Graves ? Eldritch Moon Intro Deck | Wizards of the Coast

• Creatures (20)
• 1 Crow of Dark Tidings
• 1 Cryptbreaker
• 1 Laboratory Brute
• 1 Lamplighter of Selhoff
• 1 Noosegraf Mob
• 1 Reckless Scholar
• 1 Stitchwing Skaab
• 1 Wailing Ghoul
• 2 Advanced Stitchwing
• 2 Exultant Cultist
• 2 Liliana's Elite
• 2 Seagraf Skaab
• 2 Stitched Mangler
• 2 Tattered Haunter

• Spells (15)
• 1 Murder
• 1 Succumb to Temptation
• 1 Throttle
• 2 Compelling Deterrence
• 1 Liliana's Indignation
• 3 Cemetery Recruitment
• 1 Boon of Emrakul
• 1 Ghostly Wings
• 2 Graf Harvest
• 2 Spontaneous Mutation

• Lands (25)
• 12 Island
• 13 Swamp

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Rummaging the Graves

The first thing to do is cut out the cards we don’t have room for. It isn’t always necessarily that they’re bad cards; rather, they just don’t fit what we’re going to do. Shallow Graves by its very name wants to be a Zombie deck- well, that or a reanimator deck, but the tools for that aren’t here.

So where to begin? The first cut is one of the easiest: the Seagraf Skaab. The original deck list interestingly opted for two of these and only one of the Wailing Ghoul, despite the fact that their stats and cost are the same, but the Ghoul has a second ability that synergizes with other cards in the deck. Self-milling is one of the crucial elements of the deck’s identity, and plays with several other of the included cards. By filling your own graveyard up, you.

• Could grow Liliana's Elite
• Play cards with a recursion clause early, like Stitchwing Skaab and Advanced Stitchwing
• Offer card advantage through Cemetery Recruitment
• Fuel token generation through Graf Harvest, and power up Spontaneous Mutation

While it has the look of a Zombie deck, however, you’ll notice there’s not a lot of tribal synergy here. Rather, cards moving in and out of the graveyard is the thematic element that the Intro Pack is centered around.

What we’re going to do is focus on one aspect of that, which is the interaction between graveyard-filling cards and Liliana's Elite. The Elite is a solid card, once that can touch down on turn-3 as a 3/3 (with a bit of luck), and offers a “grow-your-own closer” throughout the course of a game. Useful as it is, it’s not a strong enough card to carry a deck by itself, so we don’t want to devote too many resources to feeding it. Rather, we’ll want to build a deck that does its own thing while growing the Elite, at the same time. That’s why the Seagraf Skaab is out, and, as you’ll see, we’ll be maximizing the Wailing Ghouls.

Next to get the axe is the Exultant Cultist. The Cultist is a lower-tier supporting card, and at its worst basically says “pay 3 mana, add one to your graveyard creature count.” At its best, it trades with one of your opponent’s creatures and then replaces itself in your hand. At worst, it lingers around the battlefield for awhile. This sort of card is vastly better when you’re able to control the sacrifice and double-dip on the benefits, such as with cards like Vampire Aristocrat, but that’s not this deck.

The Reckless Scholar has some cause for inclusion, since it can help filter your hand while filling your graveyard. This is another good example of a card that isn’t necessarily bad, but just doesn’t fit with the deck we’re building. The Scholar is a slow card. At best, you won’t start filtering until turn four, and then you’re only getting to use him once a turn. As a 2/1, it’s also not the most useful in the red zone either. The build we’ll be making today is more aggressive, and just doesn’t have a slot open for a slower utility creature like the Scholar.

The Stitched Mangler is another casualty of focus. Although the ‘freeze’ effect it brings is useful, not being to impact combat directly until turn four is a bit of a miss, since they come into play tapped. The freeze ability is quite helpful for an attack-minded strategy, but this is just a case of running out of real estate. We want to hit around 20 creatures, and there’s just no room. What would have pushed them into contention? If being a Zombie mattered here in a meaningful way beyond just assisting a singleton card, Cryptbreaker (for instance, Diregraf Captain had been reprinted).

For similar reasons, we’re also cutting the Laboratory Brute and Stitchwing Skaab. The Brute is another that seems to play well with the deck’s ambitions, since it mills four off your library when it comes into play. But beyond that, it’s just a four-mana 3/3. Combining the ability and the stats makes for a decent package, but it’s just not quick enough for this deck. I’d mentioned above that we want creatures that can stand on their own while feeding the Liliana's Elite, and this just doesn’t bring enough to the table.

The Stitchwing Skaab is an interesting case, though. It’s an evasive 3/1, which is very good offensively even if the back end is rather vulnerable in this environment. Now there are two ways to look at the recursion ability of the Stitchwings. One way is to simply see it as a recursion option. Oh, you killed it? AHA, it comes back!

The other way, however, is to see it as a cost reduction mechanic. If your turn-two Wailing Ghoul managed to drop this into the graveyard, you might see the option of a turn-three Stitchwing Skaab as a desirable aggro option, especially if you’re holding cards in hand that aren’t immediately impactful (perhaps too much land). It should be noted that this is an extremely risky tactic. There are several ways to pick off something with 1 power, from Borrowed Malevolence to Weaver of Lightning, and getting three-for-one’d represents a serious setback. That’s why we’re cutting the Stitchwing Skaab, there’s just not enough upside here to justify the slot. However, we’ll be returning to this line of reasoning shortly.

The final creature cut here is the Lamplighter of Selhoff. The Lamplighter ticks a number of the boxes that have seen cards excluded already, being a large-ish body with a modest ability that comes into play later in the game. If we’re going to spend this much mana, we want something that’s going to help close the game. A 3/5 one-shot filter just isn’t going to cut it.

Stitching it Together

Those were some pretty deep cuts- what’s left over to build upon?

Well, the first thing we’ve got is our sole 1-drop, the Cryptbreaker. This thing’s an all-star card here, as it’s one of those 1-drops that you are happy to see at nearly any stage of the game. Even later on, you should have enough Zombies on the battlefield to put its card-drawing to good use (although optimally, most of them will already be tapped from attacking). We almost never cut a rare from a Meddling (we even kept Providence in a couple weeks ago because that’s often where a lot of the ‘fun factor’ comes in. When they’re as solid as this one is, it’s a real bonus.

Next up is the Wailing Ghoul, one of the cards we discussed in-depth earlier. Based on their stats, these are actually weighed more for defense, so our end product isn’t a purely aggro deck. But as you’ll see, having a little early speed bump that also helps fill up the graveyard is a good fit here. What we lose in early ground power, we will more than make up in the skies with our other pick here, the Tattered Haunter. This is our only non-Zombie inclusion, but 2 power in the air for 2 mana is too good to pass up. It’s a great complement to the Wailing Ghoul, since the Ghoul is a solid blocker while the Haunter can’t block groundling creatures.

Taken together, those two cards form half of the nucleus of the deck, with a pair of 3-drops forming the other half. The next card we’re maxing out on is Liliana's Elite. This is the 1/1 that gets +1/+1 for each creature in your graveyard. It starts out very poorly, as a 3-mana 1/1, but thanks to cards like the Wailing Ghoul and natural attrition, you can expect that number start to climb and increase the value of the card.

Right at the intersection of hard-to-block creatures and graveyard filling, we find the Crow of Dark Tidings, the last piece of the core puzzle. The Crow is an aerial 2/2 that lets you self-mill two cards when it comes into play, then mill two more when it dies. It’s not too into the realm of Magical Christmasland to envision a turn-two Wailing Ghoul, turn-three Crow, then turn-4 Elite coming into play as a 2/2 or 3/3. (Magical Christmasland would be adding in a turn-1 Cryptbreaker). Or a turn-4 tandem of a second Ghoul and Haunter, to double the damage output in the air.

So there’s the core deck. Speedbump the ground game while milling into your own graveyard, grind down your opponent in the air, and grow your Elite into a closer-sized beater. Of course, it couldn’t hurt to have a few other closing options, should things not go according to plan.

For one thing, we’ll be adding in a pair of Advanced Stitchwings. Although pricier, as a 3/4 they dodge some of the concerns we had about the 1-toughness Stitchwing Skaab. The cost-reduction clause gives you the option to bring this fellow in for only 3 mana, as long as you have two cards to throw away. Again it should be stressed that using the card that way is a risky option, but it’s just that, an option. Similarly, using the Advanced Stitchwing to throw away two creatures as an instant-speed combat trick to pump up your Liliana's Elite falls into the same category. They’re pricey, but it’s better to have them than not.

Finally, we’ll be retaining the services of our premium rares, the Noosegraf Mob. I’m actually not a huge fan of this card, in part because it changes from a “go big” strategy into a “go wide” one, with your opponent able to influence the pace. If there was a card in the deck that cared about quantity of Zombies, like Soulless One, or even quantity of creatures, that would provide an interesting tension for your opponent with every spell they cast. Still, the more Zombies you can tap, the more cards you can draw with Cryptbreaker, so there’s that.

Bringing it to Life

For the noncreature support, as usual the Intro Pack’s selections are all over the place. We certainly want some removal, so we’ll be rounding out Murder to a full playset and throwing in a pair of Dead Weights. We’ll also happily wedge in a set of Compelling Deterrence. Whether it’s removing a blocker out of the attack lane or simply bouncing back some expensive bomb for the tempo hit, these are very solid. In addition, the discard trigger will almost always proc here, since we’re running almost exclusively Zombies. Even if their hand is empty, they’ll always have something to discard.

Next up is another tribal-bonus card, Cemetery Recruitment. This has a bit of negative synergy with the Elite, since the Elite wants dead things to stay dead, but the ability to draw the extra card here is what seals the deal.

Finally, two Shamble Backs give us another option at a cheap Zombie, with a touch of lifegain to boot. We’ll only want two here, as we would prefer to have a dead card in hard waiting for one of your opponent’s creatures to die. This should rarely be cast on your own graveyard, but it never hurts to have the option in a pinch.

Here’s the final deck list:

Meddled Shallow Graves ? Eldritch Moon Standard | Jay Kirkman

• Creatures (20)
• 1 Cryptbreaker
• 1 Noosegraf Mob
• 2 Advanced Stitchwing
• 4 Crow of Dark Tidings
• 4 Liliana's Elite
• 4 Tattered Haunter
• 4 Wailing Ghoul

• Spells (16)
• 4 Compelling Deterrence
• 4 Murder
• 2 Shamble Back
• 4 Cemetery Recruitment
• 2 Dead Weight

• Lands (24)
• 15 Swamp
• 9 Island

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