Hello all! Thanks for checking out my pet deck, Shapeshift!

This primer is a work in progress.

This deck is a bit of a pet deck of mine. It started off as a way to see if I could make big water monsters a viable strategy back when the meta was aggro and magoo. It was always fun but wasn't always all that viable.

Then with the rules change aggro and Archimago got a bit weaker and midrange was back in vogue. My good buddy Pascal (fuenfrappe on discord and 2nd place at Gencon!!!)?told me I should bring this to Gencon. I started testing and tweaking and it turns out Pascal was right. This deck was more than viable!

As a result this deck had now won me 2 rainbow foil druids and is the most fun deck I've played in the current meta. I hope you enjoy!

The gameplan:

This deck requires a lot of knowledge about the game but apart from positioning and maximizing card potential it's a pretty straightforward deck. Basically I've got all the good cards for 4+ mana and just need to get there. The early game is just stall and buy time, then the late game is present threat after threat after threat and out value your opponent. You can win with just about any minion in the deck.

The deck:

I'll try to go through each card and why they are here, I'll also post a video on my YouTube channel If you prefer the visual reference.

The Auras:

These are self explanatory. Atlantean fate is one of the best cards in the game. It wipes the opponents board, submerges their artifacts, kills their spiders, and ruins their threshold. Not a whole lot to explain here other than in the current meta with so much water running around people are running a lot more ordinary sites to nerf this card specifically. One thing to remember is to throw water sites on your front row so if you need an emergency fate in your own sites you don't lose threshold when drowning their minions.

Black plague is just hard removal. Kills just about anything if you position it right and it should already gain you value by the time they can dispel it if they are inclined to. Against aggressive creature based decks, if they take a turn off from playing creatures to get rid of the plague, I'll throw my grandmaster wizards or tawney into the black plague just to keep it around and buy more time.

The artifacts:

Ring is self explanatory. It's the most ubiquetous and busted card in the game. I don't really need it early against most opponents but it's fantastic early against AoA and aggro decks. Ring, trinket, and tawney, can dismantle aggro decks on their own. You don't even need another spells. The one thing to mention is don't play it out til you're ready to use it bc between dispel, drown; bury, disenchant, swap, shatter strike.... It's a card every deck is packing removal for

Trinkets: yeahhhhh these are busted with tawney. Getting one means you're pushing real damage with tawney from the start, getting two Means tawney is trading for any aggro minion, getting 3 feels unfair. Lookout lugbog cat, my 4 power flyer doesn't even cost me a card. I will always keep a trinket in my opening hand. Depending on the matchup I might keep 3 (don't do this agaisnt fire based decks. If you don't know what your opponent is on don't keep 3 trinkets. If they have deserts you're just not playing the game lol) this is safe into AoA, AoE, waveshaper, deathspeaker etc.

Shapeshift 2nd place SCG-Baltimore

@Ceej