Shield Trigger decks-Knives101


Well, this was originally meant to be a reply to a thread in dmrealms. But this little reply eventually became a nice little article. I figured it would have a better place on pojo.com than in some random thread on dmrealms. Now don't expect me to start writing tons of articles like Cecillbill, and Scott. I just thought people might like reading this. Anyway enjoy!


There's a lot of things to consider when building a shield trigger deck these days. Hopefully this article will help you make a good ST deck.


ST's won't do you much good if they don't kill a creature or two. You can have your brain serums, spiral gates, dimension gates, crystal memories, dark reversals, and ghost touches for free. Doesn't matter to me. I've still got my double breaker in play, and you're still scrambling to defend against it. ST's that kill creatures give you extra life. A Terror Pit shield trigger is like two or three shield triggers, because it takes one hit and kills one monster. The amount of life given depends on whether or not you kill a double breaker. Oh and opponents will be much less inclined to attack your shields if they fear the punishment to come. Powerful shield triggers like Burst Shot, Tornado Flames, Natural Snare, Mana Nexus, Holy Awe, and Terror Pit are good for keeping your opponents' creatures out of the battle zone.


      Getting a card for free doesn't mean much if it costs little mana. Spiral Gate, Dark Reversal, Ghost Touch, Dimension Gate, etc. The whole point of getting a card as a shield trigger is to use something expensive for free. Really expensive cards can only be used about once per turn. Using expensive cards takes both time and mana. They take mana because of their high cost. They take time, because you have to spend your whole turn to cast them. You can't cast too many things along with them unless you have a lot of mana. Getting these cards for free saves both time and mana. Thus freeing up your time and mana for different plays. Playing a few cards during your turn, and then getting a few cards for free as shield triggers can help you to outpace your opponent. Outpacing your opponent is called tempo. Undoing what your opponent just did for less mana, or cards in hand than what he spent to do it is tempo. (Example: Your opponent spent two cards in his hand and eight mana to get his evolution into play. The evo bait costed him two mana, and the evolution costed him six mana. Now you turn around and kill that evolution with a free shield trigger. You just undid his eight mana/two card play, with a zero mana/one card play.) Getting expensive shield triggers for free makes for good tempo.

The most important problem with ST decks is that they tend to have few creatures. You can't win the game without creatures. You need at least sixteen non-evolution creatures. Otherwise a removal heavy deck will just keep your creatures off the field. It is possible to substitute a cheap searcher for a creature in deckbuilding. For instance you can count Dark Reversal as a creature since it recovers a creature from the grave.

Another problem with ST decks is that they tend not to use blockers. No blockers means that people have free range on your shields. And you will often find yourself wasting a Terror Pit on D.F.B.C. just to stay alive. When people have a direct route to your shield zone they will opt to attack your shields. They don't care because hitting a ST and losing a creature is better than hitting a blocker and losing a creature. Anyway without blockers you will find yourself playing defensively ala Steel Smasher style. With blockers you have the option of stopping their D.F.B.C. with a blocker instead of killing it with a shield. Blockers also stop your opponent from dropping an evolution to attack you directly for the win.

Someone once said that Mana Nexus will be mana'd in the hopes of getting a Nexus Chain. This brings up another issue of ST decks considering the use of Mana Nexus. A lot of times people will throw something into the mana zone hoping to combo it off of a Nexus. When Nexus doesn't wind up in their shield zone, then they just wasted a good card. One way of getting around this problem is adding some "mana from the top of your deck" effects. A few cards do this, but Bronze Arm Tribe, and Fighter Dual Fang are the best of them. When you've already got plenty of shield triggers in your mana zone (via Tribe/FDF), then you're much more inclined to hard cast that Terror Pit that you just drew. Another way to get around this is to have a way to recover your spells from the mana zone incase a Nexus isn't present in the shield zone. Boomerang Comet, Logic Sphere, Shtra, Lena Vizier of Brilliance, Bone Piercer, Sniper Mosquito, Flood Valve, and Syforce Aurora Elemental can all get the job done. I prefer the low cost creatures myself. Course all the others are good too depending on what deck you build. Anyway let's say you have a Mana Nexus and a Terror Pit in your shield zone. None of your shields are Mana Nexus. So you recover a Nexus from your mana zone, and cast it to place Terror Pit into the shield zone. Now you won't regret dropping those good cards into your mana zone, because it paid off after all.

I see a lot of people these days throwing shield triggers into their decks simply to play from the shield zone. This is a good strategy, but it can only be really useful when you have a lot of shield triggers in your deck. Throwing just four shield triggers into your deck and then expecting them to go off every game is not too wise. If you only have four ST's in your deck then the chances of getting a random ST into your five shields is once every two games on average. Four cards out of a forty card deck is one out of every ten cards. So on average every time you pick ten cards up from your deck you should run into one of your four shield trigger cards. And on average everytime you play your five shields you should see a ST once every two games. A lot of so called ST manipulation decks contain only eight shield triggers. This puts about one shield trigger into their shield zone for each game. However if you run sixteen shield triggers in your deck then you will get about two shield triggers per game (without having to place shields yourself). Now add shield placement and you're going to cause your opponent to hit about four really nasty shield triggers per game. Sounds fun huh?

There are three different cards that place shields into your shield zone. They are Emeral, Mana Nexus, and Sundrop Armor. Sundrop Armor saps your hand too much. Spending two cards and four mana just to get another shield trigger into your shield zone is not cost effective. You might as well have played two blockers for four mana. Anyway that leaves Emeral and Mana Nexus. Now unless you are going to run a water/nature deck you probably won't be using both Emeral and Nexus in the same deck. So how do you build a deck around just four cards? Well, like I said before, you add extra shield triggers into your deck so that you will get shield triggers without placement. Another thing to do is add something that will increase your chances of getting your shield placement card into your hand. Adding draw power is one way of doing it. The more cards you draw the more likely you are to draw your shield placement card. You can also fetch shield placement cards from the grave or Mana zone. Phal Eega can recover Nexus from the graveyard, and Dark Reversal is very good for grabbing Emeral. I've already listed all the cards that recover cards from the mana zone. There's quite a few to choose from. You can also search your deck for a shield placement card and put it into your hand. Cards that do this are... Crystal Memory, Logic Cube, Dimension Gate, Rumbling Terahorn, and quite a few others.

The last thing to keep in mind about making a ST deck... It's usually a good idea to use Nature as one of your civs. Not only does it have killer shield manipulation in the form of Mana Nexus, and Natural Snare, but it has mana gain to offset your high mana curve. Most ST decks have a really high mana curve thanks to all the costly shield triggers. Sure you want those high cost Shield Triggers to become your mana base, or wind up as shields, but eventually you will need to hard cast them. Or you will be forced into hard casting them. (Hard Cast = pay their mana cost and use them from the hand instead of as a Shield Trigger.) Without Nature's mana gain you will only be able to hard cast one six mana spell and nothing more. With Nature's mana gain you will be able to hard cast a six mana spell and then play another card for three mana. It makes for good tempo. Nature's mana gain can easily be turned into hand advantage via cards that send mana back into your hand. Sending a mana back into your hand is a very nice effect when you have mana gain. A lot of times you will have six to eight mana. There's bound to be a something helpful in your mana zone when you have so much mana.

Anyway I hope this helps everyone build a good shield trigger deck. You can find my shield trigger deck below this article. It's a Dark/Nature deck that I've named "Ten Snares of the Jungle." There's no tin cards in it yet, because this deck is mostly for fun.

x4 Natural Snare
x4 Mana Nexus
x4 Dark Reversal
x4 Terror Pit
x4 Death Smoke

x4 Bone Piercer
x4 Bloody Squito
x4 Bronze Arm Tribe
x4 Burning Mane
x4 Fighter Dual Fang