Ninjas Revisited

Legacy

Warhammer39999

Creature (27)

• 3x Baleful Strix
• 3x Higure, the Still Wind
• 1x Ink-Eyes, Servant of Oni
• 2x Inkfathom Infiltrator
• 3x Mistblade Shinobi
• 3x Ninja of the Deep Hours
• 4x Ornithopter
• 3x Thalakos Seer
• 2x Throat Slitter
• 1x Tormented Soul
• 2x Walker of Secret Ways

Land (22)

• 10x Island
• 4x Jwar Isle Refuge
• 2x Soaring Seacliff
• 6x Swamp

Instant (4)

• 2x Doom Blade
• 2x Familiar's Ruse

Artifact (4)

• 2x Mask of Riddles
• 1x Ronin Warclub
• 1x Shuriken

Sorcery (3)

• 3x Distortion Strike

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Maybeboard

Instant (1)

• 1x Capsize

Creature (1)

• 1x Dimir Infiltrator

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Clearly, this deck is heavily influenced by the Night of the Ninja planechase deck that Wizards released a few years back. It involves dropping evasion based creatures as a way to sneak ninjas through to get their effects.

Overview:

As stated above, this deck is basically just evasion based creatures and ninjas. This includes:

• Baleful Strix, Inkfathom Infiltrator, Ornithopter, Thalakos Seer, & Tormented Soul - A variety of 0-2 CMC creatures with various forms of invasion. Ornithopter is great when it comes out first turn, setting up a potentially turn 2 Walker of Secret Ways, but it's a dead draw against anyone with a reasonable amount of flyers in the deck. My real preference for evasive creatures is the Thalakos Seer because very few people play with shadow creatures, and it serves as card draw when it's bounced for a ninjitsu effect.

• Higure, the Still Wind, Ink-Eyes, Servant of Oni, Mistblade Shinobi, Ninja of the Deep Hours, Throat Slitter, & Walker of the Secret Ways - All of the ninjas serve as the main sources of damage for the deck, but also use the deck as toolbox of sorts. Need to deal with creatures? Find a Throat Slitter or Mistblade.

• Distortion Strike, Soaring Seacliff, & Mask of Riddles - these are just additional ways to grant forms of evasion to your creatures. Ninjas are not particularly big bodies and most have no innate evasion, so once one hits the table, you have to be able to keep sneaking their damage through. Granted, you can use Walker of the Secret Ways to bounce them, but sometimes you want to keep them around.

Card Draw and Enchantment/Artifact Removal:

As the decks I make are casual and do not have sideboards, any deck tries to conform to two stipulations: it must be able to deal with artifacts/enchantments (preferably at least two cards) and it should also have some element of card draw. Both of these features should attempt to stay on theme whenever possible.

• NONE - Unfortunately, neither black or blue is particular good at dealing with enchantments or artifacts when they hit the table, and I couldn't find anything on theme that seemed to work. Capsize is about the best I can come up with and stay on theme--but as you have to keep recasting your ninjas in the deck, you just don't have the luxury of spending six mana to recast capsize.

• Ninja of the Deep Hours, Mask of Riddles, & Thalakos Seer - In this deck, all of these become repeatable effects for card draw. As a result, this deck is not wont for additional cards in most games.

Notable Exclusions

• Sakashima's Student - Again, sold this to afford more cards. The price has since come down, and the next time he's reprinted, I expect it to crash enough to justify this.

• Silent-Blade Oni & Vela the Night-Clad - Both of these were omitted because they were just too cost inefficient. I don't like including 6-7 drops in my decks as they rarely live to see the table. They would be fine as a one or two-of finisher for the deck though.

Win Conditions:

The deck generally starts out slow and then moves into toolbox mode once you can get a Higure, the Still Wind. At that point, you can easily tutor up whatever you need to deal with the opponent. Without a doubt, it's not an overly aggressive deck (though you do want to be attacking with your evasion type creatures--but more aptly considered a ninja-control deck.

Games are won by clearing the opponent's board of creatures, making good use of efficient card draw, and attacking the opponent to death with small hordes.

Date added	12 years
Last updated	6 years
Legality	This deck is Legacy legal.
Rarity (main - side)	7 - 0 Rares 23 - 0 Uncommons 14 - 0 Commons
Cards	60
Avg. CMC	2.47