Deathfed is a green/blue (and just a smidgen of black) graveyard-centric Magic: The Gathering Innistrad Event Deck. Deathfed, like other Event Decks, boasts a full 60 cards complete with a sideboard and was designed to go immediately into a casual-competitive environment such as Friday Night Magic. Monty Ashley revealed the decklist for Deathfed on the official Magic: The Gathering website alongside Hold the Line.
Let’s take a look at Deathfed’s decklist and then review how Deathfed stacks up.
Decklist:
Sideboard:
Deathfed is a daring Event Deck if nothing else, choosing to embrace Innistrad’s graveyard theme and churning out gigantic Boneyard Wurms and spider swarms. If your win conditions fail, strap a Bonehoard onto your run-of-the-“mill” Llanowar Elf or Armored Skaab and swing for monster damage. There’s a dual land in there too, and you’ll definitely find uses for that as you build other Standard legal decks.
This is a fairly interesting template to get started with – Skaab Ruinators would work well here, Mirror-Mad Phantasms, and the rest of the Innistrad graveyard gang work fine and you can load up on more Splinterfrights that fill your graveyard as they power themselves.
The deck may seem a bit clumsy and vulnerable on the surface, and to some extent that’s true. Nihil Spellbombs have serious potential to wreck your day, and with Innistrad Solar Flare variants cropping up everywhere they’re hardly going to be an uncommon sight. Basically, since the graveyard matters, Deathfed has a highly vulnerable soft spot that decks and sideboards will be just waiting to counter.
That said,it plays better than it looks. Once you get rolling with Deathfed you really take over in a hurry, and it’s very difficult for an opponent to keep your huge creatures at bay even with board wipes, as a flashbacked Spider Spawning can do the job by itself. The issue is that getting up to speed can take time, and many Standard decks simply won’t provide you with the luxury of getting your graveyard going.
The really glaring weakness in Deathfed is the complete focus on offense – you’ve got almost nothing to defend against opposing creatures, and unchecked critters with Swords or Heroes of Bladehold will shred you in short order as you try in vain to stop them. You’re definitely going to want to consider options to fight against these things, but the downside is that addition of removal spells will water down the creatures you need to make Deathfed work. Wurmcoil Engines and Sun Titans also will shut down Deathfed almost completely, but the Mind Controls your sideboard may be able help a bit.
Deathfed isn’t the most powerful Magic: The Gathering deck by any means, but it is the most interesting Event Deck thus far, choosing to embrace a rather offbeat methodology instead of a simple building-block template like Vampire Onslaught, Into the Breach, or War of Attrition. Deathfed is fun to play, provides plenty of tools to create a fresh graveyard deck, and is good to go out of the box.
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