Shadowfist Deck: Death Cab for Cutie by Jan Malina

Home > Decks > Decks: Death Cab for Cutie (GenCon 2002 dueling championship winner)
[posted 31 May 2003]

Originally posted to the Shadowfist Forum on Yahoogroups on 12 Nov 2003. Republished with permission. If you're a member of the group, you can read the original in the archive.

Jan Malina won the GenCon 2002 Who's The Big Man Now? dueling championship using this deck.

Name: Death Cab for Cutie
Format: Dueling
Design: Jan Malina
Assistant Design: Erik Berg, John Castellucci
Named By: Andrew S. Davidson

  5 Jade Wheel Society
  5 The Pledged 

  4 Shadowy Mentor
  4 Covert Operation
  5 Operation Killdeer
  5 Suicide Mission
  1 Realpolitik
  2 Lodge Politics
  2 Faked Death
  2 Cutting Loose Ends

  3 Queen of the Ice Pagoda
  5 Dark Traveler

  2 Turtle Beach
  2 Four Sorrows Island
  2 Whirlpool of Blood
  3 Festival Circle
  2 Temple of the Angry Spirits
  1 Sacred Heart Hospital

= 55 cards

Strategy:

The generally strategy with Death Cab for Cutie is to accumulate sites in your smoked pile and then play very large Dark Travelers. Smoking sites can be done easily with Suicide Mission and several of the sites in the deck can even smoke themselves without too much work. Unfortunately, this does take a while to setup, hence the deck has cards which are designed to slow down fast opponents. Cutting Loose Ends is a classically overlooked card. It may seem to not work well in the deck given that your opponent could Toast sites in your smoked pile or smoke a Dark Traveler. However, it works exceptionally well in the early game where it can smoke an opponent's CHAR or Family Estate giving you a huge advantage. The main hitter in the deck is Queen of the Ice Pagoda, the original, not the N2 version. The Queen is amazing against Ascended decks as well as resource denial decks as she requires no resources to play. This deck tries to control the tempo of play, preventing a fast start for opponents, and then cements victory using either the Queen or cheap, large Dark Travelers.

[writeup by Jan Malina]

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