Shared Fate.dec: card choices to make a deck that can't win

[Eddie]

After a tournament in Eindhoven, Bob the Builder was contemplating in the car about his deck and his desire to build a deck of his own. His idea was to break Shared Fate. The idea was to put Shared Fate in play as fast as possible whilst the deck should have no means of winning whatsoever. We started on a list on the way back. We each worked on the list separately at home, and talked about it, checking each other’s list a week after testing and tuning. We came to the same conclusion: it was possible to get Shared Fate in play pretty fast. But the big problem was: with the same amount of trouble you go through you could win with Tendrils instead of putting Shared Fate into play and using your opponents deck to kill him. Thus we abandoned the whole idea. Still, it might be interesting for TMD members to see our list because developing this deck required some "strange" card choices. Each card had to be looked at to see if it couldn’t be used against us when Shared Fate was in play.  I will talk about the card choices below the decklist.

[Mana] 28
4 City of Brass
4 Gemstone Mine
2 Underground Sea
2 Glimmervoid
1 Tolarian Academy
7 SoLoMox
1 Lion’s Eye Diamond
1 Mox Diamond
1 Lotus Petal
1 Grim Monolith
1 Mana Vault
1 Chrome Mox
2 Cabal Ritual

[Draw] 7
2 Deep Analysis
4 Night’s Whisper
1 Ancestral Recall

[Search] 8
4 Brainstorm
1 Vampiric Tutor
1 Mystical Tutor
1 Enlightened Tutor
1 Crop Rotation

[Broken] 13
4 Dark Ritual
4 Duress
1 Wheel of Fortune
1 Windfall
1 Timetwister
1 Time Walk
1 Memory Jar

[Kill] 4
4 Shared Fate

[Sideboard (uncomplete)]
3 Fire/Ice
2 Rack and Ruin
2 Coffin Purge
2 Memory Lapse
4 Xantid Swarm
1 Yawgmoth’s Will
1 Time Spiral

Duress: An obvious choice. You need it to push the enchantment through against control. And it doesn’t hurt you when shared fate is in play. You will only have crappy useless cards in hand anyway.

Deep Analysis: A very nice draw spell. The added bonus: with Shared Fate in play, the opponent might cast the Deep Analysis “drawing� 0 useful spells. The good thing is that the Deep Analysis is put into your graveyard ready to be used again. It still costs 3U though and not everyone will be stupid enough to cast it, so 2 should be the right number

Brainstorm: Very good card. Period. I was thinking of putting it in the broken list right next to Dark Ritual. You can only hope your opponent is playing it as well cause it turns into Ancestrall with Shared Fate.

Sideboard cards: Fire/Ice, Rack and Ruin and Coffin Purge are not going to be used main deck. We’ve put them in the side so that the opponent's Cunning Wish can be used. The same for Yawgmoth’s Will and Time Spiral. Memory lapse is a soft counter. I don’t regard it as a counter as it is pure tempo oriented. It should help out against control and it doesn’t hurt when your opponent is using it against you.

Cards that didn't make it:
Demonic Tutor: an obvious missing card at first glance. While the power of the tutor would help this deck enormously, we didn’t want the opponent to look through his deck for a solution with shared fate in play. We where ok with the idea that the opponent could use Vampiric, Mystical and Enlightened to put something stupid on top of his own deck cause this would only delay the inevitable.

Birds of Paradise:
First we included this as a mana fixer. After some goldfishing we both noticed that the card only slows you down. The deck main colours are black and blue. There are sufficient multi colour lands to solve any splash issues.

Undiscovered Paradise: The good thing about this card is that it will return to your hand if your opponent uses it. The bad thing is that it is terribly slow.

Mana Crypt: The mana acceleration is enormous and you need it in a deck like this. However, we cannot build in a way to remove it. So we can only hope that our opponents deck will kill them fast enough. It might be a good idea to put it main and side it out depending on your opponent’s deck. But a place in the side is certainly a good option.

I also thought of using Academy Rector and Cabal Therapy. But the rector is a creature that can attack and therefore it can’t be used.

Thoughts on the deck:
Getting Shared Fate into play is not that difficult. We had the biggest problems against fast aggro decks such as FCG and Madness. The number of creatures on the other side might be overwhelming by the time you get Shared Fate into play (usually turn 2 or 3). Remember that your opponent still has the cards in hand at his disposal. Also, as stated above, the gain of getting it into play instead of finishing the game right there is making this deck unplayable competitively. The games are rather interesting though, and you will learn to play all kinds of decks when playing this.

Morality and playing with someone’s cards.
One of the big issues is that this deck will let you play with your opponent’s cards, and the opponent will play with your cards. This wouldn’t be a problem in T2, but you are playing with $300 cardboard pieces here. Therefore, I hope no one will ever play this thing in a tournament. Playing it casually against your friends should be ok though. A solution might be to play in a Mindslaver way. You take decisions with your opponent’s cards.

[Jacob Orlove]

Doomsday for Ancestral Recall, Black Lotus, Dark Ritual, Chromatic Sphere, Shared Fate.

That's probably the fastest Shared Fate "kill".

[Eddie]

Yes your opponent can't do anything because he doesn't get any cards from your deck. However, you still have to kill him. Anyway, we didn't think of doomsday and it will help out enormously. You can run every card you want when you use doomsday In our defence: we stopped developing the deck before doomsday was unrestricted.

[Ephraim]

My biggest gripe with this deck (and I grant, it's not a very likely situation) is that you'll end up in a mirror match with another such deck. How annoying is that? You both start playing and then there's an exchange like this:

"You're playing Shared Fate too..."
"Yup."
"Has your deck got any win conditions?"
"Nope."
"Draw this match?"
"Sounds good to me."

Even the Doomsday plan doesn't technically solve this, since they wouldn't actually lose by decking.

[Jacob Orlove]

With the doomsday plan, though, you can include a subtle win condition (like bounce), because Doomsday will make sure they never get it.

[combo_dude]

Yeah, you can stick a real win condition in a Doomsday/Shared Fate deck, as you can always Doomsday it out of your deck, which is nice. Problem is that it may not be worthwhile running it, as this means that you HAVE to Doomsday before Shared Fate.

[LotusHead]

My crappy Shared Fate deck has 4 Trinket Mages to fetch up my lone Tel-lad Stylus (the 1 mana artifact that lets you effectively bury a card you OWN. As far as my deck being threatless, what kind of deck CAN't deal with Trinket Mages?

Also, my deck is heavily Artifact, 4 Fabricates will help me get my lone Leveler out. If I resolve Leveler, happy days.  If my opponent resolves Leveler, I Stylus my Shared Fate away during upkeep.  Way cool, eh? (Oh, Tel-Jilad Stylus can be used to extend a Leveler's lifetime by buring your own permanent (to the bottom of your library) to buy you a turn or two.