Pauper Commander - Shirei, Shizo's Caretaker

Alejandro Fuentes • March 16, 2025

Deckbuilding Pauper Commander

You Would Find This Deck Lurking in the Corner During a Party

Oh, boy, this is a weird one. Shirei, Shizo's Caretaker

is a commander that I've been avoiding for a while, and to be frank, the reason is that I have no idea what the deck does. Okay, I know what the deck does. It plays a bunch of tiny little guys that Shizo can reanimate, then sacrifices them, then brings them back. Pretty basic. But what makes it so good? Shirei is the eighth most played Pauper commander, competing with the likes of Dina, Soul Steeper
 and Minthara, Merciless Soul
. I've written articles about both of those, and those commanders are really good. So why is a five-mana commander that cares about 1/1s on par with them? Let's find out!

How does Shirei work? Basically, whenever a creature with one power or less dies on your side of the battlefield, Shirei will bring it back at the end of turn. Uh, okay that's pretty strong. There's no limit to how many creatures Shirei can revive, so if you sacrifice 2o creatures, you'll get 20 LTB and ETB triggers. Okay, I'm starting to see the vision. If we pair that with something like Falkenrath Noble

, we could absolutely be popping off. 

Small Creatures Are the Heart of Pauper

Looking at a basic Shirei deck, it's exactly what you'd expect. There's almost 4o creatures with just a single point of power. This looks like the kind of deck that wants to flood the board constantly, deploying little creatures over and over, and that makes a lot of sense. The more you get on the board, the more value you're getting. The more bodies dying at once, the more death triggers you're getting, and the more creatures coming back, the more ETBs you're getting. 

So let's find 40 tiny guys who want to die and come back over and over. Shouldn't be too hard, right? Creatures like Cauldron Familiar

were practically made for this deck. Three damage a turn from it re-entering is pretty good, and we have plenty of other creatures that will have the same effect, from Tattered Mummy
 to Serrated Scorpion
. When we're causing multiple of these guys to trigger a turn, our opponents' lives will be melting like wax. 

But there are more powerful things than draining life. What about draining card advantage? Our opponents are going to hate us for this, but we can't give up the opportunity to play Elderfang Disciple

, Nezumi Informant
, and Virus Beetle
. Is forcing our opponents to discard multiple cards every single turn a nasty strategy? Yes, and I wouldn't blame you if you choose friends over deck optimization, but I'm just writing this deck for an article, and these cards are going to win the game if you play them. Enjoy!

The effects of our cards get a little more miscellaneous after that, but there are certainly some worth mentioning. Thorn of the Black Rose

is the mono-black equivalent of Palace Sentinels
, and if you've ever played with that card in a blink deck, you know that reclaiming the monarchy every single turn is quite good. Novice Occultist
 and Dusk Legion Zealot
 go together as this deck's best form of card advantage, but be careful: it wouldn't be hard to die to the life loss. Blood Pet
 and Basal Thrull
 are basically mana rocks after you get Shirei out, but they can be used as mini rituals to play our commander as fast as possible. Then, of course, we have Gray Merchant of Asphodel
. Yeah, that's kind of an obvious inclusion in any black deck. 

But hold up, it's not an obvious inclusion at all. In fact, Gray Merchant of Asphodel

shouldn't even be in here. I was really confused when I noticed this card showing up in Shirei decks. It's got two power! Is it just here to do it's thing one time? I guess that's not bad, but it feels weird to have in the deck when you can't even recur it with the rest of the creatures. Well, I thought you couldn't recur it, until I noticed another card that continuously showed up in decklists: Fume Spitter
. "Sacrifice this creature: Put a -1/-1 counter on target creature." You could use this creature to put counters on your opponents creatures, or... You could put them on your own. If you put a -1/-1 counter on Gray Merchant of Asphodel
, it becomes a 1/3, and because Shirei only checks power at the moment when a creature dies, it'll come back from the grave. Unfortunately, the only creatures that can do this for us are Fume Spitter
, Festering Goblin
, and Festering Mummy
, but if we get any of those three and Gray Merchant of Asphodel
, then we've got quite a potent combo. It's not quite as strong as using Ephemerate
 to blink the Merchant, but since we're in mono-black, this'll do just fine. 

Keeping Our Commander Alive

The last important part of this deck is making sure Shirei doesn't die. You'll notice that the Spirit will only bring our 1/1s back if it's still on the board, so we've got to make sure our opponents don't just kill Shirei before out end step. The best card to achieve this is Whispersilk Cloak

, but unfortunately, we only have one copy in the deck, so we're gonna have to get a little more creative. Luckily, we're playing Pauper, meaning the only exile removal cards our opponents can play are Crib Swap
 and Scour from Existence
. Therefore, regenerate, a mechanic that doesn't do anything against exile removal but prevents destruction, will do just fine. My personal favorite regeneration cards are Blessing of Leeches
 and Dark Privilege
, that will really force our opponents to find some other means of removal, but what's even better than forcing them to find another solution is negating their first try. Unnatural Endurance
, Dark Dabbling
, and Wail of the Nim
 can all catch our opponents unawares, and Wail of the Nim
 has the upside of killing our entire board for us!

Pauper Commander - Shirei, Shizo's Caretaker

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Well, this has been a strange deck. Going into this, I didn't really know what to expect from Shirei. I kinda always assumed it was just a random jank deck, but there's a lot of synergy in this deck that makes it much stronger than that. It's difficult to snuff out, and really starts to snowball. Just looking at it, I can now see that it has all the traits that make a deck strong. Its place is well deserved on the Pauper rankings. 

Alejandro Fuentes

Alejandro Fuentes

Alejandro Fuentes's a nerd from Austin Texas who likes building the most unreasonable decks possible, then optimizing them till they're actually good. In his free time, he's either trying to fit complex time signatures into death metal epics, or writing fantasy novels.