Soulshifting through the format

Hello Ladies and Gentlemen, yet another time!

Ever had this one deck idea that seemed really cool and somewhat potent but then got stuck while actually building it? Well, if I hadn't had such a situation before I would've now.

Let's go back a month or two. I was pretty hyped about the idea of building Celestial Kirin as my Mono-White deck, since a) the idea of playing a deck based on the opposing converted mana cost just seemed really cool and b) I am a sucker for Tribal decks since they just feel soooo cohesive. So I browsed the internet and my mind for white Spirits of any CMC while also looking out for non-Spirits that still might add synergetic effect. (Shout out to Bastion Protector for getting printed btw)

 

As I was going through cards, I came across the ol' "Soulshift" mechanic and surely they'll go fine into a Celestial Kirin deck. But then an idea sparked inside the chaos I call brain: Why not also build a deck that focused more heavily on this seemingly neat keyword. Effects like Eternal Witness have been and always will be among the stronger ones in EDH, and building a creature-based deck that has pseudo-protection against Wraths in Soulshift can't be too bad, can it?!

A quick magiccards.info-query later and I was pretty much sold:

Now while Abzan or Golgari might be good enough, I wanted to make sure blue and red didn't offer some hidden gems... And while red really wasn't that impressive...

Some of you might begin to see the problem: You'll want to play green and black for sure, since the majority of Soulshift creatures is in those two colors, while you don't really want to pass up on either white or blue.

Fortunately my playgroup allows any of the Nephilim to be played as your general, but still, playing a 4c deck that will want a certain density of spirits/soulshifters might become a problem when distributing slots since you'll also want some amount of fixing and utility in the deck (if you don't want to spend 1.000€ on your mana base that is...).

Additionally I came up with this insanely awesome toolbox, which added another pile of cards that would make me cry out in pain if I had to cut them from the deck:

...

There's just everything you'll ever need in a game of EDH printed in the form of a legendary spirit: mass removal (that even works around Indestructible), resilient threats, recurrsion, life drain, protection, and so on and so forth.

The real issues started when I actually sat down and started to build a rough draft of the deck. I just didn't know where to take the deck: 

1. If I wanted to use soulshift for maximum value - as a tool for grinding out games - I'd have to incorporate a sacrifice theme. Unfortunately a really good sacrifice engine requires quite a lot of room in a deck (outlets, additional effects, fodder, etc.), therefor I'd have to cut down on Utility-Spirits/Ramp/Toolbox. And especially cutting down on the Spirits would then make the tool box and soulshifting that much worse...
2. Going for a more aggressive approach would make many of the rather expensively costed soulshift-spirits pretty bad, but cutting them would, on the other hand, take away the safety net Soulshift provides.

Also a big thing to consider is that, depending on the curve of the deck, soulshift has a natural threshold: If you play many low drop spirits like Geist of Saint Traft and Kira, Spirits with soulshift 3 are viable additions to the deck, whereas a higher curved spirits deck might want soulshift 5 to be the lowest. This means that you can't just jam the "better" soulshift-Creatures into the deck because the quality of soulshift depends on the non-soulshift Spirits you might want to get back every now and then.

Sadly I've not come up with the perfect solution yet. Some of the Spirits that have neat little effects in addition to soulshift just are too small to return anything while others provide little to nothing besides soulshift which makes them have a bit of an awkward feel to them due to the high costs.

My "angle of attack", if you'd like to call it that, is trying to work around the high casting costs while also focusing more on the value providing Spirits instead of "comboing" with Soulshift at all costs. Also since Lifespinner will want some fodder, playing cards like Lingering Souls fill the double role of somewhat synergizing with Drogskol Captain and the likes while also providing Spirits to sacrifice. As for the "cheating" the mana costs:

Now Urza's Incubator is pretty good in most tribal decks for the acceleration it provides. But cards like Victimize or Rescue from the Underworld really shine in this deck: Either you sacrifice a small Spirit and return at least one of the better/bigger ones or you sacrifice a big one and return two Spirits to the game AND one to your hand while potentially having yet another creature with soulshift in play.

Mix one of these in there and you're pretty much set for any grinding you'll ever need.

Of course this is still not a real gameplan, but at least it's a base and I'll try to build form there. Provided all your spirit legends offer pretty insane effects, just backing them up with this recurrsion engine of Reanimate-Effects, Regrowth-Effects and of course Soulshift might be good enough in many cases, so maybe I'm just overthinking things. I hope to get a first draft of the deck running after the holidays and simply playtest my way from there to a more finely tuned pile of sweetness.

And never forget, simply running a good ramp package and value creatures is a good place to be in EDH:

With that I want to end it for today. I hope I could inspire at least one of you to try build a similar deck or maybe someone has already built a deck similar to this and wants to share his experience with me/us, because as always I'll...

See y'all 'round!