Let me first say that no, I don’t think Little Girl and Queen Barenziah are actually good cards. They’re included on the off-chance they stick a turn and give you some healing. If this deck survives to find a support or two it has a good chance of winning, so anything you can do to stall the game makes a difference.

I love Caius’ Machinations and auto-include it in every endurance deck. For a simple sacrifice of one of your many worthless bodies you’ll never win the game or even gain board control with your next three creatures get +2/+2 for the low cost of 2 mana. And since some of these cards have last-gasp abilities, since we’re playing Disciple of Namira, and especially since we’re running Necromancer’s Amulet, there’s a good chance the sacrifice in and of itself will be more useful than not killing our own creature off. This is particularly great if you can find this card and a cheap body in the first couple turns, because then you can actually secure the board for a little bit with your hillariously powerful creatures. This is especially fun with Barrow Stalker, Vigilant Ancestor, Daggerfall Mage, and Dark Guardian.

Speaking of which, I love Vigilant Ancestor. I think it’s great in slow intelligent decks. You’re never going to hit the opponent anyway, so it being permanently shackled is utterly inconsequential.

I don’t expect The Night Mother to ever work. More likely than not it’ll get removed the turn after you play her since everyone is still spooked about support control mage. That’s fine, she’s a super back-up win condition we don’t need, and drawing out support removal before you waste a turn playing Spider Lair is actually really useful.

Tel Vos Magister is pretty perfect for this deck. We want to stall forever, how better to do that than to play a warded creature who wards our actual health?

We have a decent amount of card draw in this deck. Pay attention to combos that let you find even more cycle. We’re gonna lose a lot of creatures as we stall forever, which makes Disciple of Namira perfect. Dark Rebirth is a great way to cheaply trigger Namira, and when you use it on Eclipse Baroness or Elusive Schemer you set yourself up for success in a great way.

I’m really sad I didn’t make room for Scout’s Report, Sorceror’s Negation, or Territorial Viper. If you’re not at all sold on Caius’ Machinations or Little Girl, remove all of them and add 2x each of the three cards I just listed. An older version of this deck had Indoril Mastermind. I replaced him with a better card, but he’s still very good here if you’re missing or refuse to use other cards. Indomitable Ordinator is very playable here if you for some reason lack any copies of the other 5 drops. Rising of Bones is pretty good too– could be a decent replacement for Little Girl as well.

Speaking of Namira, I’m tracking there’s such a thing as Namira’s Shrine. I’ve never used it because I’m not a dirty Doomcrag Warrior player, but you barbarians might find it useful. I don’t know if random spiders from Spider’s Lair trigger it anyway. On a related note, you should definitely not run a Doomcrag variation of this, because it would definitely not be hillarious for a randomly spawned 1/1 spider that isn’t the one with lethal to suddenly gain lethal and ruin your opponent’s day.

This is a pretty epic-heavy deck. Sorry. I can’t actually recommend crafting Spider Lair or Necromancer’s Amulet as they absolutely blow in most decks. If you’re sitting on a single copy you could try to craft just one more and run this with 2x of each, but with 75 cards you’ll probably die before you find any of them. I’ve run Scout and Spellsword (the latter uses Imperial Might instead of Spider Lair) variations of this concept before, and even with 50 cards I found I had to run 3x Necromancer’s Amulet. Good news is the rest of the epics are actually good cards you should either already have or shouldn’t mind crafting.

The deck’s not heavy on legendaries, and none of them are all that essential. Except for Barenziah they’re at least all good cards, but if you’re missing any you can easily replace them with budget options. Nahagliiv, Red Bramman, and Ungolim are the most important legendaries present by far. If you don’t have those you should definitely craft them.

Daggerfall Mage is easily replaced with Indoril Mastermind or Varanis Courier, or even with Giant Bat or Sanctuary Pet, the second pair giving additional utility rather than card draw. Nightmother, Barenziah, and Brynjolf could be replaced by whatever you wanted– they aren’t too important in the curve. I’ve already listed the three cards I’d have liked to have included earlier: Scout’s Report, Sorceror’s Negation, and Territorial Viper. If you need to swap cards around and have already included those, my fourth option on the wish-I-had-room list is Giant Snake. It’s another epic, but at least it’s cheaper than legendaries if that’s what you’re swapping it for. If you somehow can’t find any Tel Vos Magisters and have higher crafting priorities Giant Snake would be a solid replacement if you do have those.

As for general strategy: just stay alive. Don’t hit the opponent unless you’re using a creature with drain. Even once you exhaust their resources and they’re top-decking and you’ve suddenly miracled your way into board control it’s still usually not a good idea to press the attack. Remember, unlike us, they’ve actually drafted good cards. So if you break a single rune they might have two good cards at once on their next turn, and that’s simply inexcuseable. So your most common win conditions are: opponent loses patience and gives up, opponent actually runs out of cards in his deck and loses to exhaustion, and opponent has a heart-attack and you win on rope.

Enjoy, and may your spiders blot out the sun.