Shen Sivir: Kinkou Mercenaries Revisited
Beefy beatdown decks abound? Bring Barriers to the battle!
About the Author
Hello fellow Runeterrans, Ana here! I'm a Legends of Runeterra player from APAC who has hit Masters several times.
I am a deck builder who loves to cook up funny decks (that can actually work) and climb with them. You can often find me in the deckbuilding section of LoR Discord servers (under diefishmaggi #2837), where I post my homebrews and provide opinions for others on how to refine decks, and on Twitter at @fishb00k.
Recently, I climbed to Masters with this deck, so I thought it would be a good time to revisit this guide and see how it has evolved in this past half year.
Old Tricks for a New Meta
For those who have yet to read the original Shen Sivir guide, [HERE] is the link to the original guide.
TL;DR: This is a midrange combo deck that focuses on taking favorable trades and ends the game with finishers such as level-two Sivir and/or Sacred Protector.
I will not be going too much into the deck guide part, as that is covered in the previous article and the deck's gameplan remains the same. Rather, I will be talking about the changes in LoR meta (as of the Variety Set release in Patch 4.2) and its impact on the card choices and considerations.
Variety Set
LoR's latest Variety Patch (Patch 4.2.0) brought many interesting cards into the game, including two very controversial additions: Blocking Badgerbear and Mischievous Marai.
Sadly, being in Ionia Shurima, we are not able to include (ahem, abuse) these cards in our deck – not to mention that the new toys that Ionia and Shurima got are pretty niche in terms of deck-building requirements. So, most changes to our Sivir Shen deck are with old cards, but they are influenced by the new, popular decks that are surging on ranked ladder after Patch 4.2.0.
Firstly, let’s talk about the elephant bear in the room
What more can I say?
Blocking Badgerbear being a three mana 4 | 4 Elite unit with innate "I can block Elusives" is the premium Demacian three-drop, so much so that even Lux Jayce is running three copies of this grumpy bad boy – Elusive spam decks such as Fizz TF are basically nullified by this card alone.
The addition of this card made Elites and several Demacia Targon beatdown decks rise in play rate and win rate. The previously introduced Trusty Ramhound and Champions’ Strength certainly solidify the top-tier status of this archetype.
I have a love-hate relationship with these Demacian beatdown decks. On the one hand, they are incredibly boring to face: most of the game they are just putting down units, putting down more units, and then casting Champions’ Strength. On the other hand, their linear board-based game plan is also exactly why we win against them.
Shen Sivir uses Barriers to make value trades without sacrificing our own units, and this allows the deck to shine in an Elite-dominated meta. We can negate all their units’ damage by simply using Barriers to trade, and since they are not able to remove our Barriers efficiently (e.g., using ping spells), our units simply trade up into theirs. This is also one of the main reasons I have included Ionian Tellstones, since Stand United gives two Barriers while using only one card, giving us board advantage and card advantage.
Against Lux Jayce, we aim to do the same: trade up using Barriers and preserve our units, especially our finishers and champions. However, it is a little trickier to do so since they are also running Piltovan removal tools. This is still manageable for us since their removals are often expensive and deal lots of damage at one go, so saving up a few Barriers or Deny to defend against key removal spells should swing the match more than enough in our favor.
Moving on to the ticking bomb
Mischievous Marai is also a card that is very fun to play with, but incredibly frustrating to play against. She demands removal on sight since if left unchecked she can snowball very quickly to ramp up removal spells.
So far, this fish’s best decks are Divine Kegs and Seraphine piles. Luckily for us, neither of them are favored into the Demacian beatdown decks or the Jayce Lux decks, and so we are not likely to face them. Therefore, need not tech against Mischievous Marai – our best option would be Desert Duel, and that card might be a brick when facing a board of beefy units. The split of 1x Rite of Negation plus 1x Deny (as opposed to 2x Deny) is also to prevent getting blown out by an opponent chaining spells with Marai on board.
Other card changes
There aren’t many changes in units, since most of them are still performing well against the current field.
Treasure Seeker dropped to a 1x because I don’t like seeing multiples of her, especially in the later parts of the game when I should be getting my combo pieces ready.
I added 2x Tasty Faefolk due to the prevalence of aggro such as Leona Noxus and Annie Jhin before the Variety Patch landed, and kept it afterwards as it is still great as a three-mana 4/2, being one of the few three-drops that can trade into Blocking Badgerbear.
1x Concussive Palm is included for the same reason: it is a great tool against aggro and does well into the current beatdown decks too.
I removed Siphoning Strike primarily because most decks that we face are able to output a lot of pressure in the early turns, and Siphoning Strike is often a dead card in such situations. And even against slower decks like Evelynn Viego, they can easily negate Siphoning Strike by using Hate Spike or Glimpse Beyond.
Will of Ionia being swapped for Unworthy Soul should be a no-brainer since Unworthy is much much more flexible than Will of Ionia and has the potential to cost less.
Additional card considerations
Swinging Glaive
This card essentially replaced Vekauran Bruiser (RIP Barbara). There is no way we would ever consider running Vekauran Bruiser over Glaive, especially since Glaive is a reusable +2 | +1 buff.
Moral Support
I would only consider running this if I had Young Witch in the deck. Shen being the only support unit simply does not justify this card.
Forsaken Baccai
One-mana 2/1 Predict. Seems great considering we can brick pretty hard at times!
Tellstones
Both Ionian and Shuriman Tellstones are great. I am just not a fan of having too many of them personally.
The Darkin Bloodletters
After witnessing the rise of Akshan decks I have realized that a six-mana 7/7 with Overwhelm is not something to scoff at. However, our game plan is primarily trying to keep units alive to trade positively, and hence the cost of killing a unit would probably require a total rebuild of the deck.
Wrapping Up
That’s it! The deck is currently performing quite well against all the board-based beatdown decks, so I hope you guys like a fun deck that also happens to do well into them. If you have any gameplay queries or suggestions, you can always find me on Discord, I would be more than happy to help.
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