Spooky, scary skeletons send shivers down your spine. Shrieking skulls will shock your soul, seal your doom tonight. Spooky, scary skeletons speak with such a screech. You'll shake and shudder in surprise when you hear these zombies shriek. We're so sorry, skeletons. You're so misunderstood. You only want to socialize (but I don't think we should). 'Cause spooky, scary skeletons shout startling, shrilly screams. They'll sneak from their sarcophagus and just won't leave you be. Spirits supernatural are shy; what's all the fuss? But bags of bones seem so unsafe it's semi-serious! Spooky, scary skeletons are silly all the same. They'll smile and scrabble slowly by and drive you so insane! Sticks and stones will break your bones. They seldom let you snooze. Spooky, scary skeletons will wake you with a BOO!
The Basics
Spooky Scary Spirits works in 3 main parts: Player Defense, Creature Defense, and Unblockable Offense. And often they help each other out. Player Defense is provided by constant lifegain while creature defense generally takes a pillowfort approach. Offense focuses on creatures that can't be blocked for various reasons, ignoring opponents' defenses and going for the direct hit.
In addition to these there is also Spirit of the Hearth which gives the player hexproof, a nice thing to have if the opponent is also trying to curse the player or something similar.
Creature Defense
As mentioned before, Spooky Scary Spirits mainly uses a pillowfort approach to defend its creatures and, by extension, the player:
Elspeth, Knight-Errant's emblem makes all the player's creatures, artifacts, enchantments, and lands indestructible.
However, there are a few other forms of defense in this deck as well. Spells like Ethereal Haze, Absorb, Negate, and Circular Logic can block all manner of nasty things while Pacifism will turn any target creature into a vegetable. Drogskol Captain gives all spirits "hexproof." And, of course, there are plenty of enchantments and abilities which increase both power and toughness.
Unblockable Offense
This section is pretty simple. The goal is to make as many creatures unblockable as you can. Approximately one third of the creatures in this deck have shadow, which is only a concern if your opponents have shadow. Just about everything else is a spirit, of which many have flying. But we can make them a little bit better still.
This is where Cover of Darkness comes in. Cover of Darkness gives all creatures of an assigned creature type "fear." Choose "spirits" and the only creatures that will be able to block them are black and artifact creatures. The only downside is if your opponent also uses spirits then they get the same advantage.
Fun and Game-Winning Strategies
Now, this deck does not have any one particular game-winning strategy other than to survive for a long enough period of time to get enough unblockable creatures on the field. There is no singular card that absolutely needs to be in this deck to make it work, except maybe the commander. That makes it fairly flexible in that regard. However, there are a number of strategies that are pretty fun to pull off:
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