Become highly evasive with this stealthy Magus subclass.
The Shadow Court are a subclass of the Magus class from 3rd party creator, Sterling Vermin. They are an assortment of rival clans that wage war through information, secrets and assassinations. They are able to sway political powers, topple regimes and advance their own agendas through the subtle crafts of stealth and magic.
While these elements of evasion and subtlety are typically held by monks and rogues, the methods for achieving this are quite different. Rather than through physical training, the Shadow Court mostly use magical means to accomplish their stealthiness like using many illusion spells, enhanced mirror image and the ability to turn invisible and teleport when in peril. They also possess some amount of martial arts.
The magus released on D&D Beyond on the 29th September 2026 and is also available as a PDF from Sterling Vermin’s website. It includes the full class, 6 subclasses and 31 spells. This article focuses on the Shadow Court subclass for which I’ve evaluated every feature, given some advice on using them and reviewed the subclass.
At a glance
- Half caster with more spellcasting acumen than rangers and paladins
- Has lots of sneaky proficiency and stealth spells
- Has plenty of evasive tricks to help them survive longer
4/5 – The Shadow Court makes for a solid, sneaky magus build with loads of illusions, invisibility and evasive ways to stay safe. I would have liked more reasons to go for an unarmed build, but at least this subclass makes that a viable option.
Shadow Court features
Hand and foot training (Lv3) – 3/5
Stealth and thieves’ tools proficiency are great for sneaking. If you can, I’d grab stealth proficiency elsewhere so this will give you expertise. It’s not available through the Magus class but a species or feat can grant it.
Being able to make useful equipment appear in your hand is alright, but this is the kind of equipment that’s cheap and easy to grab. Where this becomes useful is when you maybe don’t have your adventurers pack available (maybe if you’ve been imprisoned, or you forgot to buy some caltrops). It’s a fun ribbon feature, but a ribbon feature nonetheless.
The more important feature here is dexterity based unarmed combat and a d6 for unarmed damage. This brings your unarmed strikes to a decent level. You’ll miss out on using a weapon mastery from a weapon, but grabbing the grappler or tavern brawler feats will help add push and grapple to your unarmed attacks which can be quite effective.
Still, this only brings your unarmed strikes up to an average sort of level to weapon attacks. You still need a feat or 2 to make this worthwhile and there are no other incentives to not just use a weapon so this is only OK.
Jade mark (Lv3) – 5/5
Overexposed is the weaker option here. It’s only sometimes going to help. I prefer the invisibility from aegis which is almost always going to be useful. It does require a reaction to activate, but it’s great for protecting allies, allowing them to move away from enemies more easily and will give them advantage on their next attack too.
Shadow Court magic (Lv3) – 4/5
| Magus Level | Spells |
|---|---|
| 3 | Disguise self, forced hesitation, phantasmal feint, obscuring prick |
| 5 | Darkness, invisibility |
| 9 | Hypnotic pattern, major image |
| 13 | Greater invisibility, phantasmal killer |
| 17 | Mislead, seeming |
There are loads of really good spells on this list, including some with loads of utility like darkness and greater invisibility. Hypnotic pattern is also a top option too.
For the new spells, obscuring prick is a really good option for a cantrip to make a creature blinded against you and keep you a little safer. Phantasmal feint is a little more average, but decent enough. I quite like forced hesitation as a beginning of combat reaction to damage and slow a creature down.
Broken mirror jutsu (Lv7) – 4/5
A great way to cast mirror image as its big obstacle has always been the setup turn required. Having said that, magi suffered with this less anyway, but at least this way, you can cast mirror image with your bonus action and use the attack action to make a standard attack and cast a cantrip.
The amount of psychic damage dealt when each image is destroyed is fairly substantial and the intelligence save will be tough to pass. You can only cast mirror image this way once per long rest, but it’s not a big cost to expend a level 2 spell slot for another use.
False body jutsu (Lv14) – 4/5
An excellent safety feature to use when things get overwhelming, but you only get to use it once per long rest. It means turning invisible and teleporting 300ft (which is a huge distance, and you don’t even need to see where you’re teleporting to).
Because you only get one use, I’d be tempted to save it for when an attack is about to knock you to 0HP or use it against an attack that deals a lot of damage to trivialise its effect.
Enshadowed sifu (Lv20) – 4/5
Eyebite and programmed illusion can both be great spells, though programmed illusion is a little situational. Just be aware that using your spell surge in this way doesn’t recover a spell slot as it usually does.
Another use of false body jutsu is great as I can see this being used a fair bit.
How good is the Shadow Court?
The Shadow Court is a pretty good Magus subclass. They’re very much built for dexterity, which suits a magi. The spellcasting and other features make you a stealth specialist and this gives you a load of utility to work with.
Unfortunately, I think you’re not given enough reasons to use unarmed strikes over weapon attacks. You’re given the building blocks to make it a workable option, but not really anything more. I’d have liked to have seen this style of combat rewarded a little more through the subclass.
This doesn’t make it bad though and it remains quite distinct from a monk, despite the obvious borrowing from a monk thematically.
4/5
Optimising a Shadow Court magus build
While the Shadow Court subclass makes for a much more stealthy magus, it doesn’t fundamentally change how you’d approach building one. You probably want to be looking more at a dexterity build and ignoring strength as an option. Unarmed combat is also very much available too so you may want to consider the tavern brawler and grappler feats. But other than this, the same advice stands for building a normal Magus which you can learn more about in my guide below.
