It is a more reliable deck compared to Bogles or Infect, thanks to the cantrips as I mentioned, and it can play a Zoo style game, but it really doesn’t want to. A Zoo deck that deliberately does 10+ damage to itself is not going to set the world on fire, which is why I don’t classify Death’s Shadow as a subset of Zoo. It is set up to play a very unfair game and to win because you weren’t ready for its bullet-like kill, which in my book makes it firmly a Gotcha deck under this classification method. Obviously when I get into these in future Beginner’s Guides, I will explain more of the nuance and reasoning.

In terms of how they actually win for the purposes of this very general outline Delver and DnT are linear aggro decks. They have a lot of extra disruption and play differently than the other linear decks, but the fundamental strategy of many small creatures attacking is the same. Obviously, once you start digging into the nuances things change.

Dredge is a very hard deck to classify in this system. It utilizes a very broken mechanic and plays not-Magic most of the time but wins by attacking with somewhat unimpressive creatures. This would put it somewhere between the unfair combo decks and Gotcha!, but I don’t really think it belongs in either. I skipped it for the purposes of the Beginner’s Guide, if we see Dredge gain paper metagame share I’ll do a more in depth look at the deck.

I suppose Delver and D&T could be construed as fair decks, but fair control and midrange are quite a bit different from tempo (maybe fair decks can be split into subcategories to address that).

Dredge is a bit tough to categorize in that it rips out of the gate and demands specific answers (which makes it similar to the Gotcha! decks you describe), but it also employs a go-wide strategy similar to Affinity/Elves or even Merfolk/Zoo. I don’t have a definitive answer as to where it sits on your categorization, so I’d like to hear what you think.