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Legality
| Format | Legality |
| 1v1 Commander | Legal |
| Archenemy | Legal |
| Arena | Legal |
| Block Constructed | Legal |
| Canadian Highlander | Legal |
| Casual | Legal |
| Commander / EDH | Legal |
| Commander: Rule 0 | Legal |
| Custom | Legal |
| Duel Commander | Legal |
| Gladiator | Legal |
| Highlander | Legal |
| Historic | Legal |
| Legacy | Legal |
| Leviathan | Legal |
| Limited | Legal |
| Modern | Legal |
| Oathbreaker | Legal |
| Pauper | Legal |
| Pauper Duel Commander | Legal |
| Pauper EDH | Legal |
| Planechase | Legal |
| Quest Magic | Legal |
| Tiny Leaders | Legal |
| Vanguard | Legal |
| Vintage | Legal |
Ghoulcaller's Chant
Sorcery
Choose one--Return target creature card from your graveyard to your hand; or return two target Zombie cards from your graveyard to your hand.
legendofa on
Scarab God UB Zombie Tribal
1 year ago
Welcome to the club, PaleBlueEyes96!
My first question is usually How much money are you willing to spend on this? There are options for everything from pocket change to the big spenders.
generally isn't great at generating and sustaining mana by itself. Dark Ritual, Bubbling Muck and High Tide, and Cabal Coffers or Cabal Stronghold can help boost your mana for a turn or two, and other artifact sources like Dimir Signet or pretty much any artifact with Dimir in the name can help with longer-term production.
Another approach that can help with your mana efficiency is reducing the mana curve. You have a lot of cards that cost 4-5 mana and not as many that cost 1-2. If you trim off some of the higher mana value cards and switch them out for lower-cost cards, this will also help. Bladestitched Skaab, Ghoulish Procession, and Ghoulcaller's Chant are some options to start with.
For card draw, this is one of the strengths of these colors. Necropotence and Phyrexian Arena are classics. You already have Distant Melody, which is good. Other sorceries and instants that might help are Sign in Blood, Notion Rain, Preordain, and Windfall.
Kazierts on
Oops, All 1 Drop Zombies
2 years ago
Sorry for not realizing the entire deck was meant to be CMC 1, not just the creatures. With this in mind, I got a few other suggestions.
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Cabal Therapy is a great discard spell that sees a lot of play in Legacy already. Alternatively, you could use Cabal Therapist for repeatable discard, though it's not on tribe.
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Ghoulcaller's Chant could be an option in case you see the life loss from Phyrexian Reclamation being too much of a problem. Sure, it isn't repeatable but in some cases getting two zombies at once without losing life could be very useful.
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One creature that's on tribe is Stitcher's Supplier. Since you have quite a few zombies that want to be in the graveyard in order to reanimate themselves, the Supplier can help you get them there.
gameflips on
ZOMBIES!!!!
2 years ago
Great deck! Cheap for kitchen table magic and a perfect template for a blue/black budget zombie deck. I really like Undead Alchemist but it's weird to switch to a milling strategy if you pull him late game. I'll probably still run him for the fun of it, but do you have any other suggestions to replace him?
Also, I have a few copies of Screeching Skaab that I might replace Returned Phalanx with to make the most out of Ghoulraiser and Ghoulcaller's Chant's graveyard flexibility and to beef up Unbreathing Horde.
eyes2sky on
Representation: List of Tribal Support in Pauper
2 years ago
Zombies: Gempalm Polluter, Ghoulcaller's Chant, Ghoulflesh, Ghoulraiser, Infernal Caretaker, Marauding Boneslasher, Shepherd of Rot, Vengeful Dead
king-saproling on
Blex: The Quest for Pest
2 years ago
You might like these: Tortured Existence , Syr Konrad, the Grim , Desecrated Tomb , Tormod, the Desecrator , Carnival of Souls , The Gitrog Monster , Skola Grovedancer , Turntimber Sower , Memorial to Folly , Phyrexian Reclamation , Blood Beckoning , Disentomb , Ghoulcaller's Chant , March of the Drowned , Ivory Tower , Venser's Journal
ClockworkSwordfish on
Fast Zombies Everywhere!
3 years ago
Rancid Rats seems like kind of a weak point in the deck! Skulk seems kind of wasted on a creature with Deathtouch - you're more than happy to have him blocked by one of your opponent's big fellas - and it will only get worse if you're trying to stack lords. If you really want the Deathtouch on a cheap body, I think Foulmire Knight would serve your purposes much better. He's one mana for the same 1/1 Deathtouch body, and can also score you an extra card if you draw him later in the game. Seeing as you already have eight one-drops, however, I can understand if you wanted a solid two-mana creature. Relentless Dead , Stromgald Crusader and Graveyard Marshal all would fit the bill.
By the way, Ghoulcaller's Chant is also directly superior to Return from Extinction in a zombie deck!
Halbrechtt on
BLACK ZOMBIE
3 years ago
I love Zombies! Probably one of the first tribes that got me interested in tribal decks, after I saw the power of my friend's Zombie deck. +1 from me just for Zombies!
Question 0: Before we can offer any meaningful help, we need to know if you truly mean this to be a deck for the Modern format? Or will it be casual and you won't care about format that much?
(As an aside, when I first started Magic and joined T/O, I didn't really understand that Modern was a competitive format and I just labeled any deck that could be legal in Modern as Modern. LoL. Pretty sure some of my decks on T/O still mistakenly have Modern set when really they should be Casual!)
I'm going to offer my advice assuming you want it to be Modern, but if you're going more for a casual build, then feel free to ignore some of this.
I would remove the "swamps matter" subtheme, as you don't really have ways to dump extra swamps onto the battlefield nor do you take full advantage of it (where is Defile for example?). Korlash might be worth keeping, since he's a zombie, but get rid of both Nightmare and Squelching Leeches, as they're not even zombies and they're on the higher end of CMC. Personally, I'd get rid of Lashwrithe as well, but if you really love the card and want to keep it, at least you can equip that to a zombie.
Then I would choose between full-on zombie tribal including tokens, or devotion and recursion. Neither of the latter play nicely with tokens, which don't have mana costs for devotion or stay in the graveyard for recursion. A few incidental tokens are fine, but cards like Moan of the Unhallowed and Shamble Back are not synergistic at all with devotion/recursion.
Next, are you more interested in recurring your graveyard or exiling it for tokens? I.e. do you want to do Ghoulraiser, Gravecrawler, Lord of the Undead, etc., or do you want to do Cemetery Reaper, Graveyard Marshal, Tymaret, etc.? You can't do both. Personally, I'd go the recursion route, add more ways to sac your zombies for value, and cycle them in and out of the graveyard at will.
So in summary, I would go with 1) zombie aggro including tokens, or 2) zombie recursion, with a subtheme of devotion for Gray Merchant. Going either route, I'd cut Nightmare, Leeches, Lashwrithe, and Tymaret (he's not a zombie, and provides only inefficient graveyard hate). If you go route 2, I'd also cut the sorceries Moan and Shamble. That's at minimum 8 cards out. What you add depends on which game plan you choose.
Relentless Dead and Unbreathing Horde are difficult to get rid of, the former because it can easily come back to hand (and bring a friend), the latter because of his damage prevention clause.
Graveborn Muse can provide some serious card advantage. Geralf's Messenger is amazing for devotion, he drains a little himself, and he's hard to get rid of.
If you go the route of cycling your zombies in and out of your graveyard, consider Undead Augur, Plague Belcher, and Quest for the Gravelord.
You didn't label this deck as "budget", so if you can afford it, Cavern of Souls is a must-include land in any tribal deck.
I don't like Sands of Delirium. It's only function is self-mill and there's more efficient ways to do self-mill. You also currently don't take full advantage of self-mill, with things like Dredge or Flashback-style effects. If you go full force into graveyard synergies, then self-mill is important, but even then, I'd play Stitcher's Supplier over Sands. For 1 mana, you can easily get 6 cards into your graveyard, and you can easily recur him, and he's a zombie that can attack. That would take 9 mana with Sands, which is just a dead artifact.
Lastly, some sacrifice options: Gnawing Zombie isn't amazing, but the effect is relevant. I would replace Sign in Blood with Village Rites — same card draw, but one less mana, instant speed, and no life loss. You also have cards that like to die, like Festering Mummy, Black Cat, Tattered Mummy, and the above-mentioned Stitcher's Supplier.
Sorry for the wall of text. I just love zombies! So I hope at least something in there was useful.
Max121212 on
My Pauper Zombie
3 years ago
Discard Grave Scrabbler to Tortured Existence. For 3 mana get you a 2/2 zombie and 2 other zombies back in your hand (if one of them is another Grave Scrabbler then repeat).
Ghoulcaller's Chant is for Nameless Inversion.
It's not about attacking. Once your in the mid/end game with more mana it's then about a 3 mana loop with Gempalm Polluter followed by Tortured Existence to pick it back up. With 8 mana this loop will do Damage = number of zombies x3. There is also Gray Merchant of Asphodel if you do not draw the gempalm.
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