Halp. I want to build a black / blue zombie block deck for the Shadows Over Innistrad block, but I just can't seem to get it right. I want to abuse reanimating
Prized Amalgam
s in the graveyard, buuuuut there are . . . problems. This is what I have so far.
Landbase
4x
Choked Estuary
8x
Island
12x
Swamp
A simple landbase that matches our deck's cost fairly well.
Core Cards
These are the cards that effectively define our strategy and what we want to do, in this case constantly growing and rebuilding our board.
4x
Prized Amalgam
Amalgam is an extremely tenacious 3/3 we want in our graveyard to reanimate via one of our other reanimation abilities, effectively granting us +3 power on any reanimation effect.
4x
Stitchwing Skaab
Our primary reanimation trigger for the Amalgam, we want this in our graveyard so we can drop two cards to it and return it to the battlefield -- we can even chuck Amalgams to its effect and they will reanimate with it, effectively giving us up to 9 power for two mana if we discard two amalgams.
4x
Cryptbreaker
Our primary one drop, discard outlet, board builder, and draw engine. To reanimate our Amalgams and Stitchwings they need to be in our graveyard, and, while 2 mana is a steep price per discard, we always get a 2/2 zombie and 1/3rd of a card from this outlet. Its low mana cost also makes a primary reanimation target for our next card . . .
Secondary Cards -- Creatures
4x
Relentless Dead
Another absurdly tenacious threat, this card allows us to reanimate ANYTHING in our graveyard if we can get it killed, most notably working well with the Crpytbreaker above, since we can reanimate it and bounce the Dead to our hand for 1b1c, and the
Diregraf Colossus
, which doesn't care how it enters the battlefield and will generate a zombie token when we play the Dead again on our next turn. It also has built in menace, so it swings in with relative impunity, and it is an infinite chump blocker since we can continually replay it.
4x
Diregraf Colossus
Our big boy, the Colossus likes when we play zombies or have them in our graveyard; so as long as we zombie cards out of our hand this card simply gains value. The problem here, however, is that we need to be casting zombie cards for its second trigger, we can't simply have them enter the battlefield, which means it plays stupid well with
Gisa and Geralf
and
Relentless Dead
, but lacks major synergy with our core cards. It is too good not to use, but not good enough to be a key part of the strategy.
Secondary Cards - Non-Creature
These cards provide protection and support for the deck, particularly stopping boardwipes and stocking our graveyard when possible.
3x
Collective Brutality
I hate that this card is so good, but, it does everything we want for us -- it protects our deck by removing boardwipes, stocks our graveyard for us, and provides removal. That price is murder, though. . _.
3x
Murder
We need removal and this is the best all around option, appealing though
Dark Salvation
may seem -- we simply can't guarantee we will have enough zombies for Salvation to kill what it needs to, while murder always will unless it can regenerate or is indestructible, in which case Salvation might work instead.
3x
Unsubstantiate
A flexible bounce spell that can also semi-counter an opponent's spell, this offers us a bit of defense for a low cost.
3x
Nagging Thoughts
We need to get cards into our graveyard and we need to draw cards, and this effectively does both while also having Madness so we can pitch it to our
Cryptbreaker
and cast it if we have enough mana.
2x
Catalog
Same as above, only at instant speed and actually requires a discard, so we can cast Thoughts off of it if we have that much mana somehow.
2x
Convolute
A soft counter, but easier to cast than
Broken Concentration
, which is our other real option.
Where I need help
So, that's what I'm looking at running here, but there are some MAJOR problems here that hurt it a lot.
The first problem is price, as
Collective Brutality
is not a cheap card and neither is
Liliana, the Last Hope
, which I didn't even bother including due to its cost -- budget alternatives in the block aren't apparent, but maybe someone sees something here I don't.
Second major problem: Quickly stocking the graveyard. The single most ideal play for this deck would be a Stichwing Skaab into the graveyard turn 1, then a double
Prized Amalgam
discard to it on turn 2, dropping 9/9 power onto the board, 3/3 of which is flying and none of which is traditionally counterable. Here's the thing, though: we have no way to actually do this in the block, as we lack a
Careful Study
effect and our only other option is an obscenely lucky
Epiphany at the Drownyard
for 0 against an opponent who doesn't know our deck, which is so far beyond unreliable it wasn't actually considered for the deck. This locks us out of an explosive turn two, meaning we want to do as much as possible to get this online on turn 3, but that would require a near exact opening hand of a
Cryptbreaker
, 2 lands, a
Stitchwing Skaab
, and 2
Prized Amalgam
. This is extremely unlikely to happen and we really need a good way to get these into the graveyard without relying on the breaker or them even ending up in our hand in the first place, and I'm not seeing an exceptionally good way to do this. There is the
Wailing Ghoul
, and I've looked at it for its synergy with the
Diregraf Colossus
,
Cryptbreaker
,
Relentless Dead
, and by extension with that last one the amalgam, but I don't know how I feel about it on the whole, especially since including it would cut into our noncreature cards, leaving us more vulnerable to our opponents.
Problem 3: I don't know what this deck wants to be, and despite this being problem 3, it really is the primary problem I'm facing, since I could build around it if I knew what the hell it even was. Is it an aggro deck? I'd love it to be, but I'm not seeing the needed support to really push it there. A combo deck? It has some strong interactions, but doesn't seem to have the tools to efficiently assemble them. Midrange? Maybe, but I don't know what I'd do for that. Control? There's a lot of value in the assembled zombies here, but not only is Shadows far from the strongest control set around, the mono black vampire deck does most of what this one could do better, short of this one potentially including actual counter spells. I don't really know; it could work into any of those, but I can't really drill it down to what it works best as.
Fourth problem: Poor synergy between the best options. While there is a lot of synergy to be had here, the current decklist's major bombs are the
Diregraf Colossus
and
Prized Amalgam
, but they don't actually have the best synergy with each other without including another card,
Gisa and Geralf
, which has absolutely no synergy with anything else going on. It is true the Colossus likes seeing the Amalgam in the graveyard when it drops, but none of the options that trigger the Amalgam are 'cast', meaning we never get the most value from Colossus there, and, additionally, it kind of sucks to draw a Colossus the turn after we reanimate things from the graveyard. This is actually also the problem with
Liliana's Elite
, another considered card that was ultimately cut, because unlike the Colossus it isn't worth much without things already in the graveyard, which we, in an ideal world, want to be constantly reanimating.
Problemo number fiveo: Creature to spell ratio. This ties into not knowing what kind of deck this should be, but I have no idea how many and of what I should be running. The deck works best with more creatures in it, but it isn't fast enough to truly capitalize on that, and cutting down the creatures for more spells hurts the Amalgam, Dead, and Colossus.
ARRRRGH. Yeah, I don't know what I'm doing here at all. Suggestions would help, since this is one of the block decks I'm missing for my Shadows dual deck project. . _.
