Introducing my NEW, new Zombie deck: the third incarnation of my first-ever EDH deck featuring the newly-spoiled
The Scarab God
for our blue-and-black-identity pleasure, and thus a total excision of all green-identity cards. For reference and posterity's sake, linked here is the previous version of the deck which I had since the release of
Sidisi, Brood Tyrant
in Khans of Tarkir, and here (hoo whee, this is an old one) is the first version of the original
Grimgrin, Corpse-Born
EDH deck which I first constructed as my first EDH deck during the summer of 2012. Additionally, here was a primer to my Sidisi deck I wrote a few years ago.
If you take a look at my discussions on the Sidisi deck page, you will find that I had been anticipating this reversion back to non-green identity for some time now, and for good reason: the primary reason I initially gravitated towards adding green to this deck was out of pure interest in expanding the deck theme's cardpool, improving recursion consistency and flexibility, improving other interactions with other graveyard-based effects, all without majorly impacting the fluency of my mana color fixing (because green was to essentially just join blue as another supporting color). However, quickly I grew tired of the Sidisi's new take on the deck because it felt too strung-out, too ambitious, forced me to play a general I was not in love with and also didn't have the Zombie subtype herself, pressured me to play self-mill effects in the deck that were 1) really bad and 2) diluted the card quality of the deck, and ultimately confused the deck's once-relatively-concentrated purpose and direction with several less-than-exciting subthemes for me. The last statement could also be argued for the effect of adding green at all to the deck (and widening the card pool of any deck, actually): the original version of the deck, headed by the very-flavorful
Grimgrin, Corpse-Born
, was definitely much weaker on the whole than the latest version of the Sidisi-era deck, but its lines of play were much more exciting, focused, and potent (or at least that's how I felt at the time); I loved that deck to death. Adding green added a lot of possibility to the deck, but as you can see through my updates and card cuts on the Sidisi deck page, I gradually ruled out certain new cards that Sidisi convinced me to try that just widened my potential playlines but also weakening my ability to utilize any of them reliably and passionately -- many cards, like
Lotleth Troll
and
Shambling Shell
, had really cool things that potentially interacted great with many things the deck was already doing: however, these sorts of cards just simply did not ever land it big by themselves and usually never worked consistently enough with the other more specific subthemes of the deck to actually impress me (for example, Troll never actually got huge, and I barely ever wanted to just dump card advantage to make him big because it made him a really clear target... Shell was a neat self-subservient powerhouse but we rarely wanted to dredge actually with the deck because of how the deck actually obtains and executes reanimation magic, and the fact that dredging oftentimes just robbed us of precious card advantage).
So, why are we back to UB? Well, besides all those reasons I just listed for why I've been trying to dip back out of green, WotC just spoiled
The Scarab God
, the world's highly-anticipated new UB general, and he happens to be a sort of Zombies-matter general. Just by understanding how long it can take WotC to give EDH players a viable commander for a specific-color-combination-and-specific-theme deck considering design space of sets and giving each color combination its fair share every couple of years, one would try their best to appreciate and use the newest addition to the lexicon of possible generals for the potential deck because it can be years before the specific theme of deck is up at bat again to try to shake things up. First things first: The Scarab God does some very cool things for Zombie tribal decks: he rewards the player for investing in the battlefield by forcing enemy life loss and granting you scrying capability based off of how many Zombies you have on the battlefield, which is awesome - he rewards you for having a large boardstate even before you have to worry about the outcome of combat, and also helps you sculpt incredibly good draws, which is huge for zombies since we want to be spending more slots in our deck on actual zombies and ways to help them interact favorably in the graveyard rather than boring card selection and/or advantage spells (this is also really important considering how variable our card pool is in regards to what things are potent draws and when -- we want to scry away our big fat spells early, and scry away our small 1-through-3-drops late). If that wasn't enough, his activated ability is graveyard hate, reanimation, and zombie fuel for his previous ability all-in-one. Just because of how resilient we want our graveyard, I wouldn't want to use this ability too aggressively on our own stuff, but at worst it can hate on other people's graveyards while also giving us more zombie fodder, and at best it is a very inexpensive and available way to have a clutch reanimation moment with our deck. Honestly, I'm still really mad that this guy isn't the Zombie subtype, because he misses out on a ton of our natural deck synergy, but it's not as big of a deal as it was with Sidisi considering how aggressive and tempo-oriented she was geared in smaller games (and we wanted to be swinging with her constantly too because of her ability), so for now I'm giving him a pass (flavor-wise he is 10/10 in general, just not 10/10 tribal flavor for this deck specifically). The other primary reason we are back to black-blue identity is, as indirectly argued in the previous section, to improve deck concentration, playline consistency, and increase certain card potencies: constraints reveal strong and focused possibilities. I don't like the fact that I can't necessarily bring lands back from the 'yard anymore with
Life from the Loam
, but I dont necessarily need to unless I'm obviously losing like a large portion of my landbase to mill (rare), but if that were to happen there would be little LftL could do to permanently and quickly resolve that issue to begin with: the result is LftL diluting the deck with more seemingly-good cards because they are relatively on-theme but failing to actually improve its consistency and, as a result (since we play so many more aggressively-costed zombies now), power. As another minute but emotional reason I've made the switch back to UB, I'm actually really excited to potentially encounter some old Grimgrin nostalgia with this deck, as taking out the green cards in this deck has opened a lot of design space (and of course I still have Grimgrin still in the deck, so I'll finally be able to switch him in as commander for a game or two for old times' sake), and even gives me the chance to try out the wide array of UB-identity generals now that I'm back to a more classic and support color combination (this also includes Grimgrin himself - I don't know which general will be better in this shell now, now that so much has changed!) This will be a healthy refocusing of resources and concentration back to the strength of powerful tribal and reanimator synergies in the UB identity and foregoing the utility and versatility green provides.
