The zombies go in, the zombies come out~ This here is a casual deck built around stuffing lots of zombies in the graveyard and then bringing them back out for massive upside -- we won't have the biggest creatures on the board, but we should end up with a LOT of creatures, and they'll be damn tenacious too! Looking at what we are running and why:
- Lands -
Delta and Grave give us all the fixing we will need, while Salvage allows us to pitch it and dredge additional zombies into our graveyard -- all three are optional and can be swapped for whatever lands you feel, as long as we manage to keep at least some of our blue sources. Crypt, however, is pretty important for the deck, as it will allow us to generate a critical mass of zombies at some point and push through even the biggest boardstates.
- Graveyard Stocking -
We need these cards to fill our graveyard for us, as we actually want both specific zombies AND large numbers of them in the yard to fuel our win condition. To that end we are running:
Though our blue sources are limited, a single blue mana to draw two cards and put two cards we want into the graveyard is outright amazing for us -- notable discard targets are the
Gravecrawler
,
Prized Amalgam
, and
Dakmor Salvage
, though just about any zombie other than
Relentless Dead
has solid enough value there.
This allows us to disrupt their tempo and remove two cards from them, all while stocking our graveyard. Not a bad deal.
Our ideal black 1 drop, we can tap our zombies for additional cards, make zombies, and selectively stock our graveyard with it.
- Recursion -
Our primary means of reanimating targets in our graveyard, and most notably pairs with
Carrion Feeder
so we can repeatedly return bigger and bigger
Diregraf Colossus
as our graveyard fills up, not to mention bringing various
Prized Amalgam
back with whatever we reanimate. It also works well on our 1 drops whenever they die and is the primary reason we want the Crypt in the deck, as we will need a lot of mana to crushingly outpower our opponents.
We will nearly always meet the zombie requirement to cast this for a single mana, meaning we will constantly be reanimating Amalgams with it and creating tokens via Colossus, and this gets out of control quickly if we have a Feeder in play to sac it to and cast it yet again. In fact, Crawler + Feeder basically function as this decks engine, vroooom!
A kind of emergency reanimation card, this can hit anything in our deck and bring it back if we don't have a
Relentless Dead
to do that for us yet, the most ideal targets being a Colossus or the Dead itself to keep the cycle going. We can also cycle it away if we need to, though this is almost never the ideal situation.
- Other Zambinies -
The ETB damage is nice, but what we really love is the Undying trigger, which will bring back our Prized Amalgams for us, so it is an absolutely lovely 1-2 combo with the discard in our deck.
The sacrifice trigger here allows us to make some really nifty plays in such a recursive deck, like dodging exile based removal and whatnot, and it works with the
Gravecrawler
to become extremely large very quickly alongside Crypt's extra mana. It is also key to reanimating all of our other zombies by sacrificing
Relentless Dead
.
Our big boy here works on the two big value engines our deck runs, synergizing with Agadeem by coming in with additional plus counters for all the zombies in our graveyard, and the producing tons of tokens via the Crawler+Feeder combo, which we can also turn into card draw via our
Cryptbreaker
.
Throw it in the graveyard, watch it come back from the graveyard, make win. I mean, we can hard cast it too, but, like, naaaaaaah, just let it reanimate itself. :D
- Utility -
Turns out, while we fear relatively little creature based removal, we are damn well terrified of graveyard hate, and Duress is probably the best way for us to deal with that. It can also pull pesky things like
Settle the Wreckage
from the opponent's hand for us if need be, though we honestly don't mind that too much if we have a
Carrion Feeder
out to sac all of our non-token creatures to.
Sometimes we need a board wipe; this is a board wipe. :D
We can hit surprisingly high X values in this deck, and the Breaker and
Careful Study
both allow us to discard this for a lot of health and zambinos.
