Horde Magic: Compendium (Casual MTG Deck)

Have fun! This is a casual and social format and as such is meant to be fun. If some portion of the game-play is unfun or not working well within the rules of Horde Magic, it is generally accepted practice to come to a consensus as to what works best for those involved. Cycling problematic cards is a common fix.

Flavor of the format

Horde Magic was originally themed around zombies and representing the Zombie Apocalypse. Since the Horde Deck uses special rules that allow it to run automatically, the Horde should have as few choices to make as possible. This fits well with the brainless nature of the depictions of most zombies in pop culture. Since its creation, many other thematic Hordes have been built and played. Cards included in Horde Decks should be thematic as well as work within the rules.

Basic rules

Participants

Horde Magic is divided up into two factions: The Horde (the deck that runs automatically) and The Survivors (the players).

Win Condition

The Horde wins if The Survivors' group life total is reduced to zero or below.
The Survivors win if The Horde has no cards in its library, no cards in its hand, and no creatures on the battlefield.

Rules for the horde

The Horde has no player, it pilots itself.
Any choice The Horde must make should be made as randomly as possible.
The Horde has an infinite amount of mana at all times.
The Horde's turn starts by revealing cards from the top of its library until a non-token card is revealed. All revealed tokens are then cast. The revealed non-token is cast. Then, if applicable, The Horde casts any cards that can be cast from its graveyard as well as any cards it has in its hand.
All creatures controlled by The Horde have Haste and "This creature must attack each turn if able."
The Horde has no life total. Damage dealt to The Horde causes that many cards from the top of The Horde's library to be put into its graveyard.

Rules for the Survivors

The Survivors have three turns to set their defenses before The Horde gets its first turn. Then turns alternate like normal.
Like in Two-Headed Giant, The Survivors are a team and all take their turn simultaneously. The Survivors attack and block as a team.
Each Survivor contributes 20 life to the group life total.

Adjusting the difficulty of the Horde

Depending upon the number of players and/or the type of decks being used by The Survivors, it may be necessary to adjust some of the aspects of the game in order to set the difficulty of the game to a preferable level. The following are ways to adjust the difficulty and power level of The Horde:

Adjust the number of turns in which The Survivors have to prepare.
Adjust the amount of life each of The Survivors contributes to the team.
Exile a random portion of the Horde Deck prior to the first turn.
Card Selection during Horde Deck deck construction and/or a sideboard.
Replace random choices by The Horde with consensus decisions by The Survivors.
Allow tokens to remain in the graveyard instead of ceasing to exist.
Allow or disallow The Survivors to attack The Horde during their set-up turns.
Adjust the token to non-token ratio.

Rule clarification and adaption from greenspike Show

Rule adaption by welknair Show

Initial changes recommended:

Attacking the Horde directly is no longer so simple - Before damage can be done to the Horde's library (Causing it to mill), first they must control no creatures with the capacity to block while untapped (IE, if they swung with three zombies, you need to kill those three before you can hit their deck, unless those three happen to be Walking Dead , which can't block under any circumstances. You just walk past them. Pacifism also lets you get around enemies). "So how do I kill so many zombies?" you ask. It's simple - You go Hunting. On the Survivors' turn, they can Hunt tapped Horde creatures, effectively being allowed to use Prey Upon at-will for free, except is causes the Survivors' attacking creatures to tap. If the Horde controls any untapped creatures capable of blocking (Vigilance), those must be dealt with first.

If the Survivors would ever deal damage to the Horde's health (Red burn, Extort, you name it) while they still have creatures capable of blocking when untapped, instead that damage is dealt to one of the Horde's creatures. Whenever the Horde would deal damage to itself, it actual mills that number.

Some creatures are "Guarded" (Will be included in Horde-Specific Rules), meaning that they do not attack as normal, and that they can't be targeted with Hunting until the Horde controls no other Hunt-able creatures that aren't Guarded.

Survivor health shouldn't go UP as the number of survivors goes up, it should go DOWN. Why did the original rules make the health positively correlated to number of players? Makes it WAY too easy for 4 players. Nah, try these starting healths: 1 player: 60

2 players: 50

3 players: 45

4 players: 40

Further, the survivors shouldn't be allowed to ever half more than 20 over their starting health, to prevent life-hoarding.

Decks shouldn't be fixed at 100 cards with about 60% tokens. That makes little sense, is terrible to balance around, and is generally way too fast. There should be more horde monsters than player monsters. They're the HORDE for crying out loud. By standard rules, the Horde will be getting mobs about as fast as the survivors combined, except their stuff will be getting blocked, doombladed and otherwise taken out. My solution? Vary the number of cards and percent of tokens in the deck. The percent of tokens determines the average number of tokens played per turn. This can also be used to balance the differing base stats of the races - IE 1/1 Goblins would have a greater % of tokens than, say, 4/4 Giants. To start, I'll fix the number of non-tokens at 50, as all that really does is determine the number of turn-breaks the deck has. Initial ideas for token-counts for various racial templates (TWEAKING NECESSARY):

1/1: 200 (Humans, Goblins, Kobolds, Elves, Slivers)

2/2: 150 (Zombies)

2/2+ability: 125 (Vampires)

3/3: 125 (Centaurs, Minotaurs, Golems)

4/4: 100 (Giants)

4/4+ability: 75 (Angels)

The Horde needs to ramp up with the players. When their Library is half gone or more, they begin taking double-draws (At the start of the turn, they draw until they draw a non-token twice instead of once). Of course things will be tweaked between decks, and perhaps different Hordes could have their own rules. Also, each deck of mine will include specific rules for card abilities that aren't straightforward. For example...

HORDE SPECIFIC RULES:

You'll notice this deck has a Grave Titan as it's commander. How Commanders work in Horde is that once the Horde begins taking turns, it counts down a timer equal to the CMC of the commander until it plays the commander in addition to it's regular turn. Whenever the commander would be destroyed, exiled, tucked, or otherwise made useless, it instead returns to the command zone and is re-played in two turns. Commanders attack each turn, as normal.

See welknair zombie horde deck her: Super Horde Magic: Zombies

Horde deck construction

A Horde Deck is a 100-card constructed deck. Sixty of the cards should be tokens, the remaining forty are regular Magic cards. Cards included in the deck should not cause the Horde to have to make choices. This excludes almost any card that targets individual objects. Cards and Tokens included in the deck should be thematic, flavorful, and/or fun as well.

Ban List for Survivors

Not really a Ban list, but some cards are auto-wins against most horde decks and should therefore either not be played or cycled. This list is probably not complete but should give you a good impression which cards should not be played.

This rules came from https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Horde_Magic

2. How to build a horde deck Show

3. How to add a horde deck Show

The biggest problem when entering a Horde deck on TappedOut.net are the tokens, because they cannot be added directly to the deck.

The first possibility is to represent the tokens by placeholder cards in the deck. So for a Zombie Horde Deck the Zombie tokens could be replaced by Swamps. Even better you can use a creature that is very similar to the token it represents. For example, you could use the Walking Corpse or Scathe Zombies cards to tokenize a 2/2 Zombie. That is enough to represent the deck on TappedOut and with creatures representing the tokens, you can even play against the horde deck using the playtest option on TappedOut.net.

You can improve this option by adding the additional tokens in the tokenboard. Now you can exchange the placeholder cards with the tokens as you "palytest" the Horde Deck

The second option and especially for playtesting the Horde deck is to use card alters to change the card in the deck directly to a token. So instead of using the normal Walking Corpse you can add for example the alter code

*A=19220*

and you get Walking Corpse .

You can find a list of "all" available token alters in the deck section. Just press the A behind a card a you get to the accordingly alter page where you find the alter code.

If I have missed some alters please let me know.

4. Compendium of Horde decks

Demon Hordes Show

Human Hordes Show

Cleric Hordes Show

Knight Hordes Show

Angel Hordes Show

Goblin Hordes Show

Minotaur Hordes Show

Dragon Hordes Show

Vampire Hordes Show

Squirrel Hordes Show

Wolves Hordes Show

Beast Hordes Show

Elephant Hordes Show

Wurm Hordes Show

Eldrazi Hordes Show

Elemental Hordes Show

Giant Hordes Show

Samurai Hordes Show

Rogue Show

Sliver Hordes Show

Multi Tribal Hordes Show

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Top Ranked	Achieved #4 position in Casual 2 years ago
Date added	2 years
Last updated	5 months
Legality	This deck is Casual legal.
Rarity (main - side)	6 - 0 Mythic Rares 6 - 0 Rares 16 - 0 Uncommons 26 - 0 Commons
Cards	56
Avg. CMC	3.00
Tokens	Adorned Pouncer 4/4 B, Bat 1/1 B, Cat Dragon 3/3 BRG, Dragon 2/2 R, Elemental 5/5 RG, Emblem Sorin, Solemn Visitor, Spirit 1/1 W, Vampire 2/2 B, Zombie 2/2 B
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