Horde much?
The Kitchen Table forum
Posted on Sept. 16, 2014, 8:55 a.m. by Sloanan
Hey Guys,
I just discovered horde mode last weekend with a buddy of mine. Really fun stuff! I love having a game where everyone is working together instead of pulling off cheap combos on one another and pissing each other off. My bud and I loved it so much that we're planning on each making a horde deck of our own to play against next time. He's making a beast deck (which sounds really scary, considering there's a good bit of difference between a 2/2 zombie and a 3/3 beast when you're staring down 10 of them at once!) and I'm fine-tuning the zombie one.
I started with just a bunch of generic zombie creatures I had around the apartment (aside from a couple of lords, it was mostly generic common & uncommon stuff like Diregraf Ghoul & the whatnot), but now that I'm actually willing to invest a little, what cards would you suggest? It's pretty open at the moment - I have a couple of Zombie Apocalypse and Army of the Damned mixed in with some sweepers & Call to the Grave / Grave Betrayal for non-creature support.
Basically, it's 2-4 player co-op against an autonomous 100-card deck consisting of about 60 tokens (zombies in this case) and 40 other spells. Each player shares a life total and adds 20 HP to the health pool (so 2 players would have 40 life and 4 would have 80). They have the first three turns to build up their defenses (meaning the horde doesn't take a turn until T3.
When it's the Horde's turn, you reveal cards from the top of the deck until a nontoken card is revealed. The horde then puts everything revealed onto the field & casts whatever the revealed spell was (the horde has infinite mana). The Horde's creatures have haste and attack each turn.Whenever the Horde would lose life, it instead mills that many cards (5 life loss = 5 cards put in the graveyard). The players win when there are no more cards in the Horde's library and there are no more creatures on the Horde's board. For a little more explanation, check here:
September 16, 2014 9:10 a.m.
Sooo, basically the sidegames for Theros Block prereleases. Hydra, Minotaurs, XenaGod and now the final boss - Zombies. I would look at a pauper EDH to get some ideas:
September 16, 2014 9:23 a.m.
MagicalHacker says... #5
An eldrazi horde would never lose! Muahaha! (Oh no! Emrakul, the Aeons Torn got milled!)
In all seriousness though, I'd like to see a horde deck for each block/set, cause that'd be sweet. Innistrad vampire horde would be neat xD
September 16, 2014 10:05 a.m.
i used to have a zombie hoard during innistrad (tons of zombie tokens!) and it was lots of fun. we never played that much with it, but i just moved to a new city and i might try to rebuild to see if anyone would want to play. wish i had saved the decklist. the article that you posted is where i started as well, it's a great resource.
i remember cards that wrath the board and return all creatures to play being good (Living End , Living Death and Twilight's Call ). also cards that cause each player to discard (Delirium Skeins ) are great as the horde has no hand.
some of the black devotion stuff from theros could be good (if you loosen your definition of devotion to include tokens that might make it too good, not sure). i'm thinking cards like Gray Merchant of Asphodel , Abhorrent Overlord , Erebos, God of the Dead , Athreos, God of Passage and Mogis, God of Slaughter .some of those indestructible gods could be really tough to play against, though they might violate the idea of the "zombie" hoard.
the trickiest thing i find about the hoard is making it good/interesting enough to battle 4 players, but not TOO good that it's unbeatable. good luck!
September 16, 2014 10:07 a.m.
Gidgetimer says... #7
When playing in a format where there are multiple opponents I find that symmetrical spells are great. This means that they would be very powerful in the zombie deck. Pox might be a little excessive but Small Pox would probably be a good addition. Ashen Ghoul with the caveat that it is put into the graveyard first when he dies and his ability is used whenever possible would be cool (do the zombie tokens actually stay in the graveyard in this variation, It would make cards like that much better). Grave Crawler could be good too.
for the last few suggestions I'm going to make I'll just give a list of rare zombies that could be good:
Gidgetimer says... #2
You may want to explain a bit about the format of "Horde" I've never heard of it and as such I'd assume most other people haven't since i like to keep up on alternative formats.
September 16, 2014 8:58 a.m.