On Theme: Night of the Living Dead

In last week’s article, we talked about Tribal All Stars, and I mentioned that tribal decks were some of my favorites, so today we are going to look through the deck that I run weekly.  It is my go-to deck, and I have not had a bad game with it so far.  The deck is my Zombie tribal deck.  So we will take a look at it, and see how it works.


When starting to build this deck it started as Mono black, and then went esper, but finally settled into Dimir colored.  There are a surprising amount of Legendary Zombies to choose from, but I was building it during Innistrad block, so I went with the new face of zombies, Grimgrin, Corpse-Born.  

This image was stole.... borrowed from www.mythicmtg.com




This guy does so many things right, and is perfect for a zombie reanimator styled deck.  He loves munching on the easily recurred zombies to grow to enormous sizes, and smash some people for general damage.  His ability to untap means he can combo out for some things as well.


Let's start with some of the creatures that put in a ton of work for the deck.  There are a ton of good zombies out there, and I tried to squeeze as many into the deck as I could.  Now this is a pretty strict theme deck, meaning there are good cards that would work in the deck that are cut for theme, but I did make one consent for Grave Titan.  I am pretty sure most would agree that he fits into zombie deck, even without being one himself.


This deck runs a lot of lords; there are just so many good ones for zombies.  Here is the list I run: Cemetery Reaper, Death Baron, Diregraf Captain, Lord of the Undead, Undead Warchief, Adaptive Automaton, and Zombie Master.  Not only do they pump the many zombie tokens to be real threats, they also offer some other options.


Cemetery Reaper - Lets me do some targeted Graveyard hate and makes tokens, at instant speed if needed.


Death Baron & Zombie Master - Give nifty abilities, Deathtouch and Swampwalk respectively. They make all those tokens even scarier, either as chump blocks that eat other peoples more costly creatures or as beaters that get in for damage.


Diregraf Captain & Vengeful Dead - These guys are great little combo pieces. Letting you punish people when Grimgrin goes on a zombie eating binge.


Lord of the Undead - Gotta raise the dead somehow, right?


Now for the more utility creatures, the ones that solve problems for the deck are some of the most fun cards in the deck.  These guys are the blue collar workers of the deck - they do the heavy lifting to keep things under control till the big guys hit the table.


Gravedigger & Ghoulraiser - Cheap and easy recursion, ain’t nothing wrong with that.


Gravecrawler - We will talk more about this guy when we talk about combos, but it is great in this deck.


Fleshbag Marauder, Skinrender - These guys are great to bring back over and over to take out troublesome creatures, like those indestructible ones that black has some trouble with.


Helldozer - Land Destruction, on a nice sized Zombie, and it is repeatable...yeah that’s good.


Boneknitter - More ways to save your creatures, that’s good.


Corpse Connoisseur - Entomb with a body.


Graveborn Muse - Card draw, though you have to be careful, because it is easy to take 10 or 15 damage off this guy with this deck.


Geth, Lord of the Vault, Gravespawn Sovereign, Havengul Lich - Sometimes other people have cooler things than we do, and we just gotta take them.


I have a personal love for enchantments, I think they have some of the coolest effects in magic and really make things fun, and this deck runs a couple cool ones.  So let’s look at those.


Black Market - Things die in EDH, and tons of black mana is fun, this card is just awesome.


Call to the Grave - Force people to kill their creature without spending resources, yeah I can get behind that.


Endless Ranks of the Dead - If this sticks around, it has the ability to make tons of tokens; if someone kills it, then it took a blow that something better would have taken.


Grave Pact - My creatures die a ton in this deck, and turning a Gravecrawler into a board wipe is just fun.


Rooftop Storm - Zombies are fun.  Free things are great.  Free Zombies are AMAZING!


Tombstone Stairwell - With the ease that black makes tons of magic, it is really fun to see how many tokens this makes, and then putting them to good use in the deck.


Zombie Infestation - More instant speed zombie tokens.


With Zombies, reanimation is the theme.  There are tons of ways to bring back the dead, and I try to run a good group of them, some we have talked about already, so we will cover the spell based reanimation now.


Gravepurge - Mass graveyard emptying, plus deck manipulation and a card draw... plus I packed a foil one, so why not?


Cruel Revival - Destroy a creature and return a zombie, seems fair to me.


Exume - This guy is cheap, and while it helps everyone, we are the ones with things like Entomb, Buried Alive, and Corpse Connoisseur.


Ghoulcaller's Chant - 2 for 1 in this deck, that is a good deal.


Reanimate, Rise from the Grave, Zombify, Animate Dead, Necromancy - These all do similar things, but they are all good.


Zombie Apocalypse - The card is called Zombie Apocalypse, and has the rules text of Destroy all Humans... that is a kind of flavor that I can’t avoid playing.  And it is pretty good.


Now we need some ways to win, and the main one in the deck is Grimgin punching out people, or raising a zombie horde and letting them overwhelm the other players.  So what about some other win conditions.


Phyrexian Altar + Gravecrawler = Infinite Death and ETB triggers.  This makes Grave Pact or Noxious Ghoul a boardwipe, it turns Diregraf Captain and Vengeful Dead into death for a player.  It can also make a ton of mana for Black market.


Rooftop Storm + Cloudstone Curio = Bring in zombies over and over like Noxious Ghoul and Skinrender, or if you have enough tokens to sac Fleshbag Marauder.


Noxious Ghoul + Army of the Damned = All non zombies take -13/-13, good times.


Grimgrin + Gravecrawler = this makes Grimgrin into a shade of sorts, 1 black to untap and add a +1/+1 counter.  It gets even sillier with Rooftop Storm.  Grim also likes Tombstone Stairwell, gives you something to do with all the tokens before they disappear.


So, that is a pretty quick breakdown of some of the stuff in the deck, here is the full playlist.  Now, I have a few versions of the deck floating around, so some cards are different in paper than on Cockatrice, so there is wiggle room for customizing the deck.


Commander

1x Grimgrin, Corpse-Born


Creautres

1x Boneknitter
1x Cemetery Reaper
1x Coffin Queen
1x Corpse Connoisseur
1x Death Baron
1x Diregraf Captain
1x Dread Slaver
1x Fatestitcher
1x Fleshbag Marauder
1x Gempalm Polluter
1x Geth, Lord of the Vault
1x Ghoulraiser
1x Grave Titan
1x Graveborn Muse
1x Gravecrawler
1x Gravedigger
1x Gravespawn Sovereign
1x Havengul Lich
1x Helldozer
1x Lord of the Undead
1x Mikaeus, the Unhallowed
1x Nested Ghoul
1x Noxious Ghoul
1x Shepherd of Rot
1x Skinrender
1x Soulless One
1x Unbreathing Horde
1x Undead Warchief
1x Vengeful Dead
1x Vengeful Pharaoh
1x Zombie Master
1x Zombie Trailblazer

Enchantment (9)

1x Animate Dead
1x Black Market
1x Call to the Grave
1x Endless Ranks of the Dead
1x Grave Pact
1x Necromancy
1x Rooftop Storm
1x Tombstone Stairwell
1x Zombie Infestation

Instant (3)

1x Cruel Revival
1x Entomb
1x Gravepurge

Land (39)

1x Barren Moor
1x Bojuka Bog
1x Cabal Coffers
1x Command Tower
1x Darkwater Catacombs
1x Dimir Aqueduct
1x Dreadship Reef
1x Drowned Catacomb
1x Frost Marsh
1x Halimar Depths
1x High Market
1x Homeward Path
7x Island
1x Jwar Isle Refuge
1x Lonely Sandbar
1x Minamo, School at Water's Edge
1x Salt Marsh
1x Secluded Glen
1x Strip Mine
8x Swamp
1x Tainted Isle
1x Tectonic Edge
1x Temple of the False God
1x Unholy Grotto
1x Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
1x Wasteland

Sorcery (12)

1x Army of the Damned
1x Ashen Powder
1x Buried Alive
1x Decree of Pain
1x Exhume
1x Ghoulcaller's Chant
1x Plague Wind
1x Reanimate
1x Rise from the Grave
1x Syphon Flesh
1x Zombie Apocalypse
1x Zombify

Artifact (4)

1x Amulet of Vigor
1x Ashnod's Altar
1x Cloudstone Curio
1x Phyrexian Altar


So, that is the end of my zombie deck, hope you had as much fun as I did looking through it.  Next week, I think I will start a series on the Ravnica guilds, since we are going back to the city of guilds this fall.  As always, if you got any ideas for the deck or any other strange themes you would like to see built, shoot me an email at jmfelber@gmail.com, or hit my twitter @RealFelber.  I am also on the Salvation boards as HatterofMad all the time, and if you wanna check out my experiment in MTG Trading check out The One Red Mountain Project, it is starting to get exciting up to about 20 bucks from trading starting with a single foil mountain.

Jon Felber