Card/Deck Revisiting Zombies

Onderzeeboot

Onderzeeboot

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Check :)

Cemetery Reaper has been a perpetual near inclusion. I like that you can just run it without any zombies at all, because he can just crank them out himself.

Other interesting zombie cards you might have missed:


Curse of Shallow Graves is actually very good by the way.
 
Jason Waddell

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
Okay, so here's the problem with the archetype. It gets too much of its stuff from within the color, and too much of the stuff it relies on is not in demand by other drafters. This allows the deck to be too consistent in practice, even though there are a lot of different theoretical builds that can happen. I think the solution is to intentionally strip away a lot of its in-color support.



Double Bloodghast feels unnecessary to me. Sure it ran them, but I don't know that it was completely necessary, and it really pushed the deck far into mono-black territory. I don't know how I feel about Geralf's Messenger. It's a fun incentive card, and even has worked often in Pod. Anyone else chime in?

I started the package with 2 Carrion Feeder, 4 Gravecrawler and 2 Bloodghast but I think we should trim at least one of those cards and I'm leaning towards 'Ghast.

White:


This is a good base of support. Is there more we can do?

Blue:


I like captain, and I always wished it could be played in non-Zombie decks. I've seen it, but it was probably wrong. I am thinking of errata'ing cards here. Entomb with Flashback {1}{U} and Screecher as a 3/2 Zombie. What else is there...

Green:


Zombie pod is playable. Is there more I should be doing with green in the Gold section? I have Abrupt Decay and Pernicious Deed, which are just kind of "good stuff" cards. Lotleth Troll was a bit turdy but maybe it deserves revisiting?

Red:


Red has a lot. It'd be cool if other colors had more too.


Colorless:



Help me out people.
 
Jason Waddell

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
Image.ashx
 
D

D.B.S.

Jason Waddell said:
White:
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Cathar, Mirror Entity and Ranger have really nice cross-synergy with a humans package, like tripling up on Champion of the Parish. Xathrid Necromancer also makes Zombies!

Is doubling up mirror entity worth the slot? Probably not necessary but it's flexible.
 
Jason Waddell

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
D.B.S. said:
Cathar, Mirror Entity and Ranger have really nice cross-synergy with a humans package, like tripling up on Champion of the Parish. Xathrid Necromancer also makes Zombies!

Is doubling up mirror entity worth the slot? Probably not necessary but it's flexible.
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I don't really want double Mirror Entity. It goes unplayed fairly often, it's not really ideal for multiples.
 
Jason Waddell

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
Okay, let's talk about this. This is a big problem people.

The support that comes from other colors mainly comes from 3's. That means I need to create demand for them, specifically by slashing the 3's the you get from just staying in black. I need some more generic and/or control-friendy 3 drops here to force the zombie player to find the rewards offered by other colors.
 
Jason Waddell

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
Keep in mind that for curve purposes the black cards are like, 90% of a card and other color cards something like 30% of a card, in a mixture distribution.

Cutting Stronghold Assassin, Geralf's Messenger, Lifebane Zombie and Curse of Shallow Graves.
 
Jason Waddell

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
Changling Bob said:
Also, shouldn't this theme overlap with other themes, not just other colours? This seems tricky, depending on what your themes are.
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Yes, well, there's a couple ideas.

One is to have regular "good" cards contribute to the theme, e.g. Falkenrath and Putrid Leech.

The second is, if you make the theme big enough then it becomes a major component of your set. I've had red decks that use sacrifice themes without using zombies. That sort of thing. Most of these support cards aren't particularly narrow, so if the bulk of the "theme" is playable outside of a theme-focused deck then I'm happy, particularly because it creates competition for the cards and forces the player in said theme to improvise based on how the packs fall.
 
Laz

Laz

Developer
That huge block of cards you focussed on before seems to be both the sacrifice theme and the zombie theme. There is a lot more play to those cards than just those two themes though. The most obvious is a graveyard-value deck. You have Faithless Looting there, but no mention of Forbidden Alchemy, Thirst for Knowledge, any of the other blue card draw that incidentally dumps cards in the yard? There is also a sweet spot between the Zombie and Human themes for Zombie/Human aggro, with Xathrid Necromancer as the cross over piece.

In fact, my favourite incidental engine was actually Bloodghast + Trading Post in an artifact-oriented deck. Bloodghast provided sweet value both by being discarded for life and sacrificed for artifacts.
 
Jason Waddell

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
Laz said:
That huge block of cards you focussed on before seems to be both the sacrifice theme and the zombie theme. There is a lot more play to those cards than just those two themes though. The most obvious is a graveyard-value deck. You have Faithless Looting there, but no mention of Forbidden Alchemy, Thirst for Knowledge, any of the other blue card draw that incidentally dumps cards in the yard? There is also a sweet spot between the Zombie and Human themes for Zombie/Human aggro, with Xathrid Necromancer as the cross over piece.

In fact, my favourite incidental engine was actually Bloodghast + Trading Post in an artifact-oriented deck. Bloodghast provided sweet value both by being discarded for life and sacrificed for artifacts.
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Hmm, I don't really think of the graveyard as one of the active play spaces of this cube. Thirst is a card, and it's there, but cards like that and Forbidden Alchemy aren't really going into a Gravecrawler deck, nor do most of these cards do much when dumped into the yard. It's a nice thought, but it's not really where I am.

Mechanically the most prominent theme of the set is Sacrifice. It ties to Birthing Pod, to Unearth guys, to Persist, Undying, token producers and cards like Brindle Shoat, Evokers, threaten effects. Shriekmaw plays with Phyrexian Reclamation, sacrifice turns on Morbid, etc.

It's true that when you sacrifice something it goes to the graveyard but there's not a lot there at the moment. Could there be more? Maybe. There's only so much I can support in the cube. There's some tangential stuff going on with lots of fetches and lots of Brainstorms, but they don't take up much space. Right now I'm focused on diverse ways to play with the sacrifice theme and to tune it properly, but if you can propose a way to integrate Graveyard themes I'm certainly open to it.
 
GenericZero

GenericZero

Jason Waddell said:
Image.ashx

Intersect Brainstorm and Sacrifice themes? :p
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Lorescale Coatl was already good. Now it isn't gold and makes a ton of tokens? Not to mention it is as awesome as you think it will be with brainstorm. You can play it turn 3, but it can sometimes be better as a turn 4 card if you have any draw spell or a Tandem Lookout.

One small side note. Spikeshot Elder loves drawing cards with his pal Tandem Lookout WAYYY more than Grim Lavamancer does.
 
GenericZero

GenericZero

Get that blue threaten out of there. Red has hard enough of a time getting other colors to splash into it without that kind of crap.
 
FlowerSunRain

FlowerSunRain

Contributor
Ray of Command is a reasonable idea. Red gives you millions of reasons for zombies to splash into, Blue needs help in this regard.

Giving Entomb flashback seems unnecessary. I realize its not the best card in a lot of our cubes, but its still pretty damn good. If you want a bluish entomb, how about Intuition although that doesn't solve the problem of 3 drops. Frantic Search also is a 3 drop, but at least you can still cast your other 3 drop. Equilibrium takes advantage of all those extra cast triggers, but it might be too slow and guess what? It costs 3 mana. Old Man of the Sea, damnit, also costs 3 mana.

Overtaker is going deep here and amazingly doesn't cost 3, but his her activation costs 4 which is even worse.
 
Grillo_Parlante

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
I'm not sure what to think about this. Running skaab ruinator will be tough if you are not considering the graveyard to be play space. The best blue zombies were innistrad block creations, and were designed to encourage the graveyard as a zone of interaction.

Also: ray of command is amazing, two thumbs up.

And we are going to discuss blue zombies, any discussion would be incomplete without


 
silasw

silasw


A little crazy...


Mill your gravecrawlers? Flooding is kind of narrow, it might require some other overlapping themes to be worth considering. Crab can be used as a nasty win condition with all those fetchlands.
 
CML

CML

Contributor
GenericZero said:
I have no clue, but I do know an effect like that belongs in red 100 percent of the time, period.
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i guess i'll cut faithless looting because careful study did it first. maybe i will also cut char because of psionic blast then

ray is an instant btw

i like ophiomancer its power level is very high though so plan accordingly

i would cut all of the blue cards because nobody else ever is playing kathari screecher or diregraf captain or even ruinator. these cards will be played exclusively by "the blue zombie deck" and i do not think their inclusion is good design. grimgrin feels the same way but havengul lich is kind of interesting. undead alchemist is cool but its a draft card and siren of the silent song is (here comparisons are useful) just bad hypnotic specter in two colors

i wouldn't discount playing thirst in such a deck either, "esper zombies" is somewhere in the 3-0 thread and it didn't play it but IT COULD HAVE. you can even have jinxed idol realize its potential by binning it!

my last point is very important. the new putrid leech art is cool

edit: the RB devotion and hybrid theme, along with the zombie "theme," is being cut by me over here. this is part of my new design philosophy of "you shouldn't try to push themes, but instead just have cards in your cube," similar to "what is a wincon? i call it a card in my deck." obviously gravecrawlers and bombardment and feeders and friends will still be in, but cutting the weaker cards like skaab ruinator that only see play in one deck seems like the way to increase archetype diversity
 
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