i-hate-magic-duels / posted on 25 July 2016

Wanna combo out your opponent by spawning a horde of zombies in Magic Duels? Look no further than this EMN deck!



Creature (25)

2x Advanced Stitchwing

2x Cryptbreaker

2x Diregraf Colossus

2x Fleshbag Marauder

2x Forgotten Creation

1x Gisa and Geralf

3x Haunted Dead

1x Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy

1x Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet

1x Liliana, Heretical Healer

3x Liliana’s Elite

2x Prized Amalgam

3x Screeching Skaab

Sorcery (6)

2x Dark Salvation

2x Languish

2x Nagging Thoughts

Instant (5)

3x Grasp of Darkness

2x Murder

Planeswalker (1)

1x Liliana, the Last Hope

Land (23)

2x Drowned Catacomb

6x Island

2x Rogue’s Passage

2x Sunken Hollow

9x Swamp

2x Westvale Abbey





http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/emn-dimir-zombie-dredge-combo/



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With the selection of new zombie tribal cards that we’ve received in EMN, everyone and their mother has seemed to try to build a zombie tribal deck. Some try aggro zombies with menace from Graf Harvest, others try a midrange deck trying to capitalize on value with two-for-ones, and even others just try and jam zombies into a UBx control deck. None of these options have been particularly successful, These decks all have one thing in common, though: they tend to win when they can spam recursion effects from the graveyard and either out-swarm or out-value their opponent.







So, why don’t we jam a deck that focuses on that?





This deck is a combo deck that focuses on three things: being able to mill/discard relevant cards into the graveyard, being able to use recursion effects to get value off of our zombies, and using payout cards to abuse our zombie horde. Everything else in the deck is synergy or value cards that help glue our deck together and lets us assemble our combo pieces together.







Using this version of UB Zombies, one thing to note is you are really a combo deck at heart. Yes, you can grind out some games by playing like a worse UB control deck, but your games are going to be won off of having explosive turns (or series of turns). Because of this, the deck does mulligan. A lot. More than other decks. Mulliganing is really a skill that you have to develop in order to be successful with this deck. You can’t go, “Oh, three lands and four spells, lets go,” with a combo deck like this. Instead, you need to see, “Okay, I have two or three lands, and a way to at least start developing towards my combo.” Typically, this is through either a discard outlet (Jace VP, Cryptbreaker) or a self-mill effect (Screeching Skaab). Having a card to get value out of these discard effects or a win condition is nice, but you often will have to settle with just having a way to get to your combo pieces.





Our combo enablers are our discard effects (Jace VP, Cryptbreaker, Forgotten Creation) and our self-mill (Screeching Skaab, Nagging Thoughts, Gisa and Geralf) that lets us get our deck started. We have 8 low CMC and 3 high CMC combo enablers in our deck, which gives us a 65.4% chance of having one of our low lost enablers in our opening 7, so mulligan aggressively for one. In order to get value out of these effects, though, we’re needing to have cards that actually want to be discarded. Thankfully, we have a gamut of those! Advanced Stitchwing, Haunted Dead, Prized Amalgam, and Nagging Thoughts love to be discarded and/or milled (with the exception of milling Nagging Thoughts), and you’ll be able to abuse their recursion or madness effects with ease.





Some of the cards in our deck are extremely obvious in how they’re going to benefit from our grave. Lilana’s Elite and Diregraf Colossus get huge with a huge graveyard (and become unblockable with Rogue’s PAssage), Gisa and Geralf lets us just recast the vast majority of our deck from the grave, Prized Amalgam gives you a steady stream of disposable 3/3s whenever you recur any of our zombies, and Advanced Stitchwing/Haunted Dead let us discard cards AND summon them back from our grave at instant speed. Put on top of that our sacrifice effects (Kalitas, Westvale Abbey) for additional win conditions and you end up having a fairly fluid deck.





This deck does have some tiny tricks to actively improving your play. You typically only want 4-5 colored sources, and 1-3 utility lands (Rogue’s Passage or Westvale Abbey). Anything pass 6 lands on board needs to be judged on if you *really* need it, as we often need cards in hand to discard to Haunted Dead, Jace VP, Advanced Stitchwing, Forgotten Creation and Cryptbreaker. If you play extra lands, you do have a chance to lose value off of these options.







Our deck does have several options to get wincons that we milled, discarded, or loss throughout a game. Liliana (both version with their minus ability) grab cards from the yard, and Gisa and Geralf just lets us cast our Liliana’s Elites and Diregraf Creations.







Dark Salvation is one of our unique removal spells. You can pay a SINGLE black source of mana to give an opposing creature -X/-X, where X is the amount of zombies you control. Sometimes, if you have a large enough field, it’s worth casting Dark Salvation for X=0 as a CMC1 removal spell.







We have a lot of token generators in this deck. Kalitas, Haunted Dead, Diregraf Colossus, Cryptbreaker, and Westvale Abbey all make tokens. A common win condition in this deck is simply flipping Westvale Abbey and swinging for lethal.







As I always will, I’ll be posting a topic on /r/magicduels to see what sort of decks players want to see. Later on today, expect to see a more meta-oriented deck: GB Evolutionary Toolbox!

