Tribal is one of my favorite archetypes, not usually powerful but always flavorful. Armies of goblins, elves, humans, zombies, and dragons all going head to head. While this deck will be playable in any commander game, it will be the most fun in a tribal vs tribal vs tribal situation.
Searching for type = Zombie in gatherer turned up a result of 245 possible entries for the deck. How will we reduce this to the 59 nonland cards we need for a typical commander deck?
A typical starting point for any tribal deck is the lords. These traditional lords give zombies +1/+1 and have some other effect.
1Diregraf Captain - The newest Zombie Lord is not a let down. If our opponents or ourselves kill our creatures, they still lose life.
2Cemetery Reaper -Use this to hate your opponents graveyard, yours will be recycled.
3Death Baron - Deathtouch is powerful when our guys are typically small.
4Lord of the Undead - Recycling your zombies
5Mikaeus, the Unhallowed - While not really a zombie lord, he pretends in this deck. giving our zombies a second life is pretty insane, esp with grimgrin as a sac outlet.
6Undead Warchief - Making zombies is fairly useful for this deck, while an extra +1 power is icing.
Non Traditional lords interact with zombies somehow while not pumping them.
7Boneknitter - can allow them to regenerate, somewhat weak but playable.
8Corpse Harvester - Allow a zombie to be sac'd to go get another.
9Graveborn Muse - Makes each zombie draw you a card costing you 1 life per - make sure you have a sac outlet or this will kill you in more ways than one.
10Gravespawn Sovereign - a handful of zombies bring more back.
11Lich Lord of Unx - Zombies mill your opponent
12Noxious Ghoul - Zombies entering the battlefield make other armies smaller
13Vengeful Dead - doubles up on diregraf captain.
14Zombie Master - gives zombies swampwalk and regen
15Zombie Trailblazer - couple zombies make one unblockable.
15 cards down at this point, lets look at some non zombie cards that interact with zombies before we fill the deck with the army of the damned.
16Rooftop Storm - Making most of our spells free is good I hear. This with our general makes him cost only whatever his commander tax is.
17Rise from the Grave - will bring back any creature as a zombie.
18Lim-Dûl the Necromancer - turns opponents dieing creatures into your zombies. can easily take over the game itself.
19Infernal Caretaker - lets me recast my zombies later on.
20Call to the Grave - opponents sac creatures every turn, while we have very few creatures we will have to sac.
21Zombie Apocalypse - This card was made for this deck
22Patriarch's Bidding - while more effective if you are the only tribal deck, way more fun if you are not.
23Distant Melody - gives us some card draw
More graveyard resurection cards.
24Balthor the Defiled - Silly ignore the part about minions, and look at the red creatures coming back as a downside. This will res many of the creatures in our deck.
25Corpse Connoisseur - Entomb is great, but this is a on a body. I'm avoiding the instant/sorcery versions in exchange for a creature version that I can use multiple times.
26Liliana Vess - Her ultimate should be game over.
27Fleshbag Marauder - very interesting creature to resurect multiple times.
28Gravecrawler- Resurects himself, sick with Grimgrin, worse with Grimgrin & Rooftop storm
29Havengul Lich - Sic at reanimating our own creatures, even more sic if we reanimate theirs.
30Phyrexian Crusader - stupid good at defence, gives you an alternate win condition.
Now to fill in some meat to the deck.
31Carrion Wurm - very large body, can make for some interesting politics if you get ahead in the game.
32Dread Slaver - Stops players from attacking you.
33Geralf's Messenger - While this isn't 1 on 1 play (normally) he is still a 3/2 that is hard to keep dead for only 3 mana.
34Geth, Lord of the Vault- Mill and steal, and 5/5 body to boot.
35Helldozer - Not nice at all. muhahaha!
36Korlash, Heir to Blackblade - Largest zombie there is, sometimes.
37Soulless One - Could be huge!
38Unbreathing Horde - Same as above but math only once.
39Waning Wurm- Doesn't last long but should make an impact when it is around.
40Black Cat - Randomly making someone discard, with our graveyard manipulation he can do it repeatedly. and often at instant speed...
41Cabal Interrogator - Repeated discard to annoy an opponent.
42Cackling Fiend - another discard effect, this time hitting all opponents.
Utility creatures:
43Crypt Creeper 44Withered Wretch, and 45Entrails Feaster- for being mildly reliant on my graveyard, I dont want to take it easy on other players' graveyards.
46Plaguebearer- kill lots of creatures.
47Grave Defiler - adds possible card draw to a body. Card advantage is always good in commander.
48Gutless Ghoul - Another Sac outlet, this lets us offset lifeloss.
49Gempalm Polluter - Coming back to your hand to get cycled again, and again, and again...50Polluted Dead- gets rid of annoying land.
51Sedraxis Alchemist - Fits into the deck perfectly
52Havengul Skaab - very interesting way to reuse of 187 effects.
53Skinrender- Kills creatures a little more slowly than some.
54Jhessian Zombies- here for the early game mana fixing.
55Fatestitcher - If nothing else he allows you to untap Grimgrin without sacrificing a creature.A small subtheme of milling in this deck mainly to support blue and give the deck a fun twist.
56Armored Skaab - Supports our graveyard theme. Good early defence.
57Geralf's Mindcrusher - supports a milling theme, also supports our gy theme.
58Undead Alchemist - Changes the way the deck plays.
59Rotcrown Ghoul - Strait mill 5
A small sidenote on tribal and creature types. I hate when wizards adds a creature type onto an older card without reprinting that card. It's just a pet peeve of mine. Stronghold Assassin and Western Paladin are zombies now and I would love to play them in this deck, but I wont because I dont want to have arguements on if they are a zombie or not with other players. Wizards, please reprint some of these cards in side products (like planechase, duel decks).
Now on to land
Mana Fixing:
Bad River, Creeping Tar Pit, Darkslick Shores, Darkwater Catacombs, Dimir Aqueduct, Drowned Catacomb, Frost Marsh, Jwar Isle Refuge, Polluted Delta, Salt Marsh, Secluded Glen, Sunken Ruins, Tainted Isle, and Watery Grave 14 mana fixing land. it's easy to come up with allied color duals.
Cabal Coffers, Deserted Temple, and Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth - make an unholy trinity of mana production
Crypt of Agadeem - is no slacker itself
Bojuka Bog - gotta hate their yard
Duskmantle, House of Shadow, Nephalia Drownyard - little extra milling
Hall of the Bandit Lord - Some of our guys could use a little haste
High Market, Miren, the Moaning Well - if we need life, or to ditch a creature and grimgrin has gotten expencive...
Minamo, School at Water's Edge - untap grim without sacing
15 more land, should probably have more swamps than islands, but I'd split them even 8 swamp and 7 island.
There are many zombies that could have easily been in this deck that just didn't due to room constraints. There was a group that made 2/2 black zombie tokens that I ended up cutting out, sorry Grave Titan. Feel free to adjust your version of the deck your way. Note that this list was very purposefully not including any zombie that required exiling one of your creatures to function. These do not help the deck stay in the fight any don't belong.
Hope you enjoyed. Let me know how it works in your playgroup.
Great post! I think you hit the sweet spot for balance between being "just a deck list" and "wordy as hell"! My posts tend toward the overly-long and overl-verbose. This format is readable, digestible, yet informative. I like it.
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