It's time to rise some decklists from the grave, the theme of this week is Zombies, a competitive archetype in standard and quite decent in duels. Here's the rules: viewtopic.php?p=563993#p563993
Anyone can join this poll, by building all these decks and testing them. Then you can vote up to 2 decklists, the one with the best record and if you want the one with the second best record or a decklist that you enjoyed particularly.
It will be nice if you can also post the record for any decklist and leave feedbacks for the decks you enjoyed. Only the best decklist will win, but having feedbacks for all the decklists is appreciated and also a reward for people who joined this contest.
Let's see the options:























11 decklists submitted, quite similar because some cards are straightforward. There are some spicy lists too.
The poll will be open for 2 weeks, it should be enough time to test them all without pressure.
Here's the list of the deckbuilders: Black Barney, CardboardNomad, Cucho Lambreta, DJ0045, elk, Hello World, Modulo, Shard, Sl33pHumper, TheFlakyMage, WoodlandWanderer.
As always have fun testing these lists, it requires a lot of games, so don't forget to shame deckbuilders too, maybe next time there will be less people
Let's see which is the best orzhov zombie decklist, and who is the best deckbuilder that control zombies and can spend a whole night with Lili, playing magic and nothing else.


Or if you prefer the one from the comics.

Image

I pity the fools that try out my deck, *glances at Barney*

I like Woodlandwanderer's deck name the most btw

My money's on cucho's deck. Zombies should be mono-black. Needs more vehicles though.

My opinions on zombies is the 2-slot is too weak, so that's where you should splash your non-zombie beaters: black has plenty.

The last day before the deadline i got 6 or 7 decklists, so i decided to not submit mine. Anyway if you are interested to take a look here's my decklist:

Uprising

2 x Cryptbreaker
2 x Dread Wanderer
4 x Festering Mummy
3 x Fatal Push
2 x Dark Salvation
1 x Graf Harvest
4 x Miasmic Mummy
4 x Cemetery Recruitment
3 x Grasp of Darkness
2 x Smuggler's Copter
2 x Diregraf Colossus
2 x Plague Belcher
3 x Lord of the Accursed
1 x Liliana, The Last Hope
2 x Liliana's Mastery
1 x Liliana, Death's Majesty

20 x Swamp
2 x Westvale Abbey


In general Orzhov zombies is closer to the standard decklist, but monoblack zombies is closer in one important thing: the manabase. I found that orzhov works fine but not as smooth as this one without the fastlands, because the white cards you want are 2cmc so that you need too many white sources to make it work smoothly. So i decided to sacrifice a bit of strength for consistency.
Festering Mummy and Miasmic Mummy are not very good cards, but they do their job decently for an aggro deck, with a decent sinergy with Cryptbreaker and Diregraf Colossus and ofc with the lords.
Festering Mummy is small, but it is 1 cmc and good with Belcher. I prefer Miasmic Mummy over the 2 cmc Ghoul, pretty bad with Cryptbreaker and Copter. The discard usually is not fair, but i can discard bad zombies, extra lands, or 5 cmc cards that i cannot play soon. You can discard also good zombies and take them back with Recruitment, drawing also a card. About Recruitment, before i tried 4 Mummy and 4 Ghoul as 2 cmc cards, but taking back the good ones is always better than having mediocre ones.
Scrounger is bad in this deck, exiling stuff in gy is not very good, has no sinergy with the tribal stuff and it's bad in mirror. Copter is the only exception for me, since it's better and smooths your draw. The 5cmc Lili pw is here only because i had a free slot and didn't want add a Ghoul. You should quite always discard her with Mummy or Copter without fear, since we don't need her but it's a good topdeck or if you have lot of lands.

so... just because it's mono black?
Talking about 2 drops, cucho uses 3 aetherborn, but missing out on copters.. by going mono black, he's missing out another seven 2-mana zombies. Without those, the lord, diregraf and mastery drop in their efficiency. He plays cruiser yahenni and bone picker, but they are not quite what mono black is strong at. I like the 3x grasp though... cause that's the one of the real advantages for going mono black. My WB deck can use 2 unmakings so I took out 2 grasp. With white, in addition to the 2 drop boost in 7 zombies, copters, I have 2 extra spirits to protect diregraf and lord. Now consider put your money on mine.

btw, just read Giocher's list above - a different take on mono black. The difference is Giocher uses 2 drop zombies to enhance the tribal synergy. I prefer this way much more than bone picker, aetherborn yahenni and cruiser. Giocher also taking advantage of mono color speed to include the 1 drop zombies. These are all great choices. Liliana > Obnix too.

Totally agree... I chose Scrounger and copter, because obviously. Lol

It's just a choice made on flavour. I really dislike the idea of white or orzhov zombies.

I really dislike blue zombie especially the flying embalm zombies.

Hmm... I submitted my list in a build friendly format but it got switched to the standard CMC sort instead. Here's the build friendly list:

I'm trying to keep them all in the same format, it should be easier to build one and then copy that one making some changes.

I voted for Woodland, but I feel like I would cut down to 23 lands and add a miser Graf harvest.
Besides that looked like the best/most streamlined list.

I hope i eliminate Juicy Mommies first cuz the name bothers me so much (probably because I own the entire series on DVD)

Dj wins best deck title

I can certainly see mono black using graf harvest. -4 binding mummy is a big loss in terms of turning off blockers. in that case, menace becomes a good addition.

On the other side in a deck with 4x binding mummies + 8x direct removals, I would prefer investing the 1 card slot into an extra low cost zombie or something better than 4 mana 2/2 . Yes it potentially is a anti-control card in the long run but that feels like an edge case.

I actually ran into the juicy mummies concept deck in 2hg a couple of times!! The deck got annointed + embalm creatures online, but the creature qualities were so low that it was almost hilarious... a bunch of 2/3, 1/1, 1/3 that couldn't attack through a defending lambholt pacifist
but well the deck is definitely doing decently against heavy removal decks and low def decks.

24 land just seems a bit much for the deck.
and it also helps trigger those binding mummies when you're in top deck mode or just drawing blank lands.
Binding mummies + menace is damn near unbloackable.

Alright, I've got a ton of chores I should be doing. Perfect reason to procrastinate with some MtG, eh? Lets get this party started!

WB Zombie Aggro

Game 1 vs Izzet Improvise (20)


Game 2 vs Gruul Beats (20) (AI)


Intermission:
My next match got stuck in the loading screen and while I was waiting for it to time out someone plopped a bowl of homemade fettuccine (a word that I have absolutely no idea how to spell) alfredo in front of me, which, if I scrunch my eyes up enough, almost looks like brains. Yum!

Game 3 vs Gruul Energy (23)


Game 4 vs Orzhov Lifegain (18)


Game 5 vs 4C Walkers: No Black (23)


5 Game Verdict:


That's it for tonight. Hopefully I'll get a chance to test the next one tomorrow.

I'm going to build these tonight and break their cherries against the AI before taking them to war

Building ten of these back to back is going to turn me into a zombie . My neck is already sore just thinking of it

Got some games in with WoodlandWanderer's WB Zombie Aggro:
Record: 4-3, probably should have been 5-2 or better had I been a little more conservative.
Notes: solid standard zombie deck, effective but not really exciting to play. Can't quite race the fastest aggro, but pretty powerful midrange with all the lords and masteries.
MVP: I was always happy to see Selfless Spirit show up. Could have saved me both aggro losses.
Ditch: Evolving Wilds. I'd go down to 23 and replace with hubs, maybe an Abbey. These are tempo killers.

Game logs:

Who voted for WW already!?

TheGodAmongMen did. Is it me, or does that sound like the kind of handle Vert would pick for an alt?