Graveyard Bash v.1

I don't know myself, it's the first deck I've ever made, albeit with input from my dad. I just create a lot of zombies and cross my fingers. In what matches I have done with it, it's been successful enough by my standards.

I gotcha. Well, first of all, welcome to the game.

If you don't mind, I'll walk you through a few basics and help you out with this build. I'll assume you are using cards from your dad, and any new cards you'd get would be purchased separately, so I'll keep my recommendations cheap.


The first basic question you ask when making a deck is 'what do I want my deck to do, and how do I want it to do that thing'. For example, a deck that runs huge green creatures would say 'I want to win by playing heavy hitters, and I'm going to do that by ramping mana so I can play them more quickly'.

Zombie decks all want basically the same thing 'I want to swarm with a bunch of zombies' but there are actually a few different ways to go about this, as zombies are a huge tribe with a few built in mechanics. The three primary ways to do this is either from token production, regular swarm, or from grave shenanigans.

Token production wants to play support zombie creatures, primarily lords (cards that give all X creatures +1/+1 for example (like Death Baron)) and the rest of the deck either makes zombie tokens or rewards you for having zombie tokens. Stuff like Diregraf Colossus, Ghoulish Procession, and Headless Rider are reliable token generators.

Regular swarm wants to play cheap zombies with zombie lords and just deal fast combat damage with 1 and 2- drops that are all buffed up thanks to the lords. This would look like:
turn 1- drop a land, play Diregraf Ghoul
turn 2- drop land, swing with the Ghoul for 2 damage, play Undead Augur
turn 3- drop land, play Death Baron swing with a juiced up Ghoul for 3 damage and an Augur for 3 damage

After 3 turns, you've got 3 fielded critters and have opponent down to 12 life.

Grave shenanigans wants to fill the grave with lots of zombies and then get rewarded for doing so. This deck works by running mill cards, primarily zombie ones, and then reaping the rewards. Cards like Mire Triton, Stitcher's Supplier (look this one up, it's very powerful), and Thought Scour help with the milling, and there are tons of cards that take advantage of the milling, such as Liliana, Untouched by Death (which you already have), Cemetery Recruitment, Wight of the Reliquary, and Patriarch's Bidding.


The second thing to look at when building a deck is the mana curve, or how much each card costs in relation to every other card in the deck. This site has a cool feature of showing you on a graph the mana curve, which is super helpful. You generally want decks to be faster rather than slower, meaning you want cards that cost less rather than more. There's no guarantee you'll have 4 lands by turn 4, and you'd much rather have an active field of slightly weaker stuff than having to wait to field something bigger. The rule of thumb is that you want mostly 1 and 2-drops (cards that cost 1 or 2), then a good amount of 3-drops, then some 4-drops, and not many higher cards. In competitive magic, it's all about the early turns, so you need either cards that cost 1 or 2 or have an alternate cost (like evoke for example), but I assume you're looking for a more casual build, in which case I'd recommend the following: make your deck mostly 2-drops with lots of 1 and 3 drops and a few 4 drops, maybe a touch of 5-drops, and that's about it. That will get you moving much more quickly and will help you start your damage clock (how quickly you can kill opponent with your creatures), which is what zombie decks want to do.

The third thing to look at when building a deck is to check for synergy and anti-synergy. Synergy is the idea of 1 + 1 = 3, anti-synergy is 1 + 1 = 0. For an example of synergy, look no further than your own Gisa and Geralf and Diregraf Colossus. G&G fill up the grave, so when you cast the Colossus, it will be bigger than it would have been otherwise. Then, once you have the Colossus in play, you can play zombies from your grave with G&G, which causes the Colossus to make zombie tokens. Both cards synergize perfectly with the other. An example of anti-synergy is also in your deck, as you're running 3 copies of Damnation, which is the exact opposite of what you want in a creature-based build. You want your field to stay alive. If you need a Damnation to solve a problem, you've basically already lost. You'd be much better off with something that supports the zombies, more zombies in general, or spot removal (cards that kill 1 thing) so you can keep your field alive but can still solve a problem if it comes up.

So saying, I'd make the following suggestions:
1- focus on a zombie necro mill deck, as you've already got that theme going on here
2- cut down on the mana curve considerably
3- cut out all the cards that don't directly help your plan of: a- mill zombies, b- profit from milling zombies

This is how I'd build your deck from the bones of the version you're currently showing:

https://www.mtgvault.com/dknight27/decks/modern-beginner-zombie-budget/

The real shame is that the ace of this type of deck, Gravecrawler, is mildly expensive, or I'd recommend him and his supporting cards in a heartbeat, as you can build a sick deck around him. So, if I'm wrong about the budget, let me know.


Anyway, just some advice, for what that's worth.