dknight27

Are you going for budget casual here?

This looks pretty sleek, can't really think of much I'd change in the mainboard. Nice work

I've been tooling around with a few things here and there, lots of concepts swirling around, not too many have been flushed all the way out just yet.

I love cards like [[Rise of the Dread Marn]] as an answer to nukes, especially since its foretell cost is so damn cheap. In a format that ran more nukes, I would absolutely think about running it, but (to my knowledge), the only decks running any are Murktide and Jeskai, and only Jeskai has any mainboarded (in most cases). In addition, I've sort of set things up so that (hopefully) while a nuke would set the build back, it could still recover, as it has all the death mechanics that profit from my zombies dying, etc. So maybe, but we'll have to see.

I've never really messed around with cards like In Oketra's Name, as I almost never play critter builds, and am far too chicken to play tempo critter builds that are ok tossing material for a big attack turn, but I do see the merit of essentially doubling the damage I'm doing in a turn for a 2-drop surprise in game 2 or 3 against something that needs time to build. Let me ponder.

Ghoulcaller's Chant is a terrific card that puts you at a potential +2 with tempo, but it's vulnerable to grave hate, and this build will be targeted by sided grave hate and will have to side in grave hate, so I'd probably have to stay away from it. I do love the idea of Village Rites + Ghoulcaller's Chant in response to a lightning bolt though, that's just a devastating turnaround, and one I might toy with in a different build.

Thanks for the feedback.

I've been toying around with some of it, nothing too concrete as of yet. I almost never play critter-heavy decks, so it's not as intuitive for me as it is normally.

I'm relatively positive of a good matchup against energy, amulet titan, and control, unclear about the combo decks (belcher, storm, grinding station), have no idea whatsoever with the new eldrazi nonsense, and probably have a problem against living end.

I'm a tremendous fan of Damping Sphere, one of the most interesting cards ever made in my book. It works against storm and land shenanigans, so you can side it in against tron, storm, eldrazi, and amulet titan. Plus, it slows everything down, so it inadvertently works against The One Ring and other such 'I can do more than you can' builds, all for 2 colorless mana. I can't really think of a reason not to side it, other than its slight interference with Gravecrawler in this build, but that's a more than acceptable loss. The only potential problem is that storm runs anti-artifact hate for this very reason, so I've been trying to find a way around it that they can't really do anything about. I'm a TREMENDOUS fan of the card [[High Noon]] (I've been trying to work multiple decks around it), and running it would shut down storm and living end completely, but wouldn't be much good against tron, eldrazi, or amulet titan, cause it hurts you as much as it hurts them. Still working on this dilemma.

Void Mirror is a hell of a counter to both tron and eldrazi and does nothing to this deck whatsoever, so that's a huge win. It also shuts down soft counters, which opponent might keep in to try to deal with your side options, so that's nice.

The real killer I've been looking at is running a full set of [[Pithing Needle]], as it shuts down [[The One Ring]], [[Psychic Frog]], the grinding station build, and the charbelcher build, and everyone and their mother wants to run most of that to some degree. Needless to say, it's still very much a work in progress.

Well, I can't say I was expecting that. Best of luck I guess

What format, budget, and level of competition are you going for here?

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.

I'm kind of confused about where this deck wants to go. I see elements of a mass reanimate strategy, a swarm strategy, and a general zombie agro strategy all sort of wrapped in Dimir mechanics. Would you mind clarifying what your goal is for this build?

Not trying to disparage anything, just looking for clarity before commenting further.

I feel like I'm missing something here. When you cast Tainted Pact, you either have the Oracle in your hand or you don't. If you have it in your hand, you just draw out the deck, cast the Oracle and win. So you'd need 4 mana, the Oracle, and Tainted Pact. Makes perfect sense (even if the odds are low). If you don't have the Oracle, you mill till you find the Oracle, which almost certainly means you've got too many cards left in the deck to cast the Oracle for the W. You can't keep going, cause you'll eventually run into the other Oracle, which ruins the win condition. Thus, you'd want to use Thought Lash to deck yourself, then cast the Oracle for the W. Meaning you'd need Tainted Pact and Thought Lash in hand as well as at least 4 mana. Again, makes sense, but is even less likely, as there's only 1 Thought Lash and it costs 4, so you'd have to split turns to run this maneuver. Either case is unlikely, even with all the dig and fetch cards.

There are some shenanigans you could pull with cards like Snapcaster Mage, such as running a Tainted Pact for either combo piece, then Snapping the Pact again to complete the deckout, but that just tweaks the math by a little bit, as it would require a Snap and Tainted Pact in hand, or a Snap with ether combo piece with Tainted Pact already in the grave. Certainly ups the odds of the combo going off, as you can use it to do whatever you need it to do, but since there's only 1 Snap and only a few ways to fetch him, again, unlikely.

I also don't understand cards like Barrowgoyf and Reanimate (other than as a way to fetch back the Oracle if it dies), as both Tainted Pact and Thought Lash don't mill, they exile.

All of this in a deck that can only run a handfull of ways to protect the combo, so if opponent can say 'no' to anything, the game's over.

I am in no way trying to disparage the build, I think it's fun and creative as hell. I just feel like I'm missing something.

Perhaps 1 copy of [[White Orchid Phantom]] over a Ghost Quarter, as you can fetch the Phantom with Recruiter of the Guard, which ostensibly brings up your land hate to 6 instead of just 4, and cuts out a potential dead draw, as Ghost Quarter isn't that helpful a topdeck against many decktypes popular in modern.

Other than some sideboard tweaks to deal with specific modern threats, this looks pretty tight and solid to me, and I see a lot of good synergy going on.

[[Extravagant Replication]] is one of the shenanigan cards you can play around with, as you can use Copy Enchantment on it, and the two copies can make copies of the other, ostensibly pumping out 4 copies of stuff each turn (unless you want to keep replicating). [[Mirage Mirror]] is wildly useful (and combos with Extravagant Replication the same way). If you just want to copy your own dragons, [[Mirror of the Forebears]] or any of the various iterations therein. I quite like [[The Everflowing Well//The Myriad Pools]] for this build, as it does everything you want (including incidental acceleration).

I'm still missing the "idea" of what this deck really is (for example, Amoeboid Changeling makes no sense to me whatsoever), but that's probably irrelevant. If you want copy shenanigans and don't want to just run the staple copy mechanics in EDH (such as Phyrexian Metamorph and Helm of the Host), the above will get it done.

I haven't played the deck yet, I typically map things out in theory quite a bit before committing to a playtest, but that's me.

Bitterblossom is the primary wincon, but in reality the deck tries to strangle opponent to death and then win with small bits of synergy built in. For example, each High Noon doubles as 5 incredibly inefficient damage to the face. In any regular build, this would be essentially useless, but in a build that wants to turn time into a win, paying 7 mana for 5 damage (broken into 2 and 5 mana) isn't that bad a deal. And since you control when High Noon gets sacked, you can plan out a turn where you dump 5 mana into sacking one, throw out a few other burn/removal/discard spells, then play a second High Noon, and you just basically got 2-3 meta-turns for free on top of burn damage. On top of this, spot removal is essentially useless against Bitterblossom, but with High Noon, spot removal becomes a complete negative, as drawing into one means you're forfeiting an entire turn of development just to ping me for 1 damage. In my mind, the two cards are best friends.

Then there are the little damage factors, like the possible token from Kaya's Guile, Hive of the Eye Tyrant, and Bolts/Helixes to the face. None of those will win on their own, but combine them with the other damage sources and (in theory) they should be enough synergy to push the build through to a slow damage win.

All of this being said, the Microwave concept is still very new, and I'm still messing around with it, so it's quite possible that more wincons need to be built in.

I've been toying around with the whole 'deal with the one ring' thing, and the best solution I've had so far is (hilariously) running [[Cast Into the Fire]], which not only deals with the big bad artifact of the day, it doubles as delightful removal against [[Ampred Raptor]] and [[Orcish Bowmasters]]. As a sidenote, I'm toying around with an anti-meta build to take advantage of this and a few other fun overlaps like [[Arc Trail]].

You're probably right about Damn, which makes me wonder if I just need to mainboard some Pyroclasm as well.

I'm still struggling with the discard element. I'm in love with a turn 1 discard disruption, especially when followed by turn 2 High Noon, but they do tend to turn into dead draws in lots of builds. My thinking on this one was that with a High Noon in play, you bottleneck opponent, who has to hold onto multiple solid cards, so when you topdeck a discard, you can trade it off for another potential threat. Not really sure what to do about this long term yet, other than to work in something like [[Blood Fountain]] and build synergy around that.

Vault of the Archangel could probably be swapped in over Hive of the Eye Tyrant or one of the Urborgs. Good potential option against big threats as well as anti-bleeding.

Proliferate isn't actually that effective for the Calendar, as it only gives you +1 counter. You can achieve that by just untapping something normally. The best way to get counters on the Calendar is via doubling effects or by its own ability. You also want to have a way to get to the Calendar as fast as possible, cause without one the deck essentially doesn't do anything. Ideally this would mean running Urza's Saga, but it's very expensive. Alternatively, you could run [[Trinket Mage]], which would also let you run [[Voltaic Key]] so you can reuse Calendar's doubling ability. You'd also want cards like Kiora's Follower (same reason), which not only lets you reuse the Calendar but gives you a tap that doesn't require an attack, putting more counters on the clock. [[Seedborn Muse]] works like a charm in the build, as it will untap all your stuff, giving you another full turn of tap shenanigans, which essentially halves the amount of time you need to build the Calendar to a win.

First cut I'd suggest, you're running too many 'lord' effects (critters that boost your smaller critters). Cut Phabine (too expensive), Kitt Kanto (not enough benefit), and Angelic Observer (3/3 flyer is nice, but doesn't really fit the build and is only conditionally good). That frees up 6 spots.

Second cut I'd suggest is some extraneous spells that either cost too much or don't fit what's going on. Daring Escape (it's just a bad card), Elspeth (doesn't really fit the build), Scepter of Celebration (way too expensive), Stimulus Package (too expensive for the payout (even if it combos with prosperous partnership)). That frees up 9 spots (15 total).


As for what to do with those 15 spots, I am less sure. There really isn't that much going on with citizens yet (that I'm aware of), so other than throwing in a bunch of 1 and 2-drop citizen cards that do SOMETHING ([[Meriadoc Brandybuck]], [[Streetwise Negotiator]], [[Unlucky Witness]]), the only things that come to mind are [[Impact Tremors]], [[Chivalric Alliance]], [[Horn of the Mark]], and [[Domri, Anarch of Bolas]]. But you very much want this to be a critter build, so don't go overboard with the support enchantments, etc.

Just some thoughts, I'm not anywhere near 100% on what I would do with this build. It's both outside my wheelhouse and pulled from a tribe that's not really all that developed yet.

Quite a few changes to the game in the last 10 years. Feel like updating the build? I assume this is budget modern, correct?

Those monsters, I've never seen the Boomerang before. That's just cruel.

I just can't justify Powerblade in my head. If you play it turn 3, you can't activate it till turn 4, so you burn a whole very important turn that ultimately only nets you a vanilla +2/+0. There aren't even that many soldiers that get bonuses for being equipped. So, assuming you're extremely lucky and have a turn 1 and 2 soldier drop, in this scenario, on turn 4 you're swinging for about 5 damage and have fielded 3 cards. IF opponent doesn't have removal and you wasted turn 4's equip, IF you have a critter that won't just die to blocks cause Powerblade doesn't give a toughness boost, etc. I can't justify the creation of this card in my head whatsoever.

Comparing it to Pirate's Cutlass is like being kicked in the mental balls. Cutlass hits the board turn 3 and gets equipped for free, speeding you up a turn and turning a 2/1 or 1/2 pirate into a 4/3 or 3/4 that's got no problem going over the top of whatever opponent has fielded and will almost certainly survive anything but spot removal, creating a (relatively) fast and reliable damage clock. Pair it with something like [[Kitesail Freebooter]] and you got rid of that spot removal that's going to screw up your plan or any of the many 2-drops that have little bonuses that help them score damage or buff things, and you've got a solid win mechanic constructed from a common equipment used in a way that takes advantage of the synergy of its own design and the design of its architype.

Not only is Powerblade terrible (both by comparison and on its own), it's boring and has basically no synergy at all. I've been randomly brainstorming how I would fix this card (I make custom cards, it's quite fun) and I can think of lots of fun ways to keep it a common-strength tribal equip that's still fun and not completely useless.

I don't know, maybe I'm thinking about this too much. There's obviously no logic in the game anymore, we're in a post-apocalyptic game world where shit just blows up and the only thing that makes sense is the need for money.

I think someone liked it. Oh well, a little nostalgia. I do miss the days when magic could try for mechanics like this. I used to run Royal Assassin back in the day.

[[Static Orb]] would be this deck's best friend