MTG Salvation

Why Josu Vess?

I love tribal mechanics, especially in EDH. However, my biggest problem with tribal decks, and all decks that rely on creatures, is how susceptible to mass removal they are. As a pretty dedicated Edgar Markov player since August 2017, I've noticed that it only takes a single Wrath of God, Damnation, Toxic Deluge, Blasphemous Act, etc., to significantly slow down these deck-types. Depending on how well executed these plays are, the damage done can be completely irreversible.

Enter Josu Vess, what is effectively an Army of the Damned printed in the form of a Command Zone target. A single casting of Josu Vess can be the difference between being completely dominated by classic sweepers, outside of the beast that is Cyclonic Rift, and maintaining a board presence for as long as it takes for your opponent's to run their hands dry of answers. As a Swamps Matter build, with the right tools, you can effectively render the commander tax completely irrelevant at your average casual table.

This actually allows for some fun swarming mechanics as the deck really doesn't care about Josu Vess once he has resolved. He's a nice 4/5 Zombie Knight with Menace, but I greatly appreciate the 8 friends that he tosses onto the board with him. You can simply sacrifice Josu Vess to keep spamming the board with more of these same tokens, provided you have a means of skipping the Commander Tax either by mana generation (Caged Sun, Gauntlet of Power, Extraplanar Lens, Cabal Coffers, etc.) or retrieving same from the cemetery (Lord of the Undead, Phyrexian Reclamation, Unholy Grotto, Volrath's Stronghold).

The Deck
To start, this deck follows a few themes/subtypes:

1. Monoblack
2. Aggro
2. Tribal - Zombie
3. Sacrifice Engine
4. Swamps Matter

I'm also going to be upfront about the fact that despite this deck having several expensive cards in it, it is a Casual deck. There is only two combos in the entire deck that chain off of Phyrexian Altar and Gravecrawler. These combos rely upon having either Grave Pact/Dictate of Erebos or Diregraf Colossus in play as to control all boards, or create an infinite amount of Zombie tokens. The sole reason this combo is in the deck is because all of the components are, naturally, already in the build. These interactions are treated exclusively as a win-condition on the side.

As the manacurve on Zombies, naturally, tends to swing higher in the direction of 3CMC and 4CMC for the Lords themselves, a sacrifice engine has been included with the intent to 1). slow the game down for opponents and 2). to provide a means of providing some form of control to the board to allow the Zombies to do their work. Menace is a great evasive mechanic, as is Swampwalk, but there is nothing better than just leaving a clear board. This deck hands out Zombie tokens like candy and you don't actually need all of them. Again, I have no delusions that this deck is simply too slow for anything resembling CEDH or the like.

Anyway, onto the deck!

I think Decree of Pain would be a solid removal spell in place of All is Dust. AiDs is great, but the decree is more flexible, being able to be used early to either dig to hit your land drops or kill utility creatures, to being a wrath that gives you the gas to rebuild much faster than your opponents.

Patriarch's Bidding seems like it would be amazing in this deck as it would benefit you more than everyone else, but also allow you to overcommit to the build without much fear of it backfiring.

Since you're already going with big mana, have you considered In Garruk's Wake?

The Immortal Sun seems like it would be really good here, performing triple duty in the form of boardwipe pump, cost reducer, and a source of card draw. The 'walker effect would be the icing, and it would only affect the one planeswalker you currently use (which is what I could cut for the sun).

If you want something more stylish, I think Last Laugh would be pretty good in your deck, especially since you have a few sac outlets and some sources of massive life gain. I think this would be another way to close out games along with Gary.