what are people's thoughts on Reaping the Graves? Or does the tokens not count as being cast
I personally don't treat my tokens as being cast so that they cannot be countered, but Horde is malleable enough that everyone has slightly different rules. Regardless of how I treated tokens, I would not run that card simply because it targets, and I like having the horde be as mindless as possible. If you chose to count tokens as cast and errata Reaping to target random creatures, I think it's cool. Still not as good as Twilight's Call and the ilk, though.
I personally don't treat my tokens as being cast so that they cannot be countered, but Horde is malleable enough that everyone has slightly different rules. Regardless of how I treated tokens, I would not run that card simply because it targets, and I like having the horde be as mindless as possible. If you chose to count tokens as cast and errata Reaping to target random creatures, I think it's cool. Still not as good as Twilight's Call and the ilk, though.
that's true. i was going through cards today and found that i had it and was like "woah that's neat"
More (mass) removal seems to be the best way. Or maybe more graveyard-based cards, like things with flashback? Either that or start going the route of destroying/limiting acceleration and growth, but I don't think that is a wise idea (although running a few Ruinations is still on my wishlist).
Ya I want more creature removal without adding non-creature removal (although I may still add in ~2 more smallpox) because I find it too crippling to lose lands in the first few turns. I really want another plague wind and maybe I'll add in a few fleshbag marauders.
I took out my ruination because I wanted it for my Adamaro deck, but I still have destructive flow in there. It does quite a bit of damage, and turns top-decked non-basics lands into dead cards (unless you want the 1 mana for that turn).
I'm trying to get my card list to have more small effects so that it doesn't get too overwhleming when the horde starts revealing triple and quadruple cards. I may also reduce the token count slightly. I will do more experimenting though. Been playing lots of regular EDH instead of horde.
Sorry for necro-ing this thread; I think this is worthy of a necro....
SAUS9001: I found this thread years ago and used it to revamp my horde deck. Thank you for making it. I had originally adopted a few of your rules into my own horde printed rules sheet (Burn The Bodies, Overwhelming Numbers, etc). I also expanded from 100 into a 200-card Horde deck. Over the many many games I’ve played, I altered a few of your rules. I'd like to share them with you...
Overwhelming Numbers
I like how the scaling changes based on the number of players. But it was too slow in one- and two-player games. I altered it a bit:
- Horde deck gets one counter, plus one additional counter for each opponent (i.e. 2 total counters for one-player; 3 counters for 2-players, and so on).
- After 13 counters, horde gets an emblem granting the additional draw.
Here’s a comparison of the two systems (screenshot of excel spreadsheet)
This adjustment speeds things up for solo games. It slightly speeds up 2-player games. It has very little effect on 3 and 4 player games. And best of all: it uses a scarier, more flavorful number - 13!
Rules Emblems
I had an idea: create a set of emblems which would explain the core mechanical behavior of the Horde deck, in an easy to read, colorful way. I decided to print the emblems onto oversized cards (3.5”x5”) because they’re more readable and it gives me more space to work with.
Here is my emblem for the Overwhelming Numbers v2 rule:
^
|
|
Notice how the final rule on that emblem simplifies the draw while also making cards like Howling Mine, etc more dangerous for players to run.
Here are the (normal card sized) emblems which are created by the above oversized emblem:
Burn The Bodies
The ‘Burn the Bodies’ special rule has worked wonders. It makes the format more welcoming to casual players - you don’t have to build for the format or sideboard in all your graveyard hate. It both makes sense, AND fits the flavor really well. I love it. I made a small change though.
- Graveyard is split into two tiers. One tier has all cards with graveyard abilities (gravecrawler, flashback, unearth, etc). Other tier has cards with no graveyard abilities.
- When exiling due to Burn the Bodies, cards may only be exiled from the graveyard abilities tier once all of the cards in the non-graveyard abilities tier has been exiled.
Keeping the graveyard-ability cards separate streamlines the process of tracking cards with unearth and flashback. Speaking of which......
Flashback and Unearth
Horde-deck Flashback and Unearth abilities have always been tricky. Having the horde play them immediately is way too overpowered. For the longest time, I simply played with “the horde cannot play flashback” and that seemed to make everyone happy. I had an idea a while ago, to make the horde deck roll dice for each such ability, and to cast the cards on a successful roll. These are the rules I use now (and they’re printed on an emblem):
Horde Life Gain
Whenever the horde deck gains life, it puts one random card from the graveyard onto the bottom of its library. Again, it prefers pulling from the non-graveyard-ability pile before pulling from the graveyard-ability pile.
The Two Other Emblems
Here are my other two emblems. I used to have more rules, totaling 6 emblems. I found that having too many emblems explaining too many rules kind of defeated the purpose of having them - a quick reference to explain the most essential Horde rules. The emblems are designed to be used in conjunction with a full printout of the format-specific rules.
Infinite mana plus spells and abilities with {X} in their mana costs were a real pain before I penned the above rules. Now, they work flavorfully. Also, cards which temporarily drain mana from mana pools will technically work, if only for a single step or phase.
The rules on the above emblem are designed to make Zombie utility creatures such as the newly printed Gisa and Geralf playable. It also makes non-tap utility zombies such as Undead Alchemist and Nekusar, the Mindrazer stay in play for an additional turn before likely dying in combat. Tokens have haste, nontokens dont. It’s worked really well so far.
Increasing Player Interest with Full Color Rules
I was inspired by the Theros Challenge Decks. The 3 Theros decks (Face The Hydra, etc) featured play mats with all the rules printed on the mats, in full color. Players seemed more inclined to play these strange challenge formats when the rules were in full color. I’m working on photoshopping a full-color rules printout. It is formatted for print on 11”x17” paper, then to be cut down to size and folded 3-panel style. I could post that here if there’s interest (It’s currently a work in progress...).
Printing Your Own Emblems
I don't want to strain my web server, so these emblems are low-quality previews. My originals are ~4MB each; 300 DPI .pdf’s (PM me if interested).
That’s about it for my rules developments. Thank you again SAUS9001 for posting this in 2013. If it wasn’t for this specific thread, I probably would have gotten rid of my Horde deck years ago. I hope this post helps others who love the Horde format as much as I do!
that is very cool actually. never thought about ticking it up per turn dependant on the number of players. does it scale well though? 13 is aesthetically nice, but does it actually work? hoping it does. might add that to my horde (though as it stands, im not sure if my horde needs the power boost).
i suppose i can tweak my list to become a 'budget' list... though it depends how you define budget.
honestly, if you wanna go budget, i think before i actually built my horde, i didn't have nearly that many zombie tokens, and i nicked an idea from someone on commandercast (podcast), of a 'tiered horde'. i'd link to them if i had it, but i dont really know where it is.. basically, the idea is:
tier 1. a bunch of random 'evil woods' creatures, some evil forest-themed jank that the players have to trudge through, which ends with a 'boss battle' (Sisters of Stone Death, one ability activated each turn). and then the next turn sisters comes into play, the next tier starts, with 2/2 zombie and 1/1 skeleton tokens (entering the evil swamp), with undead-themed effects scattered. i think mikaeus, the unhallowed as the boss at the end. then finally, 5/5 flying demons with other demonic themed cards in tier 3 with an already transformed Withengar Unbound as the boss. i think they were 50-60 card decks each, so in the end, theres a much higher chance that you'd be able to gather all those tokens for those decks rather than having to find like 70 zombie tokens..
in my zombie horde build, i think i use endless ranks of the dead in combination with Tombstone Stairwell to scale the power of the horde up. individually not very powerful as such, but together they can really wreak havoc quick. and they were budget cards back then, not sure how budget friendly they are now. no real reason why they'd be ultra hard to come by i think
The main thing I gotta say is when going into something called "a horde" is that people typically expect a lack of noncreature spells. The only three I run are Moan of the Unhallowed, Intangible Virtue and a single Safe Passage. I do, however, like the notion of Temporal Extorion.
There are a lot of spells that you could switch out for creatures if you dropped the Zombie only clause.
Skip Espuma's rules, if you want a greater difficulty always add tokens over swamps even if they are 0/0 germs or 0/1 goats ( 0/0 germs go great with Butcher of Malakir).
What I found works for my Horde was whenever the horde loses life, put that many TOKENS into your graveyard. Any stopper cards (cards with normal backs) are put into the horde's hand. This means that the horde's power cards have a better chance of being seen. As far as waves, the horde drops its hand one card at a time. If the hand is empty, it reveals the top of its library until it gets to a card with a normal back (typically a spell) and then puts all the tokens onto the battlefield and casts that spell.
Also if you want to SUBSTANTIALLY raise the power level of your Horde, you can still balance it by taking out haste. I run all sorts of creatures like Gigantomancer, Boneyard Wurm, Beast of Burden, Avatar of Slaughter, etc. I refer to cards with normal backings as "stopper cards". This name is for more than just the waves, for example Trepanation Blade mills until a land card is revealed. This translates to "stopper card". This helps the horde a lot as far as milling, as there are many mill cards that would instantly win without stopper card errata.
Lastly, I have an infect deck that can win turn 4 our 5 far too easily. I soloed my horde. From that point on I made this rule: each poison counter is instead an emblem that deals 1 damage to the horde during its upkeep, a la Curse of the Pierced Heart.
I like the exploring deck idea, it adds a lot of flavor and is especially good to add if the players do need help. I've held on to a bunch of the Hero cards from Theros... but I haven't remembered to let people use them a single time...I feel as though the reusable ones could be pretty good, unless you want the flavor of the one-shot heroes "sacrificing" themselves to help out the team.
Cool to see this got bumped a few times. Reading through it again after so long is fun, too
I totally forgot the email and password for my old account. I can maybe find it if I keep guessing, but for now, at least, I made a new account lol.
I only recently got back into magic after almost 3 years. I kind of got bored and got backed into super smash bros melee (the scene for that game exploded in 2013). I still have my horde deck kicking around, but some of the cards got stripped out since I wanted them for some real decks. Maybe I will put it back together some time. I don't know if the people I play with now would want to play with the horde. I'll bust it out after a while and after I clean it up.
Thank you for the post, GS24! It may be a bit late and I have no idea if you are active on these forums now, but I appreciate the number crunching and theory-crafting.
Going out of the full zombie theme is not a terrible idea. Some zombie cards are a bit expensive which really sucks lol. I'm already pushing my budget with the decks I want to actually use. It sucks to dump money on a $20 card for a horde deck. It's safe to say you can still make a budget version of the deck that will be hard - stuff like syphon flesh can be super powerful. Just generally increasing tokens / swapping cards for more tokens can make it a lot harder as well. I think the 100-card versions are a good place to start if you are worried about budget - it's probably a good idea just to feel out how the horde deck works before getting really into it.
Boneknitter is insanely strong, yes, but there's a few ways around it. Exiling it or playing something like wrath of god are the usual solutions. Some people countered it as well - it depends on your group. It was strong, but never really too strong when I played with my friends.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
I personally don't treat my tokens as being cast so that they cannot be countered, but Horde is malleable enough that everyone has slightly different rules. Regardless of how I treated tokens, I would not run that card simply because it targets, and I like having the horde be as mindless as possible. If you chose to count tokens as cast and errata Reaping to target random creatures, I think it's cool. Still not as good as Twilight's Call and the ilk, though.
Misc. EDH Stuff: Commander Cube | Zombies (Horde)
Resources:Commander Rulings FAQ | Commander Deckbuilding Guide
Follow me on Twitter! @cryogen_mtg
that's true. i was going through cards today and found that i had it and was like "woah that's neat"
Ya I want more creature removal without adding non-creature removal (although I may still add in ~2 more smallpox) because I find it too crippling to lose lands in the first few turns. I really want another plague wind and maybe I'll add in a few fleshbag marauders.
I took out my ruination because I wanted it for my Adamaro deck, but I still have destructive flow in there. It does quite a bit of damage, and turns top-decked non-basics lands into dead cards (unless you want the 1 mana for that turn).
I'm trying to get my card list to have more small effects so that it doesn't get too overwhleming when the horde starts revealing triple and quadruple cards. I may also reduce the token count slightly. I will do more experimenting though. Been playing lots of regular EDH instead of horde.
BBB Two Hundred Zombies BBB
Duel Commander
WR Tajic, Wrath of the Manlands RW
BGW Doran Destruction WGB
Commander
GUB Mimeoplasm, Screw Politics BUG
BR Mogis, God of Slaughter RB
RGW Marath, Ramp and Removal WGR
WUBRG Karona, Jank God GRBUW
SAUS9001: I found this thread years ago and used it to revamp my horde deck. Thank you for making it. I had originally adopted a few of your rules into my own horde printed rules sheet (Burn The Bodies, Overwhelming Numbers, etc). I also expanded from 100 into a 200-card Horde deck. Over the many many games I’ve played, I altered a few of your rules. I'd like to share them with you...
Overwhelming Numbers
I like how the scaling changes based on the number of players. But it was too slow in one- and two-player games. I altered it a bit:
- Horde deck gets one counter, plus one additional counter for each opponent (i.e. 2 total counters for one-player; 3 counters for 2-players, and so on).
- After 13 counters, horde gets an emblem granting the additional draw.
Here’s a comparison of the two systems (screenshot of excel spreadsheet)
This adjustment speeds things up for solo games. It slightly speeds up 2-player games. It has very little effect on 3 and 4 player games. And best of all: it uses a scarier, more flavorful number - 13!
Rules Emblems
I had an idea: create a set of emblems which would explain the core mechanical behavior of the Horde deck, in an easy to read, colorful way. I decided to print the emblems onto oversized cards (3.5”x5”) because they’re more readable and it gives me more space to work with.
Here is my emblem for the Overwhelming Numbers v2 rule:
^
|
|
Notice how the final rule on that emblem simplifies the draw while also making cards like Howling Mine, etc more dangerous for players to run.
Here are the (normal card sized) emblems which are created by the above oversized emblem:
Burn The Bodies
The ‘Burn the Bodies’ special rule has worked wonders. It makes the format more welcoming to casual players - you don’t have to build for the format or sideboard in all your graveyard hate. It both makes sense, AND fits the flavor really well. I love it. I made a small change though.
- Graveyard is split into two tiers. One tier has all cards with graveyard abilities (gravecrawler, flashback, unearth, etc). Other tier has cards with no graveyard abilities.
- When exiling due to Burn the Bodies, cards may only be exiled from the graveyard abilities tier once all of the cards in the non-graveyard abilities tier has been exiled.
Keeping the graveyard-ability cards separate streamlines the process of tracking cards with unearth and flashback. Speaking of which......
Flashback and Unearth
Horde-deck Flashback and Unearth abilities have always been tricky. Having the horde play them immediately is way too overpowered. For the longest time, I simply played with “the horde cannot play flashback” and that seemed to make everyone happy. I had an idea a while ago, to make the horde deck roll dice for each such ability, and to cast the cards on a successful roll. These are the rules I use now (and they’re printed on an emblem):
Horde Life Gain
Whenever the horde deck gains life, it puts one random card from the graveyard onto the bottom of its library. Again, it prefers pulling from the non-graveyard-ability pile before pulling from the graveyard-ability pile.
The Two Other Emblems
Here are my other two emblems. I used to have more rules, totaling 6 emblems. I found that having too many emblems explaining too many rules kind of defeated the purpose of having them - a quick reference to explain the most essential Horde rules. The emblems are designed to be used in conjunction with a full printout of the format-specific rules.
Infinite mana plus spells and abilities with {X} in their mana costs were a real pain before I penned the above rules. Now, they work flavorfully. Also, cards which temporarily drain mana from mana pools will technically work, if only for a single step or phase.
The rules on the above emblem are designed to make Zombie utility creatures such as the newly printed Gisa and Geralf playable. It also makes non-tap utility zombies such as Undead Alchemist and Nekusar, the Mindrazer stay in play for an additional turn before likely dying in combat. Tokens have haste, nontokens dont. It’s worked really well so far.
Increasing Player Interest with Full Color Rules
I was inspired by the Theros Challenge Decks. The 3 Theros decks (Face The Hydra, etc) featured play mats with all the rules printed on the mats, in full color. Players seemed more inclined to play these strange challenge formats when the rules were in full color. I’m working on photoshopping a full-color rules printout. It is formatted for print on 11”x17” paper, then to be cut down to size and folded 3-panel style. I could post that here if there’s interest (It’s currently a work in progress...).
Printing Your Own Emblems
I don't want to strain my web server, so these emblems are low-quality previews. My originals are ~4MB each; 300 DPI .pdf’s (PM me if interested).
That’s about it for my rules developments. Thank you again SAUS9001 for posting this in 2013. If it wasn’t for this specific thread, I probably would have gotten rid of my Horde deck years ago. I hope this post helps others who love the Horde format as much as I do!
BBB 200-card Zombie Horde
Tiny Leaders
BUW Merieke, la belle dame sans merci.
EDH
GU Edric, Master Politician
GUW Rafiq: F*** Politics.
GUR Intet's Dragons
GWR Rith's Weenies
GB Nath's ElfBall
BBB Relentless Rats (Marrow Gnawer)
BBB Mikaeus's Budget Combo
Cube
UWGRB540-card Booze Cube
Legacy - Solidarity - mono U aggro - burn - Imperial Painter - Strawberry Shortcake - Bluuzards - bom
honestly, if you wanna go budget, i think before i actually built my horde, i didn't have nearly that many zombie tokens, and i nicked an idea from someone on commandercast (podcast), of a 'tiered horde'. i'd link to them if i had it, but i dont really know where it is.. basically, the idea is:
tier 1. a bunch of random 'evil woods' creatures, some evil forest-themed jank that the players have to trudge through, which ends with a 'boss battle' (Sisters of Stone Death, one ability activated each turn). and then the next turn sisters comes into play, the next tier starts, with 2/2 zombie and 1/1 skeleton tokens (entering the evil swamp), with undead-themed effects scattered. i think mikaeus, the unhallowed as the boss at the end. then finally, 5/5 flying demons with other demonic themed cards in tier 3 with an already transformed Withengar Unbound as the boss. i think they were 50-60 card decks each, so in the end, theres a much higher chance that you'd be able to gather all those tokens for those decks rather than having to find like 70 zombie tokens..
in my zombie horde build, i think i use endless ranks of the dead in combination with Tombstone Stairwell to scale the power of the horde up. individually not very powerful as such, but together they can really wreak havoc quick. and they were budget cards back then, not sure how budget friendly they are now. no real reason why they'd be ultra hard to come by i think
Legacy - Solidarity - mono U aggro - burn - Imperial Painter - Strawberry Shortcake - Bluuzards - bom
There are a lot of spells that you could switch out for creatures if you dropped the Zombie only clause.
grave pact -> butcher of malakir
painful quandary, gibbering descent -> cackling fiend, cunning lethemancer, [card]banshee of the dread choir
[/card]blood moon -> magus of the moon, skyshroud war beast
call to the grave -> magus of the tabernacle
Kederekt Leviathan is the number one card that I recommend for every horde. It is tough to answer, nigh impossible to completely render useless, and just because it entrers the battlefield doesn't mean the game is instantly over. Best dollar bin find I ever purchased.
tribute to the wild, back to nature, creeping corrosion -> bane of progress Bane is the second most necessary card for any horde. I don't need to explain why.
zombie apocalypse -> balthor the defiled, hythonia the cruel
everlasting torment -> stigma slasher Fang Skulkin
decree of pain -> massacre wurm
no mercy -> dread, but would need some errata; Teysa, Envoy of Ghosts.
bone knitter is too op. Especially in your current iteration. I'm not sure how you are really getting around it without requiring someone to play a white deck with arrests, swords to plowshares, or other targeted exile precisely for that.
ruination -> desolate angel
anthem of rakdos -> nobils of war
Skip Espuma's rules, if you want a greater difficulty always add tokens over swamps even if they are 0/0 germs or 0/1 goats ( 0/0 germs go great with Butcher of Malakir).
What I found works for my Horde was whenever the horde loses life, put that many TOKENS into your graveyard. Any stopper cards (cards with normal backs) are put into the horde's hand. This means that the horde's power cards have a better chance of being seen. As far as waves, the horde drops its hand one card at a time. If the hand is empty, it reveals the top of its library until it gets to a card with a normal back (typically a spell) and then puts all the tokens onto the battlefield and casts that spell.
Also if you want to SUBSTANTIALLY raise the power level of your Horde, you can still balance it by taking out haste. I run all sorts of creatures like Gigantomancer, Boneyard Wurm, Beast of Burden, Avatar of Slaughter, etc. I refer to cards with normal backings as "stopper cards". This name is for more than just the waves, for example Trepanation Blade mills until a land card is revealed. This translates to "stopper card". This helps the horde a lot as far as milling, as there are many mill cards that would instantly win without stopper card errata.
Lastly, I have an infect deck that can win turn 4 our 5 far too easily. I soloed my horde. From that point on I made this rule: each poison counter is instead an emblem that deals 1 damage to the horde during its upkeep, a la Curse of the Pierced Heart.
As for Threshold, utilize the graveyard! Boneyard Wurm and Lhurgoyf are great! Splinterfright is far too powerful as it has trample.
I like the exploring deck idea, it adds a lot of flavor and is especially good to add if the players do need help. I've held on to a bunch of the Hero cards from Theros... but I haven't remembered to let people use them a single time...I feel as though the reusable ones could be pretty good, unless you want the flavor of the one-shot heroes "sacrificing" themselves to help out the team.
I totally forgot the email and password for my old account. I can maybe find it if I keep guessing, but for now, at least, I made a new account lol.
I only recently got back into magic after almost 3 years. I kind of got bored and got backed into super smash bros melee (the scene for that game exploded in 2013). I still have my horde deck kicking around, but some of the cards got stripped out since I wanted them for some real decks. Maybe I will put it back together some time. I don't know if the people I play with now would want to play with the horde. I'll bust it out after a while and after I clean it up.
Thank you for the post, GS24! It may be a bit late and I have no idea if you are active on these forums now, but I appreciate the number crunching and theory-crafting.
Going out of the full zombie theme is not a terrible idea. Some zombie cards are a bit expensive which really sucks lol. I'm already pushing my budget with the decks I want to actually use. It sucks to dump money on a $20 card for a horde deck. It's safe to say you can still make a budget version of the deck that will be hard - stuff like syphon flesh can be super powerful. Just generally increasing tokens / swapping cards for more tokens can make it a lot harder as well. I think the 100-card versions are a good place to start if you are worried about budget - it's probably a good idea just to feel out how the horde deck works before getting really into it.
Boneknitter is insanely strong, yes, but there's a few ways around it. Exiling it or playing something like wrath of god are the usual solutions. Some people countered it as well - it depends on your group. It was strong, but never really too strong when I played with my friends.