MTG Salvation

Back again for more brewing. This time, A BGx Rock deck that uses synergistic, difficult to deal with Zombies as its creature base. With Relentless Dead spoiled in SOI, I'm convinced that there is finally enough of a backbone for a deck like this to be pretty good. No sideboard yet, as that is meta dependent and this deck hasn't even seen the light of day yet.



As always, I'm open to suggestions and, especially with this brew, new ideas.

A quick note on Dark Confidant: Yes, Bob/Skrillex is a powerhouse, especially in midrange decks. However, I feel like the lifelink provided by Kalitas is not enough to offset the life lost to Bob, and there are too many high costed cards in the deck for me to feel comfortable with it. Testing and other opinions may surface. This is just the reason why Bob didn't make this draft of the list.
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Please refer to the post below for my most recent decklist for this deck, as well as the deck changelog.

Decklist as of 3/13/15



Currently playing around with spots for 2 Evolutionary Leap. Will update then.

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Reserved for future updates.

Hey! I like this deck. The rock is a deck that I've always been interested in making work and this seems like a pretty great baseline.
My initial impression is that Collected Company doesn't fit since you're only running 12 cards that it can actually target. It's a very strong card and I definitely see why you want to play it, but I don't think it fits into this particular build. (This means only 20% of your cards --1/5-- are valid targets, which is not a high enough percentage for it to be a worth a card slot)
That being said, you could build a more aggressively costed deck with cards like Kitchen Finks, Vampire Nighthawk, Bloodghast and Dark Confidant.

For the sideboard I would suggest maybe playing Putrefy, Damnation, Surgical Extraction, and perhaps even something like Raven's Crime for decks that like to maintain a large hand size.

Hi Firefly,

I have been trying to come up with some ideas for a Zombie Rock deck featuring Lotleth Troll as well. I think Bloodghast is another graveyard-focused creature that can be useful when discarding to the Troll and Lilly and can also be sacrificed to Kalitas. I am also considering Geralf's Messenger because I think that being resurrected by Relentless Dead would be very powerful. And I saw someone mention Evolutionary Leap in another forum and I thought that might be pretty good when 14 of our creatures come back from the graveyard pretty easily.

I came up with something like this:

Thanks a bunch for the feedback. I'm glad to see there is some interest in a deck like this. I agree about Collected Company. To be honest, I put it in early on when the deck was more aggressively costed, and didn't recheck the numbers later on. I'm toying with Bloodghast right now, since it does play very well with Kalitas. Evolutionary Leap seems like it could be interesting. I'll need to test it. I've never played with the card, so I don't know how well it plays. Looks good on paper, though.
As and aside, does anyone have any tips on beating the UW and <> Eldrazi decks? I want to make sure we don't just fold against them. Part of my brewing of late has been trying to find ways to fight the Eldrazi overlords.
Thanks once again for the excellent feedback. Keep it coming!

Here's my take on the deck. I would love to incorporate a Dredge sub theme here. I wish Golgari Grave-Troll was a zombie..

So I just started (and I mean JUST) started brewing a BG Zombie Tribal Coco deck. I am still not totally sure if the deck will push up to midrange grind fest or get enough aggro pieces to work but anyway here is my current MB decklist (SB is still completely in the air):



Ofcourse early stages of the deck I have just tried to jam as many dudes to maximize Collected Company or in absence of CoCo, lay down the beats with an abundance of Lords. One card that REALLY pulled it's weight in this creature heavy list was Necromancer's Stockpile. Since all my creatures (except for Kalitas) are Zombies, I've had several games now where I just hold open mana and pitched Zombies in hand for 2/2 Zombies onboard. When I draw into a CoCo, I play that instead. The result is that I end up increadibly dense on threats because you are almost netting a card a turn while applying pressure. Once they answer the swarm, you can play your dudes from hand or keep turning them into 2/2 bears. This pulls double duty for cards like Gravecrawler since you can recast them from your graveyard (animating Mutavault and recasting Gravecrawler feels incredible too). Another Zombie I feel should get an honorable mention was Stillmoon Cavalier. I used it in my SB as a 4x during testing and it came in against GBx and UW Control matchups and was incredible. Super hard to remove or deal with and when pumped with a Lord or so, it closed out the game quickly. I am considering making this a Vial deck but with an abundance of 3 cmc lords/dudes I think they might be too expensive to make Vial worth the terrible topdeck late.

The alternative to this is to lessen the overall creature count, add some interaction and try to just grind matchups. I think this would be the direction I'd lean if Necromancer's Stockpile didn't specify that you had to discard Creature cards. I wish it was just a loot that netted you a 2/2 if you discarded a Zombie. I feel like Zombies are REALLY close to being a very viable tribal on their own but they lack one or two cards to push them over (one of those cards is likely an engine). Relentless Dead might be one of those cards but I'll need to fiddle with it after release to be certain.

I'm working on a grind version of this that includes Bloodghast Viridian Emissary Evolutionary Leap Grim Haruspex Grave Pact and a few sac outlets. Check out GraveRock for potential ideas.

Evolutionary Leap is too random in a creature heavy deck, unless like all of your creatures have etb/ltb effects. I'm trying to break it with Bloodghast and Viridian Emissary(all 2 drops...). Less creatures that recur naturally turns it into a repeatable tutor. That's where that card will really shine.