I've been playing around with a horde deck for a while now, and decided that 100 cards just wasn't enough. As soon as the players stablized and started swinging at the horde, it was usually game over. The only hope the horde had was a lucky living death. For no particular reason, I figured 200 would be a good size for the deck.
A new problem arised. Since the players could not reliably mill away all the scary spells, it was pretty much only luck that could pull us through to the end. To combat this problem, I implemented a new rule!
Burn the bodies!
Basically, when the players attack the horde with creatures, normally, you just mill the horde deck for the amount of damage you dealt. With my rule, it works like this:
- at the beginning of each combat phase for the players, they choose 'attack the horde' or 'burn the bodies'.
- if they choose 'attack the horde', it works like normal. You attack them, and they mill.
- if they choose 'burn the bodies', then you exile 1 card at random from the horde's graveyard for each 1 damage they would take if you attacked normally.
- you cannot burn the bodies with non-combat damage
- you cannot burn the bodies with some creatures, and attack the horde with others. All creatures go for 1, and can't switch mid-combat (like with doublestrike or something)
- if you get another combat phase, you can choose again for that combat phase.
This rule has allowed me to include some really scary cards that would normally cause the players to lose really badly like past in flames.
Overwhelming Numbers
After much playing and experimenting, I have found that it is too hard to make the horde scale against multiple players without making it too hard for less players. The solution I have come to is a rule to increase the horde's strength over time.
The rule I currently have in place works as follows:
- At the end of each horde turn, a counter is increased by 1 for each player in the game.
- When this counter hits 10 or more, reduce it by 10, and give the horde an emblem.
- The horde starts with 1 emblem.
- The horde reveals cards until X non-token cards are revealed, where X is the number of these emblems they have.
With this rule, the players are "forced" to attack the horde, and the horde will be able to naturally overcome powerful player board states when it gets stronger.
Some ways we handle things for the horde: Minor Specifics:
- the players always have 60 life to start, and get 3 turns to set up with no draw on the first turn.
- the horde deck always uses all 200 cards.
- if the horde loses life, it treats it as damage and mills that many cards.
- if the horde gains life, nothing happens.
Choosing Creatures:
When the horde needs to choose creatures/permanents for sacrifice, or attacking planeswalkers, they choose the creatures in this order:
1) spawned creature tokens
2) 2/2 zombie tokens from the deck
3) 5/5 zombie giant tokens from the deck
4) non-token creatures chosen at random
5) enchantments/artifacts chosen at random
6) cards in hand chosen at random (if I add descent into madness or something)
Planeswalkers:
At the start of each combat phase for the horde, choose an order of the planeswalkers in play at random. For each planeswalker, going in order, the horde deck chooses a zombie (according to the above rules) for each loyalty counter on that planeswalker, and those zombies attack that planeswalker for that turn. If there are not enough zombies to attack all the planeswalkers like this, then the lucky planeswalkers at the end of the random order are not attacked.
Activated abilities:
There are only a couple activated abilities that the horde will use:
Regeneration - If a zombie would be destroyed at any point, it regenerates in response.
Unearth - If there is a creature with unearth in the graveyard, the ability is activated at the same time the horde plays flashback spells and spells from its hand. The order of all this is randomly chosen.
Decisions:
If the horde has to make a choice, and there is no determined way to handle that choice, it is chosen at random. (cards like browbeat for instance).
Here's the deck:
I went with a 130:70 split. I might try to increase the token to non-token ratio so that the graveyard fills up with more 2/2 zombies more quickly. This will make burning the bodies take a little more work, and make the deck overall more difficult to beat.
Apparently I miscounted the zombie tokens when I put them in so it's 129:71 split. I'm just going to leave it as is for now. This is the exact list I am currently using.
The cards I removed were to reduce the suicidal nature of milling the horde deck. The horde will still fight back like before, but not to the point where it auto-kills you with a huge, haste army. Bad moon is basically just a filler card for anthem of rakdos, and dread slaver is just filler in general. He will probably come out for something like bloodbond march when I get one.
I switched a 2/2 token for a 5/5 token because I wanted an even 10 of them, and also because I am still using face-down lands as proxies for about 15 2/2 zombie tokens. I left in the slightly awkward 129:71 ratio because I don't want to make the deck too much harder. It's already quite brutal, and I haven't even added the 2 deadly enchantments I'm planning on adding yet.
Dread slaver was just filler, and ruination is a sorcery and I am trying to move to more enchantments. No mercy is something I wanted to test already, and destructive flow is a slightly less but also slightly more brutal ruination. Since it can't get recast by past in flames, it will give the players more room to attack the horde, but if it stays in play, it can prevent proper recovery.
Some card explanations:
I wanted each game to feel unique, so there's a lot of 1-ofs in the list. However, there's a bunch of cards that have effects that I really like and/or I really want the deck to consistently have: Rotting Rats - basically guarentees the players will be losing cards. It helps hose counterspell users as well because it's almost impossible to stop them from using unearth. They also heavily discourage board wipes because it means you will have to discard. Noxious Ghoul - I actually want 1 or 2 more of this guy in the list, but I don't have any more copies. He keeps army sizes down, and kills stuff that is normally really tough to kill. Vengeful Dead - They make board wipes very tough to use. If the horde deck mass reanimates, you can't just day of judgement them away. It's perfect. Undead Warchief - I actually find the mass pump zombie lords to be a little boring. They just kind of end up making you die really fast, or do nothing because of removal. However, I think the effect is at least somewhat necessary for the horde deck. It means you can't just leave like 3 zombies in play and feel safe. The next turn could be this guy and it adds a ton of damage. Syphon Mind - Scales very well with the number of players. It makes each player lose a card, and then dumps a bunch of new potentially scary things onto the board. Temporal Extortion - very awesome. It forces the players to make a tough choice which is fun for them. Lose HALF our life? Or risk the horde top-deck (+ the extra attack phase)? Zombie Apocalypse - couldn't have had a more flavourful mass reanimate card. It's perfect too because it doesn't just instantly kill you. You get a turn to try to deal with it. Endless Ranks of the Dead - Not particularly strong, but it's just epic.
Some silver bullet cards were necessary to combat my meta. Forsaken wastes, and everlasting torment are both in the deck to combat lifelink. My Vish Kal deck gets really out of hand if he gets in play with enough tokens to eat. He gains us tons of life, swings in for massive damage, and can snipe important zombies while ignoring their regeneration at the same time. My friend has an Uril deck, and one time was gaining use 120 life per turn. Creeping corrosion and back to nature are to punish strong board positions later in the game. When I increased the deck size (from 100 to 200), I realised that after the first 100 cards, there is not much of a difference for the next 100. You just finish them off, or the horde gets a lucky living death and the players get 1-shot. These cards push the players further back from their ideal board positions and burn the bodies prevents the 1-shot power of living death.
There are some other cards in there to hit board positions as well: Ruination - Blow up many lands. Certain utility lands cause a lot of problems for the horde and it punishes all the greedy mana bases. Tribute to the wild - a bit on the lighter side, but it usually gets a mana rock and sometimes kills a jitte. This may need to be changed for something more powerful, but for now, it's in. Smallpox - Really hurts the players. The zombie deck just sacrifice a 2/2 token, and mills 1. The players lose many cards and a small chunk of life.
Everything else in the list is just for flavour and fun. Past in Flames - reanimate the spells! It often hits a zombie apocalypse or similar, and gets things like creeping corrosion, back to nature, and smallpox to go again. It's also quite scary with temporal extortion. Creeping Renaissance - Mass reanimator spell that has flashback. It always defaults to creatures. It's quite scary when it shows up. Makes you think twice about attacking the deck Boneknitter - All the zombies including himself have regenerate. If you don't have a way to kill boneknitter and prevent regeneration, you won't be killing any zombies. Toxic Nim - quite a simple card, but the choice of taking lots of poison or losing creatures to the regenerating monster is quite awesome. You can't really win against it until you can kill it. Sedris, the Traitor King - Really badass zombie. He is also basically a mass reanimate spell that just keeps going. If you can't kill him, he will keep reanimating every new creature that gets tossed into the graveyard. Vulturous Zombie - flying zombie. He also gets bigger over time. He's quite fun. Grim Flowering - If you don't burn the bodies, and this thing shows up, it's one hell of a fight for you (or a lot of the times just hell for you). Sutured Ghoul - He can fairly easily 1-shot you and your team. He doesn't even need much food to be scary. If he eats just 5 2/2 zombies, he is a 10/10 trample. Painful Quandary - only recently added for experimentation. I like cards that pose players with a choice. It makes it more interesting. Decree of Pain - Kills all the creatures and then dumps a new hand onto the board. It's an awesome board wipe because even if it kills a whole lot of zombies, it will replace each one with a new zombie or even more devastating spell. Graveborn Muse - If you let the zombies untap, they will crush you with a ton of extra cards. I made it so the horde draws, and then mills. This way, they will always get the cards (as opposed to milling the last 20 cards of the deck and then drawing 0). The self damage actually makes the horde even more dangerous because they will most likely play something out of the graveyard.
Cards I am looking to add/experiment with, but don't have a copy or haven't tried out yet: Descent into madness - It could really tear up the players' side of the battlefield. The mass zombies would be able to take the losses easily. Lurking Predators - I like cards that give the players a choice. It makes the deck feel more interactive even though it doesn't actually choose anything. Rise of the Dark Realms - Not even out yet, but it would definitely be fun. It's coming out in M14, and it's basically the original liliana's ultimate ability. Reanimate everything! Destructive Flow - Slowly melt away the players' mana bases. This kind of effect is necessary since my deck aims to make the game longer. (OBTAINED) Pox - Melt everyone's everything! ~suggested by Espuma No Mercy - Can't attack the horde until you get rid of it. (OBTAINED) Reito Lantern - Quite a bit off flavour, but it would basically make the horde immortal. All spells and creatures that die/get used would go back to the bottom of the deck. The only danger of something like this is that, without the graveyard, the horde deck is not nearly as dangerous. It might be too easy to just build up a solid board position while the horde whiffs zombie apocalypses. Still an interesting card though. Geralf's Mindcrusher - self mill actually accelerates my horde a lot. There are so many cards that work from the graveyard that this could heavily benefit the horde, and undying is awesome. Bloodbond March - An extremely powerful enchantment that can scare the players into attacking the deck - either to get rid of it through mill, or by burning away the zombie tokens. This will be a difinite inclusion as soon as I can get one. Anthem of Rakdos - This card is awesome. I'm sure I'll be adding it as soon as I get a copy. It fits perfectly for fixing the problem where there are not enough non-graveyard oriented threats. It basically turns the zombies into 8/2's and makes the horde self-mill for 2 for each attacking creature. This will be something you don't want to see, so milling the horde deck will be required to stop it. It's also a much better option than blood moon in terms of being a 'lord' that is not a creature
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Adjusting Difficulty
I only really get to play with 1 other person most of the time. Having just 2 of us makes it really hard to measure the power of the horde deck. If it becomes too easy though (when we add more players), we typically reduce the turn count that we get at the start. Similarly, if it's too hard, we can add a turn.
It's also possible to add 'half' turns by allowing a draw on the first turn. So maybe it's a little too hard, so a good way to fix it is to allow a draw on the first player turn.
Adjusting the starting life total is another option, but I find reducing the life total is not a very good idea. It often leads to the players randomly getting 1-shot when a scary zombie turn comes up.
Manly Mode:
The zombies take the first turn. Good for some laughs sometimes. Haven't beat it yet.
Current Problems:(New section)
This is a new section I have created regarding concerns about how my horde deck plays out, as well as solutions to each problem (either implemented or just theoretical solutions). If you have ideas for any of the problems, let me know! I'd be glad to see what others have to add.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Problem - Not enough incentive to mill the horde deck.
Since the horde deck has so many powerful 'graveyard matters' cards, it is virtually suicide to mill it with your attacks. What's been happening is that the players will only burn the bodies, and never mill the horde deck. It's not entirely bad, and it's still not easy, but it leads to rather long, and somewhat stale games.
Solution - Still working on it, but reducing disincentive to attacking, and increasing incentive to attacking will most likely do the trick.
There are a couple of cards that are unmanageable if they are cast when the horde deck has a decent amount of zombies in the graveyard. Grim flowering, creeping renaissance, and living death are the main ones. I don't mind mass reanimation, but with big hastey armies, it is usually instant death, which is no fun. Furthermore, you can always just attack the graveyard using my custom rule. This causes the players to never want to attack the horde deck. By removing some of these instant kill cards, and putting in more really dangerous cards (that are more powerful without a reliance on the graveyard, and can't be recurred by zombie apocalypse or past in flames), I can 'force' the players to attack the deck to remove these threats. Bloodbond march seems like a good fit for this. It gives the players an entire turn to try to figure something out (no instant death), but it can't be recurred by the horde deck. The only problem is that it scales with the horde's graveyard, but it isn't doubly bad like creeping renaissance which means if you mill the deck, you give it more ammo, and also make it come out sooner.
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-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Problem - Getting cheesed out by a big zombie token chain.
It happens every once in a while, and it was even a problem when the deck was only 100 cards. Basically, it's that random turn where you get 3 zombie giants, 7 zombie tokens, and then an undead warchief - usually resulting in a rather quick death.
Solution - Not entirely sure what to do, but maybe less zombie giants.
Reducing the number of zombie giants would make this a lot less painful. It's already hard enough when 10 2/2 zombies show up, so changing a few zombie giants for more 2/2 zombies would not be that bad. I don't want to reduce the difficulty too much though. I like what the zombie giants add to the horde - a threat without using their non-token card.
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-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Problem - Very powerful 'problem' permanents that typically get hit by removal right away in a normal game.
Some cards like Umezawa's Jitte and Assemble the Legion pretty much kick the horde's butt single-handedly. There are some answers to them in the horde deck, but not many.
Solution - Possibly me more artifact/enchantment removal.
More removal would lower the power of these problem permanents. The next step is to find some more nice cards to fit into the deck to kill these problem permanents. I have a gate to phyrexia lying around and may give it a shot. It will be annoying to choose targets randomly, but it should be okay. I may go with having it target the artifact with the highest CMC, ignoring its own artifacts.
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What do you think of the deck?
What about the additional rule?
Do you think my list is too easy?
I feel like it is when I look at some other lists, but I think that my deck is pretty damn hard to beat with just 2 people.
Not every deck I play with has a good way to hate on graveyards. If your meta has a lot of graveyard hate, then those cards will be good against the horde (essentially stomping on all the mass reanimation and stuff). Burning the bodies means you can hate on their graveyard without running graveyard hate cards.
If you can't burn the bodies, I was finding many mid to late game scenarios where past in flames or zombie apocalypse would just kill you. Your only hope is to have a counterspell, which not many people who play horde in my group run. Of course graveyard hate can work, but I don't think it should be mandatory. The decks people use against the horde can vary quite a bit, and I don't want to force everyone to change their deck to play against the horde.
Burning the bodies is to allow the players to play more safe (by managing the threat of the horde's graveyard) instead of trying to race it down with the hopes of removing all the main threat spells. At least that's the intention anyway. It seems to work okay right now, but I want to test it out more.
I know unearth exiles. I just meant that Sedris would bring back any creatures you kill after the first big reanimation.
I do like the idea of pox, I just have to get a copy.
EDIT: I added it to the list at the bottom of the OP. I am even more excited for this card now because it's perfect for what I want to do - cut down late game board presence. This card is awesome because it scales with what the players have. If they have lots of life, they lose a lot, if they have lots lands, creatures, or cards in hand, they get punished more for it. It's a really good way to always deal the 'right' amount of damage.
I haven't tested the current list with very many people yet, so I probably won't change it too much until I do. I feel like it may be too easy as you add more players though. I may try your swamp scaling idea in your list.
To those who don't know what it is, you shuffle a swamp into the deck for each extra player, and after they are revealed by mill or a zombie turn, the horde deck keeps them, and does an extra reveal for each swamp (basically extra turn minus the attack step).
I'm finding a small problem with my deck that makes me want to change it.
Since their is such an emphasis on the horde's graveyard, I find that it is actually suicide to attack the horde. Often, the players are forced to just clear the graveyard as often as possible so that they don't get completely wiped by a giant reanimation spell. This leads to a very long, boring victory most of the time. The players just sit there clearing the graveyard for about 50 turns.
Some ideas I have that can help fix this are:
- reduce the number of 'instant kill' cards that work with the graveyard. Cards like grim flowering, creeping renaissance, living death, and decree of pain are some of these cards (past in flames allowing the sorceries to be cast from the graveyard). I don't want to take out too many of these cards, but a couple of the big hitters will likely go.
- increase the number of threats that don't work with the graveyard. These basically have to be artifacts or enchantments that are always painful, and are possibly 1-shot so they can be good right away, and not just be useless due to removal. This will force the players to actively mill the horde deck to bypass these threats.
A simple thing I could also do is just add even more devastating enchantments like descent into madness (probably at least 2-of), and maybe even bad moon (which I don't like, but could help with what I am aiming to change).
I need enchantments that immediately help the zombies and don't wait a turn for the players to just kill them. Artifacts are welcome as well. I think another everlasting torment and forsaken wastes would be good additions. Destructive flow would also definitely be nice.
Any ideas for helping me here would be great.
EDIT
Looking at spoilers for M2014, I noticed Dark Prophecy! This could be an awesome inclusion to help me out. Basically, it makes the zombies unblockable for the turn, or makes it really painful/suicide to block. Board wipes also become a non-option.
I also think more call to the graves would make a big difference. It really puts the hurt on the players' board positions, and triggers on their upkeep which means it can only do 0 damage if the players kill it before their turn. Token decks and similar already suffer from noxious ghoul, so it should be difficult enough for even token decks.
*no living death as that removes zombies in play and patriarchs bidding helps the humans less, although slightly less flavorful*
I built it keeping the following principle in mind, for each human player I want there to be 14 tokens, 10 tier 2 cards, 5 tier 3 cards and 1 tier 4 card.
That seems like a nice way to do it SamuraiMunky. One thing though, does that mean you have to choose the cards out of the deck each time you want to play? It doesn't take long, but I'm lazy it's nice to just shuffle it up a bit and then play. If it's too hard, we just increase our turn count by a bit.
How does lich lord of unx work for you? I didn't know what to make him do because he could just infinite life-loss + mill the players so I just didn't bother including him in the deck.
Right now, the main problem with the deck is that there is too much reason to not mill the horde deck, so with my custom rule 'burn the bodies', the best strategy seems to be to just sit back, and just do enough damage to exile their graveyard every turn.
The power level of the deck seems okay for now, but I tend to dislike the cards like living death that usually just mean instant loss for the players. It does have the potential to help them out a bit, but usually, noxious ghoul (or 2.. or 3..) hit the field with 20 zombie tokens and kill everything we get back anyway. The swing is almost always lethal. I prefer zombie apocalypse because it at least gives us a turn to try to do something.
Just run less recursion, like you said you will. I think that will solve most of the problem. Of course, there is always a chance of insta-gibbing the Survivors, but that will always be the case with a random opponent. Just shuffle up and start a new game...
In my meta, I dislike Living Death especially because it usually returns more/better stuff for the Survivors. Funny how it is the other way around here.
Ya, I don't mind if it happens every once in a while, because you can still stop it if you have the right cards when it happens, I just don't want it to happen too often.
That is funny that it's the other way around in your meta for living death. Does your playgroup run a lot of graveyard hate? I suppose that would make it sort of 1-sided.
What do you think about anthem of rakdos? It would basically be a huge zombie lord that can't be reanimated, and it would self-mill the horde deck which is something I'm thinking of trying.
EDIT: In case it isn't clear, the horde deck is almost always hellbent (only bounce can deactivate it). That means this gives the zombies +2/+0 when they attack, and the horde deals double damage. They self-mill 2 cards for each attacking creature.
+2 and double damage easily offsets the 1 damage to itself, so you should definitely try that! I don't like the noncreature-ness of it, I want my lords to be reanimatable. But you could definitely run it.
There is not that much graveyard hate in my meta, there are just a lot of people that can work out of their graveyard, and actively fill it up (a few Mimeoplasms, Karador, Sek'Kuar). And even if they don't, it is usually a nice way to get all the spent stuff back, without losing too much (sacrificing in response helps too) of the old stuff. The decks I mentioned play their own Living Deaths, so seeing one from the Horde is just not that big of a problem. Zombie Apocalypse is way better for my Horde, because it reanimates everything from it, without giving the Survivors much opportunity for shenanigans.
The enchantment itself also does double damage when the controller is hellbent, so they self-mill 2 cards per zombie. It's still a ton of damage though. The fact that it isn't a creature is actually good for what I am trying to change. I want there to be a really good reason to attack the horde deck without punishing the players too hard for it. Anthem of Rakdos seems like a perfect fit since having it land in play could mean a really rough time, but milling it means it's gone forever.
I can see living death being bad in a meta like yours. I have a mimeoplasm deck, but even if I get back 5 or 6 creatures, they usually all die due to noxious ghoul + many zombie tokens coming into play. I get some cool enter the battlefield effects, but usually it's not worth it since the zombies put into play are almost always capable of killing us.
I may take out living death for a non-reanimation card. I want to try to strike a balance between milling the deck and burning the bodies. That way, it is more of a decision to burn the bodies or attack the horde. Burning the bodies is typically more of a defensive option, but with scarier cards in the deck that don't work in the graveyard, not milling the deck could be suicide.
I updated the list and played it a bunch with my friend. I added a 'change log' section under the deck list in the OP, so you can check it out. The list is also updated.
The deck is a lot better now without as many mass reanimation effects (the ones that leave the zombies untapped). It makes it so attacking the horde is not as suicidal now (as opposed to burning the bodies). I'm still looking to find some of the enchantments I want to put into the deck like anthem of rakdos and bloodbond march, so my additions are sort of just fillers for now.
I played it with my friend 4 times.
First game, we finally beat it! (hadn't beaten it with the older version) We basically won because the the 2 creeping corrosions and the 1 back to nature came at the wrong time for the horde - missing all my equipment, and only hitting my friend's enchantments (on Uril), which he got back the next turn with retether. After accumulating 20 counters on my umezawa's jitte, and around 8 counters on my assemble the legion, we were basically invincible. We swung for about 160 damage when the horde deck was at about 90 cards left to end the game.
For the next 2 games, we got crushed due to an early havoc festival in one game, and just got overrun by an unanswered zombie apocalypse (leaving around 100 power for the horde). It was also combined with a smallpox, and creeping corrosion off of past in flames, so we had very little to fight back.
For the last game, my friends switched to his white weenie kor tribal casual deck. It actually worked well since he had quite a few 2/3s for blocking zombies, and using brave the elements, he got to block 9 zombies on 1 turn without losing anything. It was all going well, but then a zombie apocalypse getting noxious ghoul (and about 20 zombies) completely annihilated our boards. We tried hard, but could draw into a wrath effect. I got mana screwed that game pretty badly too.
Note: I was using my Tajic EDH deck for all the games which is linked in my sig if you want to see it.
EDIT:
I was at the store last night and dug through some bins. I found a no mercy and a destructive flow! I took out dread slaver since he's just filler for the no mercy, and I took out a ruination (the armageddon proxy) for destructive flow since it is the same sort of effect, but won't be recast by past in flames, and will typically be more powerful if it manages to stay in play.
I love this format so much and play it all the time with my friends. We have tried playing it so many different ways but it always seemed like no matter how hard I made the horde deck (mine is also 200 cards) that the players would just win. I even had the rule that in order to hit the deck, the players needed to kill the zombies on the board first and they would still win pretty easily every time. So I started over from scratch and decided to redesign the format. Here is the link to what I came up with. Let me know what you think!
(PS also adding cards that I didnt think of like bloodband march, descent into madness, ruination, havok festival)
I love this format so much and play it all the time with my friends. We have tried playing it so many different ways but it always seemed like no matter how hard I made the horde deck (mine is also 200 cards) that the players would just win. I even had the rule that in order to hit the deck, the players needed to kill the zombies on the board first and they would still win pretty easily every time. So I started over from scratch and decided to redesign the format. Here is the link to what I came up with. Let me know what you think!
(PS also adding cards that I didnt think of like bloodband march, descent into madness, ruination, havok festival)
I think I read somewhere that you said the military deck is also a horde deck. Did I read that correctly? Can you play against that deck as well?
Also, what is the military deck like? Is it all soldiers/knights?
I like the explore deck concept. It could be quite fun since it's a risky move, but it could pay off. It would be hilarious to be exploring when a huge horde turn happens and you get owned. Reminds me of left 4 dead when someone is searching in a room and then gets hit by a hunter lol
Let me know when you post your list. I want to see what cards you used. Is there only 1 mass reanimation spell for your deck? (the zombie apocalypse with 20 suspend counters).
If I do try a crazy variant of horde, I probably won't use all your changes, but there will probably be something in there that I will use - most likely some sort of explore deck. I think it could be really interesting building the explore deck.
Played some more games with the recent changes. The horde deck is a lot more stable now (a little more predictable) so attacking the horde isn't suicide. We did get an unlucky hit one game though.
My friend busted out his Uril on turn 3 using a sol ring and on turn 4 he swung for ~13 damage since he could. The horde deck milled past in flames along with decree of pain, ruination, creeping corrosion, zombie apocalypse, and a few zombies. The horde took their turn and flipped over a couple zombies and graveborn muse. Then casted past in flames and all of its friends. I had about 3 mana rocks that got wiped away and ruination left me with a single swamp for mana. My friend had 2 forest, a plains, and a mountain, but lost his sol ring. Anyways, a few spells later, the whole board was clear and the horde was set to draw around 15 cards. We quickly glanced at them and scooped. It was pretty hilarious
Anyways, the overall deck is greatly improved. There is a nice balance between burning the bodies and attacking the horde.
Some new problems that have seem to come up: Umezawa's Jitte - instant speed removal on pretty much everything. Kills regeneration as well, and the life gain is pretty busted. Assemble the Legion - Weak at first, but after about 4 turns, we are almost invincible.
Both from my Tajic deck. They both just constantly add so much to our board, and the horde deck has very few answers to them. Any ideas for more artifact/enchantment removal for the horde? I don't really want to run purify because of the name, but is there another similar card? I also don't want to blow up the horde's enchantments so 'other players enchantments' type of wording would be ideal.
Also, I think the horde needs more board wipes. I still want to get another plague wind so that will probably be enough. Maybe another noxious ghoul as well.
EDIT Gate to phyrexia might be a cool addition. I'll probably make it so it targets the artifact with the highest CMC and it ignores its own artifacts (none in the deck currently anyway).
Hey man I have not forgotten about this forum or about horde. We keep playing it ALL the time and here is an update on what we have done with the rules / how to play / cards. NOTE: I will post my full list of all decks (Survivors, Explore, Horde, and Military, and about the new Events feature) as soon as I get some time.
So we discovered something pretty simple... atleast in my personal playgroup is that if the zombies are flipping or "waving" as we call it then they just cant beat the 4 players decks. they lose due to bad flips or just getting obliterated by the power of the players. Now... in order to try and fix this we changed how the horde deck plays and added a few more things. These changes have led to AWESOME games that are WAY less lopsided 1 way or the other. With flipping either the zombies smash haha gg or the players dominate the entire match. We wanted something different. NOTE: We play with separate life totals... that matters A LOT. Anyways here is how we play now.
1) The zombie deck DRAWS 5 cards until the Zombie Apocalypse suspend counter reaches 10. Then the Zombie deck draws 10 cards instead.
2) The Zombie deck must play all creature spells, but can choose not to cast other spells in hand.
3) The zombies no longer have haste.
NOTE: We took MOST wraths out of the deck and we have gone with a more flavorful approach. It seemed to often that the players would lose to CARDS / SPELLS and not to actual damage from the zombies. So we tried to tone that down a bit and took out the wraths. Obviously the way my format and yours are played is VERY different, but I did play it standard normal horde mode before and just had no fun as players ALWAYS won pretty much. My most recent version of the deck is BRUTAL running real problem cards like Ward of Bones, Limited Resources, Descent into Madness, etc etc. Ill post my list soon.
Last 2 things: 1)Events are places that the players can find when they explore. If the player rolls a 4 or a 5 then a new place is discovered, It could be a dead end, or even a new safe house. the other places are based off of the survivors in the survivor deck. these are all custom fun cards similar to planechase btw.
2) In order to give the Zombie deck some more "teeth" without having to use wraths and powerful spells (past in flames being a great example) I created 5 custom ONLY FOR THIS FORMAT Zombie Planeswalkers and they have play tested GREAT, the players have really enjoyed them. They feel like bosses sort of and they can REALLY amp up crazy difficulty if they are not dealt with immediately. Here is the link to them below. Thats all I have for right now. Looking forward to your response!!
Hey man I have not forgotten about this forum or about horde. We keep playing it ALL the time and here is an update on what we have done with the rules / how to play / cards. NOTE: I will post my full list of all decks (Survivors, Explore, Horde, and Military, and about the new Events feature) as soon as I get some time.
So we discovered something pretty simple... atleast in my personal playgroup is that if the zombies are flipping or "waving" as we call it then they just cant beat the 4 players decks. they lose due to bad flips or just getting obliterated by the power of the players. Now... in order to try and fix this we changed how the horde deck plays and added a few more things. These changes have led to AWESOME games that are WAY less lopsided 1 way or the other. With flipping either the zombies smash haha gg or the players dominate the entire match. We wanted something different. NOTE: We play with separate life totals... that matters A LOT. Anyways here is how we play now.
1) The zombie deck DRAWS 5 cards until the Zombie Apocalypse suspend counter reaches 10. Then the Zombie deck draws 10 cards instead.
2) The Zombie deck must play all creature spells, but can choose not to cast other spells in hand.
3) The zombies no longer have haste.
NOTE: We took MOST wraths out of the deck and we have gone with a more flavorful approach. It seemed to often that the players would lose to CARDS / SPELLS and not to actual damage from the zombies. So we tried to tone that down a bit and took out the wraths. Obviously the way my format and yours are played is VERY different, but I did play it standard normal horde mode before and just had no fun as players ALWAYS won pretty much. My most recent version of the deck is BRUTAL running real problem cards like Ward of Bones, Limited Resources, Descent into Madness, etc etc. Ill post my list soon.
Last 2 things: 1)Events are places that the players can find when they explore. If the player rolls a 4 or a 5 then a new place is discovered, It could be a dead end, or even a new safe house. the other places are based off of the survivors in the survivor deck. these are all custom fun cards similar to planechase btw.
2) In order to give the Zombie deck some more "teeth" without having to use wraths and powerful spells (past in flames being a great example) I created 5 custom ONLY FOR THIS FORMAT Zombie Planeswalkers and they have play tested GREAT, the players have really enjoyed them. They feel like bosses sort of and they can REALLY amp up crazy difficulty if they are not dealt with immediately. Here is the link to them below. Thats all I have for right now. Looking forward to your response!!
Those planeswalkers are freaking epic. I wish those existed in the real game
I really like the way that one guy works with the 'zombie enters the battlefield, get a loyalty counter'. More stuff like that should be on the real planeswalkers.
If I recall correctly, you play where a player uses the horde deck right? That would make sense for some of your rules. Planeswalkers in my horde would probably have to default to 1 ability and maybe have an ultimate ability that is used as soon as it has enough loyalty counters.
I don't remember where I saw it, but there was someone that suggested having it so when you 'wave', instead you:
1) Reveal X cards from the top of the deck, where X is the number of players.
2) If the last card revealed is a zombie token, continue the 'wave' like normal, otherwise, just stop.
Essentially, it does a 'wave' like normal but always has at least X cards each turn (to essentially skip bad turns), and isn't ridiculous against a low number of players.
Espuma in his horde also implemented a strategy for increasing the pressure later in the game like so:
Before the game starts, shuffle in 1 swamp for each player above 1. When a swamp is revealed through mill or 'waving', it is placed onto the battlefield (and ignored similarly to a zombie token so it continues waving). The horde essentially 'waves' 1 extra time for each swamp it has. The swamps are completely untouchable by players. I suppose you could look at them as emblems.
I look forward to your lists
I like the idea of creating cards, but I don't really want to create my own. Changing some rules and using some cards in different ways are all game for me though.
What do you think of the above difficulty scaling rules?
This thread has inspired me to create my own Zombie Horde deck - I'm the guy in our playgroup that brings random variants to light. I took the liberty of throwing in a few fluff creature (e.g. Maggot Carrier, Severed Legion, etc.) because I thought that too many Army of the Damneds, Death Barons, Plague Winds, etc. would be too much to handle. Turns out that 4 EDH decks are far more powerful of a force than I thought. Given a few turns, 2/2s tend not to matter in small numbers as the survivors generally have bigger creatures on their board. Lifegain turned out to be an issue as well -- the survivors were dong too well once something with lifelink and a defense of 3+ hit the field. I'll be adding more creatures that pump up the zombies.
On another note altogether, one card I really like is Bottomless Pit. I like them over Gibbering Descent and added 4 of them into my build for some beautiful hand disruption.
This thread has inspired me to create my own Zombie Horde deck - I'm the guy in our playgroup that brings random variants to light. I took the liberty of throwing in a few fluff creature (e.g. Maggot Carrier, Severed Legion, etc.) because I thought that too many Army of the Damneds, Death Barons, Plague Winds, etc. would be too much to handle. Turns out that 4 EDH decks are far more powerful of a force than I thought. Given a few turns, 2/2s tend not to matter in small numbers as the survivors generally have bigger creatures on their board. Lifegain turned out to be an issue as well -- the survivors were dong too well once something with lifelink and a defense of 3+ hit the field. I'll be adding more creatures that pump up the zombies.
On another note altogether, one card I really like is Bottomless Pit. I like them over Gibbering Descent and added 4 of them into my build for some beautiful hand disruption.
Ya! Another horde player
I know what you mean. I used to have more vanilla zombies, but slowly upgraded them into scarier cards because they were just too easy. I've also had issues with life gain I think card selection can help against it though. I use a few enchantments that read "players can't gain life" to prevent lifelink from being too strong. Running more removal for the zombies helps as well since it can clear out the lifelink creatures.
Bottomless pit is an awesome card! I don't have any copies unfortunately. I found gibbering descent in a rare bin for 50 cents so I grabbed it It's not amazing, but it's still annoying for the players.
I know what you mean. I used to have more vanilla zombies, but slowly upgraded them into scarier cards because they were just too easy. I've also had issues with life gain I think card selection can help against it though. I use a few enchantments that read "players can't gain life" to prevent lifelink from being too strong. Running more removal for the zombies helps as well since it can clear out the lifelink creatures.
A couple Everlasting Torments cleared that up quite nicely. I have a Turbofog EDH deck I enjoy playing so those shut it down for a turn. One thing I learned: cards like Prosperity are terrifying. I had everyone draw 20 cards which was great, except I forgot to save enough mana for answers to the Horde's next turn which now had +20 cards....we took 285 damage that turn...
Then again, I think that's one of my favorite parts of this variant -- if any of the survivors makes a single mistake, everyone could be done for in the blink of an eye. It's very apocalyptic and fits the theme/situation very well.
A couple Everlasting Torments cleared that up quite nicely. I have a Turbofog EDH deck I enjoy playing so those shut it down for a turn. One thing I learned: cards like Prosperity are terrifying. I had everyone draw 20 cards which was great, except I forgot to save enough mana for answers to the Horde's next turn which now had +20 cards....we took 285 damage that turn...
Then again, I think that's one of my favorite parts of this variant -- if any of the survivors makes a single mistake, everyone could be done for in the blink of an eye. It's very apocalyptic and fits the theme/situation very well.
Haha very true. I'm glad everlasting torment worked out for you all the zombies having wither is quite awesome too. It makes blocking really interesting. My friend's Uril had 9 -1/-1 counters on him once from blocking zombies because we couldn't afford taking the damage.
That's a reason I want to put self-mill in my horde deck so that some of the crazy graveyard stuff will trigger itself. Making each horde move really scary makes the game really interesting.
How many cards do you have in your horde deck? I'd also love seeing it if you don't mind posting it
Lol found a possible bannable card. I don't really want to ban cards, but this one is busted - collective voyage
I was playing with a 4-player team, and since it was kind of easy for us, we were trying out just 2 turns of set up. Then my friend plays this thing, and for our turn 3, each player had +7 lands. So ridiculous lol. We roflstomped the horde that game.
I've made some modifications to the horde deck and I will update the list when I get the chance.
I added 2 descent into madness and it's quite interesting. Thing is, if you board wipe the zombies, and they have no other thing to exile, they just lose the enchantment on the first trigger. I thought it would be horrendously difficult to fight off, but it really isn't. I think they add some fun dynamics though, so I'll leave them in for now. I think if it triggers even just twice, it will have done enough damage. It will always at least create a nice scramble for the players.
I found a copy of no mercy One game, we just sat there hoping to draw an answer. It was painful >.< The horde eventually got past in flames along with some brutal spells and we died.
I'm still looking for an anthem of rakdos. I really want one. I think it will be really scary. I threw in my deadbridge chant since I was not using it, and I think it will be interesting - basically milling the horde for 10, and then getting a random card each turn. It's not particularly amazing for the horde as opposed to regular decks, but the effect is still decent enough to include.
Mikaeus kicked our butts a couple times D: He's a monster.
You've got some pretty cool ideas here. I'm not ashamed to say that I'll be stealing a few of them. Gonna bump my list up to 120 cards to make room.
Glad you like it Let me know how your modifications go
I haven't played horde that much, but I've given it a lot of attention. Horde really is for the deck builder players. The players that care about building their decks more than playing them, or somewhere on a fairly even level for doing either. You get to create the token-nontoken ratio, you get to choose the cards for the deck, the size of the deck, even some of the rules are yours to modify.
I've been looking for some artifacts to include, but have not found any that I really like. Here are some that I found: Cauldron of Souls - I just don't like that you have to choose when to activate it. I figured on either the horde's upkeep or the players' upkeep, but either one has a serious drawback. Grimoire of the Dead - I'd love this, but I don't know how to work in the discard nicely. It's also kind of weak, but I still think it would be a cool inclusion. Maybe I'll just have the 'discard' part of it either be mill 1, or make the cost of the ability nothing, so it is just a ticking bomb. Coat of Arms - Sort of hard to find a copy, and I feel like it might just be "do you have instant speed removal? No? You are dead then", which is not entirely what I'm looking for. Nim Deathmantle - Very possible, I may just throw it in. The only thing I dislike is that if multiple zombies die at once, what should it be attached to? Probably just a random creature (ie they stack the triggers in a random order). It will probably only equip upon death. This card might be too annoything though lol.
Any other artifacts that could work that I missed?
OMG Possessed Portal would be so mean lol. Probably way too mean. I doubt it would be fun. Maybe I could rule it so it stops the horde from playing stuff too, so it is just a slug fest until the horde has to sacrifice it.
Yeah, I flipped Coa of Arms like second turn once and it was pretty much GG. I still like having a couple of non-creature cards that just have to be dealt with.
my zombies one is 150 cards, sadly not much interest in playing it so I never get to test it out
I put a slivers one together and have been afraid to test it out lol. Might just make it a commander deck.
I always love seeing more horde lists
Do you mean no one wants to play horde when you ask them? That sucks :/ I find the best time is right when evryone is either salty from losing or just don't feel like playing another game (magic'd, out we call it). EDIT
There's also that time where no one has similar format decks (ie 1 standard, 2 EDH decks, 1 random casual deck). You can mish-mash them all together and fight against the horde. It's one of the things I love most about playing horde. You can play ANY deck you want (unless it is entirely designed to screw over the horde - if you want to do that, then I will make the horde deck impossible to beat - 20 obliterate and 180 zombies).
Why are you afraid to test out the sliver horde? Is is super strong? You could always play against it solo I usually give myself 4 turns for 1 vs horde. otherwise I just die horribly almost every game.
Player my horde deck over the weekend with 3 of my good friends. We had 2 once-standard decks (alara-zendikar) and 2 EDH decks.
The horde had quite a rough time. We got planeswalkers out (because the mono-green standard deck had 8 planeswalkers in it) and grouped up to defend them constantly, and then just crapped on the zombies. The planeswalkers were nissa revane and garruk wildspearker, and both could dump out creatures that could beat zombies.
The problem was simply that 2-4 zombies a turn was FAR from enough creatures to get around our blockers, and we got more and more each turn. Once nissa's -7 went off, we just alpha swung for 100+ damage.
After 3 roflstompy games against the horde, we decided to up the difficulty. We were playing with only 2 turns of setup, but we switched it back to 3 for this. We had the horde basically reveal twice (reveal until 2 non-zombies) each turn starting from their first turn.
The games were definitely much more interesting, but were ultimately too hard. We played twice and then went to play some fighting games.
I want to ask for help on deciding on/creating rules to make horde more difficult for extra players. Here's some example ideas that I have/have gotten from other people:
Espuma's Rules - You add a swamp to the deck for each player above the first (shuffling them in). You treat them sort of like tokens, but when they get milled, you still put them into play. They just sit there and are untargettable/destroyable. They basically aren't even lands/permanents - more like emblems. Each one means that when they reveal cards, they do it an extra time. Basically, at some random point in the game, the horde will start getting extra reveals and become much harder. (Note: If you'd like to see Espuma's horde, he has posted on the front page of this thread a whole bunch and even on this page. He's replied a lot to my thread and I've viewed his thread quite a bit.)
Turn Counter - Some sort of turn counter would be interesting. Basically, at some threshold, it would increase the zombie reveals by one. For example, every 10 turns, the horde starts taking an additional turn. It counts EACH player turn, so with 4 players, it would go up 4 at a time (5 if you want to include zombies). This could be nice since it would be more consistent than the swamps, and it would mean we wouldn't have to add/remove/shuffle the swamps. The main thing would be keeping track of this number (not hard, but potentially annoying, and easy to forget).
Zombie Apocalypse - Some sort of turn threshold like the second idea, but basically, it would always be the single reveal (as normal), and then once the threshold is met, the zombies start revealing X times where X is the number of players. With my deck, it is typically split into 2 piles, so I could maybe make it once the first pile is gone, then the zombies start taking extra turns, but that's probably too slow, and doesn't scale amazingly with the number of players. Perhaps just a similar turn counter but with a higher threshold like 20-30.
What are your thoughts? Which one would be best? Any additional ideas would be great!
Also, for funsies, I was playing horde with my friend (just the 2 of us) and we decided to throw in our planechase cards. It was amazingly silly lol.
A new problem arised. Since the players could not reliably mill away all the scary spells, it was pretty much only luck that could pull us through to the end. To combat this problem, I implemented a new rule!
Burn the bodies!
Basically, when the players attack the horde with creatures, normally, you just mill the horde deck for the amount of damage you dealt. With my rule, it works like this:
- at the beginning of each combat phase for the players, they choose 'attack the horde' or 'burn the bodies'.
- if they choose 'attack the horde', it works like normal. You attack them, and they mill.
- if they choose 'burn the bodies', then you exile 1 card at random from the horde's graveyard for each 1 damage they would take if you attacked normally.
- you cannot burn the bodies with non-combat damage
- you cannot burn the bodies with some creatures, and attack the horde with others. All creatures go for 1, and can't switch mid-combat (like with doublestrike or something)
- if you get another combat phase, you can choose again for that combat phase.
This rule has allowed me to include some really scary cards that would normally cause the players to lose really badly like past in flames.
Overwhelming Numbers
After much playing and experimenting, I have found that it is too hard to make the horde scale against multiple players without making it too hard for less players. The solution I have come to is a rule to increase the horde's strength over time.
The rule I currently have in place works as follows:
- At the end of each horde turn, a counter is increased by 1 for each player in the game.
- When this counter hits 10 or more, reduce it by 10, and give the horde an emblem.
- The horde starts with 1 emblem.
- The horde reveals cards until X non-token cards are revealed, where X is the number of these emblems they have.
With this rule, the players are "forced" to attack the horde, and the horde will be able to naturally overcome powerful player board states when it gets stronger.
Some ways we handle things for the horde:
Minor Specifics:
- the players always have 60 life to start, and get 3 turns to set up with no draw on the first turn.
- the horde deck always uses all 200 cards.
- if the horde loses life, it treats it as damage and mills that many cards.
- if the horde gains life, nothing happens.
Choosing Creatures:
When the horde needs to choose creatures/permanents for sacrifice, or attacking planeswalkers, they choose the creatures in this order:
1) spawned creature tokens
2) 2/2 zombie tokens from the deck
3) 5/5 zombie giant tokens from the deck
4) non-token creatures chosen at random
5) enchantments/artifacts chosen at random
6) cards in hand chosen at random (if I add descent into madness or something)
Planeswalkers:
At the start of each combat phase for the horde, choose an order of the planeswalkers in play at random. For each planeswalker, going in order, the horde deck chooses a zombie (according to the above rules) for each loyalty counter on that planeswalker, and those zombies attack that planeswalker for that turn. If there are not enough zombies to attack all the planeswalkers like this, then the lucky planeswalkers at the end of the random order are not attacked.
Activated abilities:
There are only a couple activated abilities that the horde will use:
Regeneration - If a zombie would be destroyed at any point, it regenerates in response.
Unearth - If there is a creature with unearth in the graveyard, the ability is activated at the same time the horde plays flashback spells and spells from its hand. The order of all this is randomly chosen.
Decisions:
If the horde has to make a choice, and there is no determined way to handle that choice, it is chosen at random. (cards like browbeat for instance).
Here's the deck:
I went with a 130:70 split. I might try to increase the token to non-token ratio so that the graveyard fills up with more 2/2 zombies more quickly. This will make burning the bodies take a little more work, and make the deck overall more difficult to beat.
Apparently I miscounted the zombie tokens when I put them in so it's 129:71 split. I'm just going to leave it as is for now. This is the exact list I am currently using.
1 Boneknitter
1 Death Baron
1 Ghoultree
1 Grave Titan
2 Graveborn Muse
1 Infectious Horror
1 Lightning Reaver
1 Mikaeus, the Unhallowed
3 Noxious Ghoul
6 Rotting Rats
1 Sedris, the Traitor King
1 Sutured Ghoul
2 Toxic Nim
1 Unbreathing Horde
3 Undead Warchief
3 Vengeful Dead
2 Vulturous Zombie
1 Back to Nature
1 Army of the Damned
2 Creeping Corrosion
1 Decree of Pain
2 Past in Flames
1 Plaguewind
1 Ruination
2 Smallpox
2 Syphon Flesh
4 Syphon Mind
3 Temporal Extortion
1 Tribute to the Wild
4 Zombie Apocalypse
Enchantments - 15
1 Bad Moon
1 Call to the Grave
1 Destructive Flow
4 Endless Ranks of the Dead
1 Everlasting Torment
1 Forsaken Wastes
1 Gibbering Descent
1 Grave Betrayal
1 Gravepact
1 Havoc Festival
1 No Mercy
1 Painful Quandary
10 Zombie Giant Token (5/5)
119 Zombie Token (2/2)
Change Log:
12/07/2013
-1 Grim Flowering
-1 Living Death
-1 Creeping Renaissance
-1 Zombie Token (2/2)
+1 Bad Moon
+1 Havoc Festival
+1 Dread Slaver
+1 Zombie Giant Token (5/5)
The cards I removed were to reduce the suicidal nature of milling the horde deck. The horde will still fight back like before, but not to the point where it auto-kills you with a huge, haste army. Bad moon is basically just a filler card for anthem of rakdos, and dread slaver is just filler in general. He will probably come out for something like bloodbond march when I get one.
I switched a 2/2 token for a 5/5 token because I wanted an even 10 of them, and also because I am still using face-down lands as proxies for about 15 2/2 zombie tokens. I left in the slightly awkward 129:71 ratio because I don't want to make the deck too much harder. It's already quite brutal, and I haven't even added the 2 deadly enchantments I'm planning on adding yet.
13/07/2013
-1 Dread Slaver
-1 Ruination
+1 No Mercy
+1 Destructive Flow
Dread slaver was just filler, and ruination is a sorcery and I am trying to move to more enchantments. No mercy is something I wanted to test already, and destructive flow is a slightly less but also slightly more brutal ruination. Since it can't get recast by past in flames, it will give the players more room to attack the horde, but if it stays in play, it can prevent proper recovery.
Some card explanations:
Rotting Rats - basically guarentees the players will be losing cards. It helps hose counterspell users as well because it's almost impossible to stop them from using unearth. They also heavily discourage board wipes because it means you will have to discard.
Noxious Ghoul - I actually want 1 or 2 more of this guy in the list, but I don't have any more copies. He keeps army sizes down, and kills stuff that is normally really tough to kill.
Vengeful Dead - They make board wipes very tough to use. If the horde deck mass reanimates, you can't just day of judgement them away. It's perfect.
Undead Warchief - I actually find the mass pump zombie lords to be a little boring. They just kind of end up making you die really fast, or do nothing because of removal. However, I think the effect is at least somewhat necessary for the horde deck. It means you can't just leave like 3 zombies in play and feel safe. The next turn could be this guy and it adds a ton of damage.
Syphon Mind - Scales very well with the number of players. It makes each player lose a card, and then dumps a bunch of new potentially scary things onto the board.
Temporal Extortion - very awesome. It forces the players to make a tough choice which is fun for them. Lose HALF our life? Or risk the horde top-deck (+ the extra attack phase)?
Zombie Apocalypse - couldn't have had a more flavourful mass reanimate card. It's perfect too because it doesn't just instantly kill you. You get a turn to try to deal with it.
Endless Ranks of the Dead - Not particularly strong, but it's just epic.
Some silver bullet cards were necessary to combat my meta.
Forsaken wastes, and everlasting torment are both in the deck to combat lifelink. My Vish Kal deck gets really out of hand if he gets in play with enough tokens to eat. He gains us tons of life, swings in for massive damage, and can snipe important zombies while ignoring their regeneration at the same time. My friend has an Uril deck, and one time was gaining use 120 life per turn.
Creeping corrosion and back to nature are to punish strong board positions later in the game. When I increased the deck size (from 100 to 200), I realised that after the first 100 cards, there is not much of a difference for the next 100. You just finish them off, or the horde gets a lucky living death and the players get 1-shot. These cards push the players further back from their ideal board positions and burn the bodies prevents the 1-shot power of living death.
There are some other cards in there to hit board positions as well:
Ruination - Blow up many lands. Certain utility lands cause a lot of problems for the horde and it punishes all the greedy mana bases.
Tribute to the wild - a bit on the lighter side, but it usually gets a mana rock and sometimes kills a jitte. This may need to be changed for something more powerful, but for now, it's in.
Smallpox - Really hurts the players. The zombie deck just sacrifice a 2/2 token, and mills 1. The players lose many cards and a small chunk of life.
Everything else in the list is just for flavour and fun.
Past in Flames - reanimate the spells! It often hits a zombie apocalypse or similar, and gets things like creeping corrosion, back to nature, and smallpox to go again. It's also quite scary with temporal extortion.
Creeping Renaissance - Mass reanimator spell that has flashback. It always defaults to creatures. It's quite scary when it shows up. Makes you think twice about attacking the deck
Boneknitter - All the zombies including himself have regenerate. If you don't have a way to kill boneknitter and prevent regeneration, you won't be killing any zombies.
Toxic Nim - quite a simple card, but the choice of taking lots of poison or losing creatures to the regenerating monster is quite awesome. You can't really win against it until you can kill it.
Sedris, the Traitor King - Really badass zombie. He is also basically a mass reanimate spell that just keeps going. If you can't kill him, he will keep reanimating every new creature that gets tossed into the graveyard.
Vulturous Zombie - flying zombie. He also gets bigger over time. He's quite fun.
Grim Flowering - If you don't burn the bodies, and this thing shows up, it's one hell of a fight for you (or a lot of the times just hell for you).
Sutured Ghoul - He can fairly easily 1-shot you and your team. He doesn't even need much food to be scary. If he eats just 5 2/2 zombies, he is a 10/10 trample.
Painful Quandary - only recently added for experimentation. I like cards that pose players with a choice. It makes it more interesting.
Decree of Pain - Kills all the creatures and then dumps a new hand onto the board. It's an awesome board wipe because even if it kills a whole lot of zombies, it will replace each one with a new zombie or even more devastating spell.
Graveborn Muse - If you let the zombies untap, they will crush you with a ton of extra cards. I made it so the horde draws, and then mills. This way, they will always get the cards (as opposed to milling the last 20 cards of the deck and then drawing 0). The self damage actually makes the horde even more dangerous because they will most likely play something out of the graveyard.
Cards I am looking to add/experiment with, but don't have a copy or haven't tried out yet:
Descent into madness - It could really tear up the players' side of the battlefield. The mass zombies would be able to take the losses easily.
Lurking Predators - I like cards that give the players a choice. It makes the deck feel more interactive even though it doesn't actually choose anything.
Rise of the Dark Realms - Not even out yet, but it would definitely be fun. It's coming out in M14, and it's basically the original liliana's ultimate ability. Reanimate everything!
Destructive Flow - Slowly melt away the players' mana bases. This kind of effect is necessary since my deck aims to make the game longer. (OBTAINED)
Pox - Melt everyone's everything! ~suggested by Espuma
No Mercy - Can't attack the horde until you get rid of it. (OBTAINED)
Reito Lantern - Quite a bit off flavour, but it would basically make the horde immortal. All spells and creatures that die/get used would go back to the bottom of the deck. The only danger of something like this is that, without the graveyard, the horde deck is not nearly as dangerous. It might be too easy to just build up a solid board position while the horde whiffs zombie apocalypses. Still an interesting card though.
Geralf's Mindcrusher - self mill actually accelerates my horde a lot. There are so many cards that work from the graveyard that this could heavily benefit the horde, and undying is awesome.
Bloodbond March - An extremely powerful enchantment that can scare the players into attacking the deck - either to get rid of it through mill, or by burning away the zombie tokens. This will be a difinite inclusion as soon as I can get one.
Anthem of Rakdos - This card is awesome. I'm sure I'll be adding it as soon as I get a copy. It fits perfectly for fixing the problem where there are not enough non-graveyard oriented threats. It basically turns the zombies into 8/2's and makes the horde self-mill for 2 for each attacking creature. This will be something you don't want to see, so milling the horde deck will be required to stop it. It's also a much better option than blood moon in terms of being a 'lord' that is not a creature
Adjusting Difficulty
I only really get to play with 1 other person most of the time. Having just 2 of us makes it really hard to measure the power of the horde deck. If it becomes too easy though (when we add more players), we typically reduce the turn count that we get at the start. Similarly, if it's too hard, we can add a turn.
It's also possible to add 'half' turns by allowing a draw on the first turn. So maybe it's a little too hard, so a good way to fix it is to allow a draw on the first player turn.
Adjusting the starting life total is another option, but I find reducing the life total is not a very good idea. It often leads to the players randomly getting 1-shot when a scary zombie turn comes up.
Manly Mode:
The zombies take the first turn. Good for some laughs sometimes. Haven't beat it yet.
Current Problems: (New section)
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Problem - Not enough incentive to mill the horde deck.
Since the horde deck has so many powerful 'graveyard matters' cards, it is virtually suicide to mill it with your attacks. What's been happening is that the players will only burn the bodies, and never mill the horde deck. It's not entirely bad, and it's still not easy, but it leads to rather long, and somewhat stale games.
Solution - Still working on it, but reducing disincentive to attacking, and increasing incentive to attacking will most likely do the trick.
There are a couple of cards that are unmanageable if they are cast when the horde deck has a decent amount of zombies in the graveyard. Grim flowering, creeping renaissance, and living death are the main ones. I don't mind mass reanimation, but with big hastey armies, it is usually instant death, which is no fun. Furthermore, you can always just attack the graveyard using my custom rule. This causes the players to never want to attack the horde deck. By removing some of these instant kill cards, and putting in more really dangerous cards (that are more powerful without a reliance on the graveyard, and can't be recurred by zombie apocalypse or past in flames), I can 'force' the players to attack the deck to remove these threats. Bloodbond march seems like a good fit for this. It gives the players an entire turn to try to figure something out (no instant death), but it can't be recurred by the horde deck. The only problem is that it scales with the horde's graveyard, but it isn't doubly bad like creeping renaissance which means if you mill the deck, you give it more ammo, and also make it come out sooner.
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Problem - Getting cheesed out by a big zombie token chain.
It happens every once in a while, and it was even a problem when the deck was only 100 cards. Basically, it's that random turn where you get 3 zombie giants, 7 zombie tokens, and then an undead warchief - usually resulting in a rather quick death.
Solution - Not entirely sure what to do, but maybe less zombie giants.
Reducing the number of zombie giants would make this a lot less painful. It's already hard enough when 10 2/2 zombies show up, so changing a few zombie giants for more 2/2 zombies would not be that bad. I don't want to reduce the difficulty too much though. I like what the zombie giants add to the horde - a threat without using their non-token card.
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Problem - Very powerful 'problem' permanents that typically get hit by removal right away in a normal game.
Some cards like Umezawa's Jitte and Assemble the Legion pretty much kick the horde's butt single-handedly. There are some answers to them in the horde deck, but not many.
Solution - Possibly me more artifact/enchantment removal.
More removal would lower the power of these problem permanents. The next step is to find some more nice cards to fit into the deck to kill these problem permanents. I have a gate to phyrexia lying around and may give it a shot. It will be annoying to choose targets randomly, but it should be okay. I may go with having it target the artifact with the highest CMC, ignoring its own artifacts.
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What do you think of the deck?
What about the additional rule?
Do you think my list is too easy?
I feel like it is when I look at some other lists, but I think that my deck is pretty damn hard to beat with just 2 people.
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
If you can't burn the bodies, I was finding many mid to late game scenarios where past in flames or zombie apocalypse would just kill you. Your only hope is to have a counterspell, which not many people who play horde in my group run. Of course graveyard hate can work, but I don't think it should be mandatory. The decks people use against the horde can vary quite a bit, and I don't want to force everyone to change their deck to play against the horde.
Burning the bodies is to allow the players to play more safe (by managing the threat of the horde's graveyard) instead of trying to race it down with the hopes of removing all the main threat spells. At least that's the intention anyway. It seems to work okay right now, but I want to test it out more.
I know unearth exiles. I just meant that Sedris would bring back any creatures you kill after the first big reanimation.
I do like the idea of pox, I just have to get a copy.
EDIT: I added it to the list at the bottom of the OP. I am even more excited for this card now because it's perfect for what I want to do - cut down late game board presence. This card is awesome because it scales with what the players have. If they have lots of life, they lose a lot, if they have lots lands, creatures, or cards in hand, they get punished more for it. It's a really good way to always deal the 'right' amount of damage.
I haven't tested the current list with very many people yet, so I probably won't change it too much until I do. I feel like it may be too easy as you add more players though. I may try your swamp scaling idea in your list.
To those who don't know what it is, you shuffle a swamp into the deck for each extra player, and after they are revealed by mill or a zombie turn, the horde deck keeps them, and does an extra reveal for each swamp (basically extra turn minus the attack step).
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
Since their is such an emphasis on the horde's graveyard, I find that it is actually suicide to attack the horde. Often, the players are forced to just clear the graveyard as often as possible so that they don't get completely wiped by a giant reanimation spell. This leads to a very long, boring victory most of the time. The players just sit there clearing the graveyard for about 50 turns.
Some ideas I have that can help fix this are:
- reduce the number of 'instant kill' cards that work with the graveyard. Cards like grim flowering, creeping renaissance, living death, and decree of pain are some of these cards (past in flames allowing the sorceries to be cast from the graveyard). I don't want to take out too many of these cards, but a couple of the big hitters will likely go.
- increase the number of threats that don't work with the graveyard. These basically have to be artifacts or enchantments that are always painful, and are possibly 1-shot so they can be good right away, and not just be useless due to removal. This will force the players to actively mill the horde deck to bypass these threats.
A simple thing I could also do is just add even more devastating enchantments like descent into madness (probably at least 2-of), and maybe even bad moon (which I don't like, but could help with what I am aiming to change).
I need enchantments that immediately help the zombies and don't wait a turn for the players to just kill them. Artifacts are welcome as well. I think another everlasting torment and forsaken wastes would be good additions. Destructive flow would also definitely be nice.
Any ideas for helping me here would be great.
EDIT
Looking at spoilers for M2014, I noticed Dark Prophecy! This could be an awesome inclusion to help me out. Basically, it makes the zombies unblockable for the turn, or makes it really painful/suicide to block. Board wipes also become a non-option.
I also think more call to the graves would make a big difference. It really puts the hurt on the players' board positions, and triggers on their upkeep which means it can only do 0 damage if the players kill it before their turn. Token decks and similar already suffer from noxious ghoul, so it should be difficult enough for even token decks.
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
basic zombie tokens were tier 1
the 5/5 zombie giant token, and any non token zombie (gravecrawler, geralf's messenger, fleshbag marauder) and some non-creature permanents (celler door, call to the grave)with minimal impact was tier 2
any zombie lord, large effect zombie (grave titan, lich lord of unx); impactful non-creature permanent (plague wind, army of the damned) was tier 3
tier 4 was reserved for high impact cards:
*no living death as that removes zombies in play and patriarchs bidding helps the humans less, although slightly less flavorful*
I built it keeping the following principle in mind, for each human player I want there to be 14 tokens, 10 tier 2 cards, 5 tier 3 cards and 1 tier 4 card.
That helped me keep the power level balanced.
My Blog - contains my decklists
Uril, The Miststalker
Frankie Peanuts - needs to move to multiplayer.
How does lich lord of unx work for you? I didn't know what to make him do because he could just infinite life-loss + mill the players so I just didn't bother including him in the deck.
Right now, the main problem with the deck is that there is too much reason to not mill the horde deck, so with my custom rule 'burn the bodies', the best strategy seems to be to just sit back, and just do enough damage to exile their graveyard every turn.
The power level of the deck seems okay for now, but I tend to dislike the cards like living death that usually just mean instant loss for the players. It does have the potential to help them out a bit, but usually, noxious ghoul (or 2.. or 3..) hit the field with 20 zombie tokens and kill everything we get back anyway. The swing is almost always lethal. I prefer zombie apocalypse because it at least gives us a turn to try to do something.
Have you found patriarch's bidding to be like this?
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
Ya, I don't mind if it happens every once in a while, because you can still stop it if you have the right cards when it happens, I just don't want it to happen too often.
That is funny that it's the other way around in your meta for living death. Does your playgroup run a lot of graveyard hate? I suppose that would make it sort of 1-sided.
What do you think about anthem of rakdos? It would basically be a huge zombie lord that can't be reanimated, and it would self-mill the horde deck which is something I'm thinking of trying.
EDIT: In case it isn't clear, the horde deck is almost always hellbent (only bounce can deactivate it). That means this gives the zombies +2/+0 when they attack, and the horde deals double damage. They self-mill 2 cards for each attacking creature.
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
The enchantment itself also does double damage when the controller is hellbent, so they self-mill 2 cards per zombie. It's still a ton of damage though. The fact that it isn't a creature is actually good for what I am trying to change. I want there to be a really good reason to attack the horde deck without punishing the players too hard for it. Anthem of Rakdos seems like a perfect fit since having it land in play could mean a really rough time, but milling it means it's gone forever.
I can see living death being bad in a meta like yours. I have a mimeoplasm deck, but even if I get back 5 or 6 creatures, they usually all die due to noxious ghoul + many zombie tokens coming into play. I get some cool enter the battlefield effects, but usually it's not worth it since the zombies put into play are almost always capable of killing us.
I may take out living death for a non-reanimation card. I want to try to strike a balance between milling the deck and burning the bodies. That way, it is more of a decision to burn the bodies or attack the horde. Burning the bodies is typically more of a defensive option, but with scarier cards in the deck that don't work in the graveyard, not milling the deck could be suicide.
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
The deck is a lot better now without as many mass reanimation effects (the ones that leave the zombies untapped). It makes it so attacking the horde is not as suicidal now (as opposed to burning the bodies). I'm still looking to find some of the enchantments I want to put into the deck like anthem of rakdos and bloodbond march, so my additions are sort of just fillers for now.
I played it with my friend 4 times.
First game, we finally beat it! (hadn't beaten it with the older version) We basically won because the the 2 creeping corrosions and the 1 back to nature came at the wrong time for the horde - missing all my equipment, and only hitting my friend's enchantments (on Uril), which he got back the next turn with retether. After accumulating 20 counters on my umezawa's jitte, and around 8 counters on my assemble the legion, we were basically invincible. We swung for about 160 damage when the horde deck was at about 90 cards left to end the game.
For the next 2 games, we got crushed due to an early havoc festival in one game, and just got overrun by an unanswered zombie apocalypse (leaving around 100 power for the horde). It was also combined with a smallpox, and creeping corrosion off of past in flames, so we had very little to fight back.
For the last game, my friends switched to his white weenie kor tribal casual deck. It actually worked well since he had quite a few 2/3s for blocking zombies, and using brave the elements, he got to block 9 zombies on 1 turn without losing anything. It was all going well, but then a zombie apocalypse getting noxious ghoul (and about 20 zombies) completely annihilated our boards. We tried hard, but could draw into a wrath effect. I got mana screwed that game pretty badly too.
Note: I was using my Tajic EDH deck for all the games which is linked in my sig if you want to see it.
EDIT:
I was at the store last night and dug through some bins. I found a no mercy and a destructive flow! I took out dread slaver since he's just filler for the no mercy, and I took out a ruination (the armageddon proxy) for destructive flow since it is the same sort of effect, but won't be recast by past in flames, and will typically be more powerful if it manages to stay in play.
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
(PS also adding cards that I didnt think of like bloodband march, descent into madness, ruination, havok festival)
http://www.mtgdeckbuilder.net/Blogs/ViewBlog/2012
Those are some pretty crazy changes!
I think I read somewhere that you said the military deck is also a horde deck. Did I read that correctly? Can you play against that deck as well?
Also, what is the military deck like? Is it all soldiers/knights?
I like the explore deck concept. It could be quite fun since it's a risky move, but it could pay off. It would be hilarious to be exploring when a huge horde turn happens and you get owned. Reminds me of left 4 dead when someone is searching in a room and then gets hit by a hunter lol
Let me know when you post your list. I want to see what cards you used. Is there only 1 mass reanimation spell for your deck? (the zombie apocalypse with 20 suspend counters).
If I do try a crazy variant of horde, I probably won't use all your changes, but there will probably be something in there that I will use - most likely some sort of explore deck. I think it could be really interesting building the explore deck.
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
My friend busted out his Uril on turn 3 using a sol ring and on turn 4 he swung for ~13 damage since he could. The horde deck milled past in flames along with decree of pain, ruination, creeping corrosion, zombie apocalypse, and a few zombies. The horde took their turn and flipped over a couple zombies and graveborn muse. Then casted past in flames and all of its friends. I had about 3 mana rocks that got wiped away and ruination left me with a single swamp for mana. My friend had 2 forest, a plains, and a mountain, but lost his sol ring. Anyways, a few spells later, the whole board was clear and the horde was set to draw around 15 cards. We quickly glanced at them and scooped. It was pretty hilarious
Anyways, the overall deck is greatly improved. There is a nice balance between burning the bodies and attacking the horde.
Some new problems that have seem to come up:
Umezawa's Jitte - instant speed removal on pretty much everything. Kills regeneration as well, and the life gain is pretty busted.
Assemble the Legion - Weak at first, but after about 4 turns, we are almost invincible.
Both from my Tajic deck. They both just constantly add so much to our board, and the horde deck has very few answers to them. Any ideas for more artifact/enchantment removal for the horde? I don't really want to run purify because of the name, but is there another similar card? I also don't want to blow up the horde's enchantments so 'other players enchantments' type of wording would be ideal.
Also, I think the horde needs more board wipes. I still want to get another plague wind so that will probably be enough. Maybe another noxious ghoul as well.
EDIT
Gate to phyrexia might be a cool addition. I'll probably make it so it targets the artifact with the highest CMC and it ignores its own artifacts (none in the deck currently anyway).
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
So we discovered something pretty simple... atleast in my personal playgroup is that if the zombies are flipping or "waving" as we call it then they just cant beat the 4 players decks. they lose due to bad flips or just getting obliterated by the power of the players. Now... in order to try and fix this we changed how the horde deck plays and added a few more things. These changes have led to AWESOME games that are WAY less lopsided 1 way or the other. With flipping either the zombies smash haha gg or the players dominate the entire match. We wanted something different. NOTE: We play with separate life totals... that matters A LOT. Anyways here is how we play now.
1) The zombie deck DRAWS 5 cards until the Zombie Apocalypse suspend counter reaches 10. Then the Zombie deck draws 10 cards instead.
2) The Zombie deck must play all creature spells, but can choose not to cast other spells in hand.
3) The zombies no longer have haste.
NOTE: We took MOST wraths out of the deck and we have gone with a more flavorful approach. It seemed to often that the players would lose to CARDS / SPELLS and not to actual damage from the zombies. So we tried to tone that down a bit and took out the wraths. Obviously the way my format and yours are played is VERY different, but I did play it standard normal horde mode before and just had no fun as players ALWAYS won pretty much. My most recent version of the deck is BRUTAL running real problem cards like Ward of Bones, Limited Resources, Descent into Madness, etc etc. Ill post my list soon.
Last 2 things: 1)Events are places that the players can find when they explore. If the player rolls a 4 or a 5 then a new place is discovered, It could be a dead end, or even a new safe house. the other places are based off of the survivors in the survivor deck. these are all custom fun cards similar to planechase btw.
2) In order to give the Zombie deck some more "teeth" without having to use wraths and powerful spells (past in flames being a great example) I created 5 custom ONLY FOR THIS FORMAT Zombie Planeswalkers and they have play tested GREAT, the players have really enjoyed them. They feel like bosses sort of and they can REALLY amp up crazy difficulty if they are not dealt with immediately. Here is the link to them below. Thats all I have for right now. Looking forward to your response!!
http://s1282.photobucket.com/user/AnthonyT681/library/HORDE%20WALKERS?sort=3&page=1
My Blog - contains my decklists
Uril, The Miststalker
Frankie Peanuts - needs to move to multiplayer.
Those planeswalkers are freaking epic. I wish those existed in the real game
I really like the way that one guy works with the 'zombie enters the battlefield, get a loyalty counter'. More stuff like that should be on the real planeswalkers.
If I recall correctly, you play where a player uses the horde deck right? That would make sense for some of your rules. Planeswalkers in my horde would probably have to default to 1 ability and maybe have an ultimate ability that is used as soon as it has enough loyalty counters.
I don't remember where I saw it, but there was someone that suggested having it so when you 'wave', instead you:
1) Reveal X cards from the top of the deck, where X is the number of players.
2) If the last card revealed is a zombie token, continue the 'wave' like normal, otherwise, just stop.
Essentially, it does a 'wave' like normal but always has at least X cards each turn (to essentially skip bad turns), and isn't ridiculous against a low number of players.
Espuma in his horde also implemented a strategy for increasing the pressure later in the game like so:
Before the game starts, shuffle in 1 swamp for each player above 1. When a swamp is revealed through mill or 'waving', it is placed onto the battlefield (and ignored similarly to a zombie token so it continues waving). The horde essentially 'waves' 1 extra time for each swamp it has. The swamps are completely untouchable by players. I suppose you could look at them as emblems.
I look forward to your lists
I like the idea of creating cards, but I don't really want to create my own. Changing some rules and using some cards in different ways are all game for me though.
What do you think of the above difficulty scaling rules?
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
On another note altogether, one card I really like is Bottomless Pit. I like them over Gibbering Descent and added 4 of them into my build for some beautiful hand disruption.
Ya! Another horde player
I know what you mean. I used to have more vanilla zombies, but slowly upgraded them into scarier cards because they were just too easy. I've also had issues with life gain I think card selection can help against it though. I use a few enchantments that read "players can't gain life" to prevent lifelink from being too strong. Running more removal for the zombies helps as well since it can clear out the lifelink creatures.
Bottomless pit is an awesome card! I don't have any copies unfortunately. I found gibbering descent in a rare bin for 50 cents so I grabbed it It's not amazing, but it's still annoying for the players.
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
A couple Everlasting Torments cleared that up quite nicely. I have a Turbofog EDH deck I enjoy playing so those shut it down for a turn. One thing I learned: cards like Prosperity are terrifying. I had everyone draw 20 cards which was great, except I forgot to save enough mana for answers to the Horde's next turn which now had +20 cards....we took 285 damage that turn...
Then again, I think that's one of my favorite parts of this variant -- if any of the survivors makes a single mistake, everyone could be done for in the blink of an eye. It's very apocalyptic and fits the theme/situation very well.
Haha very true. I'm glad everlasting torment worked out for you all the zombies having wither is quite awesome too. It makes blocking really interesting. My friend's Uril had 9 -1/-1 counters on him once from blocking zombies because we couldn't afford taking the damage.
That's a reason I want to put self-mill in my horde deck so that some of the crazy graveyard stuff will trigger itself. Making each horde move really scary makes the game really interesting.
How many cards do you have in your horde deck? I'd also love seeing it if you don't mind posting it
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
I was playing with a 4-player team, and since it was kind of easy for us, we were trying out just 2 turns of set up. Then my friend plays this thing, and for our turn 3, each player had +7 lands. So ridiculous lol. We roflstomped the horde that game.
I've made some modifications to the horde deck and I will update the list when I get the chance.
I added 2 descent into madness and it's quite interesting. Thing is, if you board wipe the zombies, and they have no other thing to exile, they just lose the enchantment on the first trigger. I thought it would be horrendously difficult to fight off, but it really isn't. I think they add some fun dynamics though, so I'll leave them in for now. I think if it triggers even just twice, it will have done enough damage. It will always at least create a nice scramble for the players.
I found a copy of no mercy One game, we just sat there hoping to draw an answer. It was painful >.< The horde eventually got past in flames along with some brutal spells and we died.
I'm still looking for an anthem of rakdos. I really want one. I think it will be really scary. I threw in my deadbridge chant since I was not using it, and I think it will be interesting - basically milling the horde for 10, and then getting a random card each turn. It's not particularly amazing for the horde as opposed to regular decks, but the effect is still decent enough to include.
Mikaeus kicked our butts a couple times D: He's a monster.
I'll update my list when I can.
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
Misc. EDH Stuff: Commander Cube | Zombies (Horde)
Resources:Commander Rulings FAQ | Commander Deckbuilding Guide
Follow me on Twitter! @cryogen_mtg
Glad you like it Let me know how your modifications go
I haven't played horde that much, but I've given it a lot of attention. Horde really is for the deck builder players. The players that care about building their decks more than playing them, or somewhere on a fairly even level for doing either. You get to create the token-nontoken ratio, you get to choose the cards for the deck, the size of the deck, even some of the rules are yours to modify.
I've been looking for some artifacts to include, but have not found any that I really like. Here are some that I found:
Cauldron of Souls - I just don't like that you have to choose when to activate it. I figured on either the horde's upkeep or the players' upkeep, but either one has a serious drawback.
Grimoire of the Dead - I'd love this, but I don't know how to work in the discard nicely. It's also kind of weak, but I still think it would be a cool inclusion. Maybe I'll just have the 'discard' part of it either be mill 1, or make the cost of the ability nothing, so it is just a ticking bomb.
Coat of Arms - Sort of hard to find a copy, and I feel like it might just be "do you have instant speed removal? No? You are dead then", which is not entirely what I'm looking for.
Nim Deathmantle - Very possible, I may just throw it in. The only thing I dislike is that if multiple zombies die at once, what should it be attached to? Probably just a random creature (ie they stack the triggers in a random order). It will probably only equip upon death. This card might be too annoything though lol.
Any other artifacts that could work that I missed?
OMG Possessed Portal would be so mean lol. Probably way too mean. I doubt it would be fun. Maybe I could rule it so it stops the horde from playing stuff too, so it is just a slug fest until the horde has to sacrifice it.
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
Misc. EDH Stuff: Commander Cube | Zombies (Horde)
Resources:Commander Rulings FAQ | Commander Deckbuilding Guide
Follow me on Twitter! @cryogen_mtg
my zombies one is 150 cards, sadly not much interest in playing it so I never get to test it out
I put a slivers one together and have been afraid to test it out lol. Might just make it a commander deck.
My Blog - contains my decklists
Uril, The Miststalker
Frankie Peanuts - needs to move to multiplayer.
I always love seeing more horde lists
Do you mean no one wants to play horde when you ask them? That sucks :/ I find the best time is right when evryone is either salty from losing or just don't feel like playing another game (magic'd, out we call it).
EDIT
There's also that time where no one has similar format decks (ie 1 standard, 2 EDH decks, 1 random casual deck). You can mish-mash them all together and fight against the horde. It's one of the things I love most about playing horde. You can play ANY deck you want (unless it is entirely designed to screw over the horde - if you want to do that, then I will make the horde deck impossible to beat - 20 obliterate and 180 zombies).
Why are you afraid to test out the sliver horde? Is is super strong? You could always play against it solo I usually give myself 4 turns for 1 vs horde. otherwise I just die horribly almost every game.
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
The horde had quite a rough time. We got planeswalkers out (because the mono-green standard deck had 8 planeswalkers in it) and grouped up to defend them constantly, and then just crapped on the zombies. The planeswalkers were nissa revane and garruk wildspearker, and both could dump out creatures that could beat zombies.
The problem was simply that 2-4 zombies a turn was FAR from enough creatures to get around our blockers, and we got more and more each turn. Once nissa's -7 went off, we just alpha swung for 100+ damage.
After 3 roflstompy games against the horde, we decided to up the difficulty. We were playing with only 2 turns of setup, but we switched it back to 3 for this. We had the horde basically reveal twice (reveal until 2 non-zombies) each turn starting from their first turn.
The games were definitely much more interesting, but were ultimately too hard. We played twice and then went to play some fighting games.
I want to ask for help on deciding on/creating rules to make horde more difficult for extra players. Here's some example ideas that I have/have gotten from other people:
Espuma's Rules - You add a swamp to the deck for each player above the first (shuffling them in). You treat them sort of like tokens, but when they get milled, you still put them into play. They just sit there and are untargettable/destroyable. They basically aren't even lands/permanents - more like emblems. Each one means that when they reveal cards, they do it an extra time. Basically, at some random point in the game, the horde will start getting extra reveals and become much harder.
(Note: If you'd like to see Espuma's horde, he has posted on the front page of this thread a whole bunch and even on this page. He's replied a lot to my thread and I've viewed his thread quite a bit.)
Turn Counter - Some sort of turn counter would be interesting. Basically, at some threshold, it would increase the zombie reveals by one. For example, every 10 turns, the horde starts taking an additional turn. It counts EACH player turn, so with 4 players, it would go up 4 at a time (5 if you want to include zombies). This could be nice since it would be more consistent than the swamps, and it would mean we wouldn't have to add/remove/shuffle the swamps. The main thing would be keeping track of this number (not hard, but potentially annoying, and easy to forget).
Zombie Apocalypse - Some sort of turn threshold like the second idea, but basically, it would always be the single reveal (as normal), and then once the threshold is met, the zombies start revealing X times where X is the number of players. With my deck, it is typically split into 2 piles, so I could maybe make it once the first pile is gone, then the zombies start taking extra turns, but that's probably too slow, and doesn't scale amazingly with the number of players. Perhaps just a similar turn counter but with a higher threshold like 20-30.
What are your thoughts? Which one would be best? Any additional ideas would be great!
Also, for funsies, I was playing horde with my friend (just the 2 of us) and we decided to throw in our planechase cards. It was amazingly silly lol.
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