Dark Decks: Zombies

Hello Everyone!


Wizards of the Coast just spoiled the entirety of Dark Ascension, which you can find here! Naturally as I was looking at the set, I had my head in the brewery the whole time thinking which cards could do best in almost any deck. Over the course of this week, I will be posting several raw decklists as I think of them that could become viable in the post-Dark Ascension Standard. To start things off, let's take a look a look at the next potential Zombies deck!


4x Gravecrawler
4x Diregraf Ghoul
4x Highborn Ghoul
2x Walking Corpse
4x Geralf's Messenger
4x Cemetery Reaper
4x Diregraf Captain

2x Despise
3x Distress
2x Tragic Slip
1x Go for the Throat
4x Liliana of the Veil

14x Swamp
4x Darkslick Shores
4x Drowned Catacombs

Sideboard options:
Curse of Death's Hold
Ratchet Bomb
Nihil Spellbomb
Skinrender
Vapor Snag
Phyrexian Crusader
Mana Leak
Ghoulraiser

When Gravecrawler was spoiled, I started getting very excited at the possibility of a very aggressive mono-black deck emerging with 8 2/x 1 drops! Unfortunately, the deck is a little lacking in the 2 drop slot - we have a bear, and an intimidate bear..... cool.... However, at 3 mana the deck is busting at the seams with good stuff! 8 Lords? Liliana? Anti-Kitchen Finks? Because of the 16 quality 3 drops, I made a point to have the rest of the deck be focused at maximizing value from the 1 and 2 drop slots. 3 spot removal + 4 liliana may be a little too low on the removal spectrum, but this deck seems like it should be the beatdown in most matchups. Also, 5 discard spells may not be what we want, but this is what I intuitively feel is correct, and I will let testing take it from there.

The sideboard is not worth putting specific numbers into yet, simply because we don't know what decks need to be sideboarded against yet! However, I wanted to pull cards that have potential depending on where the meta goes. BW/x tokens is looking to be a popular archaetype, so we have Ratchet Bomb and Curse of Death's Hold for the tokens. In an attrition based match, Ghoulraiser can help us get ahead of the 1-for-1s. In a tempo based match, Skinrender and Vapor Snag are our friends. Against control, Mana Leak will help us counter their trump card and give us just enough time to finish them off (although is should be noted that with Gravecrawler, Geralf's Messenger, and Cemetery Reaper, we might simply not care about Day of Judgement at all!). Nihil Spellbomb seems better than Grafdigger's Cage to me because it doesn't hurt your own grave recursion, and the spellbomb draws a card. And finally, Phyrexian Crusader seems good against RDW or against a humans deck.

That's all I have for today! Stay tuned, as I wouldn't be surprised if I churned out new decks every day! Until next time, stay classy!

Ryan Lackie
Ryan.Lackie92@gmail.com
@ThingsILack
ThingsILack on mtgo