"They might be dead, but these mummies are masters of their trade"
-- Jace Beleren
Hello! And welcome to the Zombie emporium, known locally as "The Insightful Dead!" Today we'll delve into the inner workings of this convoluted pile of body's and limbs.
To start things off, we'll break down the elephant in the room. Lantern of Insight and Embalmer's Tools may look out of place in a deck like this - and in most cases you'd be right! But this deck however, has the same zombie hit the field multiple times a turn, and nothing having haste in the deck, grants the two aforementioned cards some wiggle room, as well as board control. Don't like your opponents top card? Mill it! Watching them get Mana flooded, or Mana dry, is a wonderful tactical choice as well!
Now, generally speaking, putting your own creatures into the graveyard would seem like a useless and foolish idea. But this particular pile of bodies thrive by coming out of the graveyard, in much more fun ways!
Gravecrawler, and Prized Amalgam are all engine pieces for the recurring mill tactic, mentioned above.
In a perfect world, you'll have easy access to one of the few real heavy hitters within the deck. Growing exponentially in a handful of ways, Carrion Feeder, and Diregraf Colossus are perfectly suited to handle the offensive power behind this menegarie of dead bodies. And both function amazingly well with the shadow mechanic - provided by a flashback played Traitor's Clutch. You'll have plenty of ways to ensure it hitting the graveyard from early on, so keep the toolbox growing, right?
Which brings us to the next point. All this talk about filling the graveyard, and no mention as to how yet. Well, between Stitcher's Supplier, Zombie Infestation, milling yourself with the cards mentioned at the beginning, and later on in the game Dakmor Salvage, fueling the graveyard full of all this fun shouldn't prove to be terribly difficult.
When going against life-gain decks, it's going to be easier to switch things up to a more indirect play style.
Altar of the Brood holds a decent addition to the mill aspect, that would further clock the opponent. With as much recursion that goes on in this deck list, taking the Altar, in place of
Lantern of Insight, or
Traitor's Clutch, would be recommended.
When going up against aggro decks, the choices made are dependant on if you're facing token "go wide" styles, or if you're facing hubris aggro. Generally, hubris Aggro decks aren't a total problem, with the mainboard it is. However, in the case of token, or generally any mass army decks,
Golden Demise might prove useful. It's not hard to meet the criteria for the Ascend, and thus protecting your own creatures. Another fun option being
Trespasser's Curse. Providing damage to opponents for playing more creature's might incite a slower pace on the creatures they swarm, and buying time to get set up.
Just relax! Most cases, going up a mill deck is actually beneficial to the entire premise of what this deck does. In most mill decks, there aren't too many creatures that would provide enough of a board presence to be concerned by. And even the ones that are out there, are so few on the field, you're more likely to swarm around them. If a creature dies in the attack - they're zombies! It'll be back!
