Hello everyone! I’m Jeremy Sunell. I’ve been playing Magic for twelve years, but only the last two have been competitive. Casual Magic at my house had gotten so intense that we had to have a house ban on cards like Congregate (seriously, that card is just not fair when six people are playing), so I decided to switch it up. Over the last year, I’ve been working at J&M Comics in Eldersburg, Maryland as a manager and event coordinator, and I absolutely love it since comics have now become my secondary specialty!
Most of you don’t know me very well, but I have a reputation for being the best card drawer ever—to which I like to respond, "Have you seen Brian Kibler play Magic?" But seriously, this past weekend at the StarCityGames.com Standard Open in Baltimore, I have to admit that I had something along the lines of Luck+35. After losing round 1 to Bant Flash, I had pretty much accepted defeat. But after taking a moment alone outside, I calmed down and told myself, "You got this." Oddly enough, I had done that once before at a tournament in Washington to some success.
I lost round 1 to Jeph Foster—one of the judges at the tournament last weekend ironically—and then proceeded to win my next nine rounds. So after I won six in a row last Saturday and Jeph started calling my name for feature matches, it felt pretty great. It was a much-needed Top 4 because my performance at SCG Opens had been slacking ever since I lost my significant other—Jace, the Mind Sculptor. It made me feel like all my work wasn’t for naught and that I can actually play decks without Islands.
I think I played really well for the most part throughout the tournament, but I know I didn’t play very well against eventual champion Brad Nelson in the semifinals. My keeps were a little awkward, and I learned a very valuable lesson (that ten or so people have told me): always kill the Skirsdag High Priest immediately! The same can be said about Blood Artist, which sadly Brad killed right before my timely miracled Bonfire of the Damned.
Anyway, I know most of you are wondering why I chose to play B/R Zombies, so let’s get on to the deck:
Creatures (27)
- 2 Bloodthrone Vampire
- 4 Diregraf Ghoul
- 4 Gravecrawler
- 4 Falkenrath Aristocrat
- 2 Hellrider
- 4 Geralf's Messenger
- 3 Blood Artist
- 3 Knight of Infamy
- 1 Blood Scrivener
Planeswalkers (2)
Lands (22)
Spells (9)
Why I Chose B/R Zombies
I wanted to play a fairly balanced aggro deck, and I really have loved Zombies for quite a while. It also has one of my favorite cards of all time:
Blood Artist is literally just insane value. During round 6 against Junk Aristocrats, I had out two Blood Artists against my opponent’s board of Doomed Traveler, Cartel Aristocrat, and four Lingering Souls tokens. At the end of my opponent’s turn, I overloaded an Electrickery, gained ten life, and, more importantly, made him lose ten life! No other card allows for such a huge shift in a game.
The other reason I really like B/R Zombies is that it has a pretty great matchup against midrange decks (Jund, Junk Reanimator, etc.) that make up a large portion of the format. Even the Naya decks are going more midrange (Barich and Edel Naya) instead of taking the Blitz approach.
My initial build of B/R Zombies was really weird. It had Faithless Lootings, three Blood Scriveners, three Liliana of the Veils, and only one Tragic Slip. I had basically "Sunellified" the old B/R Zombies list. Luckily, the night before the tournament, my buddy Devon Hogan told me how awful my changes were, and from there we made some changes to make the deck run way smoother and be more consistent.
As an aside, I have a bad habit of playing lots of one-ofs and drawing them exactly when I need them. As a result, I’m not too surprised when people make fun of me for playing them or removing them when they play my decks. I just want to give fair warning to people out there that I tend to get a little lucky heh.
Now let’s go over some of the more extravagant card choices:
Bloodthrone Vampire. I can’t stress enough that if you play this deck you must run at least two of these. If you read the fine print on Bloodthrone Vampire, you’ll see that it says "counter target Pillar of Flame." As far as being aggressive goes, I’d rather have this than Cartel Aristocrat due to how well it combos with Gravecrawler and any other Zombie (with or without Blood Artist).
Did I mention my final attack of the Standard Open in the Swiss? My Naya opponent was at fourteen when he dropped a Thundermaw Hellkite and swung with his entire team to put me to five. On the next turn, my board of Diregraf Ghoul, two Gravecrawlers, Bloodthrone Vampire, and Three swamps got the job done since I drew another Swamp, proceeded to sacrifice one of the Gravecrawlers five times, and swung for fifteen with an 11/11 Bloodthrone Vampire and friends!
Blood Scrivener. There’s a lot of blood being spilled here, eh? Blood Scrivener is really good if there’s a decent amount of control decks in the room. My thought was this + Liliana of the Veil would be pretty good together, and luckily I was able to see it do a Dark Confidant impersonation twice—both times it was awesome.
Liliana of the Veil. I originally included three copies of her to go along with three Blood Scriveners. Liliana is in a weird spot because she’s more of a metagame card right now so you can’t play a ton of her maindeck. She turned out better than I expected since she’s the best card you could ask for against both control and Bant Hexproof. She’s just really bad against any Lingering Souls deck like Junk Aristocrats.
Electrickery. I was basically forced to play this card by some of my friends at my local shop, and I’m glad I was! Electrickery is insane when it’s good, but it typically just kills a mana dork or two or rots in your hand against Jund.
Mark of Mutiny. What cards are defining Standard? Do Thragtusk, Boros Reckoner, and Voice of Resurgence ring a bell?
Changes I Would Make
One thing about making the Top 4 that kinda sucks is that my deck is probably going to be hated on. So with Zombies and Voice of Resurgence surging, I would expect to see a lot of Flames in the shape of Pillars. This is a problem because there isn’t an awesome answer to it other than maybe going up on Bloodthrone Vampires or running weird cards like Altar’s Reap. Cards I might cut are Blood Scrivener (again, depends on your local metagame) and maybe the Electrickery in the sideboard since one is probably all you need.
Well, I don’t want to overdo it here, so that’s about it. Special thanks to all my teammates and friends. I can’t wait til Thursday so I can watch my matches and see what Cedric Phillips and AJ Sacher had to say about the matches and my deck on SCGLive. I’m not sure which ones were actually on camera, but I know there’s at least one!