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Video: Rebuilding The Dead In Legacy

In this video article, Sam experiments with cutting all the Zombies from his Legacy Zombie deck. Get an in-depth look into his deckbuilding and playtesting process!

In my last article, I touched on the idea of experimenting with some more radical overhauls on my Legacy Zombie deck, including cutting all the Zombies, which makes it harder for me to figure out what to call it. Today I’m going to try two slightly different takes.

The first is:


In the first game, missing land drops after getting Wastelanded put me really far behind. I made a game of it, but it’s pretty hard to win when your opponent has a Jace, the Mind Sculptor while you’re casting your first spells. Really, I think the recovery I managed to make from there was fairly impressive since I was still live to win the game going into his last upkeep. Admittedly, it wouldn’t have been nearly as close without a few key mistakes on his part, most notably not casting the Jitte.

The second game felt like it was going well before the long string of Swords to Plowshares showed up. After that, I drew two lands and two blank Thoughtseizes to lose to a very unimpressive offense. More thoughts on this later.

My second match was with the same deck:

In the first game, Lewis drew perfect cards on his first turns, which is the best way to beat discard spells. The second game felt like it was going pretty well, but then Lewis stuck the Jitte and I drew lands. I possibly could have held back an extra Spirit to play around the Swords to Plowshares the turn when I double blocked his Deathrite Shaman. At that point, there’s a chance we would have just stared at each other for several turns, but the Jitte would still probably get me in the end.

For the next two matches, I changed to this deck:


Tom basically didn’t draw any spells the entire match. Game 2 he got way ahead on mana early while I missed land drops. If he’d drawn a powerful spell of any kind, I would have been out of it, but he just didn’t hit anything.

That match pretty clearly showed that Nimble Mongoose is a huge problem. When I had Leyline in game 2, things were a lot easier, but without it I just couldn’t beat Nimble Mongoose. In the past, I’ve had Perish, but I’m not sure that’s the best approach with Deathrite Shaman. More Lilianas could work, or perhaps Innocent Blood.

Ultimately, I think cutting the Zombies takes away a lot of my early pressure, and the result is giving my opponent more time while I don’t do things that are powerful enough going late. It’s possible that what I need is some kind of big monster, like Tombstalker, but Tombstalker has problems with graveyard hate. Abyssal Persecutor might be worth considering.

Thanks for watching,

Sam
@samuelhblack on Twitter
twitch.tv/samuelhblack