Johnny on the Spot: The Walking Dead

Long ago (about 3 months) in the pre-Deathrite banning era, I had a pretty sweet graveyard recursion deck called The Walking Dead.

4 Gravecrawler 4 Deathrite Shamans 4 Lightning Bolts 4 Faithless Lootings 2 Dark Blasts 4 Dark Confidant 4 Bloodghast 4 Tarmogoyfs 2 Tymaret, the Murder King 2 Terminate 4 Geralf's Messenger 4 Marsh Flats 4 Verdant Catacombs 4 Blackcleave Cliffs 4 Blood Crypts 1 Overgrown Tombs 1 Woodland Cemetery 1 Dragonskull Summit 3 Swamps

Sideboard: Lost to time

 

 I know you secretly want the zombie apocalypse happen.

It was perfectly suited for the old metagame. It came out very aggressively with recurring creatures. It had late game reach without using combat. It had main deck graveyard hate with Deathrite Shaman. Most importantly, it DIDN'T have hand disruption. Jund, with Thoughtseize and Inquisition of Kozilek, was so prevalent in the metagame that combo decks couldn't make up a sizable portion of it. I basically cheated by not playing them. People weren't playing combo cards that needed to get discarded and Jund's discard wasn't all that effective against me. I felt like I found a sweet niche in the metagame.

Then Deathrite got axed.

 

Little buddy!!!! NOOOOOO!!!!!

D'oh!

I rebuilt The Walking Dead with some new faces:

4 Gravecrawlers 4 Faithless Looting 4 Lightning Bolt 2 Dark Blast 1 Grim Lavamancer 4 Dark Confidant 4 Bloodghast 4 Stromgald Crusader 3 Nameless Inversions 4 Lilianna of the Veil 3 Haakon, Stromgald Scourge 4 Verdant Catacombs 4 Marsh Flats 4 Blood Crypts 4 Blackcleave Cliffs 1 Dragonskull Summit 6 Swamp
SB: 1 Knight of Infamy SB: 2 Torpor Orb SB: 2 Engineered Explosives SB: 2 Damping Matrix SB: 2 Shattering Spree SB: 2 Rakdos Charm SB: 4 Thoughtseize

Green had to go. Goyfs are really good but the manabase was too fragile without Deathrite's color fixing. The first version was very aggressive that could produce a second wave of creatures and burn to win. This version goes very midrangey setting up late game value with cards like Liliana and Haakon.

 

The hot girl dating the strange, ugly dude. Weird, huh?

How it works

This deck plays differently than almost every other decks I've seen. The goal is to start out aggressively, then switch gears to control, then switch gears back to aggressive to push the win through. Knowing how and when to switch is the key because it varies with each matchup.

The first wave: The best thing for this deck is to start out by Faithless Looting on turn 1. Discarding any combination of Bloodghasts, Gravecrawlers, or Haakons is great because all of those will return to play. They are effectively still in your hand. Getting Bloodghast back with turn two's land drop is an amazing feeling and a strong tempo play. Unless the removal is Anger of the Gods, the removal is kind of useless. Even Path to Exile doesn't scare me that much. It ramps me and it's one less path for Haakon later in the game. Not all games start with looting, but the first three turns will normally be focused on getting as many creatures on to the battlefield as possible.

    Paired with 

Feels like...

  Paired with 

Well...maybe more like draw 2 and add BB to your mana pool. Still really good.

Shift to control: Around turn four is where is decks starts to shift into control mode. Liliana and Haakon start to come online and removing the opponent's creatures will start to matter. The nice thing about recursive creatures is that they have a type of evasion. I've found that my opponents are much less likely to block a Gravecrawler or Bloodghast when they know that the creatures will just come back into play. Blocking is dangerous for them because the Bolts and Nameless Inversion the kill their bigger creatures post combat.

 

You're strangely dressed...for a knight.

Shift back to aggro: This is the toughest part. There's no real set turn where this happens. You'll have to go by feel. Chances are the opponent is at a pretty low life at this point. You'll have looted and dredged through a good amount of your deck and should be able to swarm in this an army to finish off your opponent. You must be aware that your opponents are probably trying to do something more powerful than you. An undead army of 2/1's is cool, but they are probably trying to combo off or cast something much bigger.

 

One final wave FTW.

This is the deck I decided to run at GP Richmond. It was nowhere near polished or tested enough. But, I guess no brew was since the banning/unbanning happened a month earlier. I was able to win an FNM and a GPT with the deck though. Going 11-0-1 before the GP and getting byes got my hopes pretty high. But I didn't do so hot there. Next week I'll show you the tournament reports for those events and go over some of the obvious and not so obvious interactions of this deck as well as the good and bad matchups.