I've mentioned the idea of adding green to my Legacy Zombie deck for Lotleth Troll, Abrupt Decay, and Vengevine. I've seen other people build the deck that way. I'm pretty sure that just substituting Vengevine for Lingering Souls and Lotleth Troll for Tidehollow Sculler isn't the right way to do it. If you do that, your creature count is a little low for Vengevine and your Cabal Therapy are worse because you can't see the opponent's hand as often.

Today, I'm experimenting with a take on Zombies that's built around the Lotleth Troll / Vengevine interaction:

Vengevine Zombies

Sam Black

0th Place at Test deck on 12/23/2012

Legacy

 

Creatures (33)

• 3 Blood Artist
• 4 Bloodghast
• 4 Carrion Feeder
• 4 Deathrite Shaman
• 4 Gravecrawler
• 2 Greater Gargadon
• 4 Lotleth Troll
• 4 Mogg War Marshal
• 4 Vengevine

Lands (19)

• 2 Swamp
• 3 Badlands
• 2 Bayou
• 4 Bloodstained Mire
• 1 Marsh Flats
• 2 Polluted Delta
• 1 Taiga
• 4 Verdant Catacombs

Spells (8)

• 2 Goblin Bombardment
• 2 Abrupt Decay
• 4 Faithless Looting

Sideboard

• 1 Pithing Needle
• 2 Dark Confidant
• 1 Leyline of the Void
• 1 Abrupt Decay
• 1 Darkblast
• 1 Surgical Extraction
• 4 Cabal Therapy
• 4 Thoughtseize

 

I think this deck is worse than the white version. I think the discard is extremely important to the strength of the deck and not having it in the main is a serious cost. But I think Vengevine is too inconsistent to bother with without it, and I'm trying to really take advantage of that card and the other cards needed to support it. Because there aren't more creatures I wanted to add that cost one, I had to add several that cost two, which makes my curve worse since I'm losing the one-mana discard, so I've added Greater Gargadon as a one-mana sacrifice outlet for my Blood Artists.

These videos might just be examples of why I don't build the deck this way for tournaments, or we might get to see some sweet explosive games with Vengevine.

Goblin Bombardment is pretty good against Elves, but with less spot removal and no Parish or Engineered Plague, I'm relying very heavily on drawing one of them. This is why I mulliganed so aggressively in games 2 and 3 and why I lost those games.

Playing only two Goblin Bombardment just isn't realistic, so I'm cutting a Greater Gargadon for a third from here on.

The fact that he drew so many more Deathrite Shamans than I did this match was definitely significant. Lingering Souls is also an extremely powerful card here. Blood Artist is the trump, but only if they don't have a Goblin Bombardment to kill it.

In game 3, it's possible that he should have waited until my draw step to remove my Faithless Lootings, but I'm guessing he wanted to know my hand before planning the rest of his turn.

I think this deck likely needs a twentieth land. I've been on the fence between nineteen and twenty and wanted to give nineteen another try with Deathrite Shaman, but it really needs twenty. I'm not sure what other conclusions to draw from this. I probably should have sided Abrupt Decay in rather than out.

That was really brutal. Without the discard, I can't interact relevantly with combo in game 1, and the Leyline made game 2 go the same way.

I can't say I'm particularly surprised by the result. There are certainly other ways to build the deck that are less extreme than this, but I think anything less extreme is even closer to being just a worse version of the white build. Ignoring the specific weaknesses of the deck in terms of not having discard, the Vengevines and Lotleth Trolls themselves didn't seem particularly good. Both cards are generally clunky and weak.

I hope you feel like you can learn something from decks that don't work, but I know it's much more useful to learn how to play good decks, so I'll try to keep this kind of thing to a minimum.

Thanks for watching,

Sam

@samuelhblack on Twitter

twitch.tv/samuelhblack