First up, just like how Zombie Master often ended games all on his own, Mezuki wields an ATK that allows it to make serious dents in your opponent. You can swing with it recklessly, and you’ll know that when it goes down, it’s just going to haunt your opponent with its effect later.

When it does, its special summon ability will contribute to your swarm of attackers yet again, while also giving you three more ways to draw a card off of Card of Safe Return. I actually had an interesting discussion with a friend yesterday post-tournament. After playing some games with my newly-proxied Zombie build, he questioned the necessity of Card of Safe Return altogether by comparing the deck to Lightsworn. My friend knows I despise Card of Safe Return in Lightsworn strategies, and he brought up a good point: why did I like Card of Safe Return in Zombies when I disliked it in another deck that I play regularly?

The answer was pretty simple: numbers. While Lightsworn play Monster Reborn, Premature Burial, three copies of Lumina, Lightsworn Summoner, and sometimes Glorious Illusion, that’s still only five special summon cards with a chance at a couple more. Zombies on the other hand? They have Premature, Reborn, three copies of Zombie Master, three Book of Life cards, at least one Il Blud, and now three copies of Mezuki. That’s twelve cards that can bring a monster back from the graveyard: almost double what the average Lightsworn deck plays even if you count Wulf, Lightsworn Beast.

Every Zombie player knows the pain of two opening hands: the hand with Card of Safe Return but no special summon cards, and the hand with Zombie support, but not enough playable Zombies. Mezuki slips into the deck so easily over Giant Rat, and from there it seamlessly supports your two big strategies while also helping to eliminate your dead opening hands. It accomplishes that by being both a Zombie and a special summon card.

And from those two obvious points, a near-infinite number of finer synergies are available on a smaller scale. Take Goblin Zombie: since Mezuki has only 800 DEF, the Zombie can let you search it from your deck. The same can be said of Pyramid Turtle. Bring Mezuki back with Zombie Master, Book of Life, or Il Blud. Heck, discard Il Blud for Zombie Master’s effect, then bring Il Blud into play for free with Mezuki.

Mezuki’s quick-access special summoning makes it even easier for Zombies to run Crush Card Virus, too. If Spirit Reaper is in your graveyard, you can keep kicking it back to the field with Mezuki, meaning that you don’t have to hold onto it waiting for Crush Card Virus to show up. And since Mezuki lets you draw more cards with Card of Safe Return, you’ll get to Crush Card faster.

There are even some simple combos that are easy to miss until you actually play the deck. For instance, Zombie Master’s effect without an active Card of Safe Return is traditionally viewed as a card-for-card trade—you discard a monster, and get one back in return. But if you discard Mezuki for Zombie Master’s effect and bring back something else, you can remove Mezuki immediately afterward to special summon a second Zombie for free. You give up one in-hand card (Mezuki) to bring two Zombies to the field. If the monster you summoned with Mezuki was Il Blud, well, you can see how things could get crazy pretty fast.

But honestly, the biggest advantage I’ve seen in testing Mezuki isn’t its synergy with the cards I’m already running. Instead, I’m loving how . . .

Burial from a Different Dimension could solve these problems in the early game by bringing the removed Zombies back to the graveyard, but it wasn’t consistently useful—you had no guarantee that your opponent was even going to play D.D. Crow, let alone play it early enough that you’d be desperate enough to activate Burial. And desperation was important: giving up a card to play Burial is a big deal, and if it can’t balance itself out in card presence, you’ll quickly find yourself out of options. Low utility and high risk made Burial from a Different Dimension impossible to run.

But Mezuki changes that. Now a duelist can play up to two copies of Burial safely depending on how his or her Zombie deck is constructed, knowing that even if the opponent doesn’t play D.D. Crow, that Burial can be used in the mid-game to bring back removed copies of the Zombie deck’s latest all-star. More than that, expending Burial itself is instantly balanced as soon as you bring back just one copy of Mezuki—you give up Burial, but you’ll special summon a Zombie to recover your expenditure. Bring back two or three copies of Mezuki, and you’ve just made a huge move.

Playing Burial then lets you play another card I was never happy with in Zombies, albeit one that saw limited Day 2 success—Allure of Darkness. Most Zombies are Dark monsters, a factor that led some duelists to play Allure in a bid to draw into Card of Safe Return earlier. The problem this presented was that a removed Zombie was useless. The Zombie deck had no way to bring a removed monster back into the game, and when an integral card like Spirit Reaper or Il Blud had to be sacrificed, the deck’s performance suffered. That’s not the case anymore, because if you’re playing three Mezuki and two Allure of Darkness cards, you can easily play two copies of Burial to balance out the Allures and abuse Mezuki along the way.

Speaking of draw cards, Mezuki also strengthens my personal draw engine of choice for Zombies—Hand Destruction. Again, like Burial, it was the loss of Hand Destruction itself that made it undesirable to many Zombie duelists. While choice draw cards like Solar Recharge and Destiny Draw consume themselves and a discard—giving an even two draws in return—Hand Destruction required the loss of three cards total for just two back: a factor that made it unplayable in the eyes of many. I ran it and loved it, but I was in the minority.

Mezuki changes everything. Hand Destruction’s discard effect is a great way to load copies of it into the graveyard, and whether you’re discarding Mezuki itself or just something for Mezuki to return to the field, you can easily compensate for the one-card loss Hand Destruction is going to cost you. If you’re lucky enough to discard two copies of Mezuki, well, you’ve garnered an extra card right there. In the meantime, you’re also working your way through your deck as you draw toward the all-important Card of Safe Return.

Mezuki even makes it easy to run that second copy of Il Blud that few duelists could rationalize. Since you now play Hand Destruction to load Il Blud into the yard, and have three more ways to special summon it, playing more than one copy is a lot easier to do.

Goblin Zombie took this one step further, giving duelists a monster that simply didn’t care if it was destroyed: send Goblin Zombie to the graveyard, and it’s just going to replace itself with something even nastier. The Zombie player loses nothing when Goblin Zombie goes down, making it easy to throw 1100 damage onto whatever over-extension you want to make. If your opponent plays a mass-removal card, awesome: he or she just gave up one of his or her most powerful options, and you didn’t really lose out.

Mezuki allows for similar plays. You can send it into basically anything, and as long as your opponent doesn’t flip Dimensional Prison you probably won’t care. If Mezuki goes down in battle, or falls to Torrential, it’s just special summoning another monster to replace itself later. That makes Zombie decks more aggressive, harder to fend off, and way more resilient in the hands of an assertive player.

For now though, Mezuki improves virtually everything we already liked about Zombie decks, while bringing new tricks and tactics with more consistency. Get ready to dust off your copies of Zombie Master and Il Blud: Zombies are back from the dead!

—Jason