I am convinced that I would not enjoy being hunted down by a throng of brain-eating zombies. To tell you the truth, I’m a big fan of being both alive and human, and I’d wager that every other person out there who shares these traits would agree with me. Thus, anyone who shares the traits of “alive” and “human” would then not enjoy being hunted down by a throng of brain-eating zombies, since such an event carries a high likelihood of wiping an individual clean of these and other desired traits. From there, I’d guess that approximately 99% of my opponents share the qualities of being “alive” and “human” and would very much not like to be hunted down by Zombies, especially if I was in control of said Zombies. It pleases me when I do things my opponents don’t like. Therefore, I must conclude that this deck is a good idea.

Monsters: 19

3 Pyramid Turtle

3 Zombie Master

3 Il Blud

2 Ryu Kokki

2 Giant Rat

1 Spirit Reaper

2 Cyber Dragon

1 Sangan

1 Morphing Jar

1 Treeborn Frog

Spells: 12

1 Heavy Storm

1 Mystical Space Typhoon

1 Snatch Steal

1 Nobleman of Crossout

3 Book of Life

1 Book of Moon

1 Premature Burial

3 Brain Control

Traps: 9

3 Widespread Ruin

1 Mirror Force

1 Call of the Haunted

1 Torrential Tribute

3 Solemn Judgment

Doesn’t it just feel great to see new, extremely playable Zombie monsters in print? Jason got to keep all the Zombie goodness to himself during our previews, but Zombie Master and Il Blud are fair game now! Let’s put them through their paces, shall we?

The greatest strength of Zombie monsters has also long been their greatest weakness. Specifically, Zombies have really great high-level monsters, but until just a couple of weeks ago, the only Zombies at level 4 or lower that people were willing to play were Spirit Reaper and Pyramid Turtle. Now we have Zombie Master, and that changes the general purpose of the Zombie deck. Before, Zombie decks were all about special summoning their biggest monsters through Pyramid Turtle. Generally, this was either Vampire Lord or Ryu Kokki, with the scale visibly tipped towards Kokki after the release of Cyber Dragon. With Zombie Master and Il Blud, the deck becomes all about special summoning in general, not necessarily the summoning of one particular large monster.

Il Blud is the master of this strategy, with the power to special summon any Zombie monster from either player’s graveyard so long as you spend a normal summon to change it into an effect monster. Il Blud now becomes the key monster to protect in this set-up, but in this case, protection doesn’t necessarily mean keeping it on the field the entire time. These are Zombies we’re talking about. They’re quite good at rising from the dead, so it’s to our advantage to facilitate this through heavy use of Book of Life and the ever-popular revival cards, Call of the Haunted and Premature Burial. Furthermore, the DEF of Il Blud is only 800, making it fair game to special summon from our deck on the opponent’s turn with Pyramid Turtle. Recruiter tricks are often the best way to ensure that a Gemini monster survives long enough to activate its effect, and with the effect of Il Blud being what it is, activating it even once could be enough to either win the game outright or put victory out of the opponent’s reach.

The Master is essential in any and all early game pushes—something that the Zombie deck was generally incapable of in the past. Furthermore, unlike many Zombie monsters (Ryu Kokki, I’m looking at you!), drawing multiple copies of Zombie Master is more likely to end in hitting your opponent with an OTK rather than being forced to sit around and develop your field at a snail’s pace. As Jason mentioned in his preview article, the trick of throwing away a Zombie Master to activate a Zombie Master and then summoning the second Zombie Master is pretty neat and really quite useful. More useful, however, would be to toss Il Blud into the graveyard in order to summon something back, revive it with Book of Life, and activate its power to summon another Zombie all in one turn. Throw in one of your three copies of Brain Control (or that Snatch Steal) and you could have game right there. Unlike the combo of Card Trooper and Machine Duplication, this maneuver will likely leave you lower on cards in hand than you might normally like to be. Copies of Zombie Master don’t replace themselves upon destruction, so be careful if you decide to go all-out in the early turns! You wouldn’t want a flurry of Cyber Dragon and Brain Control cards to end you while you thought you were ahead.

The alternative strategy for this deck (should you not come up with a hand that’s workable in the early game) is to switch over to a more conservative style of play and push toward a mid- to late game win courtesy of Il Blud summoning a lot of Zombies just because it can. Realistically, this is the type of game you’re likely to play the most throughout a longer event, since the probability of drawing extremely explosive opening hands is actually quite low. Slower games generally start out with a set monster and a spell or trap card. Pyramid Turtle and Spirit Reaper are the kind of cards you want to set in this situation, but Giant Rat will do as well, since its sole purpose is to go fetch Pyramid Turtle for you. As in most Zombie decks, Pyramid Turtle really is that important, and you’ll want to have access to the card as early and often as possible. I say “often as possible” with full confidence that you will execute the effect quite often, even if you have to do it yourself by ramming the Turtle into a bigger monster. Book of Life and Il Blud are your guarantees that even if your opponent gets off a big play or two that you weren’t able to block with Solemn Judgment, you’ll still be able to get back into the game, and surprisingly quickly at that. As long as you managed to special summon Il Blud in some way—be it Pyramid Turtle on your opponent’s turn or Book of Life on your own—you will get two monsters on that turn. This is the method by which you accelerate the game from the slow pace you started with at the beginning toward the huge finish that you have planned.

Most decks these days are a big fan of Card Trooper, and leaving a copy in attack mode against the newfound power of Zombies is a really bad idea—almost equivalent to making no play at all, especially after the Card Trooper attacked your Pyramid Turtle and let you summon Il Blud. In all honesty, Smashing Ground has pretty much vanished from the format thanks to Brain Control, so it’s becoming less and less likely that whatever Zombie you searched for will be eliminated in the second main phase. Il Blud loves that, since it practically guarantees survival to your turn, at which point you can normal summon it again and bring back your Pyramid Turtle. If you had a Zombie Master in the graveyard as well, you could summon it with Il Blud and then pitch a monster card to it to summon Pyramid Turtle! Really, the possibilities and combinations are essentially endless, and all of them lead to bad things for your opponent.

Finally, I’d like to leave you with a few metagame notes, now that the format is starting to wind down. Unlike the start of the format, literal combo decks like Demise OTK and Diamond Dude Turbo are gone. This is a huge bonus for Zombie players, since they never really had any sort of resilience to those types of decks (outside a potential set of Solemn Judgment cards like the one I chose to play here). Machine beatdown is still the deck to beat based on the last two Shonen Jump Championships. Worlds may have told a bit of a different story, but it was also held under a different Forbidden and Limited list than the standard one to ensure fairness to all representatives. This had the effect of altering the potential metagame, and thus I choose not to use it in making my determinations for what decks to watch out for. Over the next few weeks, my decks will be tuned with T-Hero, Trooper Monarchs, and Machine beatdown as the decks to beat, so please keep that in mind as you read. Hopefully, all of you had a great time at the Tactical Evolution Sneak Preview, so until next time, play hard, play fair, and most importantly, have fun!

Jerome McHale

jcmchale@andrew.cmu.edu

NEXT WEEK: Agggh! I’m being attacked by spinning penguins and bubble robots and those stupid dragonfly things that show up in the corner of the screen! Wait, what do you mean I’m thinking of the wrong game?