Over the last few months, Modern has flourished, boasting a diverse metagame with plenty of viable options. To showcase this, The Magic Spotlight: The Hobbit Main Event at SCG Con Dallas, held this past weekend, featured a whopping 921 players and highlighted all kinds of decks. Some players even found success bringing new brews, none more exciting than Rakdos Zombie Typal, which finished with a 10-5 record.
Sacrifice Theme with a Typal Approach
At its core, this Rakdos deck is designed to consistently sacrifice creatures for value, using Gravecrawler as a card that can be repeatedly cast from the graveyard. When paired with Goblin Bombardment, you have the luxury of pinging down opposing creatures or slowly whittling away at the opponent’s life total. Alternatively, you can sacrifice Gravecrawler to Carrion Feeder and repeatedly grow your one-drop.
Of course, for Gravecrawler to be recurred, you need another Zombie in play, which this deck fully leans into. Champion of the Perished is the strongest of the bunch, threatening to grow out of control with all your other Typal one-drops. In slower games, Cryptbreaker can generate card advantage to keep things rolling. Should your Gravecrawler get exiled, Rotten Reunion and Shambling Ghast offer lots of backup fodder to keep your game plan going.
With lots of fodder available, Flare of Malice makes for excellent interaction, taking down massive threats like Kappa Cannoneer for free. In conjunction with Force of Despair, you’re well-suited to disrupt opposing creature decks while still advancing your game plan.
From there, you just need ways to turn the corner, and Sephiroth, Fabled SOLDIER accomplishes this task nicely. On top of offering a nasty Blood Artist effect, transforming Sephiroth is trivial thanks to your recurrable sacrifice fodder. After triggering Sephiroth a bunch, you can even increase your combat damage output via Spymaster’s Vault. While this helps create a focused game plan, its linearity comes at a cost.
Extreme Matchup Variance
While Rakdos Zombies is far from a top-tier archetype, there are at least some factors that help it compete in Modern’s current state, particularly its strong creature deck matchup. Shambling Ghast and Goblin Bombardment make Boros Energy’s threats, and Devoted Druid’s mana dorks look foolish. At the same time, explosive Slickshot Show-Off draws from Izzet Prowess risk getting blown out by your zero-mana kill spells.
Given how popular these decks are, there’s certainly some appeal to this archetype, but if you run into a combo deck, you’re essentially giving an opponent a free win. This deck’s clock simply isn’t fast enough to race decks like Ruby Storm or Song of Creation Combo, and you have no discard spells in the main deck. While Rotten Reunion can, in theory, help cheese the Esper Goryo matchup, the Solitude + Ephemerate
EphemerateExile target creature you control, then return it to the battlefield under its owner's control.
Rebound (If you cast this spell from your hand, exile it as it resolves. At the beginning of your next upkeep, you may cast this card from exile without paying its mana cost.) package is still brutal.
This high level of matchup variance ultimately means that Rakdos Zombies is more a fun choice than a competitive one. Still, a 10-5 record in an event of this size is rather impressive for such a rogue archetype. Consider surprising your friends by bringing this deck to your next Modern FNM.
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