Greetings and welcome to the second part of my matchup series, where I go through all different matchups that I have the necessary card to experience, and explain these matchups in details while narrating how I pilot the game as well!
The goal of this serie is to help all new or unexperienced player get to know a certain matchup for a deck in details, to get more familiar with how they should play the match and how to win this certain matchup more than usual and overall get better at the game!
For this post we have the famous Magic vs Death matchup, where I will be playing my card draw magic deck vs a zombie death deck! Now this matchup is very annoying due to the high heal your opponent have from zombies, as well as the strong creatures. So without further ado let's jump into it.
The concept and goal of zombie death!
To further underatand the matchup, let us first talk about how zombie players usually think and what does this deck actually do. So to me, zombie death have 2 phases that completes each other and makes it so strong:
- Phase #1: The phase number one is usually setting up the two main weapons of zombie death which are of course the Necroscepter and Cursed Obelisks to setup a good starting position.
- Phase #2: After setting up their main weapons, they will try and snowball even more with using big, strong mid game creatures to get some damage in and also build and unkillable board with the high HP these creatures have and the threat they can cause.
Now at this point if these 2 phases were completed and not interrupted, you are probably in a really tough spot! In addition to that zombie have these 2 last resorts to finish things off:
Overseer of vitality:
With a board that has at least 2 creatures, this can be devestating either for clearing or the insane damage it can cause to the face.
Corpse Explosion:
You might get to a point where you find yourself starting to take control, however, your opponent might have already done decent damage with the strong or annoying boards he had. This is where some zombie players pulls this card out and finish off the job with it!
So this is how basically the zombie deck is played in general, now let us see how we should play against it to have the best chances of winning! Because of course, you can not win the same matchups always!
How to play against it with card draw!
Now since our deck is literallty called card draw, we have to stick to the archetype and focus on building our hand and drawing mechanics to get tempo. But the key in this matchup is while we are doing that, we have to focus on stopping the phase 1 of the zombie deck which is building his weapons and zombie up to the board!
Since it is almost impossible to come back after they get tempo of zombies + big creatures, we have to try and stop them from getting there since the beginning. To do that we have 2 choices depending on our starting hand.
Option #1: The first option here is going to be to try and have your relic removal early on in your hand, while having 2 card that skyrockets your card draw. Having the relic removal will slow down your opponent so much while you will have even more options for clearing if you start drawing early on. An example of this starting hand will be something like this:
Of course you can replace the two cards for draw with any other card draws that you have, something you have to not be greedy and take what you get!
Option #2: Now of course you will not always get your relic removal from the beginning, so the second best option here is to start with of course something for card draw, but instead to also have some sort of removal spell to slow down your opponent a little bit. Example of these starting hands will be like this:
Tracking Bolt is really good option here especially if you get the Street conjurer in a near draw!
Both of these hands can help start setting up a good early draw while slowing down your opponent at the same time!
Gameplay
Here is a matchup where I play against zombie death while explaining how I am piloting the game and what I am doing:
Final Thoughts
This matchup is not the easiest of matchups for card draw to say the least. Your opponent have so many annoying stuff to deal with and you can not let him slip through. However, it is definitely winnable with the strategy I explained and I did it many times and it got me so many victories against this archetype!
Now of course, you will not always get the starting hand you will need or you opponent will be on fire and the tides will be in his favor but that is just part of the game, so do not feel down and always try again and keep playing your best while thinking ahead!
That was it for this one, I hope you like and I really hope this series would be beneficial for anyone out there that want to get better at the game because that what makes me happy the most! This game has really good potential to grow even more and I hope the developers do the right job for it! Be sure to let me know in the comments what matchup you want to see next! Thank you so much and I will see you on the next one!
Mad Love, Peace out <3