[SCD] Necromancer's Stockpile

[MGB]

Necromancer's Stockpile
Enchantment, 1B

{1}{B}, Discard a creature card: Draw a card. If the discarded card was a Zombie card, put a 2/2 black Zombie creature token onto the battlefield tapped.


So this card was released in M15 and after watching Conley Woods play it in a Standard deck at Pro Tour M15, it caught my eye as the cornerstone of a potential Legacy deck. Why has no one experimented with this or build something around it? It seems like a very powerful card in the right deck.

Of course you would slot this into a Zombie deck. We know zombies haven't been the most competitive deck in Legacy's history, but if we essentially have a 1B card advantage engine as the centerpiece, then maybe we have something. And then there are cards like Gempalm Polluter and even Patriarch's Bidding that take advantage of the situation that this card would often create. And recently printed Zombies are very good at making this effect even more assymetrical - Grave Crawler being a major new addition that would be excellent alongside this card.

The first thing that most people do when analyzing this card is to compare it to Zombie Infestation. It's similar, but this card creates actual card advantage whereas Infestation creates card disadvantage with every activation. The mana cost is steeper per activation, but the fact that this is an actual draw engine of sorts merits far more consideration than anything like Zombie Infestation. A 1B mana cost is always easier to pay than two cards from hand.

Could this be enough to give Mono Black Zombies the ability to play the long game and shore up that weakness that has always been present in tempo-oriented aggressive black decks?

[rufus]

So this card was released in M15 and after watching Conley Woods play it in a Standard deck at Pro Tour M15, it caught my eye as the cornerstone of a potential Legacy deck. Why has no one experimented with this or build something around it? It seems like a very powerful card in the right deck. ...

The mana costs are prohibitive by legacy standards, and most of the time, Zombie Infestation is simply better.

[MGB]

The mana costs are prohibitive by legacy standards, and most of the time, Zombie Infestation is simply better.

Zombie Infestation creates card disadvantage while this creates actual card advantage. I'd gladly pay 1B to create long-term card advantage. In fact, paying two cards is far more costly than paying 1B and gaining a card in addition to a 2/2 body. The power level between these cards is pretty far apart.

What is unique about this card is that it does something powerful mid/late game that mono black aggro decks rarely have had the ability to do in the past. Most black zombie decks packed with early disruption have struggled to keep pace with decks that have stronger mid/late games and can create card advantage steadily. This might change that.

[iamajellydonut]

There are three hundred and thirty seven Zombies in Magic: The Gathering and all of them suck except for Nameless Inversion. Forty four of them are non-black and they represent the worst. Tack those on to an over-dependance on the grave and a card that makes Bearscape look good and you have a deck that looks like it had a stroke.

[rufus]

There are three hundred and thirty seven Zombies in Magic: The Gathering and all of them suck except for Nameless Inversion. Forty four of them are non-black and they represent the worst. Tack those on to an over-dependance on the grave and a card that makes Bearscape look good and you have a deck that looks like it had a stroke.

To be fair, there are some other borderline ones like Gravecrawler,Tidehollow Sculler,Geralf's Messenger, and Haakon. Of course, most of those will work better with Zombie Infestation, so...

[maharis]

About the only way I see this card working is with the Shambling Shell engine — you get a 2/2, dredge 3, get your card back. I'm not sure if there's a deck that wants to do that but doesn't already have a better way to do it. But you can Entomb or Green Sun's Zenith for half the engine, so maybe there's some way to break it.

[sjmcc13]

About the only way I see this card working is with the Shambling Shell engine — you get a 2/2, dredge 3, get your card back. I'm not sure if there's a deck that wants to do that but doesn't already have a better way to do it. But you can Entomb or Green Sun's Zenith for half the engine, so maybe there's some way to break it.Same, you need a card that can come back to your hand to get any real value out of this, and even then it is to slow. now if Squee was a zombie... nah still to slow.

Now in modern it might be fun, but Legacy If I want to dredge, I will just play dredge, and it has better options.

[[SLAYER]chaos]

I was looking at this in Modern and not Legacy. You do lose a lot of the cards that would make this engine insane like Cabal Therapy, Anger, Entomb, or fast mana (chrome mox/mox diamond).

Edit: Nevermind, Wonder instead of Anger. Didn't know the tokens came into play tapped.

[MGB]

What makes this card intriguing is that you don't HAVE to go all-in on the graveyard. Shambling shell is a nice play, but if they board in graveyard hate that would kill dredge, you don't have to die to it if you run a deck built around this. Stockpile doesn't require any graveyard interaction whatsoever, and you can extract tons of value from it even without something like Shambling Shell.

[apple713]

Max potential for this card would be modern not legacy. To play it in legacy you would have to remove the mana cost from the activation.

[TsumiBand]

With Tymaret, the Murder King you do have kind of a derpy engine thing going on, I suppose? Discard Tymaret to Stockpile, if you hate your card, sac the zombie to get Tyramet back, etc.

Maybe I just want Tymaret to be a playable thing. He's the king of murder! C'mon! It's like how Michael Jackson is the King of Pop; Tyramet is just as unwilling to truly die and just as bad to have around children. He should be crushing the metagame! Let's make a decklist already!

[iamajellydonut]

and you can extract tons of value from it even without something like Shambling Shell.

No, you can't. If Necormancer's Stockpile said "discard a card", I'd be all over it. Cycle a late-game Thoughtseize or Island? Awesome. But it doesn't. It says "creature". Hell, part of my joke was that you can't even discard Nameless Inversion to Necromancer's Stockpile. The only way to make use of Necromancer's Stockpile other than including poor creatures strictly for the interaction would be discarding cards that you actually want to cast.

[Richard Cheese]

With Tymaret, the Murder King you do have kind of a derpy engine thing going on, I suppose? Discard Tymaret to Stockpile, if you hate your card, sac the zombie to get Tyramet back, etc.

Maybe I just want Tymaret to be a playable thing. He's the king of murder! C'mon! It's like how Michael Jackson is the King of Pop; Tyramet is just as unwilling to truly die and just as bad to have around children. He should be crushing the metagame! Let's make a decklist already!

I just want to play him because he looks like GiantDad (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyA8odjCzZ4).

[TsumiBand]

I just want to play him because he looks like GiantDad (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyA8odjCzZ4).

That's uncanny.

I do like me some Tymaret though. Blow up Goblin Guides after chumping a durdle/durdle monster? Check. Chump block a thing and come back later? Check. Look like a weirdo, I guess? Check check.

[Richard Cheese]

That's uncanny.

I do like me some Tymaret though. Blow up Goblin Guides after chumping a durdle/durdle monster? Check. Chump block a thing and come back later? Check. Look like a weirdo, I guess? Check check.

Fire up the Bass Cannon? Che-WUBWUBWUBWUBWUBWUBWUBWUB

[Esper3k]

I've been wanting this card to work!

Some other thoughts:
-this seems to fit decently into the Vengevine / Gravecrawler / Carrion Feeder shell as it lets you discard your Vengevines while drawing a card
- Vengeful Pharoah was an interesting card I saw to play with this. Discard the Pharoah to Stockpile, kill their Delver / Goyf seems decent
- Maybe we can finally make a deck worth playing 4x Squee?

[ESG]

As the undisputed king of Vengeful Pharaoh in Legacy, I can say that Necromancer's Stockpile is far worse than Phyrexian Arena. What kills this card is having to sink two mana into it with each activation. The best value you could get from it would be dumping Squee every turn, but that kind of mana-to-draw ratio doesn't cut it these days. Graveyard strategies have been getting progressively pushed out of playability, and any kind of incremental-advantage deck built around Necromancer's Stockpile is going to rely heavily on the graveyard. You can build a deck around it, but that deck won't be better than the format's marquee graveyard decks, yet it will still get hosed by Rest in Peace and Terminus.

[MaximumC]

About the only way I see this card working is with the Shambling Shell engine — you get a 2/2, dredge 3, get your card back. I'm not sure if there's a deck that wants to do that but doesn't already have a better way to do it. But you can Entomb or Green Sun's Zenith for half the engine, so maybe there's some way to break it.

I agree with this man. The way that you make this card work is you play it with Dredge. You discard the dredger as part of the cost, meaning you get to replace your draw with dredge. At that point, it basically reads:

"1B: Reveal a card with Dredge X in your hand. Mill X cards. If it was Shambling Shell you revealed, also get a 2/2 zombie."

That's probably a piss poor use of Dredge in Legacy, since you have far more powerful ways of filling your yard. However, in Modern, this might actually be one of the best ways to grind out value from your yard. You have lots of ways of making this kind of thing work for value:

1. Re-animators like Vengevine, Gravecrawler, Bloodghast, Nether Traitor

This kind of goes without mentioning, but all of these cards are good with Stockpile. They give you value out of the yard, whether you Stockpiled them or Dredged them there. I can see setting up a turn 5 play where you Dredge a stockpile, drop a land, and end up bringing a bloodghast, a crawler, and a vine back into play to quickly wreck face. Thats not necessarily unplayable. The other nice thing is that none of these cards are terrible hard casts either, particularly Gravecrawler and Vine, so you can play around yard hate by just playing as an aggro deck.

2. Scourge of Stromgald + Nameless Inversion

Another yard-based interaction good with Dredge-Pile is using Scourge to nuke your opponents repatedly with Inversion. Admittedly, this takes some setup, and there very few other Knights that would be worth using in a deck like this.

3. Vengeful Pharoah

This is a wonderful card that doesn't see much play. I don't really like it as removal because the opponents gets to choose when it goes off. So, will they hit you with that 3/4 Goyf when Pharaoh is in the yard? Of course not! In the meantime, Goyf is a big fat wall stopping your Zombies from getting in. You have accomplished very little other than preventing him from attacking until the attack is going to be lethal, or he has an answer for Pharaoh.

The nice thing about all of these interactions is that they can be protected as a yard strategy by things like Ground Seal, which also stops opposing yard based decks. Of course, Rest in Peace is pretty bad.

I dunno, my impression at the moment is that this card is at least one powerful interaction away from being a good deck.

EDIT: Here's an existing Dredgevine deck that might be a worthwhile starting place:

http://sales.starcitygames.com//deckdatabase/displaydeck.php?DeckID=71457

What does this deck look like if you switch out some number of Grisley Salvages and Faithless Lootings for Stockpile?

[trollking21]

One cool interaction between vengeful Pharaoh and necromancer's stockpile happens at instant speed. So after they declare attack you can ditch him draw a card and put him back on top. So he can function as real removal once an ld a attack deterant till they can deal with him, or present lethal. A vengeful pharough could very easily beat a deck like RUG that has a very limited amount of threats.
But perhaps I'm overselling myself on a cute interactiom

[easysantiago]

Same, you need a card that can come back to your hand to get any real value out of this, and even then it is to slow. now if Squee was a zombie... nah still to slow.

Now in modern it might be fun, but Legacy If I want to dredge, I will just play dredge, and it has better options.

Zombie tribal fans should just accept that Dredge and all its variants are the zombie decks in Legacy and move on with it.

[FTW]

But I want to play bad creatures and spend 1B a bunch of times to create 4 2/2 zombie tokens over 6 turns instead of paying 0 mana and making 9 2/2 zombie tokens over 2 turns.

[TsumiBand]

What, you don't want to play the hilariously bad slew of Black Madness cards? "EOT, discard Nightshade Assassin to Necromancer's Stockpile, pay the Madness -- ! I'll reveal Gibbering Descent and Brain Gorgers to give your dude -2/-2, which doesn't kill it, but I don't even care. Look how tiny he is! Tee hee!"

[MGB]

But I want to play bad creatures and spend 1B a bunch of times to create 4 2/2 zombie tokens over 6 turns instead of paying 0 mana and making 9 2/2 zombie tokens over 2 turns.

I guess you also want to be completely hosed by dedicate graveyard hate and the preponderance of Deathrite Shaman in the format, too.

People act like playing Dredge and going all-in on the graveyard is just something with no drawbacks in g2 and g3. This card does *not* require graveyard dependence, which is what makes it interesting. Is it stronger with a graveyard recursion engine? Yes. But it doesn't require it.

What made Survival of the Fittest really powerful in its Vengevival heyday was not that it used the graveyard to power out a combo, but that it could continue to function if the graveyard was compromised. Extirpate all of their Vengevines and you still have to deal with a great utility tutor.

If you Rest in Peace with Stockpile on the board, I should in theory be able to still cycle through my deck pitching other creatures and creating tokens. If you Rest in Peace with a Dredge deck, I'm hosed until I find my anti-hate from the sideboard.

[iamajellydonut]

What made Survival of the Fittest really powerful in its Vengevival heyday was not that it used the graveyard to power out a combo, but that it could continue to function if the graveyard was compromised. Extirpate all of their Vengevines and you still have to deal with a great utility tutor.

What makes Survival of the Fittest great is its ability to turn any creature into an instant one mana tutor. By sharp contrast, Necromancer's Stockpile makes bears. Sometimes.

[MGB]

What makes Survival of the Fittest great is its ability to turn any creature into an instant one mana tutor. By sharp contrast, Necromancer's Stockpile makes bears. Sometimes.

Clearly Survival is one of the best cards to ever grace this format. My point was simply to illustrate that the really good cards often cannot be attacked from one angle. That is a good quality to have - being multidimensional. Dredge, on the other hand, is a Tier 2 strategy and always will be a Tier 2 strategy simply because it is completely All-In on the graveyard.

What I like about Stockpile is its ability to be multidimensional. Yes, you can play Shambling Shell and have a graveyard-based recursion engine, but you can still generate card advantage in a deck filled with Zombies by cycling them for 1B and generating tokens, and this doesn't have to be affected by any graveyard hate. Tutoring for stuff is obviously more powerful, but then again Survival was so powerful it was banned. This will never be banned, but it might be playable and even strong.

[iamajellydonut]

How many Zombies were you planning on running? Sixteen and a half Gravecrawlers to be sure (great start), and beyond that? Haakon's cute, but ultimately a waste of slots. Same with Blood Scrivener. You pretty much end up with Tidehollow Sculler as the only Zombie creature that you don't have to justify. Toss that in with basic staples like Deathrite Shaman and probably Dark Confidant and your shell is looking pretty sparse in terms of food.

Feel free to giggle screaming "ZOMBIE O'CLOCK" or some catch-phrase that wasn't first claimed by CatPost, but don't get your hopes up on a feature match.

[MGB]

How many Zombies were you planning on running? Sixteen and a half Gravecrawlers to be sure (great start), and beyond that? Haakon's cute, but ultimately a waste of slots. Same with Blood Scrivener. You pretty much end up with Tidehollow Sculler as the only Zombie creature that you don't have to justify. Toss that in with basic staples like Deathrite Shaman and probably Dark Confidant and your shell is looking pretty sparse in terms of food.

Feel free to giggle screaming "ZOMBIE O'CLOCK" or some catch-phrase that wasn't first claimed by CatPost, but don't get your hopes up on a feature match.

Here's a starting point:

4 Thoughtseize
4 Swords to Plowshares

4 Gravecrawler
4 Carnophage
4 Tidehollow Sculler
4 Geralf's Messenger
4 Gempalm Polluter
4 Death Baron
2-3 Withered Wretch

4 Necromancer's Stockpile

[iamajellydonut]

So, again, sixteen and a half Gravecrawlers is not a strong core. That list has twenty dead cards, not even solid beaters, and "2-3" obsolete bears.

[MGB]

So, again, sixteen and a half Gravecrawlers is not a strong core. That list has twenty dead cards, not even solid beaters, and "2-3" obsolete bears.

Twenty dead cards? Maybe they are not Tarmogoyfs, but they're most assuredly not dead. Would you call Goblins or Elves dead cards just because they are suboptimal as individual creatures? No, because you realize that you sacrifice individual power to contribute to a greater whole.

[iamajellydonut]

Would you call Goblins or Elves dead cards just because they are suboptimal as individual creatures? No, because you realize that you sacrifice individual power to contribute to a greater whole.

Suboptimal as individual creatures? Maybe, but Goblins and Elves have a cohesive plan and the means to consistently make that plan work. And every card, from Lackey to Siege Gang to Symbiote to Craterhoof is alive. There is hardly a single card in either deck, right down to the lands, that doesn't work towards the greater cause. But what's here? Gravecrawler does nothing. Carnophage does nothing. Geralf's Messenger does nothing. Gempalm Polluter does nothing. Death Baron does nothing. Withered Wretch is unnecessary.

"Being a creature" is not enough. Life is the least important resource and these cards don't even present a relevant clock. None of those cards generate mana. Kill creatures. Disrupt their hand. Protect you. Disrupt their board. Generate consistency. Get more cards. If you open up with a hand that contains only those, you've just lost the war. You're running them because, and only because, they're Zombies huzzah. That should not be the case.

[TsumiBand]

Undead Gladiator + Astral Slide

Undead Gladiator is a recursive dude that hops back into your hand after he's been cycled/discarded/killed/whatever. Also a Zombie so whether you're cycling for Astral Glide or throwing it at Stockpile, it's value like Dollar General

Astral Slide has been tryina get back in the game since forever

You cycle through your deck for dat Wrath effect, stalling with Astral Slide and then blowing suckers out with tons of Zombies

You also get to play Tidehollow Sculler. And can stack-trick the shit out him with Astral Slide in play to exile cards permanent-like. Maybe you also play LftL or something similar

Can also maybe rock Eternal Dragon, who doesn't love that guy?

I'm probably not serious. But what if I was? Is this concept (a) Worse than Tight Sight (b) destined for glory (c) Tom Hanks (d) worth the $3.68 USD for a playset of Undead Gladiators? I have no idea

[rufus]

...

Great idea! How does Necromancer's Stockpile fit in? :wink:

[TsumiBand]

Great idea! How does Necromancer's Stockpile fit in? :wink:

Err right.

With Undead Gladiator being recursive cycling Zombie, you can play him in lots of different ways -

1) Discard to Necromancer's Stockpile, draw card and make a Zombie, return it to hand at next upkeep
2) Cycle it to Astral Slide, RFG a thing until next EOT, return it to hand at next upkeep
3) Chump blocker for life, again returning to hand at next upkeep

The big drawback is that unlike a RW Rifter deck or whatever, you cannot trigger both Astral Slide and Necromancer's Stockpile at once. So you're either/or with Undead Gladiator; whether you need to make a Zombie token or RFG a thing, he can do one or the other.

It's really kind of meh and slow and probably not very good :) hah

[easysantiago]

Undead Gladiator + Astral Slide

Undead Gladiator is a recursive dude that hops back into your hand after he's been cycled/discarded/killed/whatever. Also a Zombie so whether you're cycling for Astral Glide or throwing it at Stockpile, it's value like Dollar General

Astral Slide has been tryina get back in the game since forever

You cycle through your deck for dat Wrath effect, stalling with Astral Slide and then blowing suckers out with tons of Zombies

You also get to play Tidehollow Sculler. And can stack-trick the shit out him with Astral Slide in play to exile cards permanent-like. Maybe you also play LftL or something similar

Can also maybe rock Eternal Dragon, who doesn't love that guy?

I'm probably not serious. But what if I was? Is this concept (a) Worse than Tight Sight (b) destined for glory (c) Tom Hanks (d) worth the $3.68 USD for a playset of Undead Gladiators? I have no idea

(c) Tom Hanks

[easysantiago]

But I want to play bad creatures and spend 1B a bunch of times to create 4 2/2 zombie tokens over 6 turns instead of paying 0 mana and making 9 2/2 zombie tokens over 2 turns.

Sounds about right.