Coldsnap - Beyond the Grave

To a necromancer, death is the most delicious part of life—and when playing the “Beyond the Grave” deck, you’re the necromancer. Don’t hesitate to send your minions to their doom, because each death increases your dark powers. The more corpses you produce, the more zombie fodder you’ll have, and the more spells you’ll return from your graveyard to your hand.

Early in the game, play defensively. Block and trade your creatures for your opponent’s creatures. Don’t worry, cadavers come in handy later! This deck needs a lot of mana, so just keep your opponent’s strategy in check while playing lands turn after turn. Later in the game, the tide will turn in your favor.

As the game progresses, don’t stop letting your creatures fall in combat—in fact, that’s the key to your success. It’s especially good for you when certain creatures, like Insidious Bookworms, die. To make things even better, whenever one of your creatures is marked for death due to a spell or combat damage, sacrifice it to Skull Catapult, Orcish Bloodpainter, or Gutless Ghoul instead. If Sek’Kuar is overseeing things, you’ll get a bonus 3/1 Graveborn creature token no matter how the creature dies. When the creature hits the graveyard, you can return any cards with recover in your graveyard to your hand. If you return Grim Harvest to your hand, you can use it to get back the creature that just died, then pop it right back into play! If that’s not an option, you can recycle the corpse with Balduvian Dead to create a Graveborn token that, itself, dies at the end of the turn . . . setting off the cycle all over again!

This deck can be complex to play, since there are so many triggers and options. You have to be extra careful when there are recover cards in your graveyard: If one of your creatures dies when you don’t have the mana to pay the recover cost, you lose the recover card forever. The deck also has no way to block flying creatures, so they’re particularly dangerous threats.

Once you’ve played a bit with this deck, you might want to modify it to your tastes. An interesting angle is to include some Golgari cards from the Ravnica: City of Guilds set. Many cards from that guild, such as Golgari Germination and Savra, Queen of the Golgari, make it even more beneficial to you to bump off your own creatures. It’s a match made in—well, you don’t want to know!

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