Zombies

Deck Introduction
Zombies as a strategy make excellent use of battle tutors to gain advantage through Creature Swap, trading small monsters for more useful monsters on your opponent’s side of the field. The ability to revive and recycle many of the zombie monsters played grants the strategy extra grind power for the late game. Zombies exhibit their fullest potential through their ability to churn out powerful synchro monsters by means of Plaguespreader Zombie, one of the most powerful tuners in the format! The rest of the deck is a standard tempo deck, playing many powerful one for one Spells and Traps that prevent your opponent from making explosive comeback plays, in so doing zombies pave the way for victory from beyond the grave!

Deck Strategy
Pyramid Turtle is one of the more powerful battle tutors in the game as it is able to tutor out any zombie from the deck with sufficiently low defence, as compared to the elemental battle tutors which have an ATK point ceiling of 1500 points. This is made even more impactful as the first recruit is likely to be Zombie Master, the main player in maintaining field presence by trading hand advantage to revive level 4 and lower zombies. This becomes especially important because Zombie Master’s revival effect lacks a “once per turn” clause. While Pyramid Turtle pairs especially well with Creature Swap, Goblin Zombie pairs especially well with Caius or Plaguespreader Zombie. Upon leaving the field, for any reason, Goblin Zombie triggers a search effect to recruit powerful zombies directly from the deck such as Mezuki, Plaguespreader, and Spirit Reaper. Another powerful effect lacking a “once per turn” clause! This means you can recruit multiple times a turn and maintain hand advantage while putting out powerful level 6 synchro monsters such as Brionac, Dragon of the Ice Barrier! The ability to control the number of monsters in the graveyard enabled by zombies enables the deck to make use of the powerful Dark Armed Dragon as well! A beast that only requires your grave to contain precisely 3 Dark monsters in order to summon, after which point you can revive those very same Dark monsters for use in synchro summons and make twice the use by banishing those Darks later for Dark Armed’s effect. With how grave friendly zombies are, it’s practically essential to max out on Rykos so as to accelerate feeding the grave with different zombie monsters to revive later. With this general strategy making up the bulk of the offensive components, the remaining spells and traps serve disrupt your opponent’s attempts to reset the battlefield, using Book of Moon to set tuners/non-tuners that would allow your opponent to shift the momentum, and Bottomless Trap Hole to permanently remove powerful threats when summoned.

Strengths and Weaknesses
​Zombies are a very robust strategy due to their recurrability and recruitability. Additionally, access to niche synchros such as Revived Ruler Ha Des, to neutralize powerful Flip and “when this card is destroyed by battle” effects, and Doomkaiser Dragon, to gain advantage by reviving opponent’s monsters while Zombie World is active provide for added avenues to apply pressure to your opponent! The capacity to stall your opponent with battle tutors that can be revived and then trade those for useful boss monsters applies significant pressure to the opponent whose resources can’t as easily be traded exchanged for cards in the graveyard. One of the main drawbacks to zombies is their ability to be floodgated out of the game by Necrovalley and The End of Anubis. Without the ability to make use of their graveyard effect or revival mechanics, zombies are on average very weak with the only beaters being Mezuki and Zombie master, sporting 1700 and 1800 ATK respectively. Perhaps even more of a threat is D.D. Crow which can be chained to Mezuki or Zombie Master’s effect once a target for revival has been declared, with potentially devastating effects if your lone Plaguespreader if sniped. Finally, Consecrated Light  and Shadow-Imprisoning Mirror are both threats in the side game due to their ability to shut off power cards like Plague, Zombie Master, Caius,  Mezuki, and Dark Armed. While many of the aforementioned cards do not effect the powerful synchro monsters that zombies are able to churn out, they do prevent zombies from being able to churn them out in the first place.