A fast combo zombie deck centred around a harmless looking skeleton / ignited / bone jumble getting buffed into outer space by the likes of necropotence / overpower / gift of the wolf and going on a rampage with willing tribute / grapple shot / blaze of glory grigori rasputin.

This deck runs with the assumption you're going to spend the 1 mana every turn to make a skeleton. It has a very low curve to support that, peaking on 2 mana, so you can always afford it. After making and testing a bunch of necromancer decks, I keep finding that this is critical in order for your avatar to generate enough value to compete with the likes of archie, sorcerer, druid, and savior, and even more so if your strategy relies on having a little innocent looking skeleton at the corner of the realm ready to turn into the hulk. This also lines up well with searing truth, as the curve is naturally low.

Since we are priced into double fire already, gift of the serpent gives us a tidy way to take care of midrange or bigger units, that replaces itself. Add morgana le fay and boudicca and we now have a formidable lineup of fire cards. We also need earth for the critical buffs, and air for willing tribute, desecrate, bone jumble and eclipse.

With so many buffs and doublers, the deck operates as a psuedo-otk strategy, regularly putting out 16 or so damage out of nowhere, but there are enough generically powerful aggressive cheap cards that it can easily overwhelm a slower deck even if it stumbles to find a combo.

Even the small buffs snowball. Trinket on a skele, attack, sac it to jumble, pick up trinket, attack, banish it to grigori rasputin, gain charge and its power, pick up trinket, attack. Or road to perdition + overpower on a skele, attack, sac willing tribute to untap it, attack, grapple shot.

With toolbox and common sense, we have access to a tonne of relevant effects in a pinch. This enables things like fetch gift of the serpent, cast on a skele, then blaze of glory as a surprise board clear. Or fetch grapple shot, necropotence a skele, hit for 12 with your willing tribute out.

History

A long time ago, in a land far far away (alpha meta), my main deck i played was seer control, with orb of baal berith and craterize + major explosion to kill them out of nowhere. The deck kinda sucked, and got run over by the fast stuff in the meta, but I still felt like there was something to the combo. Packing your deck with answers and sweepers that can double as your finishers seemed really powerful, and being able to bypass healing by killing them from a high life total in one turn.

The moment AL released, i swapped out seer for archimago and juiced up the deck with things like arcane barrage, a common sense package etc. It was infinitely more powerful, but archie drew so much hate i felt bad playing it. People were bored as i was barely playing a minion, and I was bored as i wasn't doing anything particularly proactive, and i technically wasnt killing them in one turn either...

Along came a brew of mine called otk archie, that went through about a billion iterations. I initially used buffs and double strikers like overpower and gigantism, skirmishers of mu and quarrelsome kobolds. The core reason the deck worked was that overpower and critical strike are both ordinary, and can be common sensed. This was really fun to play, but folded to any removal as the buff carriers were few and far between, and all of them died to a humble lightning bolt. All you needed to do to win was keep the skirmishers and kobolds off the board. Over time, i found myself morphing the deck more and more into a classic archie deck as cuts and additions for consistency happened, and all of a sudden it was just a bad archie deck.

Back to the drawing board. I started looking at stealth as the critical piece, to ensure my units survived the turn and could take advantage of the buffs and critical strikes. I also needed some buff carriers to be ordinary, so they could be common sensed in a pinch. I ended up with band of thieves and dead of night demon as my core units, and the deck started functioning a lot better.

All of a sudden i could almost always find a stealthy buff carrier. The issue this time, however, aside from the fact the deck was pretty boring to play against as it was a little like solitaire (opponent can't often interact with stealth), was that it was still just too slow and clunky. I would often have to spend the whole turn and bunch of mana to develop a stealthy unit (common sense into band of thieves then play him for 5 total). If i had to fend off early aggression i was likely dead in the water, and now i had some very dead draws. T6 empty hand draw dead of night demon does not feel good when facing down 3 units.

Along comes gothic, but i can't get my focus off archie, as its just too tempting to double buff or double critical strike. Now we have necropotence and gift of the wolf, both slam dunks for the strategy, along with some more doublers like willing tribute that can be common sensed.

Staying true to my stealth-based game-plan, I pivot to water to take advantage of the new survivors of serava, which together with sly fox, can fill the stealth role while at least chipping away early game. This helps mitigate the issue in the previous version of this strategy, where none of my units can interact without losing stealth. I could now buff then kill a 3 power unit or something, and get stealth back, letting me hold off early aggression more.

We also have pretty good access to buff carriers given a bunch of them are ordinary, but we are still have some very dead draws, like the second or third stealth unit, but the real issue is the change to 60 card decks.

That change hurts a lot, as the number of buffs available is pretty limited. The obvious floor in the water-based stealth unit plan is it doesnt take advantage of the best new buff, necropotence, or the best new doubler, willing tribute. A few test games with this list and it’s clear the deck is not working as well as it could.

I full circle out of water and build another shell for this with undead units at the core this time, to take advantage of these new bursty cards. In the process, I realise we no longer need stealth that much. The role it was filling, other than just trying to help our units survive long enough to get buffed, was to help hit their avatar directly with critical strike. In order to hit them, we need to play in close amongst all their units, so blockers become a major issue.

Adding willing tribute solves this in its own way, as they let you have a doubler that doesnt care about hitting the avatar directly, so we can combo at the fringes of their sites and avoid blockers. Add desecrate as essentially another willing tribute effect, and all of a sudden the deck was looking cohesive again. Our skeleton generation is also primarily spells, like undead ambush, exhume, raise militia etc., so archie is much happier here. We also play earth and air, so get both open grave and open mausoleum as site-based skeles.

This new brew felt really powerful, and looked great on paper. But a few games in I started finding i had a similar problem to versions in the past, where without stealth, having a buff carrier was never guaranteed, and if i put in enough redundancy to ensure that, the deck was just too slow and clunky.

God forbid i was looking at stealth again. But lets take stock. The deck wants stealth as a way to ensure you can have units to carry the buffs, but to support the stealth plan we need vanishments, fades, and some pretty mediocre minions. The minion-generating spells are too slow to compete against fast decks. If i put enough units to guarantee we will have one, archie starts to feel like rubbish, and we are just playing a bad minion deck half the time. Sorcery just doesnt have the card draw or filtering to support combos. If i try to pack in enough units and enough buffs to consistently have both effects, there wont be the slots left to survive against fast decks.

At that point i realised im a silly goose and i've been building it backwards... In my avatar choice, the allure of double critical strike or triple overpower had got to my head. Im focusing too much on the buff and not enough on the buff carrier. In A+B combos, especially where B is dead without A, you need to focus on the A side of the combo, and they need to be powerful enough in their own right to be playable when the combo doesnt come together. Archie supporting (and not actually providing) the B in my A+B combo is just too greedy.

It suddenly made sense why all my previous attempts playing mad scientist to find good enough A's (units) to carry the B's (buffs) had fallen flat on their backs. I need the avatar to provide one side of the combo on its own, ideally the A.

Queue necromancer.

What if you could guarantee having a body to carry buffs? What if that body carried the evil keyword so it could be targeted by willing tribute and desecrate? What if it was an undead so it could be targeted by necropotence??? What if, when you dont put together the A+B combo, the deck could function competitively as an aggro deck, so the buffs function more as the sugar on top, rather than a critical combo piece? What if you could now run arguably the best buff out there, torshammar trinket, since you reliably have a carrier? What if you could run a card to refill your hand when you dump it out early, as a rare way to refuel that the strategy never had before, that can also act as a late-game finisher by targeting the opponent - hello searing truth.