Standard Rotation in Magic: the Gathering is only a couple weeks away, and with preview season for Innistrad: Midnight Hunt in full swing, we’re getting some sense of what deck archetypes are getting support. We know that there’s various tribal support coming in Innistrad from Werewolves, to Vampires, to Humans. But one of the tribes getting great support in the set is Zombies. Today we’ll look at some cards to consider for your zombie decks in new standard.
Existing Cards
There’s a decent number of zombies cards in current standard, so let’s look at options there first.
Wight 
Ebondeath Dracolich
Of the zombie cards that we have right now, I’d look to these 6 to start as our base. Shambling Ghast has proven to be an all star in Standard 2022, as it offers some very versatile death trigger effects. Dungeon Crawler is our modern day Dread Wanderer almost. Wight has a good stat block for a 2 drop, and is a great blocker that can help generate more zombie tokens for us.
Post early game, we have Acererak, the Archlich, which is a lot of stats for 3 mana. We do definitely want to try and complete the Tomb of Annihilation as we get a 4/4 token and get to keep Acererak around. On 4, we have a lord in Death-Priest of Myrkul, and while 4 mana is a lot for this effect, we do get the ability to generate some Skeleton tokens to help with refilling our board. Lastly we have Ebondeath, Dracolich which could be our big bad boss monster. We don’t want to invest too heavily into the existing creature base as I believe that the support in Innistrad will ultimately become a lot of the meat of our deck.
Innistrad Cards
Our new cards that we have are really quite something. Champion of the Perished is our best early game creature, as we can buff it up pretty quickly with our other 1 drop creatures. Next up was another card that was previewed earlier this week, Jadar, Ghoulcaller of Nepahlia. Jadar is a consistent way for us to generate Zombie tokens, to help buff our Champion, but also to put pressure on our opponent.
Our newest creature previewed, Tainted Adversary is a really great early game blocker, but also can be an incredible late game bomb. Even if we can pay the Pseudo-Multikicker cost twice, we generate 4 zombie tokens. We also get a half lord in Bladestitched Skaab. This does mean we have to go into blue, which could be of benefit to us for other reasons.
Other Support Cards
Innistrad: Midnight Hunt gives us one of the best 2 mana removal spells in black ever printed. Infernal Grasp is unconditional creature removal at the cost of only a couple life. If we end up going into Blue, we also can try and play Narfi, Betrayer King as another lord that can be recurred very easily. If we’re playing snow lands we can also look to implement some other zombie synergies from Kaldheim.
READ MORE: MTG Standard Rotation Guide 2021
Zombies is a fan favorite tribe and looks to be getting some really solid support. I’d expect that the cards we have aren’t the only ones coming, so this deck could change and get even better. Definitely keep this on your radar for when the set drops!
Innistrad: Midnight Hunt is the first of two new Innistrad sets coming to Magic: the Gathering. It’s being released in tabletop on September 24th, 2021, and online on September 17th, 2021. Previews start on September 2nd, 2021. Be sure to check out our Preview Gallery to stay up to date with all the new previews. You can also preorder Innistrad: Midnight Hunt product here.
