Hey guys! In response to my article about Suicide Zoo last week, I asked my readers which they would rather see: a video about Grixis Control, or one with Suicide Zoo. You guys voted Suicide Zoo, so I did a short Video Tech and then ran the list through an 8-man event to try it out.

As this is my first run at producing content in this format, I would appreciate all feedback regarding video quality, presentation, etc., in addition to the usual comments about the deck and gameplay. I feel that an alternating video/written notes structure is best as well, as it can be used either to elaborate on a point mentioned during the video and passed over or highlight a topic I forgot to mention. Let’s begin!

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Suicide Zoo Deck Tech

There's one more concept I would like to mention but didn’t feel like I’d be able to clearly express it in the video: our role in matchups. Due to the explosive nature of our deck we are almost always the beatdown, even in matchups against Burn and Affinity. Not only do we have few (if any) ways to interact with our opponent, every card in our deck is working towards our goal of winning the race. Our opponent is often incentivized into racing us, as our creatures are difficult to block profitably due to our abundant tricks and we often deal 8-12 damage to ourselves anyways. Keep this in mind when boarding, I often leave Dismember in the sideboard even when it has targets, depending on what else I’m boarding in/out. Every cantrip removed from the deck decreases our virtual creature count and makes opening hands slightly worse. Don’t overboard!

Round 1: Grixis Control

The only thing I would say about this matchup is that Gitaxian Probe and Thoughtseize make it abundantly clear how our deck capitalizes on hyper-efficiency and using life as a resource to keep our opponent on the back foot. At 15:54 we Probe our opponent, revealing his keep of three land, Dispel, Snapcaster Mage, Spellskite, and Cryptic Command. While this hand has some glaring issues (mainly, the lack of removal) it’s still a strong hand for our opponent’s deck, but easily invalidated by a lot of what we are doing in the matchup. After a Thoughtseize taking Spellskite, we easily played around our opponent’s Dispel and just clocked him with cheap creatures while threatening our all-in combo. One of the things I love most about this deck is how horrible it makes opposing “fine draws” look.

Round 2: Storm

The Storm matchup is one that I’m not very familiar with, but it seems to be about as non-interactive as any matchup could probably be. There’s not much that can be said about our strategy besides just attempting to kill our opponent as fast as possible, but we were doing that anyways. Because this matchup comes down to killing our opponent before he can “go off”, post board we should make sure not to overboard and possibly be a little aggressive concerning our mulligan decisions, as slow hands might look fine on the surface but probably aren’t good enough to “get there”. One of the best lessons I’ve learned concerning mulligans went something along the lines of “don’t evaluate hands based on land/spell ratio, but rather look at hands and ask can I win the game with this?”

Round 3: Burn

Burn can be such a swingy matchup, depending largely on the makeup of our hand. Boarding out eight cantrips means that we are doing less damage to ourselves at the cost of decreased consistency. Leyline of Sanctity is not an “auto-win”, as our opponent can still find ways to use his burn spells advantageously. More than anything, the matchup really comes down to how quickly can we find and cast Death's Shadow. Sometimes, we drop an early Shadow and our opponent is dead the next turn. Other times we can’t seem to get anything going and we’re dead on turn four while our opponent still has multiple cards in hand. I would call the matchup close, probably slightly in Burn’s favor, but I think it’s closer than most people believe. I would have loved to win one on camera to show the naysayers, but we can’t win em’ all. If anyone has Burn online, stop by the stream and let’s play a set!

Conclusion

All in all, Suicide Zoo is an incredibly fun deck capable of some insane draws. The deck has a surprising amount of play to it, and there are many intricacies and complicated lines of play to be explored that aren’t found in some of the other linear strategies. Suicide Zoo is first and foremost a fun deck to play, but I’ve found that the deck presents a unique puzzle that the pilot and the opponent have to get used to solving, and it’s a great exercise and example of one of Magic’s fundamental principles in action. Give the deck a try: I think you’ll like it!

Trevor Holmes
The_Architect on MTGO
Twitch.tv/Architect_Gaming