An Inspiring Start

Being a fan of D&D and Magic: the Gathering, I was immediately drawn to the premise that the Star City Games' Commander VS team laid out in their season 13 Halloween horde episode. The idea of encouraging creative - and in some cases suboptimal - deckbuilding through themed restrictions sparked my propensity for unconventional builds. Of course, the prospect of building more decks than any person in their right mind and wallet should was equally enticing. Combine that with a desire to introduce a semi-cooperative game in the vein of Betrayal at House on the Hill to my playgroup and my next obsession was in full swing.

As far as the rules, the Commander VS team laid some good groundwork. Three levels of the horde with intermingled loot offered a great dungeon delving feel. Using that as my starting point for gameplay, I decided to focus on the fun part of building the class decks so I could start the tweaking. To do this, I wanted to have a deck for each of the base D&D 5e classes: barbarian, bard, cleric, druid, fighter, monk, paladin, ranger, rogue, sorcerer, warlock, and wizard. Each class deck, would pull inspiration from abilities and spells laid out in the rulebooks.

Prepping for the Journey

I wanted to stick to the basic limitations of the Commander format, so narrowing down the list of available commanders helped focus my deckbuilding, while also bringing to light other restrictions for the sake of the intent of the game. The first was forgoing infinite combos that just ended the horde without much of a fight. Easy-to-assemble combos like Exquisite Blood + Sanguine Bond, Duskmantle Guildmage + Mindcrank, and Felidar Guardian + Saheeli Rai seemed to counter the spirit and challenge of the game. That also brought me to the realization that Planeswalkers, as powerful as they are, not only added more complexity to the game mechanics, but also could easily take control of the game. Since D&D encourages bending the rules for the sake of the story, there some exceptions that will be discussed on the specific deck pages; however, I tried to maintain the spirit of the classes and fun of the game.

After meticulously combing the commander pages on EDHREC and becoming intimately familiar with the advanced search on Scryfall, I finally managed to put together the starting decklists. Fighting my in-no-way addiction-driven need to expand my collection, I built the decks with proxies and started to test the gameplay.

Rolling for Initiative

It didn't take long to notice some bugs in the initial gameplay. For instance, once the table realized the power of holding back from attacking in the first round, they were able to consistently steamroll the horde. The early game was also exceedingly non-threatening as the horde's lone creatures often met their demise the turn after entering, because they were attacking alone into somewhat established boards. The ability for some decks to lay on massive amounts of damage later in the game also meant watching great loot disappear into the dregs of the graveyard.

In order to deal with both the early game weaknesses of the zombie horde and the sudden massive amounts of damage from the players, I decided to incorporate a few changes. The first was including bosses in the zombie decks. Now, mini-bosses are sprinkled throughout each of the horde decks, while big bads are a force that always comes as the last card in each deck. Not wanting to miss out on the danger, each of these bosses have the caveat that if they are milled, then they immediately enter the battlefield, without being cast. That means no countering for the blue players. Next, at the beginning of each round of play, the horde amasses 1 2/2 zombie token. These tokens start manifesting even during the opening rounds; however, they don't attack until the end of the opening, or until the players attack the horde, whichever comes first. As for the loot, I decided to pull them from the horde decks into a separate one that players draw from after killing a certain number of zombies. The intention was to have it be a bit of a loot drop, with the amount of loot increasing by one for each level of the horde.

Bringing the Pain

The changes to the rules brought some fun twists while encouraging being more strategic in how much damage players deal. Unfortunately, the zombie deck was still a bit slow to build up and once the players got into a good defensive position, the fear of losing went away and it just became a waiting game. That brought me to the idea of the Calamity Deck. What better way to invoke dread and suspense in the players than introducing something that they can't predict and can flip things around. Even when victory seems assured.

Capturing the nature of random events that might occur in a zombie apocalypse, the Calamity Deck is made up of sorceries and instants that inflict pain on the player, including everything from having to discard cards to wiping the board. These calamities occur whenever the last card of a level is pulled or milled by the zombie horde, as well as when the players cross the calamity threshold. To indicate the calamity threshold, there is counter that starts at 1 and increases by 1 on each non-horde player's turn. During each turn - including the horde - the player rolls a die. If they roll less than the current threshold, the top spell is immediately cast by the horde from the Calamity Deck.

Investigating for Loot

With a juiced up horde and a new sense of suspense, the game shifted once more. The horde grew in formidability and the players not only had to contend with the growing onslaught but random impediments. The only problem that remained was the loot. It was still coming few and far between and the players often missed out some fun pairings, because they just weren't getting far enough into the deck.

Taking inspiration from the calamity deck and wanting to incorporate more dice rolling, I introduced the Loot Die. In addition to the timed loot drops, the Loot Die gives players the opportunity to find random loot whenever they kill a zombie from the horde. Now players had a better chance to make use of sets of items like the Kaldra equipment, which were rarely seen previously.

Out of Time

At this point, the decks were humming. There was challenge. There was suspense. There was crushing defeat and elated victories. The only problem was that the game had become quite complex. While playing, I found myself acting almost as a DM as I orchestrated both my deck and the horde. And as anyone who's ever played a combat in a D&D game knows, combats take a long time. And that carried over here, as well, with the average game taking between 3 and 5 hours.

That isn't necessarily a problem, but it makes the game an event to play. And sometimes, you just don't have time. That brought me to the final bit of changes. Introducing a more customizable set of horde decks, where players can choose how epic the battle will be, as well as the difficulty.

The Next Adventure

I am currently in the testing phase, working to fine tune things more; however, there are a couple expansions I'd like to incorporate. The first is the old Planechase decks. The sheer chaos could be fun; however, it doesn't seem to fit thematically. That leads me to the next goal: creating a new horde type. Zombies are great, but I'd like to explore other tribes and themes. The main theme knocking around my head is something around the absolute and utter chaos of 2020. What better way to kick that awful year down the road than crushing it with your commander deck.