Zombie Master

The odd one out among the original tribal lords, and the most interesting for it. Where the other early lords (Lord of Atlantis, Goblin King) handed their tribe a flat +1/+1 anthem, this one bet on evasion and resilience instead of stats. Every other Zombie creature gets swampwalk, and every other Zombie gets a regeneration outlet, which together make the team hard to block and impossible to profitably trade with: a board of regenerating Zombies that the defender cannot stop on the ground applies a different kind of pressure than a board that is simply bigger. Time has not been kind to the parts. Swampwalk is a near-dead mechanic that does nothing against a Swamp-less opponent, regeneration was eventually retired as an evergreen keyword, and a 2/3 at three mana sits below where the modern stat curve starts. Yet the choice to distribute an evasion ability and a survival ability rather than raw numbers is the road not taken for tribal design, and it kept mono-black Zombie strategies viable in the mirror for years before the tribe had enough bodies to win on count alone. The eventual successor was Lord of the Undead, which swapped swampwalk and regeneration for the standard +1/+1 and a recursion trigger built for the graveyard-centric game Zombies grew into. This is what the lord slot looked like before Wizards had decided what the lord slot was.