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What was Ornithopter doing in the opponent's deck?

On these articles I'd recommend talking through a couple alternative ways to go with the deck, so your audience can flow better with what they already have.  Maybe somebody already has Drowned Catacombs, and you could mention the obvious blue splash for Diregraf Captains & Mana Leaks, or go Red for burn / sac. outlets like some of the Bx PT decks from a couple weeks ago.

And yeah, budget is questionable.  Gravecrawlers are still 7-8 at shops, and Messengers are around 5.  So that's not toooo bad on paper, but Online this is pretty rough, since those guys were just released and are both going for 8-10 apiece as of this post.  Considering how much of your audience is on modo, that's kind of a bust.  Maybe this would have been a better deck for a month or two from now, after the release prices come down.

Instead of just posting what you see as flaws, how about suggesting a cheaper alternative list that functions equally well, or better? If you can do that then you may have something. I've tried playing cheaper decks in Standard wthout any high dollar value cards (e.g. U/W Humans w/o Hero of Bladehold or Geist of St. Traft, U/R w/o Stromkirk Noble, etc.), and they tend not to do very well. I'm not saying it's impossible, just very difficult. 

Other than the Messengers and Gravecrawlers, this is a very cheap deck. But let's face it, if you're playing Zombies without Messengers and Gravecrawlers in Standard, you're playing sub-par Zombies. It does seem likely that the deck could be better with a Blue splash. But then it needs some sort of dual land, because you need every land to produce black mana for the Messengers to be good. So that adds a minimum of about $20 to the deck right there (and that's assuming Drowned Catacomb is the land being used).

My opinion is that we should cut Jacob some slack here. The definition of 'budget' has to be a much higher dollar/ticket value than it was a few years ago, due to singles prices going through the roof in recent years, especially for paper cards. I think he's doing the best he can with a very difficult column.   It's Building on a Budget, not 'Building Dirt Cheap and Terrible' or 'Building for the Pro Tour' so there have to be some compromises made. 

What about the glaring omission of Skirsdag High Priest?  With all of the morbid being activated in this deck, seeing a turn 3 5/5 flying demon is not out of the question.  I'm not sure many decks have a good answer for that, save for a morbid Brimstone Volley or Oblivion Ring.  Even then, it's a token demon, and one that could easily be made over and over again in a deck like this.  

Then again, you could just go watch the deck tech video from PT DKA and see that exact deck.  Splashing red for Kuldotha Rebirth means easily having enough guys to tap/sacrafice again.