You still brought up the hydra in the adept build. It's not a strawman if you did exactly what I'm acusing you of doing.
I brought up a hydra as an example of a nasty undead you could make. You're the one who then decided I was saying you got to cherry pick exactly the undead you wanted... THAT is the strawman. 10 headed Hydras just happen to make some of the best zombies... but there are better undead you can make too (for example almost any zombie or skeletal dragon, Storm Giant skeletons, and so on). Seriously: hydras are just an example. Feel free to find me saying otherwise anywhere.
Unless you bring up some random creature generator (that works with all creature types, not just those that are efficient to animate dead), you'll be still cherry picking, when otherwise it's up to the campaign and the DM what monsters you face.
That's just stupid.
Zombies fly so poorly they'l be hard pressed to do anything. Skeletons are more efficient, but magic flying creatures with great natural combat stats are indeed rare.
And yet both fight against flyers better than most Monks, so, you know, we're cool there.
"Appropriate" meaning a lot of diferent things to diferent persons. Otherwise nobody would've bringed up the 10 headed hydras at 10th level (and then trying to cheese out ways to animate dead 12 headed hydra zombies on top).
No... I'm pretty sure picking a 10HD melee critter from MM1 is a pretty appropriate example of a melee critter around CR 8-14. I'm sure the person talking about 12 headed zombie hydras simply misremembered. It just so happens that Hydras make great zombies.
But we don't have a game here. We have a 1x1 duel. This adept never adventured or fought any battle, and now you want to give it advantages based solely on its background.
Now if you want, we can fill the duel arena with other randomized monsters and if your adept can kill them and animate deading them in real time then I have no complains.
Who the heck invented this rule? We're talking about which class is stronger in play. 1X1 duels are useless for determining such things. And we have yet another strawman... I have said nothing about background. I'm saying in the course of a campaign you're going to fight monsters, and some will likely be melee monsters. These you can turn into powerful undead via Animate Dead. Then I gave some examples. That's all. Anything else is either a strawman (such as your insistence that the Hydra Zombie was anything other than a singular example) or shifting goalposts (such as you here insisting we're talking about duels).
Seriously, go find an example of me (or heck, anyone) claiming this was about dueling. We're talking about D&D here, not Yu-Gi-Oh.
I was checking out the Monsters of Faerun version, which is where google said they're from. What's UE again?
Unapproachable East.
Please, vine/golem/grave strike have been printed long ago to enable rogues to easily sneak up pretty much everything.
Oh good, now we've got a Rogue that, best case, has to burn a charge off a wand every round just to hurt anything. Yeah, that's gonna be an awesome campaign. Sure, you think it's unreasonable to say that at some point an Adept player might fight a melee creature that's good to turn into a skeleton or zombie during a campaign, but a campaign of nothing but Constructs, Plants, and Undead where there's constantly wands of grave/vine/razing strike everywhere? Totally normal!
Based on your previous logic, dead magic zones exist somewhere in the campaign, so clearly the fight will be in a dead-magic zone that happens to be filled with optimal monsters for animate deading. One background condition from each player is only fair.
Um, no? Based on my previous logic, somewhere in the campaign world there might be a dead magic zone... but since you can't bring the results of that with you, it doesn't really matter. Why do you think "there's some melee monsters in the world" is equivalent to "there's dead magic zones over all of them?" You sound like a terrible DM. Also, if you happen to have a dead magic zone... drag the corpse out. Animate it there. And again, there's no "the fight." We're talking about playing D&D. Talk about your Pokemons elsewhere.
Then choose monsters whitout any specfific preference. There's several random ecounter generators out there to keep things fair. Otherwise, guess what, you're still cherrypicking them when you bring a specific monster out of nowhere to the duel!
Okay. I used this one:
http://www.monsteradvancer.com . It's the first one Google showed me. Then I went to the 3.5 encounter generator. I set it to CR 12, no other modifiers, and clicked generate. It got me this: 2 Large Digesters (Advanced HD to 13), an 11 HD Huge Girallon, and an 11 HD Thorny Digester. Two make okay Skeletons, one makes a very solid Skeleton, the fourth is a plant. Then I set it to CR 11 and got a Copper Half-Dragon Copper Dragon (what the heck is wrong with this thing?), which makes a great Zombie or Skeleton. Then I set it to CR 10 and got a Spellwarped Monstrous Centipede, Huge with 11 HD and an 11 HD Monstrous Centipede, Huge. They'd make passable, but not great, skeletons. So then I thought I'd try a CR 14, and guess what? 5 Nine Headed Hydras was the result (seriously, I thought that was hilarious). And that makes some seriously awesome Zombies. So... see how that works? I assume that shows you the basic idea? I went through the CRs so you'd see that at each level he'd be getting new options (not always better options, but new ones). Out of those 4 encounters I randomly generated, I got 5 amazing zombies, one amazing zombie or skeleton, one decent skeleton, and four just okay skeletons. Considering you can usually only control 2-3 really good undead at a time via Animate Dead (assuming you go for lots of HD in one creature, which you should) that clearly shows how well this works.
Last time I checked it's not a strawman to repeat what others have said, and several times you were all mentioning specific optimal monsters for animate dead for the adept to use.
Those are called examples. Nobody said you needed those exact creatures. That's your strawman... claiming that anyone was saying you got to pick the exact creatures. But nobody said that. What we said was that Animate Dead could get you really solid (and survivable) warriors, and that Hydras and giants and dragons were good examples of that.
So I'll stop it when you stop it as well and either use a random monster generator, or simply use some of the other's monk tricks.
Good. Now I've used a random generator and showed you the basic idea. And I love that I got that encounter of 5 9 headed hydras. But feel free to use that one too and have a good time with it until you see how many totally random encounters do indeed result in pretty darn good undead.
JaronK