It will be rare that you have this problem, because zilean is strange in that he fill two different roles during different parts of the game...
At the beginning thru midgame, he is a nuker like ryze/annie/etc and will be able to put out huge damage that way, but at the end of the game he doesnt scale quite well enough to be an end-game caster carry (like karthus, kennen, Anivia) and becomes a support role, making your dps chars unkillable.
Basically, he will work on almost any team because every team has at least one DPS character (meaning having zilean is a good thing) and he can still fulfill the mage roll for your team if there is none