Magic the Gathering

Constructed

Getting Your Fangs into Mono-Black Vampires

By Joseph Watson ⋅ November 5, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment ⋅

With the release of Zendikar I was really hyped for the unveil­ing of the Vam­pire tribe in earnest. We’d been teased with them in M10 what with Vam­pire Noc­tur­nus and the like but we were still wait­ing for the big release, the one that many peo­ple were claim­ing would mark mono-black as a major con­tender in Stan­dard.

Now I’m sure you’ll have read tons of arti­cles now waxing-lyrical about the poten­tial awe­some­ness of the vam­pire tribe so I’ll get straight to the point. They win games, lots of games.

That’s because pound for pound vam­pires sim­ply out match almost any other crea­ture present, sure Steppe Lynx is pow­er­ful with lands but it never has the con­sis­tency of Vam­pire Lac­er­a­tor, sim­i­larly blue might get the most fliers but it cer­tainly hasn’t had any­thing as tasty as Vam­pire Nighthawk [Ed. Note: Vam­pire Nighthawk was the Man­a­Na­tion exclu­sive pre­view card for Zendikar. Just say­ing. — Trick] in a long while.

What I’ve found to be the key to play­ing with mono-black vam­pires is to have a solid curve of cheap mon­sters with a bomb at the end around the five mana mark. I say this because peo­ple keep ask­ing me why I don’t run Sorin Mark­hov in my deck. The main rea­son is because he’s just too slow next to the other vam­pires; his +1 abil­ity will be use­ful but his sec­ond abil­ity is prob­a­bly use­less by the time he is dropped and his final abil­ity will prob­a­bly only be pow­ered up when you’re mov­ing in for the killing blow. In essence, a “win more” card when it comes to vam­pire decks.

Now set­ting up the mana base was easy, after some thought I opted for a full play­set of both black fetch­lands: Marsh Flats and Ver­dant Cat­a­comb. After that it was sim­ply four­teen swamps bring­ing me to a land count of twenty two. The fetch­lands help us thin out our library while also pro­vid­ing us with swamps that we need, the life loss is irrel­e­vant since we’ll have won the game long before that becomes a problem.

Now I’ll run through the crea­tures and other spells and explain my choices.

The Crea­tures

• Vam­pire Lac­er­a­tor: One of the best one-drops in Stan­dard right now, he can mus­cle his way in for dam­age early on in the game and then act as a chump-blocker later if needed. The only crea­tures able to take him on in the first cou­ple of turns are Steppe Lynx and Gob­lin Guide; Gob­lin Guide is prob­a­bly tapped and attack­ing back while the Steppe Lynx isn’t capa­ble of trad­ing with you since it needs lands.
• Vam­pire Noc­tur­nus: This bad boy is a bril­liant anchor for the deck and really pro­pels Vam­pires into the com­pet­i­tive zone, he’s very effi­cient too, pro­vided his abil­ity is switched on, even with the vol­ume of spot-removal in Stan­dard a 5/4 flier is still hard to deal with. One thing, watch out for red play­ers that might be pack­ing Light­ning Bolt and/or Burst Light­ning (read: all of them) the Noc­tur­nus is easy pick­ings if his Unholy Strength isn’t switched on. Finally, late in the game the Noc­tur­nus has a neat lit­tle syn­ergy with the fetch­lands as you can use one as a means to re-shuffle your deck and get another shot at get­ting a black card on top.
• Gate­keeper of Malakir: An edict with a body this guy is a black sta­ple regard­less of whether or not you’re run­ning Vam­pires. His abil­ity allows you to cap­i­tal­ize on dam­age in the early turns by remov­ing poten­tial block­ers while also get­ting around cards that your other removal strug­gles to hit, typ­i­cally crea­tures with pro­tec­tion (Great Sable Stag) or shroud (Wall of Denial).
• Blood­ghast: When I first saw this guy I’ll be hon­est I didn’t really think much of him. His abil­ity seemed rather under­whelm­ing on a 2/1 body and to top it off he couldn’t block. How wrong was I this guy is freakin’ amaz­ing! He pro­vides you with an insur­ance against sweep­ers; some­thing which vam­pires can suf­fer from given their fairly low tough­ness rat­ings. Also, this guys works nicely with Malakir Blood­witch; usu­ally giv­ing you more bod­ies on the field, giv­ing her abil­ity more oomph.
• Vam­pire Hex­mage: Think of this girl as a two mana sor­cery which reads “Destroy tar­get Planeswalker” seri­ously, this is good, incred­i­bly good even. Don’t stop there though – she does a very good job at stop other threats as well. Take a look at the new quest cards for instance, she can rip the coun­ters right off of those too which should be seri­ously con­sid­ered as Blood­chief Ascen­sion and Pyro­mancer Ascen­sion are deadly in the right deck and black is famous for strug­gling to deal with enchant­ments. To top all that off she also has first strike, mak­ing her very dif­fi­cult to block against and trade. Many vamp decks I’ve seen place this card in the Side­board but I gen­uinely think she has a reg­u­lar place in your main sixty.
• Vam­pire Nighthawk: I’ll put my neck out here and say this is the best vam­pire printed, with a body and a cost like that I’d have set­tled for death­touch or life­link but the com­bi­na­tion is astound­ing. Of course, all this awe­some­ness comes at a cost; he gen­er­ally ends up being the favorite tar­get of all your oppo­nents red burn and white removal such as Path to Exile and Obliv­ion Ring. Still this can also work to your advan­tage – using him as a “light­ning rod” to weed out your opponent’s removal spells mak­ing it safer for things like Vam­pire Noc­tur­nus. Pro­vid­ing he does stick around how­ever he is one amaz­ing crea­ture, capa­ble of deal­ing his dam­age rel­a­tively unmo­lested (there are very few cheap fliers worth play­ing in Stan­dard at the moment) and is incred­i­bly dif­fi­cult for your oppo­nent to race against.
• Malakir Blood­witch: This is the bomb, the cul­mi­na­tion, what could well be described as the cli­max of the deck (bet you’ll never see that com­par­i­son again). Oh and Banes­layer Angel, say hello to your new best friend. This card is incred­i­bly dif­fi­cult to play around, Doom Blade doesn’t work, nei­ther does Path to Exile or Obliv­ion Ring/Journey To Nowhere and its tough­ness is too high for Light­ning Bolt to bring down, noth­ing short of a kicked Burst Light­ning is hit­ting this baby and even that won’t work if Vam­pire Noc­tur­nus is switched on. And just in case that wasn’t enough its abil­ity is incred­i­ble, pro­vid­ing the vam­pire deck with some reach just in case you’re run­ning out of steam and your oppo­nent has begun sta­bi­liz­ing the board. In short an incred­i­ble card that coun­ters a lot in the cur­rent Stan­dard metagame.

The Spells

• Doom Blade: One deci­sion I had to make was to pack either Doom Blade or Feast of Blood. The main rea­son I chose Doom Blade was for the flex­i­bil­ity, being able to play this when your oppo­nent begins their attack can be crit­i­cal and it can be a safety net against some pos­si­ble sur­prises your they may have. Granted if most peo­ple are play­ing Aggro decks in your area you may want to play feast but if peo­ple are pack­ing plenty of board sweep­ers ala Day of Judg­ment or Pyro­clasm then the blade is prob­a­bly your safer bet.
• Dis­fig­ure: I loved Last Gasp and I love this even more in fact, ‘nuf said.
• Sign In Blood: This is one of the best card-drawers worth run­ning at the moment, if we could play Esper Charm we’d prob­a­bly play that but we can’t so I for one am happy to set­tle for this. Also note the spell can be tar­geted so it is pos­si­bly to kill some­one who is low on life.
• Mind Sludge: A con­trol play­ers night­mare this will pretty much read “Tar­get play dis­cards their hand” for the most part and given the nature of coun­ter­spells at the moment there is very lit­tle that blue can counter with save Negate. One word of cau­tion, watch out for Swerve, the UWR con­trol decks have been gain­ing pop­u­lar­ity recently and they’re likely to be pack­ing it and yes if they back-fire the sludge you do have to dis­card cards equal to the num­ber of your swamp count.

The Side­board

Side­boards can be dif­fi­cult at the moment due to peo­ple still get­ting com­fort­able with the new Stan­dard envi­ron­ment, I held off writ­ing this until I got a bet­ter idea about how the Stan­dard metagame was shap­ing but it is still rea­son­ably wide open as we speak. I can see the new Marsh Casu­al­ties being use­ful against white wee­nie decks pack­ing Conqueror’s Pledge while Duress will be an obvi­ous inclu­sion in the side­board to com­bat con­trol decks that may pop up. Other than that the afore­men­tioned Feast of Blood might be use­ful against vam­pire mir­rors while Sadis­tic Sacra­ment might be a fun card to employ against any combo decks that might pop up in your area.

And here is the deck in all its vam­piric glory:

Over­all, the Vam­pire deck is incred­i­bly com­pet­i­tive and once it gets going is very hard to stop, it’s more effi­cient than White Wee­nie decks while being faster than most Jund Aggro builds.

I hoped you’ve enjoyed this arti­cle, until next time have fun and keep playing.