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Last year, Vampires was a joke at best. It had some minimal success at the start of last season as a bad Jund deck that dodged Spreading Seas and beat up on Wall of Denials, but then Jace the Mind Sculptor showed up. The card was literally unbeatable when you were playing on the Air Elemental curve. Vampire Hexmage was a cool solution until you realized that the best case scenario was they still got to Brainstorm. On the draw you could be facing down a Jace with no creatures in play on turn three, often because it Time Walked you and bounced the one you did have. Vengevine made the creature decks you tried to beat better than you at grinding out games, and Primeval Titan was the stake in the heart. If Jace was too big for you to beat, how could you beat six mana win the game?
Sure, every so often you binned their hand with Mind Sludge or curved out with Gatekeepers on all of their guys, but usually you just got demolished by their superior card quality. You couldn't even get away with it in Block. Something really embarrassing might happen there, like dying to a kickered Rite of Replication on Bloodwitch.
This is not that deck. Welcome to the new face of Vampires. That was The Count from Sesame Street, this is Angelus.
Malakir Bloodwitch or Mind Sludge? You assume we want to hit five mana.
Vampire Nighthawk? Two power do nothing is nowhere even close to what you want.
Vampire Hexmage? Why should I care about their Planeswalkers? I can just attack those if I'm not going to kill those.
No longer are you a bad Jund deck. Vampires has been remodeled to resemble Ravager Affinity.
[cardlist]
[Creatures]
4 Pulse Tracker
4 Vampire Lacerator
4 Viscera Seer
4 Bloodthrone Vampire
4 Bloodghast
4 Kalastria Highborn
4 Pawn of Ulamog
3 Gatekeeper of Malakir
[/Creatures]
[Spells]
4 Vendetta
3 Blade of the Bloodchief
[/Spells]
[Lands]
4 Marsh Flats
4 Verdant Catacombs
14 Swamp
[/Lands]
[Sideboard]
2 Skinrender
2 Disfigure
3 Doom Blade
3 Marsh Casualties
3 Duress
2 Dark Tutelage
[/Sideboard]
[/cardlist]
The main deck is card for card Caleb Durward's which top foured the last $5K event. I started with a compilation of lists and eventually converged to this point.
While this on the surface looks like a bad joke that would 0-2 drop FNM, the synergies it represents are a lot stronger than they seem.
Bloodthrone Vampire, Kalastria Highborn, and Blade of the Bloodchief represent a end game reminiscent of Disciple-Ravager. Highborn costing mana pulls this back to reality, but it's very easy to do upwards of the full twenty in one swing with this deck. Viscera Seer helps keep the later two active as well as being a pseudo-Looter with Bloodghast.
Pulse Tracker and Vampire Lacerator provide a sufficient clock on their own as well as decent fodder later on. The beats they provide help put your opponent in range and let you actually clock the ramp decks. These two put the control decks into a bad place where they can either kill your early team and die to your end game plan or just die to random 2/x beats.
Vendetta and Gatekeeper help the beats keep coming. Vendetta is the best removal option as you are aiming to be extremely aggressive and mana is tight, especially if you have to aim it at a Frost Titan. Gatekeeper isn't anything more than it seems. It just happens that a guy on top of your removal spell is enough to make it worth playing, even at three mana.
Bloodghast and Pawn of Ulamog are your main sources of cannon fodder. Bloodghast is by far your best card. It lets you extend a board into sweepers and goes absolutely crazy when you start saccing it in multiples. Pawn is a bit weaker as you have to invest actual cards into it, but has benefits when blocking comes up.
Lets look at a fairly average curve: turn one Pulse Tracker, turn two Bloodthrone Vampire, turn three Pawn.
Any creature on four puts this to 19 damage total, and the parts are all interchangeable. If the Pawn was a Bloodghast even without fetches you still have 17 with a guy and land drops on four. Seer and Blade on one and two pushes you back a turn on the clock, but your creatures are giant and crash through any resistance at that point.
Some things that don't make the cut that weren't discussed earlier.
Red: It's cute to do things like Forked Bolt and Mark of Mutiny, but the black removal is just as good. Lightning Bolt doesn't really fit, as you aren't really dealing damage in small packets and coming up short. You often are killing them in 10+ damage swings in a turn. Mark is pretty sick if you hit a Titan, but that's about it.
Blue: This is probably the best splash color, but why would you play it? Four counters really isn't enough against the ramp decks and your control matchup is fine as is against the current builds. If things start moving back in the Day of Judgment direction it might be worth it, but switching to a different deck at that point is probably better.
Captivating Vampire: Activating this guy is much less of a pipe dream than it seems but is usually irrelevant. If you have five vampires in play you probably win anyways as they should assemble to do around a million damage. Other than it just leaves you open to Pyroclasm when a large benefit to this deck is how well it plays around that card. The one place it is good is creature mirrors where it gives you the inevitability but the sideboard is a better way to tailor your deck for that.
Tectonic Edge: When you lose to Valakut it rarely is because of one Valakut. It usually means their Titan triggered twice and you were just dead or their Avenger is coming through for enough to kill two of you. Against control killing lands is nice, but not really necessary. What is necessary is having two black mana, and I have terrible memories of block Vampires getting Black screwed with twenty one sources.
Some basic notes on how the deck plays out:
Your typical goldfish kill is around five. Usually this kill plays through a removal spell or two and maybe a blocker aka exactly what a beatdown deck should do.
The Bloodghast-Viscera Seer will let you sculpt out a lot of otherwise mediocre draws. Just remember to attack with Ghast and do any Blade or Pawn shenanigans before scrying. The correct stacking for getting the scry out of a fetch land activation is to sac Ghast then in response crack the fetch to rebuy it. This comes up a lot, so keep it in mind.
Strongly consider moving Blade counters around if you can afford to to dodge Pyroclasm and push guys over blockers. As cool as killing them with a 17/17 Viscera Seer is, odds are a 9/9 Seer and a 10/10 Highborn is good enough.
When counting for lethal, remember that double Pawn only gives you two tokens on the first one. This is an easy dumb mistake to make and lose to, so don't do it.
On to the actual matchups:
Swarm Aggro:
This encompasses Quest Aggro, Elves, and the various Fauna Shaman decks.
In general, game one isn't going to be exceptional. They will likely have enough guys to block your giant Bloodthrone Vampires and Bladed guys, especially the Green decks. You will want to be very aggressive and try to get them into Highborn range as soon as possible. Sometimes you can get them into a scenario where they keep having to throw multiple guys under the bus with Blade, but that's the only way you are going to grind them out.
Sideboarding:
-1 Pawn of Ulamogg
+3 Doom Blade
+2 Disfigure
+2 Skinrender
Now you are the control deck. All their stuff dies, then they do. I'm not sure if this is overkill or not, but 17 removal has been enough for me.
Red decks (RDW, Boros):
Standard Red deck procedure applies. Trade cards, don't get too low, kill their Dragonlords and Koths, and try to close once they start running low on gas.
Sideboarding:
-1 Viscera Seer
+2 Disfigure
+3 Doom Blade
Basically you take out cards that are bad at trading for those that aren't. Lacerator makes the cut over Pulse Tracker as it is less value to Arc Trail and actually trades with a Goblin Guide. The life loss is somewhat awkward, but you are most likely to lose by taking hits from creatures. Against Boros you might want a Marsh Casualties or two depending on their creature base. Lacerator comes out for those as it doesn't actually trade for a Steppe Lynx.
Creature light control (UW, UB, UR):
Play conservatively against the builds with Wrath. Bloodghast allows this to happen. Minimze their Mana Leaks and just keep the beats coming. Odds are you will win in the long run. They have to get some big threat up and running to stabilize, but often you can just go over the top or kill it.
Sideboarding:
-5 Removal
+3 Duress
If they have Abyssal Persecutor you want Gatekeeper, if they have Colonnade you want Vendetta, and if they have neither it's a toss up. If you see Baneslayer I would also leave in up to four targeted removal spells. Same plan as game one. Just beat down and grind them out. They have to play very defensively as you can kill them from nowhere, so you get a lot of average attacks in that add up in the end to lethal.
Creatureless Ramp (typically Valakut):
Game one is a pure race. You tend to be a bit favored as you are better at turn five killing than they are and will usually kill through the first Titan.
Sideboarding:
-2 Vendetta
-1 Viscera Seer
+3 Duress
Duress isn't great, but it can Time Walk them a fair amount of the time by taking ramp or strip their Pyroclasm. Post board you should try to line up your two drop to dodge Pyroclasm if possible, which basically means play Bloodthrone or Bloodghast over Highborn or two one drops. Same as game one, this is just a race.
Creature Ramp (aka Lotus Cobra, Joraga Treespeaker, etc.):
Game one they can get you sometimes by just playing a turn three Titan off Cobra, but if they don't they are worse than Valakut at racing.
Sideboarding:
-1 Viscera Seer
+2 Doom Blade
This board plan is specifically for GUR, but it also applies to other decks. Duress isn't good against these decks as the ramp you are aiming to hit with it just isn't there. Jace doesn't really matter, and hitting a Mana Leak or Bolt is the same thing your guys would do. On top of wanting all the removal for their mana guys and end game threats, these decks often board in Obstinate Baloths you need to punch through.
This deck is far from a joke. Take it from someone who has said "Friends don't let friends play Vampires". While it has weaknesses, namely Day of Judgment and specific hate cards like Devout Lightcaster, it is strong against the spot removal and Pyroclasms that people are packing against the other aggro decks.
So, if you like being the beat down and mising your opponent out with unplayable draft commons, this is the deck for you. If you like punishing your opponent's bad draws and card choices, this is the deck for you. And if you just want to be on Team Edward, well, just die in a fire. But still, this is also the deck for you.
