The Prisoner by Jean-Leon Gerome (1861). Murkfiend Liege by Carl Critchlow.
Today's story could start in one of two places.
I play against players in my EDH league, against players at our weekly LGS "causal" Commander night, and about twice a month against a few old friends at home. In those games at home we have a mix of casual and more serious players and two of them happen to have Mikaeus the Unhallowed all-in combo decks. A few weeks ago I wrote here about reworking my Nazahn deck and my Mimeoplasm deck in an effort to find a way to keep up with the occasional double-Mikaeus matchup.
I haven't yet had a chance to try either of those decks in a Mike & Mike game, but the desire to have solid options when I'm faced with decks that are so reliant on graveyard recursion is still on my mind. I don't want to always be grabbing the same answer. Having two or even three options will make me feel like I'll always have something to go to that might work without having to grab the same one. It feels more sporting.
The other starting point is one that should be familiar to many EDH players.
When you draft or do a sealed prerelease, do you ever feel a compulsion to put some of your new cards into your Commander decks?
I have that problem. I really only play EDH so if I do an occasional limited format game, I feel like it's almost a waste if all of my cards go straight into binders & storage. I want to have something I can slot into a deck somewhere, even if it isn't necessarily an upgrade.
Today I'm going to talk about a deck I've built as another response to my Mikaeus problem and as a way to put some new Ixalan cards to use.
Let's start in the land of Pirates, Merfolk, Dinosaurs and most importantly, white Vampires.
Ixalan Leftovers
When Ixalan was released, I jumped into our LGS' sealed league. The monthly sealed league is a format where you start with 3 booster packs and build a 30 card deck. After 3 losses and on weeks 2, 3 and 4 you can add another booster to your pool of cards.
My pool of sealed league cards wound up including a bunch of decent white vampire cards. The best were probably these four.
I wasn't able to turn them into a successful run of games in the sealed league. I'm an EDH player and don't really like short games, so my heart wasn't in it. I spent most of the month thinking about what on earth I was going to do with these new white vampires.
A few months earlier I had picked up the Commander 2017 Vampires deck but hadn't kept it together. I needed Teferi's Protection for my Ramos combo build and I threw a few other cards from it into other decks. Looking at all those juicy white Ixalan vampires, I definitely thought about building around one of the legendary Mardu vampires but the thought of throwing yet another of these decks into an already crowded field wasn't that inspiring.
I wanted to explore new territory and build something nobody else had built.
That's when I turned to my rare binder and found my black/white vampire commander. She's an incredibly strong answer to graveyard decks so she'll pose a problem for Mikaeus recursion strategies. She'll also give me access to green, which opens up all kinds of interesting new options for a vampire-themed deck. Her only real shortcoming is that she isn't a vampire.
Meet Anafenza
I have no idea how long Anafenza had been sitting forgotten in the legendary creatures section of my rare binder. I suspect I must have picked her up out of a random Khans of Tarkir booster pack and was just never inspired to build a deck around her. She's not a vampire but she'll let me run my black and white vamps and she'll do real work against Mikaeus the Unhallowed and any other deck that wants to use the graveyard.
The question is simple - how can I best abuse this card with the cards I have on hand, or with a few select additions?
If that sounds like a weird question - I don't break the bank on any deck I build. I'll usually pick up a card or two if a project requires more than what I have on hand to really work but I'm rarely going to build "optimized" decklists. The sky isn't the limit and I try to work with what's either in my collection or easily and cheaply obtained.
Before we go any further, let's take a look at the general I'll be using to lead my vampire army.
She's not a vampire, but she also doesn't care about creature types so that's not a huge problem.
She will put a +1/+1 counter on target tapped creature when she attacks. That's not nothing, but it's also not exactly game-breaking.
We could build around +1/+1 counter shenanigans but her second ability is far more interesting. If a creature card would be put into an opponent's graveyard it will be exiled instead. That means any time we wipe the board we'll be filling up our graveyard but we'll be exiling our opponents' creatures.
That's going to be our angle. We're going to make boardwipes and recursion a major part of this deck's strategy.
How We Win
Normally this wouldn't be the first topic I'd cover but for Anafenza this question is going to drive a lot of decisions.
If we're wiping the board early and often, we need to turn that to our advantage. The following cards are what initially came to mind as potential game-changers if used at the right time.
Having lots of creatures in our graveyard can be a win condition on its own. I've always wanted to build a deck and get a win with Mortal Combat so let's throw it in and see how it works out. I don't know if we'll be able to load up the yard fast enough to make it a viable wincon. If we run into a long game there's every reason to think this could become relevant so it's going in. Also, it's a personal bucket list item. I really want to get a win using Mortal Combat.
If our creatures are going to the graveyard and our opponents' creatures are getting exiled, sorceries like Living Death, Living End and Twilight's Call will all work nicely. Patriarch's Bidding would also do the trick if we've successfully kept our opponents' graveyards clear of any corpses. For Living End & Death we can run Ashnod's Altar or Altar of Dementia so that we can sac our board (except for Anafenza) and get everything back to the battlefield upon resolution of the spell. If our opponents don't have any creatures in their graveyard it should put us in a really strong position.
Coat of Arms is a tribal staple that I've had kicking around for a while. As I said - I'm building with cards I have lying around and this one didn't happen to be in any of my decks. I know that my sound weird, but it's dangerous because it can easily help our opponents. If we have enough vampires on the battlefield it could be enough to let us swing out for a win so I think it's got to go in.
How We Ramp
In any EDH deck you want to do well you are going to want to ramp a lot.
The safest option for ramping is always going to be putting lands onto the battlefield. Few EDH players run mass land destruction and targeted land destruction is usually reserved for problematic lands like Gaea's Cradle, Maze of Ith, Rogue's Passage and other lands that can really cause problems for opponents. Another common and effective way of ramping is with artifacts. Nearly every deck runs Sol Ring and many competitive builds run Mana Crypt and Mana Vault. Most strong decks run signets and Commander's Sphere, and some also run cluestones and keyrunes.
I could pursue either or both of these ramp strategies but this deck is going to care about creatures an awful lot. For that reason, and because I think it will make for an interesting experiment, I'm going to go with a wholly creature-based ramp package.
Some of the usual suspects like Birds of Paradise and Sylvan Caryatid will probably make an appearance in this deck but if we're going all-in on mana dorks we get to look at some less familiar faces. Naga Vitalist will produce any color we can already produce with lands we control, so it's not great in 5/c but in a two or three color deck it'll do just fine. Avacyn's Pilgrim will give us a little help producing white mana, which will help us cast our boardwipes, which are mostly in white. This is a three-color deck so flexibility is important. I'll may well grab a few more guys if they can tap for something other than green.
If we're going to be bringing creatures back from the graveyard, dudes who can sacrifice themselves are probably more valuable than your average mana dork. Sakura-Tribe Elder, Dawntreader Elk and Oashra Cultivator will all help fill up our graveyard and put lands onto the battlefield. We don't want to ignore land ramp entirely. We just want to focus primarily on using creatures to get the job done.
Going Green
You knew Green was going to let us ramp, though you might not have guessed I'd be choosing to ramp with so many creatures. This is probably the worst way to ramp but we're not pretending we're building top tier deck. We're building a deck designed to shut down graveyard recursion and do a few dumb things that if successful should put us in a position to threaten to win the game. The wonderful thing about midrange deckbuilding is you can do an awful lot of different things and still have fun at the right table. Of course, green can do a lot more than ramp.
Not going with Mardu (RWB) vampires is a questionable decision on its own so let's see if we can find some ways to get some real benefit out of having our third color be green. I'm going to be look at cards like the following five to try to make our vampire build really work.
Wild Pair is a card I've wanted to get some use out of for a long time. We're going to have so many creatures in this deck that we should run lots of ways to get them onto the battlefield. Every time we cast a creature from our hand this should let us get one from our library. Hibernation's End will act like an enchantment version of Yisan, the Wanderer Bard, though it doesn't combo with Wild Pair. It will help us fill up the battlefield even if it isn't cheating our mana costs. You might ask why I'm not just running Yisan, and the answer is that he's already heading up my only mono-green deck so he's currently spoken for. Picking up another copy of Yisan might well be worth it, as he's currently under a dollar.
Fecundity will be an all-star in this build as our opponents' creatures will go to exile and ours will die and give us card draw. It should be fantastic with board wipes.
Creeping Renaissance will let us return all cards of a chosen type to our hand. There should be times where grabbing a bunch of sorceries out of the graveyard will be enough to close out the game. Last but definitely not least, cards like Overwhelming Stampede and Beastmaster Ascension will let us take our board of random vampires and assorted other creatures and attack for significant damage.
There are certainly better green cards out there I could be running. If I were to take apart all of my green decks, I'd probably find it hard to resist putting Triumph of the Hordes, Craterhoof Behemoth, Krosan Grip and Eternal Witness into this build, but those are all currently in other decks. This is going to be a benchwarmer deck, built to come out and have fun in certain conditions but it isn't likely to ever be one of my main decks or even a deck I play in our EDH league.
Orzhov Vampires
The backbone of Abzen Vampires is going to be our black and white vampires. Not going with Mardu means there are lots of good vampires that we won't be able to include, but there are so many good options in black and white that I think we're going to be fine.
Many of you are familiar with the 2017 Vampiric Bloodlust precon deck. I'm going to at least look at including nearly every black, white or Orzhov vampire from that deck. Falkenrath Noble, Sangromancer, Blood Artist and Pawn of Ulamog will all play well with boardwipes. Many of the other tribal staples are worth looking at, so Vampire Nighthawk, Captivating Vampire, Malakir Bloodwitch, Butcher of Malakir and lots more will probably make the cut. I was able to line up eighteen possible recruits for our Abzan build out of the precon list, but I also want to look at what else I have lying around.
Vampires are a surprisingly deep tribe and I was able to dig up twenty-seven more potential recruits. I clearly won't be able to run forty-five vampires in this deck so we'll have to figure out which are worth including. At first glance there are quite a few worth looking at.
We will definitely want a few sacrifice outlets if we're gearing up for mass exile / recursion with Living End or Living Death. That means Indulgent Aristocrat could come in handy. We should have lots of extra creatures around since our ramp package is creature based, so there will be times when we can sac a few dudes and swing for some decent damage. We might want to be able to whittle our opponents down, so Vicious Conquistador could make for another convenient one-drop in this deck.
While he doesn't fly like Vampire Nighthawk, Gifted Aetherborn brings some appropriate keywords to the party for a vampire. Stromkirk Condemned will let us pump our whole team and help to fill up our graveyard by making us discard a card. Drana's Emissary is an Orzhov vampire who helps further the incremental life drain / life gain that this deck wants to use to get us in a position to try to go for the win.
We'll probably already be running the precon Drana, but Drana, Liberator of Malakir might be just as good if not better. She flies and if she does damage to a player we put a +1/+1 counter on each of our attacking creatures. Mirri the Cursed brings her own keyword soup into play, and the +1/+1 counters she gains will also help her grow more and more relevant if she sticks around very long.
Having lots of instances of lifegain should make Cliffhaven Vampire a threat anytime he's out even if we don't run any combo wincons that work off of his ability. I'm not a big fan of two-card combos and I'm already going to have to pick up a few cards for this deck so I don't think I'm going to go the extra mile to pick up Exquisite Blood. I've got combo decks and this deck isn't going to be going after that combo.
Bishop of the Bloodstained is going to do a lot of work in this deck if we manage to get a decent number of vampires out. Markov Crusader might be overcosted but there are definitely times we're going to want to have creatures with lifelink and haste on the field.
I've shown you 10 cards that may go in but some of these might not make it in and there are many, many more that are "on the bubble". Will Child of Night find a home in this build? Should Voldaren Pariah make the cut because it can transform into Abolisher of Bloodlines and that's one of the best card names you're going to find on a Magic Card anywhere? We'll see. Deckbuilding is a long and challenging process and this build, with this many options, has set me up to make lots of tough choices.
I think rather than go through an endless parade of good and not-so-good vampire cards, let's take a step outside of the tribe. We know we're running vampires and we know we're running mana dorks. What other cards should we look at to get the most out of this tribe?
Beyond Vampires
I'm well aware that I'm not going to be running what some would consider a true "tribal" deck. I've got nothing against building with only one type of creature but I want to really take advantage of the colors we have available to us. Let's look at a a few other options that might help make this deck be a little more dangerous.
With all the keywords our vampires like to throw around Odric, Lunarch Marshal has the chance to be another great addition to this deck. If we've got 6-8 creatures out and one has lifelink, one has deathtouch, one has flying and one has haste, they'll all share those keywords from the beginning of combat until the end of turn. With a wide board that could have a huge impact on combat for us.
Mirror Entity may not look like a vampire but it's a changeling so it certainly is one. That's largely incidental, as he lets us pump our whole team and can be a devastating game-changer if you have enough mana available.
We should be gaining a fair amount of life with this deck, so it makes sense to throw in Felidar Sovereign as an extra wincon. It always seems to get removed but it's still worth having as both a potential threat and as a big body with lifelink and vigilance. Kambal, Consul of Allocation would help us with that lifegain and will help to keep our opponents' life totals down if they're casting noncreature spells very often. Since we're planning to be a combat-oriented deck with lots of creatures, Champion of Lambholt should be able to get pretty big and will let us swing freely with our creatures if she gets big enough.
I'm not leaning heavily on green but I think these five are all pretty solid additions if we're willing to go outside of vampires for some of our creatures.
Having a little fun
I'm not above running combos in my decks. I just find greater enjoyment in running combos that are more than just 2 cards coexisting and winning you the game on the spot. I'm not going to aim for Exquisite Blood / Sanguine Bond and this deck isn't going to try to sneak Mikaeus the Unhallowed and Triskelion on the table. I do like to have interesting stuff in my decks though, so I'm very tempted to try running stuff like the following cards.
Spike Feeder and Sunbond well allow you to gain infinite life and have an infinitely large Spike Feeder. You enchant the former with the latter and when you pull a +1/+1 counter off of it you gain 2 life, which puts 2 more counters on Spike Feeder. If you have the mana, you can pull counters off of Spike Feeder and put them on other creatures, but you'll need inifnite mana and other creatures to really turn this into a bona fide wincon.
Vraska the Unseen synergizes with boardwipes really nicely. If she's out long enough to be ready to use her limit break and your opponents think they're safe, they'd better hope they can stop your Wrath of God or Damnation.
Reyhan, Last of the Abzan and Blade of Selves is a wonderful little combination, but both of them also work well on their own. If you have an infinite / infinite spike feeder and someone uses Doom Blade on it, those counters can go right onto another creature. Lots of our creatures will benefit from swinging with Blade of Selves. Bishop of the Bloodstained is an ideal pick but we should wind up with a bunch of interesting options that will pair up nicely with an equipment that gives a creature myriad.
Boardwipes
Part of the process of building this deck will be taking apart my Zurgo Helmsmasher deck and grabbing some key pieces out of my Skithyrix deck. I've got plenty of sweepers but they're so important that they were all spoken for, and spoken for by a big angry Orc Warrior or a hasty Blight Dragon. I hadn't played Zurgo in a long time so I gave him the proverbial axe - waiting until it wasn't his turn of course. Skittles is still intact, but is a little weaker without a few key cards.
These are probably the most important cards in this deck outside of our commander and our recursion. We want to wipe the board early and often, loading up our graveyard and exiling our opponents' creatures. Planar Collapse will telegraph our intentions, but will rarely last very long before it goes off or gets removed. Toxic Deluge should take advantage of our vampires' lifegain and will help with indestructible creatures. Wrath of God, Damnation and Fumigate are just good old-fashioned (and new-fangled) boardwipes. If we add in End Hostilities, Planar Outburst, Deathbringer Regent and Nevinyrral's Disk we should have a good chance of having a boardwipe available when we need one.
The End Result
This was a difficult build because I wanted to include all my vampires, lots of ramp, lots of interesting green cards, all my boardwipes, all my Living Death / Living End shenanigans, and still have room for a normal land / non-land ratio. In the end I was able to cut it down to 100 cards but I had to drop a few things out. Even after completing this writeup, I went back and swapped in even more vampires that had been left out, losing even more green cards but making the current version much more of a Vampires deck.
Some of the vampires I included in the pictures above actually got cut, as did Kambal, the Spike Feeder / Sunbond combo and Vraska. I wound up including both Reyhan and Ravos along with Reyhan's favorite sword - Blade of Selves. I might never want to swap out Anafenza, but I now have the option of playing the deck as Reyhan/Ravos partners if the mood strikes me.
I didn't include as many white vampires as I would have liked. The decision to try to go after a Mortal Combat alternative wincon effectively ruled out playing the sorcery that creates 1/1 vampire tokens. A number of the other Ixalan white vampires just weren't good enough to keep in and I wasn't going to cut mana dorks to make room for them. The list as of this writing has 35 creatures. Before the last rework it was at 31, which didn't feel like it is was quite enough to aim to get 20 of them in my graveyard for Mortal Combat to trigger. Now with 35 if I boardwipe early & often I might be able to extend the game long enough to get there.
The manabase is again just what I had lying around. It's about as far from a good Abzan landbase as you can get without actually running guildgates. If I enjoy the deck and it plays well enough I could see myself picking up lands to make it better but for now it's mostly just a bunch of junk and basic lands. I'm OK with that, but if you build this and you have higher standards, definitely look at making more responsible choices about what lands you put into the deck.
So far the real wincon of this deck is to pull off the Living Death / Living End strategy with a graveyard full of vampires. I'm also secretly hoping to be able to play against an Edgar Markov deck, steal Edgar using New Blood or Captivating Vampire and start using Edgar to churn out vampire tokens. Sure it's mean, but who says competing clans of vampires are going to play nice with each other?
One possible oversight in this first build is not having auras like Gift of Immortality to allow Anafenza to survive my boardwipes. If Anafenza is the constant target of removal spells, which could easily be the case, I may need to go back and add in some boots, greaves and maybe a Mask of Avacyn. I also have slight regret over not running Spy Kit so that Anafenza can actually be a vampire. Decks are rarely ever really done, so this build should see some additional changes even after its first few games.
Early goldfishing has been interesting. Wild Pair feels like it's got a ton of potential. Hibernation's End makes me think of long-frozen vampires thawing out of a glacier on the outskirts of a remote northern village. I may well keep it in for the flavor alone. So far I find myself wondering if this deck will be fast enough to actually get the job done. I think it's got potential but might not be focused enough. That's not at all uncommon for my first drafts of EDH decks, and revisions often serve the purpose of narrowing that focus so the deck performs better and works more efficiently.
I'll definitely keep you posted on how Abzan Vampires works out. So far I'm really curious about how hard it will actually hate on graveyard decks. When I do wind up with a full decklist I'm always happy to share it and this week I actually managed to get the thing built in paper. You can check the current list at the link below.
Abzan Vampires on TappedOut.net
Other News
I play lots of EDH and every week I find myself sharing stories of my games. If you're a regular reader I hope you find this of some interest but if you don't, I understand.
This past Tuesday night on our "casual" Commander night - which isn't necessarily casual, but just isn't EDH League - I had a rare great night of games. A good night, at least in terms of my win/loss ratio, is a night where I can win at least one game. I lose plenty so on Tuesday winning not two but three games felt fantastic!
In the first game I played my aforementioned Nazahn deck. I started with a Sol Ring and a Signet and it was off to the races. I was able to eliminate one very strong Sigarda player early on and once I had Hero's Blade, Hammer of Nazahn, Sword of Kaldra, Helm of Kaldra and Loxodon Warhammer out I was swinging for just short of lethal commander damage. I ran into a little trouble until I was able to eliminate a player who was running Meren and forcing us to sacrifice creatures at an alarming rate. Once Meren was gone I was able to grab Prowler's Helm and with a little help with equipping from my handy dandy Brass Squire it ended up being a solid and convincing win. It was also my Nazahn deck's first win, so that felt pretty nice.
In the second game I tried to switch down to a weaker deck and played Neheb. I lucked into getting Cryptolith Fragment out and with Neheb on the field I was able to ping my way to a Gamble and tutor for (and keep) Aggravated Assault. When I played it, we all realized that unless anyone had removal I had the game won because nobody had any blockers big enough to stop me from just running infinite combat steps until the table was dead.
I lost game three to the Sigarda player who owed me one from the first (and second) game. He got going pretty quick and successfully cleared the table. Great guy. Strong deck. I was playing Brion Stoutarm and just never really got going. It's a fun build but not particularly threatening to a player with a hexproof general. My goal with that deck is to steal opponents' creatures and throw them at players so Sigarda had no real fear of Brion Stoutarm.
Game four was my third win of the night. The Sigarda player switched to Arcanis. The Meren player wasn't used to playing multiplayer games and was seemed kind of miserable. He kept getting close to being able to combo off and kill the table but never quite got there. We picked up an Oloro player making it a four-player game. The long story of this game is one I am going to save for a post about multiplayer politics, but the short version is that I was able to do it all.
I killed the Oloro player by flying a huge Ramos at him while it had infect. The Meren player was the second to die and was shown the door - the Door to Nothingness, that is! I had never used Door on anyone before, so that was kind of neat. The Arcanis player got to lose to the Ramos Conflux combo that I've written about in this blog. It involves a long, convoluted chain of spells culminating in hitting an infectious Ramos with Chandra's ignition. My final victim actually said it was pretty neat to watch the wincon come together. He was playing mono-blue and I had him locked out of my turn with not just a Dragonlord Dromoka on the table, but a Dragonlord Dromoka equipped with Conqueror's Flail!
If you've been keeping up with my EDH League play, I went 0/2 yesterday with Zedruu, My quest to pull off some dumb wincon before the month is looking less and less likely to come to a successful conclusion. The deck just isn't fast enough (or good enough) to keep up with the better decks in our league. I'll be playing it again next week and the following week I'll likely miss as we'll be away. Then we'll be on to December and I'll need to figure out what I'm playing for that month.
That's all I've got for you today.
Thanks as always for reading. I expect to have more news about the future of this blog and the possibility of my appearing as a guest on one of my favorite podcasts, but I'll want to share details until they are confirmed.
See you next week!