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BMoor's Magic The Gathering Deck Garage
Olly's Vampire Deck
February 8, 2010

Today's deck fix I feel bad about, for not fixing sooner. Olly sent me the deck a week or two before Worldwake was announced, and I wanted to wait until the Prerelease to see if there were any good Vampires in it that Olly should play. Trouble is, Olly mentioned an upcoming tournament, which I might be too late for. Alas, better late than never.

Hello,

I recently began the game and purchased 2 “Rise of the Vampires” theme decks from the new Zendikar set. I basically meshed the 2 decks together and ended up with my vampire deck, made with cards purely from the theme decks.

I am entering my first tournament soon and I was wondering if you could fix my deck so I actually stand a fighting chance at the tournament.

Thanks,

Olly.

VampireDeck:

2 Malakir Bloodwitch
4 Vampire Nighthawk
4 Guul Draz Vampire
4 Vampire Aristocrat
4 Child of Night
2 Gatekeeper of Malakir

4 Feast of Blood
4 Vampires Bite
2 Diabolic Tutor
2 Hideous End
2 Blood Tribute

22 Swamp Land
4 Piranha Marsh

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Luckily for you, Olly, some good Vampires did get released in Worldwake, and it looks like you've got room for them. Although, I must confess I see a bit of a problem with your deck.

You see, the best reason to run a tribal deck is that, in a true tribal deck, your creatures are made better because of their creature type. You drop an Elvish Archdruid, and voila! Our elves are better. You, however, don't really have any Vampire Lords, so there's not really any reason for your deck to involve Vampires. All you have right now is Feast of Blood, which is downright uncastable unless you have two creatures out, and Blood Tribute, which wants you to tap a Vampire at time of cast in order to gain some life. That doesn't really entice much, now does it?

Also, you're running 26 lands in a 60-card deck. That's a little high. You shouldn't need any more than 24. Remove two lands in favor of the go-to Vampire Lord from M2010, Vampire Nocturnus. You should probably have four, but they are mythic rarity, so two will be enough for now.

Next, we need to identify the weakest Vampires in your deck. I'd say they're Vampire Aristocrat and Guul Draz Vampire. Guul Draz is only good when your opponent gets down to 10, but she seems like she wants to be dropped earlier due to her mana cost. And Vampire Aristocrat works best when you're churning out tokens.

Luckily there's a few new Vampires in Worldwake to take their place. The best one, Kalastria Highborn, definitely wants to be in your deck. The next best one is Anowon, the Ruin Sage-- a card that will definitely make you grateful that all your creatures are Vampires-- you won't have to sacrifice a thing. You probably don't want a full four copies of Anowon, though, so instead just increase your number of Gatekeeper of Malakir to four.

Next, I want you to remove Diabolic Tutor and Hideous End for a playset of the best "Vampire" card in Worldwake-- Urge to Feed. What better way to make yourself grateful for filling the board with Vampires? Put +1/+1 counters on all of them of course!

And finally, since you're running Vampire Nocturnus, you don't want the top card of your library to be a land more often than necessary. You can solve that problem by replacing a few Swamps with either black Borderposts-- they act just like lands that come into play tapped as long as you don't keep an opening hand with no Swamps-- or Terramorphic Expanse, so you can shuffle your library while reducing the number of lands in it simultaneously. Since you no longer have a turn-one play, either one will do fine.

Good luck!

~BMoor