Guest Column: Doing the Frank Karsten: Block Constructed Vampires

By Sebastian Parker

This year a few winning MTG Online players have written about how playing constructed online is a great way to increase the value of your online collection without investing too much cash The theory is you buy a deck and you play in queues. If you win, you sell the boosters and use the tickets to enter more queues and hopefully over a few repetitions you have won more queues than you’ve lost and you’ve ended up in enough profit to buy some boosters and do a draft. Block constructed is a great cheap (~$12 for the stock vampires list) way to get started on the MTGO ladder because it can lead into playing standard if you play for consecutive years. With that in mind I thought I would have a go at playing Zendikar block constructed. Zendikar block constructed is dominated by vampires – approximately 50% of winning decklists online are vampires decks. (25% are UW control and most of the rest are aggressive white and red decks, stats are included in the spreadsheet).

Last year Faeries was the best deck and at the world championships Frank Karsten took a novel approach to building his version. He took a bunch of high performing decklists from the decks of the week archive. Vampires have been performing similarly well in the Zendikar block constructed daily events so I decided to do the same thing as Frank Karsten did with the Vampires decklists.

1)The stock list

24 Swamp

4 Bloodghast

4 Gatekeeper of Malakir

4 Malakir Bloodwitch

4 Vampire Hexmage

4 Vampire Lacerator

4 Vampire Nighthawk

4 Disfigure

4 Feast of Blood

4 Quest for the Gravelord

Sideboard:

4 Mind Sludge

4 Marsh Casualties

3 Hideous End

4 Other

Combing through the decklists one list kept coming up over and over again so I thought I’d list it separately before presenting the averaged decklists

2)The Mean and Weighted Mean ‘Aggregate’ Decklists

So the mean decklist is gotten by just adding together all the cards and dividing by the number of decklists:

24 Swamp

4 Bloodghast

4 Gatekeeper of Malakir

4 Malakir Bloodwitch

4 Vampire Hexmage

3 Vampire Lacerator

4 Vampire Nighthawk

4 Disfigure

3 Feast of Blood

3 Quest for the Gravelord

1 Mind Sludge

1 Marsh Casualties

1 Blade of the Bloodchief

Sideboard:

3 Mind Sludge

3 Marsh Casualties

3 Hideous End

1 Soul Stair Expedition

1 Halo Hunter

1 Blazing Torch

1 Sorin Markov

1 Blade of the Bloodchief

1 Needlebite Trap

And the weighted mean decklist is attained by multiplying the number of cards in a deck by how well that deck did – 3 wins in a daily event multiply by 3, 4 wins by 4 and top8 of a premier event times 5 and divide through to get a 60 card deck. This didn’t affect the main deck but the sideboard changed to:

Sideboard:

3 Mind Sludge

3 Marsh Casualties

4 Hideous End

1 Soul Stair Expedition

1 Halo Hunter

1 Blazing Torch

1 Sorin Markov

1 Needlebite Trap

The difference being that decks with Blade of the Bloodchief aren’t winning as much, which makes me feel more justified in disliking the card.

Now we have the decklists, we need to decide how we can use this information to our advantage. The usual issue with the averaging is that you can get a final decklist with a bunch of 1-ofs, which is not something I usually advocate – one of the cards is going give you more wins than the others and so I’d recommend testing out which one and then maxing out on that one. (So far I am favouring Mind Sludge because it is so good in the mirror match) But alternatively you could get rid of the one ofs and max out the 3-ofs to 4-ofs, in which case you end up with the stock list.

The other issue with averaging is ending up with some number of fetchlands. I didn’t find any reason to think that fetchlands make your main deck more powerful – in such an aggressive format the fact you’re less likely to draw land later in the game is pretty much balanced out against the life cost. Given that each fetchland is in the 3-4 tix range, the cost of the deck escalates from 12tix to around 40tix for little benefit. So I’d recommend not splashing out on fetches if you’re just getting started.

The analysis mainly shows that if you’re playing vampires in block constructed you’ll be playing 56 of the same cards as anyone else (give or take fetchlands), which means that the mirror match is going to be very much a coin flip. Once you start profiting from beating up on the non-vampires decks you might want to invest in some alternative strategies to help in beating the mirror.

The Mirror

Quest for the gravelord has been so far unimpressive and in a match where you tend to trade removal spells and creatures and go down to topdecking, often the quest is a pretty dead topdeck. It is good on turn one but more often than not your opponent can remove the counters with vampire hexmage you need to remove 5 creatures to trigger it, at which point any creature spell is going to help you win the game.

If you aren’t playing fetchlands, the big card in the mirror is mind sludge. Since there isn’t really a good way to generate card advantage resolving a mind sludge first will often result in winning the game. In order to achieve this, you want to get to 5 lands on turn 5 consistently so siding in 1-2 swamps is going to help that plan. (And playing swamps over fetchlands will increase your chances of drawing into your 5^th land)

The other main way I have read about (but not tested yet) is to use carnage alter and bloodghast to draw extra cards. Obviously this works better if you are playing fetchlands since you can trigger landfall multiple times. Speaking of landfall, once you get to the stage of running fetchlands you can run Ob Nixilis, which the opposing vampires deck must draw a feast of blood to answer, or vampire nighthawk to half-answer. You can also run soul stair expedition and trigger it immediately off of leaving fetchlands in play, allowing you to trump their removal again.

If you are going to play block constructed then these decklists are a fine starting point, once you’ve beaten people with swamps and mind sludge you might want to give the carnage alter/soul stair expedition plan a try. Get plenty of practice with vampires and you should be a winner online in no time.

Seb (RisingSun000 Online)

P.S. I’ve attatched the excel file of all the decklists and the mean decklist calculations.