modern BR vampires

Modern forum

Posted on Feb. 6, 2013, 9:21 p.m. by satonas

B/R Vampire Deck with the new bans of belf and seething song, jund and storm got weak, what do you think about modern vampires?

Barandis says... #2

The thing is that the statement "jund and storm got weak" isn't really true. It's more like "Jund was weakened in some matchups and Storm is dead." So yes, a Vampire sort of deck (or any aggro deck; I plan on testing Zoo) will benefit, but maybe not as much as you think.

Jund is kind of a unique problem. Most of the time when decks have cards banned, they drop off in popularity for a while. I'm not sure that Jund will suffer from that because of the price of Tarmogoyf . When someone invests in a set of those, he's going to want to use them. Given that there are viable drop-in replacements for Bloodbraid Elf that don't necessitate many other changes to the deck (other than dropping Boom/Bust ), Jund players still have the option of playing a very strong deck.

Maybe some people will switch to RUG or BUG with their Goyfs. Aggro decks are pretty good against BUG because it's a hand-destruction archetype that's light on removal, but RUG is probably better against aggro than Jund is (Snapcaster Mage on their Lightning Bolt s is much worse for aggro than hand destruction + Liliana of the Veil is).

For those that do stick to Jund, they'll have drop-in replacements like Huntmaster of the Fells  ^Flip , Kitchen Finks , Thrun, the Last Troll , card:Geralf's Messenger, and Olivia Voldaren . Only the last one isn't either resilient or drop multiple creatures, and if Olivia drops when the aggro player is tapped out, chances are she'll be out of bolt range before she can be killed. Aggro decks will not prefer a single one of those to a Bloodbraid Elf that was easily killed and sometimes missed into useless hand destruction or a Liliana that might be dead before she could even make you sac a creature.

That being said, Storm is dead, and Bloodbraid Elf going away will make control decks stronger. Those are both good news for aggro. I certainly think that decks that turn little creatures sideways are pretty good right now, but maybe not as good as you'd like them to be.

February 7, 2013 10:21 a.m.