Eddy Markov
By Shay Muscarella
Let’s break our deck down piece by piece starting with our commander, Edgar Markov. First look gives us a 4/4 for 6 in Mardu colors. Not particularly good if I'm being honest. Haste and First Strike? Okay getting better but still meh. +1/+1 to our other vamps on attack, still meh. Putting a 1/1 vamp into play with every cast vampire? Yup, let’s abuse that. That's basically the best token generator you can ask for. Honestly, I want him safe in the Command Zone and don't really intend to cast him.
Mardu Ramp
Let's agree that white, black, and red are the less ramp heavy colors in the game so let’s take a look at some options we have. Run of the mill ramp first, we have Sol Ring, Signets, and Command Sphere. Wayfarer's Bauble is a fantastic piece of ramp if you don't have green in your deck. Cabal Coffers, Cabal Stronghold, and Urborg are our better pieces of land ramp for the deck. Phyrexian Altar, Ashnod's Altar, and Black Market work wonderfully for us as we will have plenty of fodder to use for mana. I'm throwing K'rrik, Son of Yawgmoth in the ramp section because he is basically "free" mana for the rest of our deck. Finally, I have Herald's Horn to reduce our vampire's cost and sometimes draw us an extra card each turn. I've never had an issue with casting my spells in this deck so I think this is a perfect amount of ramp.
Card Draw
Most of our card draw will be in black so it’s going to cost us a little life, but you know what? That's fine. We've got 40 life and that will be more than enough. I'm usually pretty tough on Phyrexian Arena, but it can really help out sometimes. It's just a bit overrated usually. Next up is Skullclamp. Pay one and sacrifice a creature to draw two cards? Easy trade off. Same for Vampiric Rights (also a flavor win). Anje Falkenrath lets us file through our deck slowly unless we have a Falkenrath Gorger out. Then all of our vampires have Madness and we can draw through multiple cards each turn if the Magic gods are on our side. Champion of Dusk is a little more conditional as he really wants lots of vampires on the field when he comes in. Fortunately, will be playing lots of vampires! Smothering Abomination can be a total powerhouse in this deck so we will forgive it for not being a vampire. Our final two are just bonkers in Ad Nauseam and Necropotence. Usually I keep these available until I'm looking to either win...or find something to stop me from dying. I've also got Razaketh, the Foulblooded and Bolas's Citadel as pseudo card draw.
Spread the Disease
Here are our other vampire makers. There aren't too many as our Commander already makes a ton of vampire tokens for us. So all of our vampires automatically make us a vampire and Anointed Procession just doubles up our commander's eminence trigger. Bloodline Keeper and Pawn of Ulamog are the only other dedicated token producers in the deck.
WIN RIGHT NOW
Alright so you're playing for your third hour and the Meren player keeps making you sacrifice all your cool stuff. How about we just play one big turn and wipe everyone off the board so we can move to the next game? First, we need a way to deal damage to our opponents by way of Blood Artist, Falkenrath Noble, and Cruel Celebrant. Next, we need Phyrexian Altar and/or K'rrik to let us play our one drops for "free". Finally, we have to be able to replay our one drops over and over and over. Here we've got Enduring Renewal and Cloudstone Curio. With Enduring Renewal out, we can sacrifice Quag Vampires (our one drop) to Phyrexian Altar for a Black Mana. Quag Vampires returns to our hand and we now have one black mana floating and a 1/1 token in play. Do this on repeat and we end up with an infinite number of Vampire Tokens. With any of our damage dealing vampires in play, we end up dealing infinite damage and gaining infinite life. K'rrik can replace Phyrexian Altar in this example so long as we have Anointed Procession in play to double our tokens, or we have two life drainers so we are gaining two life on each loop to offset paying life for our black mana pip of our Quag Vampires. Cloudstone Curio takes the place of Enduring Renewal as long as we have two one drops out on the board.
Filling Out the Deck
Obviously, this isn't a full 100 cards. The rest of my deck contains eight pieces of removal, two board wipes, and six targeted removal spells. You're playing white and black so take your pick! Everything is your choice of favorite vampires. Try and opt for lowering casting cost (one and two drop vampires) as these are the most efficient way for you to keep your vampire army fully stocked.
Dextras
If you really want to stomp your playgroup and just throw your budget out the door, here are some upgrades you can throw in your deck. First off, you'll realize the only tutor we have in here is Razaketh. I purposefully don't include tutors in the deck because I see them as taking some of the fun randomness out of the game. However, they do make your decks much more consistent. Vampiric Tutor is completely on theme here anyway. Diabolic Intent and Demonic Tutor are also fantastic options for this deck. And of course Exquisite Blood and Sanguine Bond is an excellent combo to insta-kill your table (and a flavor win to boot). Again I just don't feel like that's a fun combo to win with and choose not to play it, but it’s very effective and very powerful.
Creature (39)
Land (35)
Enchantment (7)
Sorcery (3)
Artifact (10)
Instant (5)
Shay has been playing Magic since way back in 8th edition and played mostly Modern for a long time (filthy Tron player). These last few years though he's been all about Commander. Outside of Magic he is a career firefighter who's currently trying to get his whole department in on the addiction...errr game.
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