Vampire Nighthawk

Creature — Vampire Shaman

Flying

Deathtouch (Any amount of damage this deals to a creature is enough to destroy it.)

Lifelink (Damage dealt by this creature also causes you to gain that much life.)

Discussion (51)

lagotripha on Sorin to victory (orzhov vampires)

1 week ago

I've played a lot of modern vamps. Some of the best options are dirt cheap, so it makes for a great budget list to take to FNM. Most of the time I've been in mono black, but splashing for lietennant is fairly low-cost and low-risk for a great card.

For this list, Vampire of the Dire Moon , Vampire Cutthroat , Indulgent Aristocrat will do an amazing job filling out the one-drop slots. They are the 'best' budget setup I've found- great burn matchup and evasion/great deathtouch trades into bigger threats. They also play nice with Lashwrithe and Blade of the Bloodchief .

If your budget is tight enought that filling out with $1 1 drops seems rough, look at Guul Draz Vampire , Shadow Alley Denizen and Pulse Tracker alongside Stromkirk Condemned , Urge to Feed and direct damage like Gonti's Machinations and Bump in the Night . Playing a lot of 1 mana creatures that get pumped is really good, and evasion like intimidate makes something like mono-red burn but with hand disruption.

Two mana stronger options is Legion Lieutenant and Cordial Vampire (you can run Stromkirk Condemned , Dusk Legion Zealot or Cruel Celebrant ), and three is Vampire Nighthawk and Bloodthirsty Aerialist since you have them and want those slots for budget removal/carddraw. Gifted Aetherborn deserves a mention as it used to be cheap, but dire moon is frankly better and in print.

Next we come to the thing that makes budget mono-black king of the budget lists- cheap, effective spells. Sign in Blood is playable card-draw. Underworld Connections while far, far worse than Phyrexian Arena , and worse than bob still performs admirably. Delirium Skeins & Mind Rake devastates control players. Duress successfully hates out combo players. Standard cards like Mire's Toll & Drill Bit perform miracles. Cards like Flaying Tendrils can play at being one-sided boardwipes, and your sideboard has access to all manner of oddball cards that had too many copies to get expensive for modern- from Shadowfeed to Davriel, Rogue Shadowmage .

Grab some playtest tools and muck about- you will find a great deck within your budget that you can muck about with to perform well in your local meta.

Naverius on Mono-black budget demon

2 weeks ago

RNR_Gaming would switching Vampire Nighthawk for Disciple of Griselbrand be a good swap

kamarupa on vampires

2 weeks ago

Overall, this looks pretty well thought out. You've got an AVG CMC under 2 and a pretty classic breakdown, heavy on creatures, light on utilities, and all basic land. So I imagine this gets into gear pretty quick.

How's Guul Draz Assassin been? Seems like a pretty big mana sink for a deck with 20 lands... I'm think you'd get more mileage for overall less mana with Vampire Nighthawk . I imagine Drana, Liberator of Malakir would be pretty strong here, too.

I notice a lot of the spells included here have "when a creature dies" conditionals, but you don't have many ways of forcing that to happen. Opponents might remove your biggest threats and just take damage from smaller deathtouch creatures. So, given this is mono-black, some kind of direct removal in the mainboard seems like it would be useful. Defile , Cast Down , Murder , Doomblade, Go for the Throat , Bone Splinters , Geth's Verdict - you get the idea.

Along those same lines, if sometimes those "dies" conditionals are triggered by your own creatures leaving the battlefield, 1-2x Immortal Servitude will prove devastating to your opponents.

Sign in Blood seems fitting and useful here - I think you'll probably have good chances of gaining back the life lost, and in a pinch, you can use it for a kill.

Possibly useful lands: Cabal Stronghold , Bojuka Bog , Field of Ruin , Scavenger Grounds

Other potentially useful sideboard artifacts: Ratchet Bomb , Pithing Needle , Elixir of Immortality .

Tata on Rayami the sac queen

3 weeks ago

I like the direction you're going in. I just have a problem with the creatures that don't do enough outside of combining with your commander. These include: Banehound , Mirri the Cursed , Mistcutter Hydra , and Vampire Nighthawk . Hexproof and some form of evasion are probably the most important keywords you want, so you can prioritize cards that give you those, but those creatures should also function well outside of being sacrificed for your commander. I also think you should give a little more focus to Indestructible.

I think your curve could be smoothed out a little. Good turn 1 plays like Search for Tomorrow or Mystic Remora would improve your early game a lot.

pghvbrothers on Savra, Queen of the Golgari Aristocrats

3 weeks ago

LadyZ One thing i like about Gifted Aetherborn and Vampire Nighthawk is the mana cost, with a few play tests ive done, sometimes it takes a little to get out the cards i need to do some damage. So they provide some good bodies to gain some life and protect from attackers, and if they arent needed could be sacrificed later.

LadyZ on Savra, Queen of the Golgari Aristocrats

3 weeks ago

There are some more reanimation options you can look at. Victimize and Dread Return both support the aristocrats theme, and Vigor Mortis brings the creature back stronger.

I'd think about cutting Grave-Shell Scarab , it's main purpose is to fill your grave from the deck. Drakestown Forgotten similarly cares more about how fat your grave is than actually using it. And as for Gifted Aetherborn ... I would just cut it, but if you like the deathtouch-lifelink vampire that much, I'd pay the one extra for Vampire Nighthawk

StopShot on StopShot

3 weeks ago

@TypicalTimmy, Ah, I haven't changed my blurb in years. (How embarrassing.)

As for why the preference on the color pairing; I don't have a simple answer to it, but if there was a good number of colors to focus on, three always seemed ideal.

There are 10 three-color deck combinations to choose from. Before sticking to one color set I experimented with other color combinations using guild gates as the backbone of my manabase when I first started out playing Magic. I ended up playing against a lot of other decks that were absurdly more costlier in terms of money than my own decks back then which made losing a constant, but what made Magic most enjoyable for me was more so on the deck building and creativity. For me it kind of felt like a form of personal expression that was unique. My opponents were those who wanted to play competitively and they'd net-deck in Standard, Modern, and EDH playing sometimes with mirror copies of tournament-winning decks. For me that style of playing Magic was never appealing as it felt like you had to take someone else's idea or deck-concept to play seriously, and that net-decking was just an absurdly, non-ending, recycling of the same deck with only minor changes until it's as optimized as it can be. (Not saying it's wrong to play like that, it's just not something I would ever enjoy doing as it feels so unfulfilling to me.)

My Theros standard deck only consisted entirely of cards I had opened from a couple of packs from the various standard sets at the time, but I started picking up Modern when a friend of mine bought out a random person's collection online. This friend of mine was generous enough to let me have any of the worthless commons and uncommons he didn't mind parting with, so I built a kitchen table Modern deck that consisted of Gore Vassal and Feral Ridgewolf as it's signature cards. (This deck was crumby, but was way better than my excuse of a standard deck I was using and I liked it a lot more too because I had a bigger selection of cards to choose from which meant more creativity.)

I eventually got a part-time job after high school where I was actually making some money for once, but the pay wasn't amazing either. If I was going to financially invest into building a more serious deck I'd have to stick to a single three color-set as I did not have an intown local game store to trade one mana-base out for another. I decided on Mardu for a few reasons. One was that this was before the Khans of Tarkir block debuted, so I was limited to the original Zendikar fetch-lands to choose from and it seemed more ideal to build a three color deck that had a "wedge" color pairing as opposed to a "shard" color pairing. This meant I could run two sets of in-color fetches as opposed to just one; Arid Mesa and Marsh Flats . Second, I believe at the time those two fetch-lands were the cheapest to buy which also made them more favorable. Lastly none of the competitive Modern decks back then ever ran a true Mardu-color deck. ("True" as in not splashing into that pairing just to run a singular card.) The color combination just seemed as though it was ripe with potential to build around with and if I did make something really competitive it would give me a sense of pride and ownership that I didn't have to borrow someone else's idea or concept in order to win against my competitive friends.

I eventually did make a high stakes Modern deck in which used an Evershrike + Spirit Loop synergy to create a nasty end-game for my opponents. At the time other Modern graveyard strategies were nowhere near as prevalent or fast either so graveyard-hate was little to no concern as well. The issue with the deck was consistently pulling off that synergy just wasn't good enough at the time with the cards that were available, and so the other half of my deck consisted of good-stuff like Boros Reckoner and Vampire Nighthawk which generally made the focus of the deck an all-rounder as opposed to aggro, control, or midrange - good at everything, but not the greatest for any given one. That deck probably would have been tier 2.5, (higher tiered if I could land the signature combo,) but even though it wasn't the best the personal enjoyment I got out of giving my friend's net-decks a real struggle made it exhilarating to play with as if I was on the verge of creating a new Modern archetype all by myself. (It was pretty strong against the Splinter Twin and Jund match-up which is part of what made it so promising in the first place.)

That never worked out though. I spent exhaustive nights pooling through gatherer, but I had hit the limit. There was no real way to make the end-game combo anymore consistent than I already had it. The deck was scrapped, because the best way to improve it was to either drop red or white for green to run Commune with the Gods and Rancor . Seeing how the Splinter Twin archetype was later banned out of modern and with the rise of faster, stronger graveyard decks made graveyard hate more common, had I changed out of my color set to include green that Evershrike deck would have needed to eventually devolve into yet another Zoo, Dredge, or Jund deck just to stay in the meta. I digress, with the level of care, spending, and testing dedicated to just that one color-combination I would have gone absolutely nowhere had I abandoned my personal color combination.

In return, I canned Modern for EDH dedicating all my time and focus on the same color set - the same style of deck - the same business as usual. I already had the cards, the experience, and whatever I didn't have was just convenient to obtain for the circumstances at the time. Mardu OG dual-lands were still in the $50 price range while others were over $100, my college offered a playgroup consisting heavily of a competitive no-nonsense-styled EDH meta that forced me to rely on what I already did best to just to keep up, and by constantly being pitted against the decks that were already pushed to their limit I was able to do the same for my own.

In the end what I learned is you could spend your time playing in different colors and different strategies, and develop a flexible understanding on how to pilot just about any deck, but at the same time you only ever play each game one deck at a time. In each game how well you have crafted and piloted that deck is reflective only on how much time you've spent with that deck itself. I can't switch over to other colors as it would be like asking an artist who has dedicated all his time to painting to pick up a musical instrument or to write novels. For me all my experiences and thoughts are placed in one color combination, so whenever I play a game I'm going to be coming out throwing everything that I got into it. That's why I value above all other color combinations, but only for personal reasons. (I don't think it's fair to say any color combination is truly the strongest though, but even if there was one I would have no interest in playing it because I would like to be the one who proves that claim wrong.)

There's a quote from Bruce Lee that sums it up pretty well:

"I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times."

If you're curious my sole EDH deck is Flame Haze. The other decks are concept works I haven't even acquired the cards for. (Flame Haze's deck description is currently outdated at the moment however.)

burferking on Phylactery Broker

1 month ago

This is my kind of deck! I'd suggest to swap Garza's Assassin for Murderous Betrayal since an enchantment is a bit harder to destroy, and all your Swamps for Snow Swamps. This way, Extraplanar Lens doesn't give extra mana to other players that play Swamps (but no Snow Swamps). You could also add Hex Parasite just to pay life, or Vault Skirge for a little flying blocker (with lifelink!), Lashwrithe and/or Nightmare Lash to pay life and buff a creature. Other suggestions: Withering Boon Exsanguinate Pontiff of Blight Shauku, Endbringer Vampire Nighthawk Bond of Agony Killing Wave Phyrexian Reclamation Razaketh, the Foulblooded Strands of Night Boseiju, Who Shelters All Aetherflux Reservoir Torment of Hailfire Phyrexian Processor Well of Lost Dreams