When the Ixalan block was new and the tribes were revealed I knew I wanted to build a deck around the Vampire Conquistadors. That deck was a lot of fun to play and I had plenty of success with it in my local meta and online with MTG Arena during the Beta testing. However, as is the course with any standard meta, rotation hit, a few cards rotated out and needed to be replaced. Over the past few sets the deck has gone largely unchanged from its Ixalan base. That said, I did feel it was time to go into an update and one more chance to get a little more out of the wonderful Ixalan Vampires before they are gone
To start with the deck list can be found here.
Again, one thing that has not changed is that the deck still relies on smaller early game aggressive creatures. Skymarcher Aspirant and Adanto Vanguard are still creatures that put the hurt on early. Those initial hits can be crucial, especially against a meta that has cards like Settle the Wreckage. The Vanguard’s ability can become relevant very quickly and as we all know, it can often be worth 4 life to remove a creature from the other side of the board. We will also be using Dusk Legion Zealot to facilitate a bit of early game card draw as we dump our hand.
Nevertheless, paying life and chipping away at life totals won’t win most games. In order to add some more depth to this deck, we must go wide. Calling in our Lifelinking Vampire army helps stem the tide of having to pay life for Adanto Vanguard as well as getting our Skymarcher to Ascend. The best tool we have for this is Legion’s Landing. In addition to this we will also have Queen’s Commission and Call to the Feast. This package gives us a free-flowing set of bodies onto the battle field. These can attack, block and muddle up the board as we start to build for the final finishing strike.
So, there are two the bodies and ascension. Having the bodies allows us to use Pitiless Pontiff to slow down their larger threats. Cards like Radiant Destiney and Twilight Prophet help us exploit our army of vampires. Radiant Destiney gives us the ability to start trading up and gaining some real nice life amounts from attacks with our tokens. To supplement Destiney, we are also going to have Legion Lieutenant to further the payoff for keeping bodies around.
Twilight Prophet, when ascended, can be enough to finish off a game when the opponents board gets too big for us or if there is just too much there to make profitable attacks. Our other finisher is Sanctum Seeker. Seeker allows us to swing in for lethal without landing hits. Since the Seeker’s ability triggers on attack, we will know if we are going to get the trigger or not before we decide to throw our fighters into the meat grinder. In this case we can set up attacks that can finish off an opponent even if they have a Settle in hand.
At the end here we will round it off with a bit of removal to get the overly annoying creatures off the other side of the board and we are all set! I chose mortify here and I believe it is the right choice because there are enough enchantments out there were it seems to be worth it.
Add in the nice two-Color land package we have in the current standard and we are done!
Let me know your thoughts!
Osogladiator 