Similar to the GW Convoke primer I put out there, this is the how and why of the BW lifegain deck working. But first, a story.
Life gain sucks. Really sucks. It's traditionally a sign of a new player that they overvalue lifegain cards like Meditation Puzzle (which is still bad), and a card has to be ridiculous (like Congregate in multiplayer) to get a look in, or come tacked on free with an actual playable card, like Divine Favour. The reason for this is because life points aren't all even. When you are on 20 life and take 2 damage, you've lost 10% of your life total. When you're on 4 and take 2, that's 50% of your life (and at much higher risk of losing on the spot to a pump or burn spell). So as a general rule you don't really care about your life total much when you're above 10 life, but you really care when you're below 5.
This matters because of the black life loss cards. Now, losing 3 life or even 6 life isn't that big of a deal. But when you're dealing yourselve 9 damage or more, well, let's just say that often even a bad opponent will be able to kill you if you start the game at 10 life. And when you get down under 5 life, casting Ulcerate can be downright perilous.
The upside to all of this of course, is that lifegain cards are much more valuable when they are gaining you life from the position of being nearly dead, than they are when you are at a safe life total, because gaining life when you are at 3 means so much more than when you are at 20. In addition, there are a couple of cards that actively reward you for gaining life. By themselves they would be too unreliable and inconsistent to justify running otherwise bad lifegain cards to combo with, but combined with the above lifeloss cards, put the deck over the hump from being gimmicky and unreliable to being synergysic enough to form an actual archetype.
* Soulmender is a key card, because having multiples of him turns Ajani's Pridemate into a bomb, plus he's also an in-demand card for convoke decks, so you may not be able to wheel this guy in M15. Ditto with Sungrace Pegasus. These are both 'bad' cards that are secretly playable in M15.
So, now that you know what the key commons and uncommons are, how do you draft the deck? It's really pretty simply. Draft the lifeloss cards as if they didn't have the lifeloss text. So Ulcerate is just -3/-3 to a creature for B. Then once you have 3+ lifeloss cards (so that you can reasonably expect to be casting multiples of them in the same game) you increase your priority of lifegain cards, with the expectation that the 'Synergystic lifegain' cards will go around late, since nobody else will be wanting them.
I ran a deck like this last friday and I put enough lifegain where I wasn't worried about the double Ulcerate et. Unless I had serious trigger effects I still wouldn't run staff's.
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Out of the blackness and stench of the engulfing swamp emerged a shimmering figure. Only the splattered armor and ichor-stained sword hinted at the unfathomable evil the knight had just laid waste.
I cannot imagine Profane Memento is ever playable in any deck.
I don't hate Blood Host in a normal black deck; it's not a high pick, but it gets value from chumps, crusty buddies and early drops. Also, I think Divine Offering might be a decent 23rd... I could be wrong, but Will-Forged Golems are going to be kicking around, and there are some answer-me-now enchantments out there.
This is going to be my favorite deck to draft in m15. I always look for an excuse to go BW, and this is Valuetown. "Pilgrim! Fetch me my letter opener!"
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My Decks: EDH: Sygg, River Cutthroat , Road to Scion
Grimgrin, Corpseborn Modern: Polytokes IRL: Progenitus Polymorph , Goblins
I ran a deck like this last friday and I put enough lifegain where I wasn't worried about the double Ulcerate et. Unless I had serious trigger effects I still wouldn't run staff's.
Yeah, maybe I need to split that section out a little more. I do regard the Staffs as generally bad. It's just I love Sign in Blood so much that the staffs offset the significant lifeloss.
I cannot imagine Profane Memento is ever playable in any deck.
Funny story: I was trying to convince a recent FNM opponent that he shouldn't run it in a deck with Ajani's Pridemate. He was resistent to the idea. Maybe I'll bump it down.
I don't hate Blood Host in a normal black deck; it's not a high pick, but it gets value from chumps, crusty buddies and early drops. Also, I think Divine Offering might be a decent 23rd... I could be wrong, but Will-Forged Golems are going to be kicking around, and there are some answer-me-now enchantments out there.
This is going to be my favorite deck to draft in m15. I always look for an excuse to go BW, and this is Valuetown. "Pilgrim! Fetch me my letter opener!"
On the other hand, ther eis so much competition at the 5 slot for creatures that a 3/3 like this is still really bad.
If it came down to a last 5-drop, would you run Blood Host or Rotfeaster Maggot. Yeah yeah, I know, "it depends", but what's your instinct? Personally I just like the low commitment and floor of the maggot. Worst case scenario he's a 3/5 for 5, and that looks pretty relevant in this format.
On the other hand, ther eis so much competition at the 5 slot for creatures that a 3/3 like this is still really bad.
The more I think about the Blood Host, the more I like it. Coming down for five, he is an unimpressive 3/3. However, as the game goes on, he turns your topdecked dorks into beef and lifegain, soon becoming the biggest thing on the board (probably.) Combine with Black Cats in a control shell and you can lock a topdecking opponent out during their draw step!
Full disclosure: I read the LSV review before making this post, and his review validated and galvanized my liking of the card.
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My Decks: EDH: Sygg, River Cutthroat , Road to Scion
Grimgrin, Corpseborn Modern: Polytokes IRL: Progenitus Polymorph , Goblins
Blood Host is quite a bit better than Rotfeaster unless you absolutely need to block a 4/4 right away.
I still think this strategy has issues, because none of the life loss cards are so damaging that they require life gain, and most of the life gain cards are bad. I don't really think that Sungrace Pegasus makes Ulcerate better -- Ulcerate is just good, Pegasus is making your deck worse. It's like saying Meditation Puzzle is good when it lets you survive long enough to draw Soul of Theros.
I don't think the take-away should be "If you have a bunch of Ulcerate and Scudders, prioritize life gain." I think the better option is just limit how many life loss spells you're willing to draft, and fill the life gain slots with cards that are better in a vacuum.
I don't see myself prioritizing weaker lifegain cards even in BW unless I drafted 3+ "lose 3 life cards" (Scudder/Ulcerate.. highly unlikely to happen with both at uncommon) or drafted more than one Ajani's Pridemate/Wall of Limbs. The +1/+1 counter creatures are the real reason I would draft lifegain. I'd want at least 2 to consider building around them and then I'd only prioritize repeatable lifegain (Soulmender/Sungrace Pegasus), not the one-shot stuff, since either of those immediately turns Pridemate/Wall into Chasm Skulker. The convoke lifegain guys help you pay for Triplicate Spirits (which you would realistically first pick either way) and Convenant of Blood, so they don't totally suck without a Pridemate on the board.
If just playing BW and grabbing only a few Sign in Bloods/Shadowcloaks/Ulcerates, seems like you'd do better by drafting good cards than by drafting lifegain. You just need to play to mitigate the lifeloss and maybe grab a Rotfeaster Maggot or 2 for midgame defense.
IMO this archetype is far better in Sealed. You never want to draft lifegain (i.e. choose lifegain cards over other cards) but if you happen to be given a pool that synergizes very well with lifegain, then you can justify it!
In limited I don't like playing cards which rely on other cards to be usable. If you can tailor your deck just the way you want it then using sub-standard cards to fit the deck can work well, but that's constructed and not usually limited.
I like playing cards which complement each other as this can really take a deck from average to very good but using cards which are sub-standard on their own is a recipe for losing in my view, unless the complement you are setting up is a bomb combo which is not unlikely to go off, such as the lifegain 4 create an angel card in M14 combined with enough lifegain 4 cards.
Well the 1/2 lifelinking flyer isn't super far from being playable anyway. In terms of straight up race math it acts like a 2/2 flyer, so if you can eke just a little more value out of it it's probably worthwhile. The Soulmender less so (but having Trip Spirits, the 2/2 that gets counters, and the +2/+1 and first strike for all white creatures card probably makes it playable).
Problem is I would play any of the life loss cards in a black/x deck without life gain. Though I like rot maggot a lot
Set is missing a card like underworld coinsmith or scholar of atheros from last block to really bring it together imo
Of course you can run an Ulcerate or two and be very happy about it. But the point is, lifeloss cards suffer from diminishing returns once you draft too many of them. I personally want to be able to run a triple Ulcerate, Necrogen Scudder, triple Night's Whisper deck. And the only way you can do that is by running decent to good lifegain cards to offset what would otherwise be too much of a drawback.
You missed priming me on the deck. You explained the life gain cards well, but all you really said is how to offset life loss. And to be honest I didn't need to be convinced on the life loss cards. I'll happily include Ulcerate in my decks even if I don't have ways to gain the life back.
So what's the deck? What are the synergies here that others are missing? Is Wall of Limbs the nuts and we're missing that? Is Ajani's Pridemate an absolute house when in a certain shell? I mean he looks fine, but archetype defining?
The point of my post was to establish roughly how good lifegain and how bad lifeloss are in a vacuum, and them how to adjust those card values on the fly as you draft progressively more lifeloss cards in an M15 draft.
Sorry if the concept was too simple for you. Not everybody is as good a magic player as you are.
Play nice. Unlike the rest of the internet, we are here to discuss Magic, not have a sarcasm contest. -Hardened
Child of Night and Covenant of Blood do a mediocre job of getting you more life to play with, especially if you're bagging multiple Ulcerates with supplemental removal to get your Child of Nights through. That's just in black.
Child of Night and Covenant of Blood do a mediocre job of getting you more life to play with, especially if you're bagging multiple Ulcerates with supplemental removal to get your Child of Nights through. That's just in black.
I wouldn't burn Ulcerates just to keep a Child of Night alive, that would be overrating the 2/1. But having said that, every time the child hits something, I think that 'turns on' another Ulcerate in your hand.
Life gain sucks. Really sucks. It's traditionally a sign of a new player that they overvalue lifegain cards like Meditation Puzzle (which is still bad), and a card has to be ridiculous (like Congregate in multiplayer) to get a look in, or come tacked on free with an actual playable card, like Divine Favour. The reason for this is because life points aren't all even. When you are on 20 life and take 2 damage, you've lost 10% of your life total. When you're on 4 and take 2, that's 50% of your life (and at much higher risk of losing on the spot to a pump or burn spell). So as a general rule you don't really care about your life total much when you're above 10 life, but you really care when you're below 5.
This matters because of the black life loss cards. Now, losing 3 life or even 6 life isn't that big of a deal. But when you're dealing yourselve 9 damage or more, well, let's just say that often even a bad opponent will be able to kill you if you start the game at 10 life. And when you get down under 5 life, casting Ulcerate can be downright perilous.
The upside to all of this of course, is that lifegain cards are much more valuable when they are gaining you life from the position of being nearly dead, than they are when you are at a safe life total, because gaining life when you are at 3 means so much more than when you are at 20. In addition, there are a couple of cards that actively reward you for gaining life. By themselves they would be too unreliable and inconsistent to justify running otherwise bad lifegain cards to combo with, but combined with the above lifeloss cards, put the deck over the hump from being gimmicky and unreliable to being synergysic enough to form an actual archetype.
1 Ulcerate
1 Necrogen Scudder
1 Sign in Blood
1 Shadowcloak Vampire
Lifegain triggers
1 Ajani's Pridemate
1 Wall of Limbs
Lifegain playable in any deck
1 Child of Night
1 Rotfeaster Maggot
1 Covenant of Blood
1 Wall of Essence
1 Sungrace Pegasus (*)
1 Soulmender (*)
1 Radiant Fountain
1 Divine Favor
1 Blood Host
1 Solemn Offering
Lifegain that's still bad
1 Staff of the Death Magus
1 Profane Memento
1 Tireless Missionaries
1 Congregate
1 Eternal Thirst
1 Meditation Puzzle
* Soulmender is a key card, because having multiples of him turns Ajani's Pridemate into a bomb, plus he's also an in-demand card for convoke decks, so you may not be able to wheel this guy in M15. Ditto with Sungrace Pegasus. These are both 'bad' cards that are secretly playable in M15.
So, now that you know what the key commons and uncommons are, how do you draft the deck? It's really pretty simply. Draft the lifeloss cards as if they didn't have the lifeloss text. So Ulcerate is just -3/-3 to a creature for B. Then once you have 3+ lifeloss cards (so that you can reasonably expect to be casting multiples of them in the same game) you increase your priority of lifegain cards, with the expectation that the 'Synergystic lifegain' cards will go around late, since nobody else will be wanting them.
Your thoughts? What did I miss?
I don't hate Blood Host in a normal black deck; it's not a high pick, but it gets value from chumps, crusty buddies and early drops. Also, I think Divine Offering might be a decent 23rd... I could be wrong, but Will-Forged Golems are going to be kicking around, and there are some answer-me-now enchantments out there.
This is going to be my favorite deck to draft in m15. I always look for an excuse to go BW, and this is Valuetown. "Pilgrim! Fetch me my letter opener!"
My Decks:
EDH: Sygg, River Cutthroat , Road to Scion
Grimgrin, Corpseborn
Modern: Polytokes
IRL: Progenitus Polymorph , Goblins
Just a friendly reminder that I will drive this car off a bridge
Yeah, maybe I need to split that section out a little more. I do regard the Staffs as generally bad. It's just I love Sign in Blood so much that the staffs offset the significant lifeloss.
Funny story: I was trying to convince a recent FNM opponent that he shouldn't run it in a deck with Ajani's Pridemate. He was resistent to the idea. Maybe I'll bump it down.
On the other hand, ther eis so much competition at the 5 slot for creatures that a 3/3 like this is still really bad.
The more I think about the Blood Host, the more I like it. Coming down for five, he is an unimpressive 3/3. However, as the game goes on, he turns your topdecked dorks into beef and lifegain, soon becoming the biggest thing on the board (probably.) Combine with Black Cats in a control shell and you can lock a topdecking opponent out during their draw step!
Full disclosure: I read the LSV review before making this post, and his review validated and galvanized my liking of the card.
My Decks:
EDH: Sygg, River Cutthroat , Road to Scion
Grimgrin, Corpseborn
Modern: Polytokes
IRL: Progenitus Polymorph , Goblins
Just a friendly reminder that I will drive this car off a bridge
I still think this strategy has issues, because none of the life loss cards are so damaging that they require life gain, and most of the life gain cards are bad. I don't really think that Sungrace Pegasus makes Ulcerate better -- Ulcerate is just good, Pegasus is making your deck worse. It's like saying Meditation Puzzle is good when it lets you survive long enough to draw Soul of Theros.
I don't think the take-away should be "If you have a bunch of Ulcerate and Scudders, prioritize life gain." I think the better option is just limit how many life loss spells you're willing to draft, and fill the life gain slots with cards that are better in a vacuum.
If just playing BW and grabbing only a few Sign in Bloods/Shadowcloaks/Ulcerates, seems like you'd do better by drafting good cards than by drafting lifegain. You just need to play to mitigate the lifeloss and maybe grab a Rotfeaster Maggot or 2 for midgame defense.
IMO this archetype is far better in Sealed. You never want to draft lifegain (i.e. choose lifegain cards over other cards) but if you happen to be given a pool that synergizes very well with lifegain, then you can justify it!
I like playing cards which complement each other as this can really take a deck from average to very good but using cards which are sub-standard on their own is a recipe for losing in my view, unless the complement you are setting up is a bomb combo which is not unlikely to go off, such as the lifegain 4 create an angel card in M14 combined with enough lifegain 4 cards.
Set is missing a card like underworld coinsmith or scholar of atheros from last block to really bring it together imo
Of course you can run an Ulcerate or two and be very happy about it. But the point is, lifeloss cards suffer from diminishing returns once you draft too many of them. I personally want to be able to run a triple Ulcerate, Necrogen Scudder, triple Night's Whisper deck. And the only way you can do that is by running decent to good lifegain cards to offset what would otherwise be too much of a drawback.
So what's the deck? What are the synergies here that others are missing? Is Wall of Limbs the nuts and we're missing that? Is Ajani's Pridemate an absolute house when in a certain shell? I mean he looks fine, but archetype defining?
The point of my post was to establish roughly how good lifegain and how bad lifeloss are in a vacuum, and them how to adjust those card values on the fly as you draft progressively more lifeloss cards in an M15 draft.
Sorry if the concept was too simple for you. Not everybody is as good a magic player as you are.
Play nice. Unlike the rest of the internet, we are here to discuss Magic, not have a sarcasm contest. -Hardened
I wouldn't burn Ulcerates just to keep a Child of Night alive, that would be overrating the 2/1. But having said that, every time the child hits something, I think that 'turns on' another Ulcerate in your hand.