General Vampire Madness Aggro

[NimbusToad]

Has anyone thought about orienting their RB aggro sections around Falkenrath Gorger? My red 1 and 2 drops are just beaters for the most part, and I thought it might be interesting to incorporate the Madness mechanic. I am looking for cards that are decent on their own, so running multiples is a must (I am trying to design my cube a bit more like a set, so this is perfectly fine for me). I think it could even just be interesting running like 4 Falkenrath Gorgers and 4 Bloodcrazed Neonates and calling it a day, but I have also identified this list of other vampires that I wouldn't mind running in my low powered cube:

Bloodcrazed Neonate
Falkenrath Noble
Guul Draz assassin
Null Caller
Soul Collector
Stromkirk noble
vampire lacerator

In terms of other madness cards, I wouldn't mind playing:

murderous compulsion
Reckless Wurm


Any thoughts?

 

[Onderzeeboot]

Ask CML about vampires in cube ^_^

 

[shamizy]

Uh, I guess if you really want to push that theme, but after a point it kind of becomes an obnoxious DRAFT THIS ARCHETYPE sign with so many copies available. Instead of being a cool synergistic deck with payoffs, it becomes a deck that you're trying to ingrain into your draft environment. Vampires, as a whole, just aren't good enough without lords and support but at that point it's kind of parasitic like most tribes. There's just not a critical mass of them incidentally in most environments to work out (unlike Humans) and I don't think they do enough interesting things to be worth putting so much effort into for an R/B archetype.

If you want to put in so many copies, you could probably make a pretty sweet Innistrad-esque Draft Sim, but I don't really know what you'd do cube-wise. There's just not enough to work with imo.

 

[NimbusToad]

My thought was mostly to just run Falkenrath Gorger and Bloodcrazed Neonate as a large portion of my red aggro dudes and not try for any actual tribal synergies. I am aiming for a low power level, so players can just ignore the creature type and draft their red beaters as usual. However, if they want to combine those beaters with looters, or loot/draw cards, or discard engines there is a possibility of opening up a slightly different aggro space than straight up beatdown.

Would it even be worth it to build the deck? Like if the payoff is playing an extra 2 drop turn 3 off of a looter is that really worth the setup? Not totally convinced, but I thought it might be a way to make madness a "thing" without having useless cards floating around.

I am sort of leaning towards a multiples-heavy environment in the new cube I am designing, so it doesn't bother me to have 3-4 copies of each of these cards (I'd like the drafts to feel like somewhere between cube draft and set-based limited).

 

[GiftsForgiven]

I've been toying with a Madness deck in my lower-powered cube. I've been holding off on it b/c I wanted to see spoilers, and so far have been given a great one with that new Demon.

I think Madness is solid, even if it's power-ceiling is a little low when compared to some other strategies. However, there's a difference between Madness and All-In vampires. I think the value-madness is just better and more workable.

 

[FlowerSunRain]

If your going to run vampires and are thinking Reckless wurm, why not incorrigible youths?

I don't think vampires as a theme have weight and I don't think you should try to hang a theme on a one toughness aggro creature. That said, I do like madness as a subtheme and there are plenty of vampires to work into that. I've had moderate success centering this theme in B/R. Olivia II and Bloodhall Priest are two great gold cards to signal this.

 

[inscho]

I really enjoy the madness/hellbent archetype in my cube with these pay-off cards:



With a curated selection of madness, flashback cards, and cards that generate value from a full graveyard. There's a lot of room to tailor to your cube's power level without using a lot of narrow cards.

 

[Rasmus Källqvist]

Show me what the 40 would look like and the format it fits in!

 

[whydirt]

Gorgers plus Neonates doesn't do much by itself. The density, power, and versatility of your discard outlets are going to shape this archetype a lot more than those two cards. Show us your plans for discard outlets and the picture will be much clearer.

 

[CML]

It won't work

 

[NimbusToad]

Hm...

I guess I may have put to much emphasis on "vampires" and not enough on "aggro-madness." I am not really interested in running lords or other typical tribal synergies. Mostly I am interested in the tribe because you could set it up so that your Gorgers are "2/1 for R, all Red aggro dudes have madness." I could consider custom cards to reach that goal maybe. I just thought that giving red aggressive creatures a sort of "madness anthem" could make the decks play out differently.

I think that @Whydirt is right when he says that the archetype would be defined by its discard outlets, so I should consider that. Ideally all of the cards are serviceable beaters without their alternate cost, but the madness ability makes them viable in UR and BR decks.

I'll think some more. Thanks for the input.

 

[whydirt]

To give more specific advice, I think a singleton of Gorger is fine to occasionally enable some Magic Christmas land scenarios, but I think it's too poisonous to build around in a fun way. To feel like you're getting full value from Gorger, you need it in play along with a discard outlet and a non-madness vampire in your hand to cast. It's basically a 3-card combo that instead of winning the game maybe gets you a card's worth of extra value, although sometimes not even that.

If I was going to double up on a low-powered aggro madness card, I'd give a second look at Bloodmad Vampire, which I think is just a better designed card than Neonate.

 

[japahn]

I dislike how "Vampires have madness" is only useful in the intersection of Vampire decks and madness decks. In this case, the card is fine by itself, but it reads bad and takes up mental space. It's like Tavern Swindler, reads like a drawback in most decks even though it's an upside, irrelevant most of the time.

If you can pull a Vampires + Madness mostly isolated archetype, you have to build intersections around it so it's less poisonous, which won't be easy, as Madness and Vampires are both already narrow themes. In the end, it would feel just like the SOI draft archetype.