Crash Test Magic – The New Robot Viking FNM Deck
That's a beautiful card, that is.
Playing in Magic tournaments is fun, but sometimes budget restrictions can keep you out of constructed events. For that reason, each “season” (each set rotation, roughly) we’ll present to you a budget-friendly Magic deck that’s effective enough to be fun, but filled with mostly commons, uncommons and cheap rares. With Lorwyn gone and Zendikar here, we’re reverting to a classic archetype: Mono-Black Control.
I’m certainly not going to take credit for this deck idea — it’s an old deck type, and the current version has been hammered out on the official Wizards’ forums (indeed, there’s still a lot of hammering going on). The basic idea revolves around creature removal and discard, with some decent threats to deal damage and a few big finishers to swing for the win. It’s not a vampire deck — it’s so much better than that. By going mono-color, you avoid the need for expensive dual lands or even more expensive fetch lands (although you can use fetches to good effect — I’ll get to that later). Even the big finishers in this deck are very budget-friendly.
Below you’ll find the budget basement version of this deck. After that, we’ll talk about a few ways to incorporate more expensive cards into the deck if you happen to have a few, or have a bigger budget to play with. That’s one of the fun things about this deck — you can throw in some big, splashy black cards and make them work.
3 x Vampire Hexmage
3 x Nyxathid
2 x Nightmare
4 x Sign in Blood
4 x Disfigure
3 x Mind Sludge
3 x Consume Spirit
2 x Duress
24 x Swamp
The rares in this deck (Nyxathid, Nightmare, Bloodwitch) are either valued very low, easy to find because they’ve been around for 15 years, or have a built in price ceiling because they appear in one of the Zendikar theme decks (anyone can get foil Bloodwitches that way). People may laugh when you play Nightmare, until you stomp the crap out of them with it.
The easiest way to jazz this deck up is to throw in some Planeswalkers. I personally don’t like to run two Duress in the maindeck, so you can drop those in favor of Liliana Vess or Sorin Markov. I’m currently running one of each, and they’re both amazing in this. The next thing you can do is add any of the Zendikar fetch lands that grab Swamps. Sure, they ping you, but running four or five of them thins the Swamps out of the deck so you have less chance of drawing them mid to late game. Don’t underestimate how powerful of an effect this is.
Another option is to add a Gargoyle Castle or two. They do slightly hinder your Sludges, Nightmares and Tendrils, but they also provide some heat against decks with lots of protection from black or tons of counter spells.
A few players swear that Kalitas, Bloodchief of Ghet works great in this, especially if you run just one and then fetch it with Liliana. I love the idea, because that’s such a fun card (my vampire eats your creatures and makes them into my minions!), but I’m not entirely sold. It’s big and slow and vulnerable.
Aside from that, some players don’t like the Nyxathids (I’ve stopped using them in favor of Hypnotic Specters), some prefer Black Knights instead of Hexmages in the main deck, and some run Fleshbag Marauders for extra creature removal. Sideboard options are numerous and generally involve responses to decks without a lot of creatures. You can flavor and tweak this to your own taste and budget, and have a lot of fun doing it.
Will this deck make you World Champion? I’m gonna say no. But I went 3-1 with it at a Friday Night Magic, and that’s more than I was hoping for, and better than I did with last season’s deck. You can build this for very little money and take it to your local FNM to play some games and meet some other players.
Related posts:
