Overview of the Deck
Mad Men intends to be sort of a mix between old school tempo aggro UG Madness, with Modern Dredgevine. It uses the graveyard as a resource to give this aggro deck gas in the late game, but the madness mechanics to cheat out big creatures for cheap... which vengvine loves.
The idea of the deck is basically a 3 step aggro game plan. You start up with an aggressive set up, that is creatures that can be used to aggressively burn down life totals while simultaneously setting up for bigger gains. This would be Stromkirk Condemned, and Lotleth Troll. After you use these, you start tossing out the burst aggression, with cards like Bloodghast, Asylum Visitor, and Insolent Neonate or Falkenrath Gorger. Then the last step is recycling Bloodghast and Vengevine to keep pressure going regardless of removal and blocks, along with the big threats like Bloodhall Priest and Olivia, Mobilized for War. Sprinkled in are aggressive utilities like Abrupt Decay, or Liliana of the Veil and Faithless Looting.
Origins of the Deck
I think it's hugely important to give credit where credit is due, and while this concepts is super new to modern, it actually has a long history behind it. Which is how I made this deck, using 1 existing modern deck, 2 extended decks, and 1 legacy deck.
Mad Men is basically, a variation on Dredgevine modern's version of dredge. Dredgevine was a deck that aimed to dump its library into the graveyard by turn 2/3, then reanimate Vengevine to quickly end the game. This method was effective, but ultimately too weak to grave hate. I noticed this was similar to The Block and Extended deck of yesteryear, U/G madness, where it first started as an all in graveyard deck, but with madness and flashback, became a more stable deck. You can read more about it's history here. Long story short, the grave went from the engine of the deck to a tool, making grave hate much worse against it. So I wanted to make a next level on Dredgevine.
But something worth mentioning is the color shifting in magic and a ton of cards that ARENT in modern. Among them are Aquamoeba, Basking Rootwalla and Wild Mongrel, as well as Circular Logic and it's careful studyis red... We color shifted over to black and red. Its totally worth mentioning that red was sometimes used with UG Maddness and sometimes, they even just cut the blue for red.
As such, the deck is much more aggro than tempo, where UG was mostly tempo. It also has a vampire synergy because, well that was what was printed.
My Current Deck
You finally got here! I put this as "current" because with making a new archtype is pretty tough, even with historical backgrounding. But from what I found "currently" seems to be the best is this. However, I'm trying to make this public info for you guys to help me make this better!
Guide to Playing the Deck
Its really important to have Discard effects in your opener. Generally, you want to either see any of the trolls or Stromkirk Condemned, or a faithless looting to get to the trolls and vampires. Sometimes against a slower deck you can get away with just having a Liliana. With around 11-12 of these cards, you'll usually hit one in an opening or the first mull. From there the real skill of the deck is to know when to drop your madness. Sometimes you might want to hold on to the creatures because Noose Constrictor can toss any card, but troll can only toss creatures.
Madness gives the creatures "flash" so it makes counter spelling hard, and wipes and removal much much worse, so you should leverage that when you can. Sometimes its better to flash out the bloodhall priest early at end of turn, before your hand is empty, because it will let you empty it for the attack. Sometimes it lets you cheat a vengevine out really easily, even if no effect happens, which can often win games out of no where.
Its also good to just keep applying pressure, as this deck has alot of haste, allowing you to discard on your turn, just for pump effects. Use madness to curve out well.
You spelled Mobilized wrong in Olivia, Mobilized for War. Anything with dredge and vengevine is fun but I got overly excited when I saw the Tibalt pic. lol. Nice build as always.
Why Temper over Condemned? It's a bad burn spell without a discard outlet, where as the Condemned offers a global pump effect to 23 of the deck's creatures while being a madness outlet itself.
How have the Vengevines been treating you in the deck? Since you aren't on the Dredge plan it seems like they would be tougher to make work on a regular basis compared to a standard Dredgevine deck.
It seems to me that both gorger and asylum visitor are the best creatures in the deck, yet you play 3 of them. Other than that I think the vengevine plan is not the best in modern right now, you are not fast enough to race the fast decks and hardly have disruption. I think the deck should be more like the old U/G madness and make use of the instant factor of madness combined with counters. I will see if I can come up with a list.
Would what blue adds outweigh losing Lotleth Troll? He's a very potent card in this sort of strategy since he retains the counters, has evasion, and can regenerate so he dodges some removal. He's also the best Madness enabler in the deck.
grave scrabbler seems great here. Cheap madness, relevant zombie and can pull creatures from graveyard. big game hunter could be the most efficient madness creature there is.
grave scrabbler seems great here. Cheap madness, relevant zombie and can pull creatures from graveyard. big game hunter could be the most efficient madness creature there is.
The problem with both of those cards is that they are overcosted if you are hard casting them without a madness enabler. All of his madness based creatures are aggressively costed in general, with the exception of Bloodhall Priest, who is there as a top end card that can throw around damage once you get into top deck mode. The deck works best with a madness enabler in play, but you can't guarantee you will always have that luxury. The cards chosen are all cards that do worthwhile things on their own that happen to have madness, rather than cards that are only useful because they have madness.
Condemned are the vastly superior card for the deck, and it's not even close. There's two reasons for this: first, Condemned is a repeatable madness outlet. You are limited to once a turn, but it's rare that you'd be finding yourself wanting to necessarily discard more than one madness card a turn just for the sake of having to pay Madness costs. Being able to do it multiple turns in a row is a major boon, especially when you take into account reason number two: Condemned is a mass anthem for your team. There's 23 vampires on the test list OP posted, so while Condemned may not have evasion, the amount of damage he can add on turn after turn can very quickly outpace what the Heir could do. Killing the Condemned also doesn't make the +1/+1 go away: if you discard to Heir and your opponent immediately kills it, the only value you got was whatever value you gained out of discarding the card. Condemned gives you the card and the temp buff to your other vampires if he eats a removal spell.
In Standard, voldaren pariah is huge in swinging games, what are your thoughts here?
With Modern being as fast a format as it is, I don't know that you'd necessarily get to actually flip the Pariah that often. The transform cost on it is steep, and investing 3-5 mana and sacrificing 3 creatures for it to eat removal in response is a total blowout for your opponent. Once you start hitting those higher mana costs for creatures, they really need to either give you a lot of value when they hit play, or be able to protect themselves against removal. Pariah doesn't do either, and while it could potentially clear the board you also likely wrath'ed yourself to do it, and the Pariah doesn't have haste or anything to allow you to immediately capitalize on the move. You are also quite possibly sacrificing at least 6 power worth of creatures to flip the Pariah, and spirit tokens can just chump block a flipped Pariah all day. There might be a match-up or two where it could be solid where you may consider side boarding it, but a card that costs 5 is too slow for game 1s in Modern without it either completely changing the game upon resolving or you are actively ramping to it.
thanks for the answer.
As I said, I'm running the standard version looking to convert to a Modern Deck at some point and trying to understand format differences of what works well versus not.
Hey, so I don't know if this is still something anyone is interested in, but I tried building a Jund Madness deck pre-Shadows and figured I could chime in. My original build was awful, is way obsolete and not exactly what I'm here to talk about. What I am here to talk about is where I went wrong.
Where I went wrong is that Vengevine is not that easy to trigger with (the old) madness creatures. It looks like a match made in heaven, but in reality it felt like too much setup for more often than not, no pay-off. That may have changed with the new vampires, but I don't know if would make it worth the effort. Side note you could maybe play Memnite and/or Ornithopter as ad-hoc Basking Rootwallas to trigger Vengevine.
What I would do now is go for a more mid-range, creature heavy approach like this. It takes some of Lantern's deck and some of my old one and mashes the two together.
Incorrigible Youths: A 4/3 with haste huh? Seems familiar. Only this one is much more reliable, though it does cost mana. Also dodges Fatal Push
Zombie Infestation: Repeatable madness enabler with no activation cost? Yes please! Comes on a turn earlier than Lilly, and is harder to remove. And since this deck can actually take advantage of an empty hand sometimes, discarding 2 cards at once isn't too much of a drawback.
Fatal Push: Didn't exist before, better against creatures than Decay. We also have enough madness enablers that we shouldn't need Faithless Looting.
Leyline of the Void: With Dredge being a big part of the meta before the ban, and probably a good enough chunk after, we needed some grave hate. Hate that didn't hurt us.
#Zombie Infestation makes you discard 2 cards every activation and the benefit isn't that great, I would suggest replacing it with Smuggler's Copter which can also loot and give you a 3/3 flyer.
#Fatal Push is a good card but it is not Lightning Bolt (which has far more utility and reach), I would rather move Abrupt Decay to the SB (though it is arguably better) for 2x Fatal Push to make room for the bolts.
#Leyline of the Void is a powerful GY hate card but it is pretty much useless outside of the opening hand, I prefer Nihil Spellbomb which can cycle as well and while it isn't as good against Dredge it is fine against other decks using the GY.
Insolent Neonate doesn't seem particulary necessary with so much other discard outlets which are also better cards on their own.
It should probably be replaced by the 4th Asylum Visitor and another removal spell.
Where the Truth Lies
Overview of the Deck
Mad Men intends to be sort of a mix between old school tempo aggro UG Madness, with Modern Dredgevine. It uses the graveyard as a resource to give this aggro deck gas in the late game, but the madness mechanics to cheat out big creatures for cheap... which vengvine loves.
The idea of the deck is basically a 3 step aggro game plan. You start up with an aggressive set up, that is creatures that can be used to aggressively burn down life totals while simultaneously setting up for bigger gains. This would be Stromkirk Condemned, and Lotleth Troll. After you use these, you start tossing out the burst aggression, with cards like Bloodghast, Asylum Visitor, and Insolent Neonate or Falkenrath Gorger. Then the last step is recycling Bloodghast and Vengevine to keep pressure going regardless of removal and blocks, along with the big threats like Bloodhall Priest and Olivia, Mobilized for War. Sprinkled in are aggressive utilities like Abrupt Decay, or Liliana of the Veil and Faithless Looting.
Origins of the Deck
I think it's hugely important to give credit where credit is due, and while this concepts is super new to modern, it actually has a long history behind it. Which is how I made this deck, using 1 existing modern deck, 2 extended decks, and 1 legacy deck.
Mad Men is basically, a variation on Dredgevine modern's version of dredge. Dredgevine was a deck that aimed to dump its library into the graveyard by turn 2/3, then reanimate Vengevine to quickly end the game. This method was effective, but ultimately too weak to grave hate. I noticed this was similar to The Block and Extended deck of yesteryear, U/G madness, where it first started as an all in graveyard deck, but with madness and flashback, became a more stable deck. You can read more about it's history here. Long story short, the grave went from the engine of the deck to a tool, making grave hate much worse against it. So I wanted to make a next level on Dredgevine.
UG Madness also had like... a month, where it was Legacy viable. During survival of the fittest Calab Durward made it work.. This showed that even with no madness, discard outlets and vengevines are kinda awesome.
But something worth mentioning is the color shifting in magic and a ton of cards that ARENT in modern. Among them are Aquamoeba, Basking Rootwalla and Wild Mongrel, as well as Circular Logic and it's careful study is red... We color shifted over to black and red. Its totally worth mentioning that red was sometimes used with UG Maddness and sometimes, they even just cut the blue for red.
As such, the deck is much more aggro than tempo, where UG was mostly tempo. It also has a vampire synergy because, well that was what was printed.
My Current Deck
You finally got here! I put this as "current" because with making a new archtype is pretty tough, even with historical backgrounding. But from what I found "currently" seems to be the best is this. However, I'm trying to make this public info for you guys to help me make this better!
3 Falkenrath Gorger
4 Bloodghast
4 Gravecrawler
3 Asylum Visitor
4 Lotleth Troll
4 Stromkirk Condemned
2 Olivia, Moblized for War
3 Bloodhall Priest
4 Vengevine
4 Faithless Looting
2 Abrupt Decay
3 Liliana of the Veil
4 Bloodstained Mire
2 Wooded Foothills
2 Blood Crypt
2 Overgrown Tomb
1 Stomping Ground
3 Hissing Quagmire
1 Swamp
1 Forest
1 Mountain
2 Gnaw to the Bone
3 Ancient Grudge
1 Thoughtseize
3 Collective Brutality
2 Kolaghan's Command
2 Abrupt Decay
1 Vengeful Pharaoh
Guide to Playing the Deck
Its really important to have Discard effects in your opener. Generally, you want to either see any of the trolls or Stromkirk Condemned, or a faithless looting to get to the trolls and vampires. Sometimes against a slower deck you can get away with just having a Liliana. With around 11-12 of these cards, you'll usually hit one in an opening or the first mull. From there the real skill of the deck is to know when to drop your madness. Sometimes you might want to hold on to the creatures because Noose Constrictor can toss any card, but troll can only toss creatures.
Madness gives the creatures "flash" so it makes counter spelling hard, and wipes and removal much much worse, so you should leverage that when you can. Sometimes its better to flash out the bloodhall priest early at end of turn, before your hand is empty, because it will let you empty it for the attack. Sometimes it lets you cheat a vengevine out really easily, even if no effect happens, which can often win games out of no where.
Its also good to just keep applying pressure, as this deck has alot of haste, allowing you to discard on your turn, just for pump effects. Use madness to curve out well.
Sexy Sig by mchief111 @ Rising Studios
EDH
G Isao
This seems like a really fun deck to toy with.
How have the Vengevines been treating you in the deck? Since you aren't on the Dredge plan it seems like they would be tougher to make work on a regular basis compared to a standard Dredgevine deck.
Would what blue adds outweigh losing Lotleth Troll? He's a very potent card in this sort of strategy since he retains the counters, has evasion, and can regenerate so he dodges some removal. He's also the best Madness enabler in the deck.
big game hunter could be the most efficient madness creature there is.
Do stromkirk condemned live long enough to be better than heir of falkenrath?
In Standard, voldaren pariah is huge in swinging games, what are your thoughts here?
The problem with both of those cards is that they are overcosted if you are hard casting them without a madness enabler. All of his madness based creatures are aggressively costed in general, with the exception of Bloodhall Priest, who is there as a top end card that can throw around damage once you get into top deck mode. The deck works best with a madness enabler in play, but you can't guarantee you will always have that luxury. The cards chosen are all cards that do worthwhile things on their own that happen to have madness, rather than cards that are only useful because they have madness.
Condemned are the vastly superior card for the deck, and it's not even close. There's two reasons for this: first, Condemned is a repeatable madness outlet. You are limited to once a turn, but it's rare that you'd be finding yourself wanting to necessarily discard more than one madness card a turn just for the sake of having to pay Madness costs. Being able to do it multiple turns in a row is a major boon, especially when you take into account reason number two: Condemned is a mass anthem for your team. There's 23 vampires on the test list OP posted, so while Condemned may not have evasion, the amount of damage he can add on turn after turn can very quickly outpace what the Heir could do. Killing the Condemned also doesn't make the +1/+1 go away: if you discard to Heir and your opponent immediately kills it, the only value you got was whatever value you gained out of discarding the card. Condemned gives you the card and the temp buff to your other vampires if he eats a removal spell.
With Modern being as fast a format as it is, I don't know that you'd necessarily get to actually flip the Pariah that often. The transform cost on it is steep, and investing 3-5 mana and sacrificing 3 creatures for it to eat removal in response is a total blowout for your opponent. Once you start hitting those higher mana costs for creatures, they really need to either give you a lot of value when they hit play, or be able to protect themselves against removal. Pariah doesn't do either, and while it could potentially clear the board you also likely wrath'ed yourself to do it, and the Pariah doesn't have haste or anything to allow you to immediately capitalize on the move. You are also quite possibly sacrificing at least 6 power worth of creatures to flip the Pariah, and spirit tokens can just chump block a flipped Pariah all day. There might be a match-up or two where it could be solid where you may consider side boarding it, but a card that costs 5 is too slow for game 1s in Modern without it either completely changing the game upon resolving or you are actively ramping to it.
As I said, I'm running the standard version looking to convert to a Modern Deck at some point and trying to understand format differences of what works well versus not.
Where I went wrong is that Vengevine is not that easy to trigger with (the old) madness creatures. It looks like a match made in heaven, but in reality it felt like too much setup for more often than not, no pay-off. That may have changed with the new vampires, but I don't know if would make it worth the effort. Side note you could maybe play Memnite and/or Ornithopter as ad-hoc Basking Rootwallas to trigger Vengevine.
What I would do now is go for a more mid-range, creature heavy approach like this. It takes some of Lantern's deck and some of my old one and mashes the two together.
4 Blood Crypt
4 Bloodstained Mire
1 Forest
1 Mountain
2 Overgrown Tomb
1 Stomping Ground
2 Swamp
1 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
4 Verdant Catacombs
2 Wooded Foothills
3 Asylum Visitor
4 Bloodhall Priest
4 Bloodghast
4 Falkenrath Gorger
4 Incorrigible Youths
2 Insolent Neonate
4 Lotleth Troll
4 Stromkirk Condemned
Enchantments (3)
3 Zombie Infestation
Instants (6)
2 Abrupt Decay
4 Fatal Push
2 Abrupt Decay
3 Ancient Grugde
2 Collective Brutality
2 Gnaw to the Bone
2 Kolaghan`s Command
3 Leyline of the Void
1 Vengeful Pharaoh
So here`s why I added what I did:
Incorrigible Youths: A 4/3 with haste huh? Seems familiar. Only this one is much more reliable, though it does cost mana. Also dodges Fatal Push
Zombie Infestation: Repeatable madness enabler with no activation cost? Yes please! Comes on a turn earlier than Lilly, and is harder to remove. And since this deck can actually take advantage of an empty hand sometimes, discarding 2 cards at once isn't too much of a drawback.
Fatal Push: Didn't exist before, better against creatures than Decay. We also have enough madness enablers that we shouldn't need Faithless Looting.
Leyline of the Void: With Dredge being a big part of the meta before the ban, and probably a good enough chunk after, we needed some grave hate. Hate that didn't hurt us.
#If you want to keep the vampire count you can replace Lotleth Troll with Heir of Falkenrath or Olivia's Dragoon.
Another non-vampire option is Noose Constrictor which can be good against opposing flyers.
#Zombie Infestation makes you discard 2 cards every activation and the benefit isn't that great, I would suggest replacing it with Smuggler's Copter which can also loot and give you a 3/3 flyer.
#Fatal Push is a good card but it is not Lightning Bolt (which has far more utility and reach), I would rather move Abrupt Decay to the SB (though it is arguably better) for 2x Fatal Push to make room for the bolts.
#Leyline of the Void is a powerful GY hate card but it is pretty much useless outside of the opening hand, I prefer Nihil Spellbomb which can cycle as well and while it isn't as good against Dredge it is fine against other decks using the GY.
Here is the deck with my suggested changes:
4 Blood Crypt
4 Bloodstained Mire
1 Forest
1 Mountain
2 Overgrown Tomb
1 Stomping Ground
2 Swamp
1 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
4 Verdant Catacombs
2 Wooded Foothills
4 Falkenrath Gorger
2 Insolent Neonate
4 Bloodghast
3 Asylum Visitor
4 Heir of Falkenrath
4 Stromkirk Condemned
4 Bloodhall Priest
4 Reckless Wurm
Artifact (3)
3 Smuggler's Copter
Instants (6)
4 Lightning Bolt
2 Abrupt Decay
2 Abrupt Decay
1 Ancient Grudge
1 Terminate
1 Pulse of Murasa
2 Collective Brutality
2 Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet
2 Kolaghan's Command
3 Nihil Spellbomb
1 Maelstrom Pulse
The deck can even be B/R for a smoother manabase by replacing Abrupt Decay with Terminate and Maelstrom Pulse + Pulse of Murasa + Ancient Grudge with some other options (Dreadbore, more Collective Brutality and Kolaghan's Command) .
Insolent Neonate doesn't seem particulary necessary with so much other discard outlets which are also better cards on their own.
It should probably be replaced by the 4th Asylum Visitor and another removal spell.