The Vampire MTG card Vein Ripper has spiked in price, after a deck featuring it was the star of the show at Pro Tour Murders at Karlov Manor on February 25. This vampire card just came out in Murders at Karlov Manor and rose from $8 to $30 over the course of the tournament weekend – a price increase of 275%.
Vein Ripper was part of the winning Rakdos Vampires deck at the weekend’s MagicCon Chicago Pioneer tournament. Piloted by Seth Manfield, this deck contained the classic duo of Fable of the Mirror Breaker and Sheoldred the Apocalypse, but mixed things up with some snazzy MTG Vampires.
In particular, the deck played Preacher of the Schism for card draw and tokens, and Vein Ripper itself: a hard to remove beater that’s also a Blood Artist on steroids. The MTG Planeswalker Sorin, Imperious Bloodlord provides a ton of value for the deck. It gives removal, buffs, lifegain, and, crucially, lets you cheat your Vein Rippers into play on turn 3.
Of note, that Sorin planeswalker card is also spiking big time off the back of this tournament victory. According to MTG Goldfish, it’s up from $16.30 to $40.50, another big increase of 150%.
Rakdos Vampires certainly made a splash. Two players running this deck – the ultimate victor Manfield and Sam Pardee – made it to the top 8 of the tournament. Before this, it doesn’t seem like the vampires deck was on many people’s radar. It’s come out of the blue and generated a lot of excited buzz: these sudden price increases are the result.
Of course, it’s currently unknown whether or not Rakdos Vampires will remain a top Pioneer deck, or whether the element of surprise was key to its success. It may be that next time players will be working around the painful Ward cost on Vein Ripper, with sac fodder to spare.
It’s worth looking a little closer at Vein Ripper’s MTG Ward effect. It looks pretty painful at first glance – no one likes sacrificing a creature – but in conjunction with the card’s other abilities, it gets really rough.
Destroying Vein Ripper requires you to sacrifice your own creature, and with the vampire’s drain effect that means a life swing of eight in total (you lose four because two creatures died, while they gain four). Brutal!
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