Mercadian Masques VIII: Blood Oath

Blood Oath 3R Instant Choose a card type. Target player reveals his hand, and Blood Oath does three damage to him for every card of the chosen card type in his hand.

A lot of people are trying to use Blood Oath, and a lot of those people have e-mailed me asking for help on their decks. Blood Oath certainly is worth thinking about because of its potential to do huge amounts of damage. There are three ways to try and use Blood Oath. One is to use it normally to damage your opponent (with or without seeing his hand first), the second is to try and cast it quickly before your opponent can empty his hand, and the third is to manipulate your opponent's hand. Only the third really makes that much sense even in principle.

A significant number of people are throwing Blood Oath into red decks. This makes very little sense. Once your opponent gets past the first three turns, he isn't likely to have a hand. If he does have a hand, it's likely because it's full of counterspells, especially Misdirection. The best you can reasonably hope for is to catch two cards of the same type. Often you'll be lucky to get even one card if you're not looking at his hand. The card seems to be an instant speed Lava Axe, costing one less mana and doing a little less damage on average. Cards that only damage your opponent tend to be really bad. In this case, it's only good against decks that regularly hold multiples of the same type of card and can't counter the Oath, and give you enough time to cast it. Sounds like a terrible plan to me. Even Lightning Blast would be better.

Idea two is to cast it quickly. There aren't that many choices here, with the main methods being the new 2-mana lands, Dark Ritual, and Grim Monolith. You can expect to cast it on turn 3 with the monored plan, or on turn 2 when you get it and a Dark Ritual. You can use Vampiric Tutor to get the missing half. Now, you're spending multiple cards and your second turn to cast a Blood Oath. Is it worth it? First, you need to be able to identify the right card type to name, unless you just intend to name land this early. If you can't read your opponent's deck like a book in advance of casting the Oath, you'll basically have to name land. Say the average deck has two lands in his hand at this point, so you get to do six damage. If you get a good read on the opposing deck, you get to name another card type and maybe do nine damage; you can't really ask for more. You're out two cards, three if you tutored, and you did six to nine damage. That's solid if your plan is to do twenty to the head, which isn't normally a very good plan, but it's not that great. The rest of the deck would have to be small creatures and burn. The Oaths then no longer help much, and no longer fit into the deck. The way to use an early mana advantage is to draw cards or take control of the board, not to do direct damage.

The third idea is to manipulate your opponent's hand. There are obviously two ways to do that. One is to prevent him from casting spells. But if you can keep him from casting his spells, you've already won, and Blood Oath is just a kill card with zero utility. So stopping him from casting his spells, while a good idea in general, belongs in another deck. Instead, what you need to do is return his cards to his hand. The only practical type two way to do that is Sunder. Together, they do three damage for every land your opponent drew, plus they return all his lands to his hand.

What kind of mana base should the deck have? Just using lands is clearly going to be a mistake, since you'd need eight to pull the combo off on turn nine. Sunder can get annoying that way. Grim Monolith obviously belongs. Is it enough acceleration? You still need five lands, and can pull the combination off on turn six now. Since you need to wait for your opponent to draw seven lands anyway, which means they need to access about eighteen cards, you're way ahead of the game if you intend to kill just off one Oath. If you want to use two Oaths you can do it sooner but then you need more mana acceleration. Eight mana after the Sunder is tough. In addition, you now need to assemble two of the Oaths to go with the Sunder. Mystical Tutor is no longer going to be enough. Gamble can help because Sunder will put a lot of cards in your hand, and you can Gamble on your opponent's end step after you Sunder. Clearly anything based largely on lands isn't going to cut it. So now we're playing a red/blue artifact deck. If that's the deck, Tinker belongs. If Tinker belongs, so do the traditional tinker targets™. At this point, you're probably out of room and could easily be over. And playing Sunder and Blood Oath over Wildfire and Covetous Dragon is going to get pretty hard to justify.

So the next thing to do is to put Blood Oath into a deck that would already use Sunder, but wouldn't already win the game off of Sunder. That means that you're not using Sunder to slow down your opponent or prevent him from countering a spell. Instead, you're using it as part of a lock down strategy, but it would have to be a soft lock. If you created a real lock, you wouldn't need the Oath. So what do we know about the deck? It uses some card similar to Propaganda, which is what the deck I'm thinking of (designed by Brain David-Marshall) used. It would have to be War Tax. Again that brings us back to asymmetrical mana production, and forces you to run the artifact mana and therefore Tinker. Curses, foiled again.

Could Ankh of Mishra be what saves this deck from total annihilation? This gets around the "if he's not casting his spells I've already won" dilemma because lands aren't spells and many decks don't lose much playing without more than three. Together, the Ankh and Blood Oath then punish your opponent for drawing lands, regardless of where they are. The artifact mana base can't be used because it takes up too many slots to have a theme like this still fit inside the deck. What lets us not use it is that we no longer need to cast Sunder and Blood Oath together. But we still need to have asymmetrical mana, which leaves only one real choice: To base the deck's mana in green. Sunder is still double blue, so the deck will remain blue to some extent. Opposition slips right into the deck, and we again are stuck wondering if the Blood Oath theme is worth it:

And of course, it isn't. You could try to put Ankh and Oath into a Sligh deck together, and that shows slightly more promise:

That's not my kind of deck, so I'm not going to pretend I know how to build it right. I almost certainly don't. So I'll let someone who does take it from here. But all of this is an academic exercise for now. Combination decks, including Bargain, are simply too strong right now. When I was looking at Eric Taylor's monoblue deck, I couldn't figure out how to make it beat even a straightforward translation of UBC Bargain. If blue control can't stop it, we have the UBC mechanic again where nothing can stop a combo deck on a good draw, and what kept the decks in check there was a lack of tutoring power. Problem solved.

If anyone has any other lingering cards in MM they're still wondering about, let me know before I write the article for Tuesday; if there's enough responses I can work with I'll keep tying up loose ends.