Spoiler Highlight: Bloodghast on Pioneer

Let's go to another Magic boomer story!

I bought my first Standard deck in 2009, Zendikar had just come out, and I was an emo high school student: of course I liked Vampires, and the release of Vampire Nocturnus and minimal support in M10 had already made me look for cards that had synergy, and Zendikar was a full plate.

Vampires was a relatively competitive deck in Standard at that time, but it always lived in the shadows of Jund Cascade, which was a better Midrange because the individual quality of its cards was stronger. That didn't discourage me from building a deck because identity mattered more than results for someone who, at that time, never dreamed that I would work writing about this game.

Most of the good vampires that came out in Zendikar were uncommons: Vampire Nighthawk, Vampire Hexmage, and Gatekeeper of Malakir were the heart of the deck, along with the mythic Vampire Nocturnus and the cheap rare Malakir Bloodwitch. But there was one rare that stood head and shoulders above the rest due to its recursion ability, and would have me spending more money on a set of it than on any other Magic card at the time: Bloodghast.

Back then, I didn't understand the value of a Fetch Land, especially for a monocolored deck, and it's worth mentioning again that I was a high school student, my income at the time was limited to a few bucks I got from my father for helping him with some jobs and some money I made selling cards, so the price of a Fetch Land was inconceivable to me, but paying the equivalent of two Verdant Catacombs - or more than 3/4 of what I made per month - for a set of Bloodghast seemed acceptable.

And that was the story of one of my many questionable decisions with Magic. By the way, I still remember exactly 76 cards from my list. Yes, 76.

This deck was a lot of fun to play, and the most fun part of it was, yes, Bloodghast. Bringing it back from the graveyard with Haste on the same turn as casting Vampire Nocturnus or Malakir Bloodwitch won games - so the value I paid for them was worth the experience of having a better Vampire deck.

Now, Bloodghast is back and going straight to Standard and Pioneer, where it has interactions with some archetypes that take advantage of the graveyard and also with “combos” involving Neoform and Abhorrent Oculus.

But first, another complaint from a Magic boomer:

This is a demonic Tasmanian devil, not a vampire, much less a spirit. Every time you play this Bloodghast, you make Sorin cry. Do you want Sorin to cry?

Historically, Bloodghast hasn't really stood out in Magic for the role it played in Vampires between 2009 and 2011 - since Modern has existed as a format and after the release of Prized Amalgam in Shadows Over Innistrad, it has become a powerful enabler to create snowball effects with other creatures and fetch lands.

Pioneer technically doesn't have Dredge, but an archetype with similar mechanics existed in the early years of the format while Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath was legal in the format. Bloodghast takes advantage of this category to increase the consistency with which we bring back Prized Amalgam.

A starting list with today's cards would look something like this:

We can go even further with cards like Tome Scour or Breaking // Entering to get cards into the graveyard faster, and if we want a late-game payoff, Kroxa, Titan of Death's Hunger does a good job, but this is a baseline for all the resources we have, and we can play this archetype straight from the graveyard in a shell, serving as the starting point for Bloodghast in Pioneer, but there are other options.

Recently, Abhorrent Oculus lists focused on milling cards and using Neoform to find their win condition have been growing in the Pioneer Metagame. This plan involves using several creatures with a mana value of two to turn Neoform into 5-8 copies of Oculus.

In theory, Bloodghast doesn't have room because it doesn't do anything on its own and isn't in the right colors, but we shouldn't neglect the possibility of cards like Neoform or Eldritch Evolution being used with it to search for larger creatures, with the guarantee of always having a "target" since it only takes a land to put it back on the battlefield.

Bloodghast also offers options for Sacrifice lists, but with the Jund version so focused on Ygra, Eater of All combo, I'm skeptical that there's room for it in this variant. However, in the Rakdos versions, which follow a more traditional line and with some lists even using Kroxa and Fable of the Mirror-Breaker, it's easy to extract value from Ghast with the discard and with Mayhem Devil triggers that stack and will eventually bring the opponent to ten or less life - the necessary for them to start attacking with Haste.

And of course, we can mention the possibilities with Insidious Roots, but because of the way this enchantment is written, we extract very little value from it with Bloodghast even if we have several of them in the graveyard. Furthermore, a list with Roots has yet to prove itself competitively viable in Pioneer.

What about Vampires?

Vampires have been in a weird state since the banning of Sorin, Imperious Bloodlord. The biggest problem is that there is no reason to play only creatures of the same type, instead of going for Rakdos Midrange and picking only the best vampires. Bloodghast does not solve this problem.

For Vampires to come back, it would need a strong support for it, similar to Vodalian Hexcatcher for Merfolks, or even Vampire Nocturnus which would justify playing the archetype (even if it was a Tier 2) due to the potential free win button that Nocturnus offered by revealing a black card on top with a board filled with Bloodghasts you just brought back with your land drop.

Bloodghast is a good addition to Pioneer and well on par with the power level. At first glance, it may not have much of an impact, but it will do enough for players to explore decks and interactions that have been on the fringes of the Metagame for the past few years.

Thanks for reading!