The vampires of Magic: The Gathering straddle a strange line. Sometimes they are bloodthirsty, violent monsters that appear from the grave to suck the bodies of their enemies dry. Other times they are beautiful creatures that capture opposing minds and convert them to elegant nocturnal hunters. They’ve been the big bad enemies of some Magic stories, and they’ve been a one-off included card. No matter where they appear, vampires are always at home in the multiverse of Magic, and the past year has seen a real vampire theme emerge in both The Battle for Zendikar and the upcoming Shadows Over Innistrad sets.
If you’re not in the know, each Magic set takes place on a different world, and each of those worlds have radically different denizens. Those on the plane of Mirrodin, for example, are often made of a biological metal. Creatures from the plane of Lorwyn are the fairies and boggarts of folktales, and each of them are fiercely tribal. Each world contains different conditions of life that creates different kinds of beings. Vampires are everywhere. They live in the secret societies of Ravnica. They haunt the swamps of Mirrodin, and they stalk the sacrificial altars of Tarkir.
Zendikar, and Innistrad in a couple weeks, are chock full of vampires. When you play the game in a competitive environment like a Standard tournament, you will have access to a couple dozen vampires that do everything from chest bursting an eldritch token to convincing their allies to help them summon zombies to do battle for them. However, from a storytelling perspective, these vampires are radically different.
The vampires of Zendikar are the product of a corruption that spread from the Eldrazi horror named Ulamog. The disease seeped into the bodies of creatures that lived near the place where Ulamog erupted from its sleep in the earth, and the vampires became a species of living batteries who would suck the life out of other creatures so that Ulamog, in turn, would be able to consume that life force by proxy. After the Eldrazi were sealed away, the vampires divided into houses led by vicious bloodchiefs who were always in competition with one another. In Battle For Zendikar the Eldrazi awoke again and turned many vampires into mindless thralls, and many of the vampires from that set are, from a mechanical perspective, either following the will of the Eldrazi or desperately fighting against it with their entire being.
Innistrad’s vampires are radically different. Instead of being the byproduct of a Lovecraftian control mechanism, these vampires were created thousands of years ago by a man named Edgar Markov in order to combat a famine. Turning people into blood-hungry nocturnal monsters certainly solves the problem of simple domestic farming, and Innistrad has a complex relationship web of aristocratic vampires who rule their Transylvanian analogue of Stensia. You can see some more information from this Paste exclusive from the Shadows Over Innistrad art book:
Shadows Over Innistrad continues the original Innistrad set’s tradition of big, bombastic vampires that are full of flavor, and I have two really unique vampires that I want to show you. The first is Stromkirk Mentor.
