Bats: A Magic the Gathering Format

What is Bats?

Bats is a single-deck Magic: the Gathering format designed for one-on-one play, built around interactions with many copies of Vampire Bats. Players share one library and graveyard. Other than that, there are no special rules.

The Decklist
Creatures

18 Vampire Bats

Artifacts

2 Conch Horn

2 Jinxed Idol

Enchantments

4 Sicken

2 Thrull Retainer

2 No Rest for the Wicked

1 Parasitic Bond

1 Volrath’s Dungeon

Instants

2 Funeral Charm

2 Misinformation

2 Soulshriek

2 Afflict

2 Bone Harvest

2 Fevered Strength

Sorceries

2 Drain Life

Lands

6 Barren Moor

2 Ebon Stronghold

16 Swamp

What’s it all about?

In a creature-heavy environment where every creature is a Vampire Bat, several interesting properties of the card become important:

1. They are cheap to play, but

2. Every point of damage they deal requires additional mana, and

3. They can trade with each other, but only if their controller has a mana to spare

These create a kind of dual-layered resource management game, in which players have to carefully manage both their mana and the number of bats they have on board, choosing when to play new cards, when to try to push damage through by attacking, and when to hold back both bats and mana to trade with incoming bats.

What else?

The other cards in the deck add a few additional dynamics to be aware of:

1. The top-of-library subgame

Manipulating the top few cards of the shared library is key to generating advantage as the game goes on. The level zero strong play in this department is casting Bone Harvest at the end of your opponent’s turn to immediately draw two bats, but it goes much deeper than this as well. Using Misinformation to stack the next draws to your liking can be brutal, for instance—but there are also a lot of cantrips available, which can completely reverse the flow of good and bad draws that the Misinformation player set up. This creates an especially tricky dynamic with Barren Moor: do you play it early to get the mana on board, or do you save it to draw something good when the top of the library has been manipulated?

There are other interactions and mind games available in this space as well, but I’ll leave those for you to discover on your own. :-)

2. Jinxed Idol

One of the key uses of bats outside of combat is passing Jinxed Idol back and forth. It might not look like much, but in a game where you normally have to pay for every point of damage you do, getting two damage a turn for free can be a large advantage. If you can secure a bats-on-board advantage and play a Jinxed Idol, you might see the board state get reduced in a hurry, and the damage can add up just as quickly. This situation can also result in a lot of bats hitting the graveyard, which can fuel a large Soulshriek or No Rest for the Wicked.

3. Haymakers

There are a few cards here that can turn the tide of the game fairly dramatically, either by allowing the winning player to end the game or by giving the faltering player a chance to come back. The obvious one is Drain Life, but the more interesting ones are the aforementioned Soulshriek and No Rest for the Wicked. Soulshriek might look unassuming, but it can often be worth five or six damage, which is huge in this context. And No Rest for the Wicked is a potentially massive source of card advantage. With careful planning, you might draw five or more bats from it! That’s a very difficult thing to overcome. Lastly, Volrath’s Dungeon can really allow the winning player to stay on top by denying their opponent useful draws on an ongoing basis (the potential brutality of this effect is why it’s one of the few one-ofs in the deck).

Advice for Remixers

There are, of course, many more cards than these that might be an excellent fit in this format. I encourage everyone reading this to make whatever changes they see fit. Take it forward, have fun, and make it your own. I do however want to give a couple of suggestions for anyone inclined to remix the format to their own taste:

1. Don’t put in creatures that are not named Vampire Bats. No, not even Sengir Vampire, as tempting as it is. The nature of the gameplay changes dramatically when there are creatures available that are not pumpable 0/1s.

2. Keep the power level low. Remember that Thrull Retainer is a powerhouse card in this format, and don’t push the power envelope too far with any other cards. If you have a card in mind, consider adding a weaker version of that card instead, if there is one available (this is how we landed on Drain Life instead of Corrupt, for example).

3. Get some reps with the deck as-is first. Some of the cards that are included don’t appear to make much sense at a glance, but through gameplay you’ll uncover some nuances that explain why they’re here. That’s not to say anything in the deck is necessarily sacred, just that you’ll likely benefit from understanding why this decklist is the way it is before you start modifying it.

That’s it! I hope you have as much fun with this format as we have.

Acknowledgments

I would be remiss if I did not extend massive thanks to the following people:

Dan Serwan, for changing the course of Magic history when he uttered the words “we need to come up with a themed game to play in the belfry… maybe a bat themed game.

Nate Gates, for patiently testing and troubleshooting every single version of this with me, including all the really crappy ones.

All the dilboys who took the bats for a spin at Lobstercon 2025, and hit me with dozens of rapid-fire suggestions for it, some of which became instrumental to the deck.

Everyone in Philly OS who played this thing and liked it enough to make me write this article about it. :-)