Chris' Magic: The Gathering Card of the Day!

The Card of the Day is...

Ravenous Vampire

3/3 Flying. During your upkeep, sacrifice a nonartifact creature and put a +1/+1 counter on Ravenous Vampire, or tap Ravenous Vampire.

A brief rundown of the card:

Unlike most other "hungry" creatures that require a creature sacrifice during your upkeep, Ravenous Vampire does not hurt you if you don't feed him, he just gets tapped. After but one feeding, your Ravenous Vampire will be out of Lightning Bolt range, and he'll be able to take down Air Elementals and Serra Angels. Let's take a look at a few ways we can squeeze the most out of our Ravenous Vampire:

• Breeding Pit
  I bet Thrulls don't taste too good, but all of the hungry black creatures sure do gobble them up. The nice thing about Breeding Pit versus other token generators (besides it's black too) is the fact that the token is present at the beginning of your upkeep.
• Wall of Kelp
  Wall of Kelp has four advantages over Breeding Pit. You don't have to pay upkeep--you can skip a turn or two of making kelp tokens if you get Mana Drained or something. Also, Wall of Kelp is just a little cheaper to cast, and it can block! Last but not least, with more mana and an untapping mechanism (Elder Druid), you can produce more than one token per turn.
• Puppet Strings
  This is awesome with Ravenous Vampire. If you can't (or don't want to) pay the upkeep for the vampire, you can later untap him with the Puppet Strings. If you can pay the upkeep, you can use the Puppet Strings to tap your opponent's flyers to help your vampire hit your opponent!
• Baron Sengir
  As if you need more big flyers when you have a Baron Sengir in play, the Ravenous Vampire can take advantage of the Baron's ability to regenerate vampires.