You have UR Pyromancer, with Thing in the Ice
and Ancestral Vision. You have Mardu Pyromancer, with Bedlam Reveler and Faithless Looting. The slower control deck, and the grindier midrange deck.
Why, when you have these two great options, would you ever play Jeskai Pyro?
The answer: Speed. Power. Interaction. This deck does everything a Pyromancer deck should do, but boy howdy, does it do it well.
Jeskai Pyro is slightly faster than its Mardu and UR counterparts, and it plays some of the best interaction in the game - Remand, Path to Exile, Mana Leak, and more. On top of this, you have twelve significant threats that must be answered (and your interaction prevents that from happening!) - Being a Pyro deck, there are four copies of Young Pyromancer. Because it's a blue deck with a critical mass of instants and sorceries, there's no excuse not to be running four Snapcaster Mages. Then, there's the Boogeyman. This deck's TiTi. This deck's Reveler.
Monastery Mentor
Mentor is what sets this deck apart from other Pyro decks. It's YP and Bedlam Reveler stapled onto one card, and it's a threat that must be answered or it will simply take over the game. Of course, we have interaction that not only manages those answers, but also adds pressure to the board thanks to YP and Mentor.
You have the burn package - 3 Lightning Helix and 4 Lightning Bolt - that serve as removal spells that never become useless. If you can't kill something with it, throw it at your opponent's face.
The counters - 2 Mana Leak, 3 Remand, and 3 Spell Pierce - to protect your threats and manage your opponent's actions.
The removal - 4 Path to Exile and 1 Vapor Snag - to deal with a threatening creature, or to simply get something out of the way for your threat.
Card draw - 4 Serum Visions and 1 Opt - to keep gas in the tank at all times
Threats - 4 Young Pyromancer, 4 Snapcaster Mage, and 4 Monastery Mentor - because every deck needs pressure.
And, of course, lands, because you need mana to cast spells. Obviously.
The maybeboard may seem peculiar to some. Why does Soulfire Grand Master eat up 3 slots? And why so much burn?
This deck needs insurance against fast aggro decks. It's too slow to be able to consistently beat Burn. It can win a G1, but the matchup pre-board is not favorable. So, to deal with this, I have concocted a potential transformational sideboard that allows us to turn into Soulfire Control to stay ahead of burn. We have the Soulfire package - 3 Soulfire Grand Master and a bunch of cheap burn-based removal - to ensure that we can stay alive long enough to enact our game plan.
Beyond this, the maybe-sideboard is fairly straightforward - Silence for Storm, Rest in Peace for graveyard decks, Stony Silence for artifact-based decks, and Celestial Purge for Jund, Death's Shadow, Abzan...basically anything that runs Dark Confidant, Gurmag Angler, Death's Shadow, or Liliana of the Veil.
That's the deck! I'm still doing some testing with it, so the numbers may change, but I really like it so far and I hope y'all do too!
