Going against the color pie in mechanics and flavor: It's an ice-themed mono-Red control deck! Comments, criticism and other types of input would be very welcome.
Dry Ice is part of a series of decks I'm assembling - going against modern ideas of the color pie as strongly as possible. At the same time, they are supposed to be powerful enough to hold their own at least on a semi-casual level.
Dry Ice, accordingly, is a mono-Red control deck. It stalls using cards like Æther Membrane and
Smoke
to prolong the game, backed up by spot removal in the form of Chaos Warp.
Tahngarth, Talruum Hero
and Rimescale Dragon are our finishers, also offering abilities rarely seen in Red (Vigilance and freezing stuff, which respectively belong to White and blue).
An-Zerrin Ruins
can freeze a particularly problematic creature (and hoses tribal decks), while Blasphemous Act is a Red wrath effect - both are included mostly for flavour reasons, as they are fairly inefficient. Sun Droplet and Elixir of Immortality are a little cheaty since they're artifacts, but hey, we need to buy time somehow.
Card draw is a bit hard to come by in Red, since R&D has actually paid attention to this. So we have to make do with things like Outpost Siege and artifacts again, but that's okay. We also run snow-covered basics to take advantage of
Scrying Sheets
, which digs us to some much-needed card advantage.
Skred
is unfortunately very Red, but it's just too efficient to not run. At least it's ice-themed. Pyroclasm has no such excuse, but it's really savage against aggro decks. If that's not a consideration in your local meta, consider replacing it with something more flavourful.
So yeah, here's Dry Ice! The name is because of
Snow-Covered Mountain
and
Smoke
. The ice theme also does a lot of work in making it feel weird and not-Red. It's not overly powerful, but it can win games, and it's quite a blast to run.
The Maybeboard contains some suggestions for adjusting the deck to different circumstances. Between Skred, Smoke and Pyroclasm, it's got a lot of game against creature-based threats, but it's a bit soft to spells; that's where
Witchbane Orb
can be handy.
Blood Moon
shuts down greedy mana bases (but also your Scrying Sheets). Pyroblast is a classic for a reason.
