Background:
I was looking for a sacrifice outlet for some nonsense Saffi combo I was brewing when I came across Dragonheart on Scryfall. I remembered taking a beating from it in MH1 sealed, and upon further investigation, realized it is the first free sac outlet ever printed on a red creature (not counting those restricted to Goblins). Having played some amount of Abzan Devoted Company with
Viscera Seer
, I'm privy to the fact that sacrificing creatures on demand is an abstractly powerful effect. You can fizzle targeted spells with additional effects, you can deny lifelink hits, you can dodge exiling spells for creatures that like coming back, etc. When you have access to a free sac outlet, your board becomes very difficult to read. Plus, it's strapped to a 4/4 hasty Dragon (when you need it). I liked that.
Brew Objective: Make
Bogardan Dragonheart
Modern-playable.
I started looking for cards in modern that might support it, and quickly came upon
Flamewake Phoenix
and
Seasoned Pyromancer
. Dragonheart feeds off pyromancer tokens and phoenix, dragonheart gets big enough to trigger phoenix coming back from the yard, phoenix and dragonheart both have flying and haste, pyromancer bins phoenix for recursion and dragonheart when your board doesn't support it, and pyromancer can activate from the yard to make even more tokens for dragonheart. And interestingly enough, they're all entirely red costed 3 drops. I love red 3 drops.
So now that we have solid value and hitters, we need to cheat on mana to really make it a Modern deck. I need lots of red mana and atleast 3 on T2. That tells me I need mana dorks, at which point my creature base screams "cast
Collected Company
". CoCo is a go-go. I settled on 4
Birds of Paradise
, 4
Noble Hierarch
, 4
Once Upon a Time
, and a pretty easy 20 land RG manabase. 17 + OuaT untapped green sources for the T1 dork is comfortable, after which your chances of drawing a non-red land are very very slim.
I have grindy yet surprisingly aggressive plan and the mana to do it, with 12 slots left for: disruption and curve fillers that synergize with the plan.
Bonecrusher Giant
checks all those boxes, easy 4.
Magus of the Moon
is about as disruptive as creatures get (tell your opponent it's for manafixing), but we call it "Blood Moon 5-8" for a reason, so in go the
Blood Moon
s. That's 60.
I've goldfished with the deck a few times, and it feels much less embarrassing that I expected. Synergy highlights:
- Hitting Magus of the Moon off CoCo means that your opponent can't fetch or float mana to answer it.
- Seasoned Pyromancer discarding Once Upon a Time feels much smarter than discarding a land.
- Between OuaT, CoCo, and Pyromancer, you dig very quickly through your deck. Way faster than a GR beatdown deck deserves to.
- Leaving Bonecrusher on an adventure lets you rebuild with Phoenixes later once the removal slows down.
- Noble Hierarch doesn't make red, but exalted triggers on a flying threat are very nice.
I don't have a fleshed out sideboard yet, but in a similar vein as Karn TGC, you can play along with the theme of the mainboard to very consistently find your 1-ofs and 2-ofs.
Goblin Cratermaker
s to pop
Grafdigger's Cage
and mana dorks,
Collector Ouphe
to turn off mana rocks, a few rain effects to pay homage to Ponza, some life gain, and perhaps a couple
Cindervines
or
Trinisphere
to fight fast combos that don't fold to Moon.
Goldfish with it once or twice and let me know what you think!
1/12/2020 Update
Brewing phase is complete. I dropped to 2 Dragonhearts after acknowledging that I am happier to see it in games that go long than in my opener. I'm off mainboard Blood Moons as I wanted maximum creatures for OuaT and CoCo. I filled in the slots with 3
Goblin Rabblemaster
, 2
Domri, Anarch of Bolas
, and 1 utility
Scavenging Ooze
. None of these should really be controversial within a GR beatdown deck.
Sideboard is also finalized, pending real world testing (lol). Seems soft to graveyard (single Scooze, lol)/combo at the moment, but we'll see how it shakes out. I want to find room for the new Klothys, she seems tailor made for the deck.
1/13/2020 Update
Mox Opal, Oko, and Mycosynth Lattice are banned. Well there goes my sideboard plan. I guess I'll talk to people at Monday tonight and see where the formats headed. Results to follow.
Mono R Prowess - LWW
Burn - LWW
Simic oko Titan field - LL
Eldrazi Tron - WW
Highlights: Scooze in the main was a stunner. You never have to worry about digging past it, Coco and ouat are incredible at finding it (and keeping the board gummed up while you get there). Titan felt good to play against, I failed to bring in Collector ouphe after forgetting that EE is their wipe and too slow a start game 1 w/o magus to beat t4 wave of zombies + 6 health of fountain. Etron is a joke, we could probably run chalice if we wanted and they can't race us with the 2 free turns that Magus buys before a ballista clears it. Postboard ouphes + magus is crippling.
Changes: -3 Rabblemaster (terrible for a deck that wants to overwhelm blockers instead of using spot removal), +3 gruul spellbreaker (solid beats + edge case of company finding spellbreaker in response to targeted spells/abilities, blanks things like gifts ungiven or valakut triggers) -1 phyrexian negator (don't need sideboard slots to blank PWs when we can just smack them), +1 collector ouphe (I want to find them fast against EE and astrolabe, redundancy is valuable like magus)
