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Rakdos Ramp: A Home for Jaya

Standard BR (Rakdos) Ramp

darklight86


Sideboard


This deck began with Jaya Ballard and trying to find something that could make use of her mana adding ability. She doesn't work well in any burn decks because of her high CMC cost, so I sat out trying to build a ramp deck that she could benefit from. Two of the first cards that came to mind were Torment of Hailfire and Ribbons.

In my brewing, I also ran into Indomitable Creativity which gives the deck another win condition. It allows us to use Jaya's +1 add (for instant and sorceries) ability to get big nasty creatures on the board quickly. Basically, we will use the card to sacrifice X number of our own tokens, and get X number of creatures from our library on the board. Since we only have high CMC creatures with great "enter the battlefield" abilities in our deck (or what is close enough for Herald of Anguish and Glorybringer), this turns into a bomb.

The First Eruption is awesome in this deck. It allows us to clean up the board twice, and adds the ability to get out any 5 or 6 drop on turn 4. It can also delay the play of creatures from the opponent if they don't have an answer for chapter 3. Sometimes, you'll have a choice on chapter 3- If you have this card in your opening hand, and you have land choices, you may choose whether or not to play a Mountain. If you do, you'll get an extra 3 damage board wipe on turn 5, but you'll have to sacrifice the mountain. Don't underestimate chapter 1 on this saga, it has wiped the board of many 1 toughness creatures on turn 3 for me. No one expects this card right now- it just isn't being played. I've also added in one copy of Sweltering Suns because I don't have much to play on turn 1-2 and almost always need a board wipe by turn 3.

We have lots of removal with 3x Walk the Plank, 1x Unlicensed Disintegration, and 4x Cut. I still haven't decided if I like Walk the Plank or Unlicensed Disintegration better, so I'm using both at the moment. Walk the Plank is a possible turn 2 play, while Unlicensed Disintegration has synergies with the treasure tokens in the late game. Even if the opponent has no creatures in game 1, I will likely keep 4x Cut in the mainboard for the aftermath Ribbons side of the card. We have two very useful options for red rummaging in this deck (Jaya's second +1 ability, and Pirate's Pillage), and Cut can be one of the cards discarded this way.

We need tokens to sacrifice to Indomitable Creativity, so we have 3x Rite of Belzenlok, 1x Trove of Temptation, and 4x Pirate's Pillage. The treasure tokens can also help ramp into a finishing Torment of Hailfire or Ribbons in the late game, and as pointed out earlier, they synergize with Unlicensed Disintegration.

Our big creatures of choice are 4x Burning Sun's Avatar, 1x Glorybringer, and 1x Herald of Anguish. We generally get more than one creature out at once, so most of the time we can do 6-7 damage spread as we please among creatures. The damage straight to the face of the opponent from Burning Sun's Avatar is welcome in any matchup.

I've considered a third Jaya Ballard, but haven't needed one yet. She is very resilient so we almost never need more than one per game.

I'm using 25 lands because missing a land drop before turn 5-6 is very bad for the pace of this deck.

Sideboard:

For creature-less deck matchups, we have 2 extra copies of Torment of Hailfire, and a second copy of Herald of Anguish. For yet another board wipe we have Chaos Maw whose damage could also stack with the other creatures' "enter the battlefield" damage.

Let me know what you think!

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Date added 5 years
Last updated 5 years
Legality

This deck is not Standard legal.

Rarity (main - side)

7 - 1 Mythic Rares

23 - 8 Rares

9 - 2 Uncommons

4 - 4 Commons

Cards 60
Avg. CMC 3.83
Tokens Cleric 0/1 B, Demon 6/6 B, Emblem Jaya Ballard, Treasure
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