This deck. I haven't been as excited about a deck as I am about this one in a long while. After an evening of playtesting i can confidently say it has extraordinary tempo and almost never has dead hands. So what does it do that is giving me such a raging one? Let's take a look...
In a proliferation-heavy deck, Everflowing Chalice goes the distance to ramp you into all sorts of goodness. For example:
4th turn koth emblem: this is pretty fun. If you;re not looking at untapped blue mana across the board, you can play your t2 Everflowing Chalice and t3 Koth of the Hammer, give him +1 and either leave the mountain open to Lightning Bolt potential Koth-hatin' critters or attack for 4 damage. Come turn 4, cast Tezzeret's Gambit or Volt Charge and unleash the koth emblem on the unsuspecting masses. Enjoy it. Suddenly you have an army of hard-to-remove, colorless cunning sparkmages with CMC 0 in your deck. if you lose now, you probably should find another game.
In the same vein, you can channel your turn 3 koth into a turn 4 Inferno Titan by using his -2 ability, and if you have all 4 mountains you may even have mana left over to use a Tezzeret's Gambit to help koth back on his feet and refill your hand. It's not as final emblem, but against decks that aren't running a lot of cheap removal that titan will seal the victory a bit quicker.
Another fun trick is hasty inferno titans. get Urabrask the Hidden(who is a surprise 4 damage by himself) into play and then drop your fiery beatstick and clear the board, swinging in for victory.
Chandra Nalaar gets her chance to shine in this deck as a swiss army knife of burn. She'll keep punky creatures at bay and draw fire while you come up with win, or just drop her, roll her up to 7, then untap and use a proliferate spell and she'll send a warm friendly 10 point flame wave washing over your opponent and all their creatures!
But the Piece de Resistance of this deck is definitely Shrine of Burning Rage. It burnt opponents faces all evening, and i'm guessing it will be happy to continue to do so. I kept a hand with two of them and together they closed out the game with 13 points of damage on turn 6. The secret of the shrine is that in this deck half the cards you play will put a counter on it, and Staggershock and Volt Charge both double up the counters. The shrine just sits there, waiting til the right moment to explode with fury at the opportune moment. And in a pinch it's a great source of colorless damage to take care of that pesky Kor Firewalker or SwoWaP-equipped hawk. This card makes me happy.
Sideboard
Dismember helps us get rid of threats like Phyrexian Obliterator and Baneslayer Angel, as well as putting titans within burn range.
Leyline of Punishment is pretty obvious, lifegain is bad news for red deck. So we shut out Batterskull, Baneslayer Angel, Wurmcoil Engine, Elspeth Tirel etc. to keep the pressure on. It also helps your creatures push through pro-red dudes.
It's necessary to up the Slagstorm count against aggro decks to wipe the wee ones away.
Ratchet Bomb: this card just saves us from alot of different things. I'm not going to get specific, but it's the sort of card you just want to have on sideboard, trust me. And with all the proliferate, you can get it up to target some pretty hefty CMC rather quickly.
Tumble Magnet: I think we all know how useful this thing is. Stops big meanies, and/or opens up the field for your attackers. Proliferate it forever.
Tuktuk Scrapper is in here against equipment or artifact heavy strategies. I'm still on the fence over whether he should be Manic Vandal, but the vandal doesn't give you the option of not destroying an artifact, and the last thing we want when we need just a couple more damage is to have a dead creature in hand because we don't want to take out our own magnet/shrine/etc.
So there you have it. Build it, play it, revel in it's smooth draws and extreme damage. And feel free to critique the build as well, for one know there is always room for improvement. Let's rage together.
