Flamewar, Self-titled
Commander / EDH
SCORE: 6 | 3 COMMENTS | 1440 VIEWS | IN 4 FOLDERS
Call it a "Primer" one more time... —Nov. 29, 2022
So, a "Primer" of sorts on how this works, this is assuming for the most part that you are keeping flamewar as the commander, things change a bit if you swap for one of the other BR Legends.
your end goal is basically to eliminate people with commander damage, while also fueling your fire from her ability. Since she exiles cards with "Intel" counters, even if she's re-cast, all the exiled cards are still able to be grabbed
And we're in Rakdos colors baby, we don't think about things like stacking the deck with effects first, we leave that to the blue mages. We just smash face and pitch our hand at seemingly random to her second ability
But, that's the secret, seriously. Remember that we have cards like Goblin Welder and Arcbound Reclaimer at our disposal, as well as equipment like Deathrender and plenty of other options in black/red to go more "Reanimator" if we cared or wanted to, it's also possible to add more graveyard recovery options as well, but for the list as it stands, anything short of "Exile freaking everything" is below our notice
The biggest thing, is that because of the unique "Gimmick" of transformers, your opponents have a harder time tracking your ability to re-cast them, as flamewar for instance is either 1BR or just BR to start, because you can cast her pre-flipped without needing a sacrifice, she's a 2/1 instead of a 3/2 then, but has evasion and deathtouch
An example of a surprise someone will DEFINITELY want to punch you for: T1 - Land, Sol ring, T2 - Land, Hero's blade, Flamewar flipped (Trigger blade)
Turn 3, someone is staring down the barrel of a 5/3 Menace & Deathtouch at LEAST (you can add either a dual-effect sword or blackblade to this potentially, for even more damage) And remember, every point of damage is a card for our lovely mystery pile
And this, is generally the goal, equipment or no, every chance you get to sneak a couple points of commander on someone and add more cards to the intel pile, the better. This lets the engines from something like Mishra, Tamer of Mak Fawa and his unearth ability do their thing, as we can ditch our hand to a robot-mode flamewar for a whopping 1 mana at instant speed.
Nothing like using Goblin Welder to get something like Cityscape Leveler on turn 3, after all
Overall, the general "Style" of the deck is very voltron-inspired, but it has a LOT of versatility in how it goes about exploiting that, no real infinites or anything, just a constant controlled stream of damage potential backed up by a cheap commander with a very useful effect
Other options include adding things like Blightsteel Colossus that can re-shuffle the yard when discarded, or just outright take someone out in one shot if gotten early (Edit, found, added, Shiny) But mods like that are also a bit risky, as having too many big expensive bombs in here you can't easily hard-cast is a detriment if the unearth/reanimate engine gets disrupted. A couple are plenty fine though, i prefer the leveler/terror for this "Final" uploaded build for the most part because they can smash creatures or permanents to let us through. Eldrazi don't really work because they need to be CAST to trigger (And they ain't artifacts, natch), and while something like Spine of ish-sah is great, it's not a creature, so that limits our options for cheesing it since things like MImic Vat and Deathrender only work on creatures
Overall though, aside from minor tweaks here and there, I'm EXTREMELY pleased with how effective and fun this deck is, it's definitely capable of some surprise early wins while not being so consistently over-the-top i'd feel bad playing it casually, it's a swiss army knife in a lot of ways.
The only downsides are that you struggle with swarms if you can't get protection from their color('s) or something, and since flamewar is basically a spicy Norin the Wary in terms of cost/toughness, there's a lot of pings and other removal that can hit her easy enough, which is why we have the multiple angles of attack.