Hello, and welcome to Red Deck Wins 2017, my mono-red burn/aggro deck. As always, if you like what you see, please +1, and all comments and suggestions are welcome.
I've always loved Burn, going all the way back to the earliest days of MtG when I used to run a mono-red UrzaFlare deck (Tron lands + Mana Flare + X burn spells), but lately WotC has made it hard to put one together properly. Then, during the Amonkhet spoilers, I saw this beauty: Soul-Scar Mage. While not quite a Monastery Swiftspear, the way this card modifies damage to creatures makes it ideal for hating on the creature-heavy decks that dominate the format. I knew I had to try building around it, and this is the result.
Part 1: Creature Aggro
The key to any aggro deck is cheap creatures that swing above their weight. While the Mage is part of this, the real curve in this deck is
Flameblade Adept
T1 into
Bloodrage Brawler
T2 (activating the Adept's discard ability) into
Lathnu Hellion
and swinging for 8 on turn 3. Even if all the damage doesn't get in, this pressures the opponent into choosing between blocking heavy damage and keeping their own creatures. Fortunately for them, we don't plan on letting them choose for long.
Part 2: Removal and Hatred
After Turn 3 the point of this deck changes. This is when most of the decks in the meta take off, so we have to be prepared for that. This is where Soul-Scar Mage shines, because it allows us to weaken that which we do not kill outright. Heart of Kiran is far less scary if a discarded
Fiery Temper
can turn it into a 1/1 at the cost of 1 mana. More importantly, Harsh Mentor hits things like the crewing of vehicles and counter removal on Walking Ballista.
Part 3: An Insulting Defeat
The final piece of the puzzle is
Insult/Injury
. The second half of the card is useful, but Insult is just insane. As long as it resolves and we've done a good job attacking and weakening our opponent's board, this card can end the game for us. If our hand starts getting thin, we have Cathartic Reunion to help with that.
Part 4: Meta and Sideboard.
The four main decks in Standard right now are Mardu Vehicles, 4-Color Copycat, GB Snek, and Temur Tower. I will cover how this deck interacts with each and what SB options we have.
Vehicles: The key is to out-aggro the aggro. If MV establishes its board, it has more horsepower (pun intended) than us, so we have to disrupt and keep the pressure on until we can get a Mentor out. For SB we have Aethersphere Harvester to out-vehicle Heart,
Weaver of Lightning
as a blocker, Magma Spray for exile and
Tears of Valakut
for targeted removal.
Copycat: Always always always leave a Shock and a Mountain up, even if that slows you down for a turn. Come SB swap in
Flame Lash
in place of Collective Defiance and bring in Lightning Axe in case they drop a Gearhulk.
Snek: Instant speed removal is also important here, because their board can go wider than ours very quickly if we are not careful, and pray they don't pull more than one Fatal Push, because that card wrecks us. Nahiri's Wrath is excellent after SB because it can hit multiple targets.
Tower: Tough matchup because of counters, so we have to keep the pressure on with the creatures. Like MV, the Mentor is key because it will make them think twice about using Dynavolt Tower. Bring Aethersphere Harvester in for incidental life gain and because Tower doesn't have the best answers to vehicles.
Well, I hope you are entertained. As above, please +1 if you like my ideas, and all comments and suggestions are welcome. Lucky draws to all!
