UR Aggro!

Wow! I have somehow managed to go a whole week without posting anything new on this blog! Which is funny, because I normally try to put out 15 posts a month, but I had 13 up a week ago so I was "ahead of schedule" so theoretically not posting anything for a week shouldn't matter. However, this past week held the Modern and Legacy bannings (and Vintage unrestriction) for news to shake things up. It's way to late to provide y'all with up to moment thoughts and feelings about where this could lead, so I will keep it brief:
Modern: They are trying to kill all the combo decks which will let a more natural meta evolve. However, I have to agree with LSV on this one: just ban Emrakul and everything will stabelize. Without Emrakul in the picture, Cloudpost loses a lot of bang and control decks have less targets to kill off. (Although it is easy for 21Post to survive without Emrakul, just use Ulamog... so maybe banning cloudpost was right, but the others were unnecesary). Basically, I think they banned just a little too much. Ponder and Preordain getting banned feels weird to say, but I can see the merit in that as well. But I strongly believe Blazing Shoal and Green Sun's Zenith didn't need to get banned.

Legacy: YAY! I don't think a single person is morose at the banning of Mental Misstep. Maybe Mark, because he has been working hard to collect the cards for his BUGstill deck, but I think that deck is still viable without misstep. Basically, legacy is now a very rich and diverse Meta all over again where you won't play the same deck twice at almost any tournament. Even with Misstep banned, legacy isn't obviously the EXACT same (Dismember says hi), but it's going back to the glory days. Oh, and by the way, Snapcaster Mage is going to shake things up a little right when we thought we were coming back to the good ol days. I look forward to this

Vintage: Fact or Fiction is unrestricted! I don't really know that this means for vintage players.... But yeah for them! If I played Vintage it would probably be a Dredge or Storm deck...

Extended: Why did they include you in the banned list? You're the red headed step child of magic. Go back to where you came from!

Standard: Well, you don't suck anymore, so good job!

So now with that aside, let's talk about something magical! RDW is a deck that I have played from time to time (including at an SCG open where I started 4-1), so obviously I have been thinking about this deck in the new standard, because the deck has never died, it's just taken various forms. Here's an idea of what to start with looking at a new RDW deck:

4x Spikeshot Elder
4x Goblin Fireslinger
4x Furnace Scamp
3x Goblin Grenade

4x Goblin Wardriver
4x Stormblood Berserker
4x Shrine of Burning Rage

4x Goblin Chieftan
4x Brimstone Volley

3x Hero of Oxid Ridge

22x Mountain

When I was thinking about this deck, I realized how brutally fast it is, but of course innovation kicks in. I started thinking about the hate that will be huge going forwards, which looks primarily based on 2 cards right now: Timely Reinforcements and Tree of Redemption. Timely Reinforcements is just a speed bump as you casually cast a Hero of Oxid Ridge and keep on going into the red zone. However Tree of Redemption is a different story. The defending player can play it and prevent a ton of of damage before finally using it gain up to 12 life, and then chump block AGAIN. To say the least, that's freakin' annoying. So I started tryingto think of ways to easily kill the Tree before things get stupid without killing too much tempo, which is when awkward tech Twisted Image came to mind. "hey, they just printed enemy dual lands, let's use them!"

As I very frequently do whenever a random idea pops into my mind, I ran it by a friend, this time it was Mark who responded with, "Is there any other options in blue for other matchups?" And all of a sudden the gears started turning in my head, and we shot a few txts back and forth to eachother. I was thinking of keeping the RDW core in tact, so the first card I suggested was Delver of Secrets // Insectile Aberration because it was 1 mana for 3 damage. This obviously encourages you to play a lot of instants and sorceries (read: burn spells) to triple the clock. You know who else loves lots of instant and sorceries? Snapcaster Mage. Up until now, everyone has been talking about how good he is in control, but Mark suggested using him to rebuy a burn spell and then bash for 2 a couple times, which sounds awesome to me! So here's a deck that can use those 2 cards effectively:

4x Delver of Secrets // Insectile Aberration
4x Snapcaster Mage
4x Grim Lavamancer

3x Gitaxian Probe
4x Galvanic Blast
4x Incinerate
4x Brimstone Volley
3x Arc Trail
4x Ponder

3x Chandra, the Firebranded

4x Sulfur Falls
12x Mountain
7x Island

A turn 1 Delver of Secrets has a 37% chance of being transformed before its first attack, and a 60% chance before its second attack, so playing him out turn 1 is a very threatening start. I figured Grim Lavamancer would be good here because were going to have so many cards in the graveyard anyways (though fetchlands are very missed) and he can randomly kill himself to enable a Morbid Brimstone Volley. Chandra is here because lots of instants and sorceries make her -2 better, though she can be very easily cut as she is very mana intensive and may not do anything... Maybe Koth is simply better here. One advantage to this kind of deck is that it runs very few creatures, so Timely Reinforcements can lose it's teeth easily. With all this red burn, another good card to consider could also be Chandra's Pheonix as a recursive threat.

But that's not all blue can offer us! Mark also suggested using Skaab Ruinator to help deliver some heavy beats. The first card that came to my head when he said this was Furnace Scamp, because that's just a beautiful synergy! Maybe a deck with Skaab Ruinator could look something like this:

4x Furnace Scamp
4x Phantasmal Bear
4x Stormkirk Noble
4x Stormblood Berserker

4x Goblin Wardriver

3x Skaab Ruinator

3x Hero of Oxid Ridge

4x Incinerate
4x Silent Departure
3x Panic Spellbomb

4x Sulfuic Falls
7x Island
12x Mountain

Furnace Scamp and Phantasmal Bear are 2 creatures that will come down before your opponent is even ready to do anything and then beat face very hard, but also die easily to be used as Skaab fuel. Panic Spellbomb is a cool card I had forgotten about, but can be good at pushing through more damage, especially 2+ power creatures that Hero of Oxid Ridge doesn't already make look foolish, all while cycling through your deck.

Putting Phantasmal Bear in a Ruinator deck made me start thinking about the Illusions deck going forwards. A problem with the deck is it's inability to go over the top when it's non-evasive creatures can't quite get there. Maybe adding Skaab Ruinator is the answer to those problems! Without the Lord of Unreal, sometimes the Illusion creatures die easily to stupid stuff like Gideon's Lawkeeper, and now their corpses (do illusions have corpses?) can be used to stitch together this Zombie! Also, you know you want to cast Phantasmal Image and make a copy of Skaab Ruinator! A great advantage of this is that it's not high costed at all, so you don't need to get stupid with Grand Architect. A problem with Wurmcoil is that he was sometimes uncastable without the Architect accelerating things, but Skaaby just needs cold bodies! Maybe this?

4x Phantasmal Bear
4x Phantasmal Image
4x Lord of the Unreal
4x Adaptive Automaton
3x Skaab Ruinator
4x Phantasmal Dragon

4x Ponder
4x Mana Leak
3x Dissipate
4x Silent Departure

22x Island

Just saying, one idea leads to another, leads to another, leads another. Never stop innovating! That's all I have for today! It's great to be posting up cool new ideas again! Until next time, Stay Classy!

Ryan Lackie
Ryan.Lackie92@gmail.com
@ThingsILack