Hi! I'm ChiefBell, and I help to carry out some admin duties around the site and spend an awful lot of time looking at Modern decks and the Modern forum.

I just noticed that this was your first deckcycle so I wanted to give you a warm welcome to the site. If you ever have any questions about the site then please do feel free to ask me. The best way to do that is to click on my username and scroll to the bottom of my profile where you'll see the 'Comment' box. If you leave a comment on my page I'll get a notification and be sure to see it! Another alternative is to post in the TappedOut section of the forums, which you can access by clicking 'Forums' right at the top of the page.

Now onto more specific feedback for your deck!

I would suggest cutting the mana costs down so that you have nothing more than 2 or 3 mana. Go from 23 lands to 20 or 21. Focus on the aggressive portion of the deck, rather than the slower elements.

Charmbreaker Devils, Mercurial Geists, Zada, Hedron Grinder, Sleep and Polymorphist's Jest are just too slow when you could be playing Monastery Swiftspear, Lightning Bolt, Mutagenic Growth, Sleight of Hand and Apostle's Blessing

Thank you, ChiefBell!

I've been a lurker for a while, but only just created an account so that I could get feedback on this deck.

I changed around some stuff, with your ideas in mind.

The only issue I ran into was, during playtesting, I didn't feel like Monastery Swiftspear achieved what I was hoping for. It didn't seem to add much aggressive pressure due to only gaining +1/+1 (versus the +3/+0 that the others get). I searched around for other 1 drops that might help more. What do you think of these? Steel Wall, Vexing Devil, Satyr Hoplite, Telepathy, Quest for Pure Flame, or Mass Hysteria

Vexing Devil is very good but insanely expensive.

Swiftspear is pretty much the best at the 1-drop slot. The 2 and 3 mana dudes are much more powerful but also the fact it has haste is definitely a plus. You get damage in pretty quickly.

I would definitely play Lightning Bolt, by the way.

With a Monastery Swiftspear casting Lightning Bolt is 4 damage because it's 3 to them and then +1 due to prowess. With Kiln Fiend a Lightning Bolt is 6 damage due to the 3 to them and the +3 to his power etc. If you think of the deck like that it pretty much leads you to very elegant solutions. You should be maximising the damage you get from the mana you spend.

Cards that give +6 power at least from to Kiln Fiend and should absolutely be 4-ofs here are:

Titan's Strength, Lightning Bolt and Assault Strobe.

Honourable mentions go to Gitaxian Probe and Mutagenic Growth for costing 0 mana.

I don't think you should put in Steel Wall because stuff like Nivix Cyclops can defend for you until you need to attack. Since you are playing an aggressive deck, in my opinion, it's ok to take a bit of early game damage and go all out instead of playng defenders and waiting until a few turns later to attack and buff. I agree with ChiefBell about cards like Polymorphist's Jest, Sleep, and Zada, Hedron Grinder but I think you should have at least 1 if not 2 of the Mercurial Geists and maybe 1 Charmbreaker Devils since you have a lot of low cost spells already. This deck looks pretty good though. I playtested it a bit and paper played it against my brother and it worked pretty well going almost even. I added and changed some cards and got these suggestions from it. Later on, when you think you have this deck set, maybe consider splashing green lands in for stuff like Giant Growth.

I would steer away from the 4-drops for this reason:

T1 - Monastery Swiftspear. Opponent at 19.

T2 - Kiln Fiend. Opponent at 18.

T3 - Mutagenic Growth (+5 to kiln, +1 to swifty), Assault Strobe (+3 d/strike to kiln, +1 to swifty), Gitaxian Probe (+3 to kiln, +1 to swifty), Apostle's Blessing (+3 to kiln, can't be removed by removal, +1 to swfity).

Swing:

Kiln Fiend: 4 triggers of +3. For +12. Growth gives extra +2 for a total of +14. Strobe gives double strike for a total of +29. Blessing means unblockable and unremovable 30 damage.

Monastery Swiftspear swings for 5.

Haha you got me beat on that. I can't argue with that kind of beautifully disgusting aggro.

I used to play this deck. You can actually make it very fast. The trick to it is maximising the "6 damage spells". Those that give the +3 buff when they trigger Kiln Fiend and also do an extra 3 damage some other way such as Lightning Bolt or Titan's Strength.

Then you need to add the "free spells": Mutagenic Growth and Gitaxian Probe because they let you accelerate far quicker than you should be able to.

Finally you add Apostle's Blessing to protect against removal like Terminate etc and to give unblockable. Then finally Distortion Strike for a bit extra unblockable and because it triggers twice due to rebound.

From there the deck is kind of open. Splashing green, black, others is also good. Tainted Strike makes for VERY surprising wins.

Do you think that Titan's Strength is better than Brute Force?

No I just forgot that card existed.

Oh, cool. I didn't know if the scry was better than the extra 2 toughness.

Depends. In your case I think that Titan's Strength would be better because of the scry and your creatures with prowess and such are having their toughness buffed wither way. A scry could determine if you win the game next turn since you can get a card to complete the combo the ChiefBell posted or get a land to postpone victory for another, possible game-changing, turn. Your opponent could get board removal their turn and then you would be at a disadvantage while they can start bulking up for later game.

Try both and see what works but in doubt listen to ChiefBell since he is obviously more adept at modern decks and decks like this than I am.

ChiefBell

I have a (probably stupid) question. When using Apostle's Blessing how does the protection work, exactly? I know that once the card resolves, the creature can't be targeted by that color. How does that work if I have, say, Mutagenic Growth in the stack before it and my chosen color from protection is green? I assume that the Mutagenic Growth would resolve, but when Apostle's Blessing resolves, will it nullify the green spell?

This is actually an interesting question, not a stupid one.

Let's look at three situations:

1). You attack with kiln fiend and cast mutagenic growth. The opponent, in response, casts Beast Within and then you in response cast apostles blessing. The stack is mutagenic growth -beast within - apostles blessing. The apostles blessing resolves first giving fiend pro green. Beast within tries to resolve but "sees" that it now has an illegal target because kiln fiend has pro green and fizzles. Mutagenic growth tries to resolve but "sees" that kiln fiend has pro green and also fizzles. You still cast two spells (1 succeeded and the other failed) so kiln fiend gets +6.

2). You attack with kiln fiend and the opponent, in response, casts Beast Within. You, in response, cast apostles blessing and then mutagenic growth. The stack is beast within - apostles blessing - mutagenic growth. The mutagenic growth resolves first giving fiend +5/+2. Apostles blessing then resolves second and gives kiln fiend pro green. It doesnt affect mutagenic growth because that has happened already. Beast within tries to resolve last but "sees" that it now has an illegal target because kiln fiend has pro green and fizzles. You cast two successful spells so kiln fiend gets +6 from his trigger and +2/+2 from growth.

3) You attack with kiln fiend and then in the declare blockers step you cast mutagenic growth which resolves. At the end of the blockers step, before damage, the opponent plays beast within at which point you respond with apostles blessing. The stack contains beast within and then apostles blessing. The blessing resolves first and gives the kiln fiend pro green. This does not affect the mutagenic growth you cast earlier in the blockers step because that has already resolved and given the fiend +5/+2. However when the beast within starts to resolve after the apostles blessing, as before, it "sees" that kiln fiend is no longer a legal target and fizzles. So you get a +8/+2 kiln fiend.

Recently changed things about the deck to make it cheaper and more consistent. What do you think?

Ahh, if only we still had gitaxian probe.