After playing this deck 6-7 times with a variable meta, I can safely say that Either a Chandra’s ignition or a settle the wreckage is needed. Settle the wreckage can be tutored with sunforger and will stop a craterhoofed yisan if he gets out of control. Unless it’s countered, there is nothing they can do. Mistveil it back into your library and repeat. Chandra’s ignition on a zada or mirror wing after a protection will clear the board also.

Jsc149

I have Soul's Fire in the deck as my tutor-able answer to most creature based threats on the field. Chandra's Ignition was in the deck in the early stages but wiping my entire board bar one creature was annoying since it can really only be pulled off once with a full board, and leaves us with a board we can no longer draw a lot of cards off of. It is also an answer that cannot be tutored which means we need luck for it to work, and requires an entire turn of mana in order to pull of since 5 is quite a bit.

Settle the Wreckage unfortunately requires the creatures to attack in order to work. Which doesn't happen very often in cEDH. You talked about stopping Yisan decks with it but that can be done by playing more versatile cards like Teferi's Protection which cripples the one turn Yisan gets for a combat victory. Yet still let's Yisan kill the other players for you.

Although the changes you recommended are definitely more of a meta based recommendation. If you find your games filled with a lot more Yisan style win condition decks than Settle the Wreckage could be considered. But you'd need to select which cards to prune from the deck in order to fit it based on which decks you don't see very often in your play group. As such I don't feel it has a place in a deck based around handling a wider arrangement of decks when it already packs a fair number of cards that handle similar strategies already.

Aria of Flame is a no-brainer, right?

Ok, but can you make one WITHOUT $1000 in mana rocks?

Sorry about the late replies, finally back home :p

TwinStags I am really liking Aria of Flame yeah, It is recurable with Sun Titan unlike Aetherflux Reservoir and doesn't force us to go all out in a single turn, allowing us to play more conservatively in order to make our board safer. I'll detail the cards being tested at the end of this post.

czarkingrex Any deck can be made without the very expensive manabase, but that would also make every deck weaker. This is a cEDH deck and in the worst colors, Boros. Any cuts to the quality and consistency of the deck will destroy any chance it has in a competitive environment. You can of course take the really expensive ones out, starting with Grim Monolith and just bring this deck to a more casual table. Just dont expect to be landing any turn 2 Feather, the Redeemed 's when your mana base looks like Fire Diamond

WHICH BRINGS ME TO THE NEXT PART OF THIS POST. I will detail all the cards being used in testing for this deck from the Modern Horizons set now that all cards have been reveled.

Cards GUARANTEED to come in: Prismatic Vista , Talisman of Conviction , and Sunbaked Canyon

Cards PROBABLY to come in: Hall of Heliod's Generosity , Fists of Flame , Aria of Flame , and Winds of Abandon

Cards MAYBE to come in: On Thin Ice , Vesperlark , Shenanigans , Tectonic Reformation, and Reprobation (no links sorry, not on Tappedout yet :p)

I will be testing all of these cards, each to varying degrees. I will not update the list until I have fully tested all of them, so dont freak out if you dont see obvious additions such as Talisman of Conviction for a few days. Look forward to it ( ^-^)

ChibiNature I've been playing your deck w/o Thalia's Lancers and feel like it's twice the work to tutor for Paradox Engine and Aetherflux Reservoir . Do you have the same feeling?

VaalVanir

Just a little bit yeah, I'm not fully certain what I'd bring out to make room tho. But it would be nice to have more tutors. There hasnt really been all that much of a difference in win % with or without it tho, so I'm not fully on board it's inclusion/exculsion atm

ChibiNature I have chosen to cut Panic in favor of Thalia's Lancers , will let you know how it goes.

VaalVanir

That is a very strange cut, but it definitely is one of the weaker card draw cards. Hope it works out for ya

God Aria of Flame is giving me such a headache on weather or not I want it in. M20 is almost out and I still cant decide on it

ChibiNature I'm running Aria of Flame . It is "the other win condition" that fits perfectly into our deck. I haven won games with Aria of Flame out on turn 4-ish and didn't have the chance to fetch Aetherflux Reservoir yet.

VaalVanir

Yes I have as well, but I've also had instances where the other players removed it enough times to where they beat the 50 health threshold for Aetherflux Reservoir which means I need twice as much hp to win. It has also let my opponent be noticeably greedier with their plays. I do really like the card tho.

ChibiNature

Aria of Flame vs Sentinel Tower . They're pretty much the same thing with their own drawbacks.

I feel like Sentinel Tower is a cop-out though with its triggers happening only on your turn.

But, at the same time, Aria of Flame gives your opponentS (yes a capitol S) 10 life. Sure you can just cast 4 spells and that will get you to 10 verse counters already but that is toward only one opponent at a time. Maybe we have to play Aria of Flame more like a burst of damage so that our opponents are not capitalizing as much on the life gain.

ChibiNature

What cards are you eyeing from M20? I haven't seen anything from the leaks.

VaalVanir

So far Chandra's Regulator is the only one I saw a minor interest in. But even then I dont think it'll get to the playtesting stage. Hopefully they'll show something nice in the future.

ChibiNature

I propose to take out Aria of Flame for Goblin Engineer .

1. We don't need another win condition and Aria of Flame is kind of a drag with its 'Instant and Sorcery' only while giving our opponents 10 lives each.

2. We need to have our pieces connect and leave less to the luck of the draw.

Right now we have disconnects in our sequence to winning... Feather, the Redeemed has a disconnect with Sunforger which tutors for Enlightened Tutor to grab us Paradox Engine but only if we get to draw using a draw spell. But where is Aetherflux Reservoir ?

I have Thalia's Lancers to tutor for Paradox Engine , even though it is up to luck if I draw Thalia's Lancers , which leaves Enlightened Tutor to grab Aetherflux Reservoir .

But by having Goblin Engineer I can grab any one of the missing artifacts that is required for our win condition. With a casting cost of 1R and activation cost R, we just need Crimson Wisps or Expedite to pull our artifact into the battlefield for a total CMC of 4, which is the same as Aetherflux Reservoir and less than Paradox Engine .

And, if need be, we can also pull Sunforger , straight into the battlefield. Which is cheaper CMC than using Stoneforge Mystic and Open the Armory (When combined with the casting cost of Sunforger ).

Yes, we need to sacrifice an artifact for the activation but that's why we have Ancient Den and Great Furnace , and that Mind Stone doesn't seem so useless in the late game anymore.

By the way: Goblin Engineer can be tutored by Imperial Recruiter and Recruiter of the Guard . I might even take out Thalia's Lancers and replace it with Goblin Matron / Goblin Recruiter .

Double post:

Why have you not added Prismatic Vista , Sunbaked Canyon , and Talisman of Conviction ?

NVM on the Goblin Engineer didn't realize we can only return artifacts 3 CMC or less from the graveyard.... that's just too bad.

Paradox Engine just got banned

VaalVanir

The reasons I hadn't added them were because I was waiting until I got through all of the Modern Horizon testing before I did anything with them. And this last month has been super busy with moving and a job change that I haven't been able to test as much as I'd like. :( And yeah it is a shame about Goblin Engineer ...

TwinStags

Yeah I saw the post... It's a huge blow to the effectiveness of this deck, and may even force me to go an entirely different win condition. Once my IRL situation settles down some more I will have to make some major changes to fixing the deck. Still really bums me out tho...

Agreed. Good luck with life shit. Maybe Unwinding Clock . Way less effective, but still plausible.

Unwinding Clock was definitely the first thing my mind went to. It was actually in the very first draft of the deck, but was removed in favor of Paradox Engine

ChibiNature Think we can go hard on Soul's Fire ? Just need to hit Fists of Flame and Zada, and Soul's Fire ... nevermind it'll never work.

VaalVanir yeah I dont think that'd really work consistently. I can always fall back into using Guttersnipe and focus entirely on that one to see if that'd be better. we shall see.

ChibiNature

I have an idea: Take out more lands, like 7 of them, and replace them with Mana Rocks. Replace Paradox Engine with Unwinding Clock . It would mean that our power level is decreased by 33% instead of a whole 100%.