Standard burn - is it feasible?
Deck Help forum
Posted on Aug. 12, 2012, 7:41 p.m. by Long_Con
My wife tried making her first Standard deck recently, and she went mono-red, heavy on the burn. I'm not sure whether to try and help her tailor the deck, or to advise her to think of a different strategy.
Is mono-red burn something that can be a competitive Standard deck? I would appreciate some links to successful decks, or synergy/strategy suggestions to help squeeze every last drop out of direct damage and its associates.
In Standard right now, as burn spells are limited and few as effective as cards of the past (Rift Bolt , Fireblast , Lightning Bolt , etc.), I'd rather recommend a mono-red deck to go for a 50/50 split on creatures and burn instead, akin to Sligh decks, for its persistent damage in terms of creature, and its final killing burst in burn spells.
Problem being, with little cost-effective burn spells available nowadays, you'd find yourself running out of cards in hand to burn before the guy's halfway there, and more often than not, after sideboarding, as pansadvocate has mentioned, life gainers will enter the foray, with Timely Reinforcements being one of the more commonly used cards.
Going mono-red isn't a bad idea ultimately, it's all dependent on how you'd picture your game plan to be. My picture of a mono-red burn game plan would be to store everything else that's big, while whittling the guy down bit by bit, then unleashing the kraken, which is something I'm working on as a prototype right now; you can take a look for consideration and ideas in the meanwhile (deck:mono-red-burn-suggestion). My idea of synergy here is to have some way of replicating burn spells, especially large ones, for a fraction of a cost, more often than not using the copy-spells that red has, eg. Increasing Vengeance , Reverberate .
For an example and link on the latest mono-red deck to hit top in an event, you can refer to this: Red Deck Wins
August 12, 2012 10:06 p.m.
I would say use Chandra, the Firebrand and Volt Charge . If they hold out too long you can always use Bonfire of the Damned .
August 12, 2012 10:28 p.m.
There is always Goblins. What with Goblin Grenade , Krenko, Mob Boss , and Goblin Chieftain to play with... The only problem is that this isn't really a burn deck per-say, but the fact that it can potentially KO your opponent on Turn 4 can prove pretty fast especially if your opponent isn't expecting it.
You run 8 one drop goblins - Goblin Fireslinger and Goblin Arsonist
Your 2 drops are card:Krenko's Command and Goblin Wardriver
3 drop is Goblin Chieftain
4 drop is Krenko, Mob Boss and Hellrider
Your Burn spells are Goblin Grenade and Brimstone Volley
Run about 23 lands, and some more burn or Goblins... Now there's deck that is competitive enough to give people a run for their money. :)
August 12, 2012 10:35 p.m.
If you want to make the burn stronger in the late game I would recommend going with Curse of Bloodletting then with copy cards you can in one turn burn them for 20 points using Goblin Grenade
August 12, 2012 10:46 p.m.
Mono Red Burn is a deck I just designed that may be what you are after. It has several copy cards and burns even from the grave.
pansadvocate says... #2
It's kind of tough for mono-red these days, with Timely Reinforcements and Thragtusk in the format. But if you decided to go for it post-rotation, it might work. Thragtusk might still be too much of an obstacle, though, because it's definitely going to see lots of play. Mono-red might not be able to compete. It's certainly an uphill battle right now. I would recommend looking at other options if what you want is a truly competitive list.
Mainly, I think what you'll probably find is that mono-red is just not as good at reducing the opponent's life total to zero as B/R Zombies, which is a VERY skill-intensive deck due to Mortarpod /Blood Artist /Killing Wave math. It's very, very powerful and always a scary thing to sit down across from, but it might not be a very good first Standard deck because there are so many weird lines of play ... it's really hard to pilot it to consistent wins against a range of opponents without serious practice and dedicated testing.
August 12, 2012 8:08 p.m.