Grixis Madness was one of those decks.
It’s almost too sweet, “four out of five doctors agree this deck will give you diabetes” sweet. And the beauty is in its simplicity. It has burn spells, cheap creatures, and value. I mean, what more do you want? That’s right down the checklist of awesome Magic. No frills, just get ’em dead and feel clever while you’re doing it.
And while the title may say Madness, to me this is a Fevered Visions deck through and through. The games where you land one on turn 3 are going to feel a lot different from those where you don’t, since in the latter you’ll often have to get a little scrappy to get in the full twenty. With Fevered Visions you never run out of gas and can focus on going upstairs with your burn spells, winning the race fairly easily even if your opponent has a full grip the entire time.
Even without Fevered Visions, you have ways to keep the gas flowing. Tormenting Voice, Nagging Thoughts, Geistblast, Goblin-Dark Dwellers, and Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy all dig you toward more spells or let you recast one. In Jace’s case, it’s both because Jace gets to do whatever he damn well wants.
Despite making the above list, Geistblast looks to me to be the worst card in the deck, since it provides the lowest impact for its mana cost. The Exquisite Firecrafts in the sideboard look great to me in the maindeck because this is really just a glorified Burn deck and Firecraft can cleanly answer an early Nissa, Voice of Zendikar or Gideon, Ally of Zendikar if the need arises. You also get to open up three sideboard slots, one of which, if you’ve been paying attention to my Daily Digests this week, should probably be the fourth Negate if only due to peer pressure. Trust me; you don’t want to be the only kid at school with fewer than four Negates in your sideboard.
My recent love affair with Burn decks in Modern was enough to probably sell me on this deck, but the presence of Stormchaser Mage cemented it. I just can’t get away from a nice spell-based aggro creature, and this deck sort of reminds me of U/R Prowess. You see a lot of cards, but manage to do so in an aggressive shell, so you should be able to handle attrition decks more easily than a traditional aggro deck does. And the madness synergies give you an angle that Standard has not seen before, which will keep people scared while trying to figure your deck out.
Too bad they’ll be burnt to a crisp before they understand what is going on.
Creatures (10)
Lands (22)
Spells (28)
