From The Lab – The “Evilution” of the Red Deck in Block Constructed

Although a nuisance, packing up and moving the Lab is just something I have to do every so often. Eventually somebody always finds the bodies…

The Tuesday slot is a little weird, as the deadline is actually before the dust has properly settled on the past weekend’s carnage. Any self-respecting psychotic mad professor needs time to pick the brain matter out of the bone-saws before cogitating on what it all means.

As you read this, I should be winging down to San Diego after competing in Grand Prix: Montreal last weekend. However, as I need to actually write an article and submit it at some sensible time for Craig to edit, this piece was actually written last Thursday night. This means that I can’t actually comment on how Tomoharu Saito beat up the field again with a brand new aggro deck (I’ve so just cursed him), or talk about any of the new Tarmogoyf decks that emerged with the introduction of Future Sight. So there may be portions of this article that are a little out of date, and potentially look a little foolish in the light of what happened in Montreal.

Before anyone wishes to complain about this, I’d like to point out that my continuing research on time travel requires a lot of live human subjects, and that I know both who you are and where you live…

However, this does mean I get to follow up on the Gargadon article with a look at how Red decks are going to shape up in Block Constructed over the forthcoming PTQ season. At the end of that article, I was convinced the future would involve the Red deck diversifying back into Green for Tarmogoyf and Riftsweeper to get an edge in the Gargadon and Epochrasite wars.

Well, testing threw up some interesting and surprising results.

But first let’s take a look at how Red has shaped up in the block so far.

Back in Yokohama, the Red deck was the metagame response to the expected invasion of White Weenie. Both Tomoharu Saito and Raphael Levy made it into the Top 8 with these surprisingly different decks:

A few weeks later and Saito went on to win GP: Strasbourg with this build:

The Gargadon had truly arrived.

Then Future Sight came in and gifted the red decks a true sense of inevitability with both Molten Disaster and Keldon Megaliths. It also gifted the red decks a savage under-costed beater in the form of Gathan Raiders. For red decks the future was looking very bright (your opponent – after you’ve set him on fire) indeed.

I talked about the impact of Future Sight Red here, and proposed this possible upgrade to the red deck:

I tweaked the deck down to this and ran it at my local store.

I swept that tournament to finish 5-0, mainly on the strength of beating other Red decks because they didn’t have Epochrasite in the board.

This list is by no means perfect. For starters, I inexplicably forgot to include Pendelhaven. The other glaring errors involve the number of Gargadons and Mogg War Marshal.

When it comes to putting cards in a deck, I follow fairly simple rules:

If it’s really good and you’d still be happy if you drew multiples of them then it’s a four-of. Stock monsters and burn spells fall into this category.

If it’s pretty good on its own and you’d like to see it, but just one copy, then I make it a three-of.

The two-ofs and one-ofs are usually the powerful cards you use to clinch the game in the later turns.

I mistakenly thought Greater Gargadon and Mogg War Marshal fell into that class. One Gargadon is pretty good, but if you draw two or three of them then the extra copies seem a bit superfluous. I thought the War Marshal was the same because of the echo cost.

While playing against the other Red decks, I realised Gargadon was actually key for the reasons I outlined two weeks ago. If they have a Gargadon and you don’t, then generally you lose. I also gained a lot more appreciation for Mogg War Marshal. In fact, while I was trying to work out whether to play Blood Knight or Keldon Marauders, there was never any question of benching War Marshal. He’s the best two-drop in the deck, especially with Greater Gargadon.

Ghostfire was perhaps the biggest disappointment. "Disappointing" is probably a bit too strong. It was always just okay.

Then GP: Columbus and Regionals came along, and Block was nudged aside for the moment. I kept the Red deck at the back of my mind, but didn’t really take it further.

With PTQs looming, and knowing I was probably going to play Block in Montreal, Spraggle mailed me a Red deck list that looked like:

I had a few issues with the listing. I didn’t like the Blood Knights in the board. Admittedly, unless you actually get to play against the White deck (where they’re amazing), the knights are fairly ordinary. But they cost two mana, and my biggest worry with the deck was that it clumped a little too much around the three mana mark.

The other thing I really didn’t agree with was having Molten Disaster and Keldon Megaliths in the same deck (and only two Megaliths at that!). The reason is the negative synergy between the two cards. The Keldon Megaliths require you to burn out your hand fairly quickly to get them online, whereas Molten Disaster is a card that sits patiently in your hand while the Fungal Reaches ticks up to power up the bomb.

At this point, the only certainties for me were that I wanted to abuse the hellbent status of Gathan Raiders and Keldon Megaliths, and that Gargadon wars would play a big part of the aggro mirror.

This was when testing results threw me a doosra (or curveball, for fans of the lesser bat and ball game – ooh, I’m going to pay for that one).

After playing around with the Zoogoyf listing, I was fairly sure Block would echo Standard. The Red decks would have to incorporate green to gain access to Tarmogoyf and, more importantly, Riftsweeper to fight opposing Gargadons and Epochrasites.

One of the crazy things about this block is that I can’t remember a time when there’s just been so many options for a predominantly mono-color deck. Chief Goblin Master Dan Paskins contacted me to get some Red deck testing in, and we spent a day running through the combinations at Nick Sephton’s house in Bradford.

First off, I stayed with something like the deck I went 5-0 with a few weeks before. It didn’t take long to realise Gargadon was pretty much everything in the mirror, although Word of Seizing could sometimes be an absolute blowout and trump Gargadon advantage in some games.

A card Dan liked that I was unsure of was Riddle of Lightning. When you have Gargadon in the deck Riddle, is possibly one of the swingiest cards ever. While there were occasions when it was a five mana Shock, there were other times when it hit for 10 and won games from nowhere. Personally the unpredictability of it scares me, but it can straight up win games nothing else could.

The one thing we noticed was that the mirror was actually fairly tricky to play. With Gargadons threatening to come in at any point, and Word of Seizing potentially wrecking racing math, the slightest misstep could end a game in the blink of an eye. What tended to happen was that the ground gummed up with lots of Goblins, and attacking was difficult because a counter-attack – backed up with Word of Seizing or a correctly placed burn spell – could spell disaster. In these games the ability to go to the head seemed far more important than committing more monsters that could only really fall under an attacking Gargadon anyway.

We looked at the Emberwilde Augur, thinking he could nip in for a bit and then go to the head when the board bogged down. His one toughness was just too fragile.

I’ve never been a fan of Browbeat. This might be the best home for it, but I think with Future Sight there shouldn’t be a need for it anymore. Ghostfire was also just okay. Dead/Gone was also surprisingly underwhelming.

The one card I’d forgotten about, but is absolutely essential in the Gargadon wars, is Kher Keep. It provides an endless stream of blockers to try and buy time to find your own Gargadon.

I wanted to try out a Green splash, thinking that would push the deck over the edge in the mirror.

I think my listing was something like:

4 Magus of the Scroll
4 Tarmogoyf
4 Mogg War Marshal
3 Riftsweeper
4 Greater Gargadon
4 Gathan Raiders
4 Fiery Temper
4 Rift Bolt
2 Word of Seizing
2 Ghostfire
4 Terramorphic Expanse
4 Keldon Megaliths
4 Gemstone Mine
4 Horizon Canopy
1 Pendelhaven
1 Kher Keep
1 Forest
6 Mountain

And it just didn’t work, which straight up shocked me. Tarmogoyf is a nasty little card for two mana, but in this deck it can’t get past 4/5, which means it basically gets trumped by a hellbent Gathan Raiders.

Riftsweeper was surprisingly bad. I think the games might have been a little odd, but I never got to connect on a Gargadon once. Worse, because my deck also has Gargadons, sometimes the Riftsweeper was stranded in hand and interfering with trying to get hellbent for the Raiders and Megaliths. Without any suspend cards to eat, his 2/2 body is just too ordinary to have any impact.

I thought Horizon Canopy would be a good source of replacing excess lands with cards, but it also got in the way of the natural flow of the deck. Unless you’re horribly flooded, you don’t mind additional lands as they mean more Megalith or Magus activations.

In theory, the Tarmogoyfs and Riftsweepers are strictly better than Blood Knights and Keldon Marauders, but you pay a cost to get these cards in that the manabase is no longer quite so smooth. The deck just wasn’t flowing, and the advantages I got from playing more powerful cards were pretty much equally balanced out by my manabase screwing with me.

I went back to a mono-Red listing that looked something like:

4 Magus of the Scroll
4 Greater Gargadon
4 Mogg War Marshal
4 Blood Knight
3 Keldon Marauders
4 Gathan Raiders
4 Rift Bolt
4 Fiery Temper
2 Molten Disaster
2 Word of Seizing
4 Keldon Megaliths
1 Pendelhaven
1 Kher Keep
4 Fungal Reaches
15 Mountain

Sideboard
4 Epochrasite
4 Sulfur Elemental
4 Dead/Gone
2 Molten Disaster
1 Kher Keep
(Possibly 4 Avalanche Rider)

At this point I was roughly fixed on the main deck apart from around nine cards. I don’t like Keldon Marauders as it just seems like card disadvantage, but when we played it those come into play and leaves play abilities all chipped away at the life total. I wasn’t sure whether I should be playing Marauders or Knights, or even both.

The two big question marks for me were Molten Disaster and Epochrasite in the board. Molten Disaster is incredibly powerful. I wasn’t fooling around when I said I couldn’t understand why more people weren’t getting excited about it, but it’s also an expensive card you might not want to draw early on in a game.

Epochrasite had been very good when I’d played it in the local tournament, but I was seeing it as an exclusively mirror match card, and if the mirror was all about Gargadons then Epochrasite didn’t seem like it really affected that battle.

I put the deck together and hit the tournament practise room on MTGO, with the aim of evaluating the effectiveness of Molten Disaster. I had to wait a while to try out the Epochrasites (thanks, Mike, for putting them in your Regionals deck).

One of the things that most impresses me with this incarnation of the Red deck is that it can literally win from nowhere. I had a game against a White Weenie deck where all seemed lost. My opponent was on 20 life and just attacked with a Griffin Guided Knight of the Holy Nimbus and Stonecloaker to put me at three life. I had two Gargadon close to coming out of suspension, but he had two blockers on the ground. All looking very bad for the dudes in Red at this point.

Then in my turn I cast Molten Disaster for two, and then rushed in with the two Gargadon. That’ll be twenty damage, and I’ll be at one life, thank you very much.

Previous Red decks have relied on hitting early and hard and then dribbling over the line just as the other deck starts to stabilise. This deck can literally kill you from nowhere.

I still wasn’t sure on Molten Disaster. Sure, sometimes it could be critical, but other times it just gummed up the hand.

It was only when I started to enter eight-mans when it really started to prove its worth.

The first match I played was against a Blue Pickles style deck. I was in a spot of bother, as he had Willbender and Shapeshifter to neutralise my burn, and then in my upkeep he Whelked a Greater Gargadon.

Bad times indeed.

Then I drew Molten Disaster. Of course I topdecked it… you do know who I am, right?

You know what I really like about split second? It’s that sudden pause you get on the other side of the world while your opponent works out that they are in fact dead, and there isn’t a thing they can do about it.

It’s Molten Disaster.

You will not counterspell it. You will not gain life in response. You will not put up damage shields.

You’re just dead.

Unfortunately, he boarded in cheaty stuff like Aven Riftwatcher and Teferi’s Moat, and drawing triple Molten Disaster is less exciting when they hover around 24 life. A pickles lock in game 3, and I was off to an uninspiring start.

The second queue was better. I lost the first game against Korlash control when a lack of Gargadon meant his Tendrils got to stick. Fortunately, I’d managed to pick up some Epochrasites by now, and happily they’re quite good against Black-heavy control decks that don’t run Teferi.

I had similar problems with Urborg-fuelled Tendrils and a lack of Gargadons in the second round. This time I misplayed in not throwing two goblin tokens in the way of his Teferi. Then he’d have to Tendrils his own creature or Molten Disaster would have taken him down.

Game 3, and I really love those long drawn out pauses a surprise split second card causes. This time it was Word of Seizing on a Teferi. I got to take three counters off my Gargadon before he finally conceded.

Unfortunately, the final was my first introduction to the Green/White Tarmogoyf deck.

Ouch, that stung.

Martin Dingler had smashed me to a pulp with a similar deck in a practise game. I clearly needed to try and find some answer to this newcomer.

I discussed flying monsters to race – like Dragon Whelp or Tarox Bladewing – with Dan Paskins. Playing against this deck was like Red Deck Wins trying to fight off Blue/Green Madness. Why couldn’t they have Timeshifted Ensnaring Bridge?

Heh, maybe I could paint on a purple symbol. They might not notice…

Then I thought about Stuffy Doll. It’s sort of like Ensnaring Bridge, except you get to double up Molten Disaster as well.

In the next eight-man it managed to steal me game 2, but the other two games were blood baths involving Griffin Guided Tarmogoyfs.

What’s with these G/W Tarmogoyf decks anyway? MTGO seems infested with them at the moment.

The second queue was a little more straightforward. I don’t even have Sulfur Elementals in the board anymore, but thankfully Blood Knight is often enough against the few White Weenie decks kicking around. Nihilith is an interesting card, and I dropped one game to a discard deck before absolutely clubbing a Tarmogoyf deck in the final.

Wow, you beat one of the Tarmogoyf decks? Was it the Stuffy Doll?

Er, kind of (he made one land and clicked "go" a lot in both games).

The next eight-man I discovered Tarox Bladewing trumps Stuffy Doll. Especially when he flies in for sixteen damage. Yikes!

Round about now, I decided the Blood Knights had beaten off the challenge from Keldon Marauders. You still need them against the odd White Weenie, and while they aren’t the most exciting they’re still fairly efficient beats. I think Dan was thinking of replacing them with Epochrasites though. The Marauders were running into Aven Riftwatchers and other random obstacles.

I wanted more burn, and kicked the Marauders out in favour of Disintegrate. The Disintegrates are versatile enough to kill critters early on, while doubling up as massive X-spells in the end game.

They also quite handily deal with Epochrasites. Forever.

Last Wednesday, I took this list to my local tournament:

Fortunately for me, the G/W Tarmogoyf menace hasn’t quite materialized in the real world of the local shop yet. Instead, I got to ruthlessly beat up a succession of Korlash control decks to another 5-0.

One of the victims was a surprised Nick Sephton. He’d played the deck online and was beating up Red decks quite easily. Admittedly his deck gave him a few mana issues, but I haven’t actually lost a match to a Korlash deck. They have power, but their spells are far more expensive. You can get in hits early, keep a Gargadon suspended to fizzle Tendrils, and then chump their big monsters while you wait for an X-spell to fry them to a crisp.

Word of Seizing on Korlash when they have Urborg out is quite a lot of fun.

Korlash doesn’t get to regenerate from split second Molten Disasters either.

We played the matchup for about an hour after the tournament finished, when Nick learned the harsh lesson that having answers is not the same as drawing them. The Red deck kills you on the percentages every time. The test games were interesting, as they threw up quite a few cool test cases about when to play around certain cards or when you have no alternative to “go for it” anyway. I’ll probably use that for a future article, as it’s a critical skill to have, especially when playing aggro decks that have to cede control of the board at some point.

There is actually one very important tip for playing against the Tendrils decks.

Forget to sac stuff to your Gargadon.

In this matchup, a suspended Gargadon is far more dangerous than one in play. You want it to stay removed from the game for as long as possible, so unless it’s a Tendrils, just let your guys die. Sure, you have a monster doing nothing while it’s out of the game, but then they usually have a Slaughter Pact in their hand doing nothing as well, because they never know when that Gargadon is coming in and they have to be ready for it.

Currently, I really like the red deck. It attacks from so many angles. Although the Magus of the Scroll and Blood Knight might not be the most exciting, they are still legitimate early offence. But the deck can also attack from the big guy angles, as well as just burning an opponent out. It’s a lot questions for any deck to answer.

However, it’s not all barbecues and fireworks for the Red deck. I’ve played against the G/W Tarmogoyf deck in about of the third of the matches I’ve played online. It is going to be around, and it is virtually impossible for the Red deck to beat. With Keldon Megaliths and Molten Disaster you can’t really control the Red deck. At some point it’s going to kill you, so the best thing you can do is kill it first.

G/W Tarmogoyf does that. Remorselessly.

With a lot of efficient early creatures, the deck takes the fight straight to the Red deck’s jugular and just keeps pounding. Gargadon doesn’t get a chance to brawl, especially when Riftsweeper gets to pick him off long before he hits play, and the Green monsters put you under too much pressure to try and take the game with a big X-spell.

This is potentially the most embarrassing thing about writing an article before a major event with the article scheduled to go up afterwards. The Red deck could quite easily go the way of White Weenie in Yokohama if Tarmogoyf, Riftsweeper, Mystic Enforcer and chums put in a heavy showing last weekend.

But hey, them’s the breaks and the risks you take.

I will be surprised if I played anything other than Red at the GP. Even with the worry of the Tarmogoyf menace, I’m most comfortable with the Red deck. I don’t think it’s the best deck, but it’s the deck I play the best.

My plan as of Thursday night was to run Fortune Thief, as they don’t seem to run much to kill it, and try and burn them out. I’d probably also board Epochrasites, and you need Dead/Gone to deal with Griffin Guide. Magus of the Scroll and Molten Disaster get the boot here.

By now we should know whether the plan work, or indeed if my fears over the Tarmogoyf deck are founded.

Now I get to switch focus and think about 2HG drafting for San Diego. At the time you read this, anyway. Currently it’s about five in the morning, and I’m thinking I should probably do some packing for Montreal, which of course is in the past now.

Uh…

It’s all very confusing.

Ah, just burn their face.

Thanks for reading.

Prof