Ah, springtime, when young men’s fancies turn to the games of spring, wooing of young maidens, and, of course, Standard. And what a Standard! The death of Affinity has opened up the doors for numerous decks to claim the top spot.
You’ve got the obvious culprits, like Tooth and Nail and B/G Cloud; decks that were good even before Affinity’s demise. And other decks that might be viable to fight these new Kings of the Metagame.
Like this one.
Med Red
3 Genju of the Spires
4 Slith Firewalker
4 Hearth Kami
3 Arc-Slogger
2 Kumano, Master Yamabushi
4 Shock
4 Pyrite Spellbomb
4 Magma Jet
4 Stone Rain
4 Molten Rain
3 Chrome Mox
3 Stalking Stones
16 Mountain
Sideboard:
4 Boil
4 Culling Scales
1 Genju of the Spires
2 Sowing Salt
4 Guerilla Tactics
Oh, come on. We’ve had Deadguy Read, Sped Red, and Big Red, why not Med Red? At least it rhymes.
Now, this is not your father’s Sligh deck. This is more or less a melding of Big Red and Ponza – you still have weenie beaters and burn, but you also have more land destruction and big hitters as well.
Slith Firewalker needs little introduction – if you have an opening draw of Mountain, Mox and Firewalker, the other four cards are just gravy. It loses some of its sting past the first few turns, but if your opponent has no answer for it – we’ve all played Mirrodin Block before, we know what happens.
Hearth Kami might seem like an odd choice, but mono-Red decks have frequently added 2/1s for two mana with a seemingly irrelevant ability (Firebrand Ranger springs to mind). Only its ability is still highly relevant, even with Affinity getting the heave-ho. There are still plenty of cheap artifacts floating around out there you have to worry about; Vedalken Shackles, Sword of Fire and Ice, Aether Vial, Isochron Scepter – all of which don’t care to see this guy hit the table early.
Genju of the Spires is the most powerful of the Genjus and, in a mono-Red deck, seldom a bad card to draw. Dropping one on the first turn is never a bad idea; it can sit there idly until needed as the board develops. In the later game, it adds to the already high oops-I-win topdeck factor Red decks in general have been known to have. And, as an added side bonus, Echoing Truth, the current bounce spell du jour, can’t do a thing to a Genju. As if mono-Blue didn’t have enough trouble with this deck.
Finally, in keeping with the original creature base of Big Red, which had a fair bit of beef in it, we have the original Shock-on-a-really-really-big stick, Arc-Slogger, and the legendary Masticore, Kumano, Master Yamabushi. They ask no quarter, and give none. Nor can you get them for a quarter, and, like the Genju, provide the late-game gas that takes the deck over the top.
As for the burn quotient, I decided on Shock, Magma Jet and Pyrite Spellbomb. Shock goes to the dome, unlike Electrostatic Bolt, and it’s not like there are Myr Enforcers running around any longer. Magma Jet and the Spellbomb aren’t the strongest spells, but both are instants and provide the added bonus of card drawing and deck manipulation. Depending on the matchup, you’ll be sacrificing the Spellbomb for a card more often than two to the dome. The merits of Volcanic Hammer vs. Magma Jet have been, and will be, continually argued, and they both have their advantages, but instant speed plus deck manipulation win out vs. the number three.
Molten Rain and Stone Rain fill out the land kill slots. If I had room or need of Demolish, I’d probably add it, but I felt that I had enough land destruction as it was, and Hearth Kami provided my artifact removal. If Pillage were still around, I’d have added it to the deck list, but a more expensive reprint didn’t cut it.
For lands and mana, there’s Chrome Mox to for acceleration – three feels about right, four is definitely too many unless I was running Shrapnel Blast – and I prefer Stalking Stones to Blinkmoth Nexus as my man-land of choice. It doesn’t require any mana beyond the first activation and hits a lot harder, too.
Twenty-two mana sources may be a little light, but I’ve seldom had trouble getting the mana I needed – Magma Jet helps quite a bit in this regard. Is twenty-two enough? Read on and find out.
The sideboard has the Blue-hating Boil, anti-discard Guerilla Tactics, Culling Scales to answer Circles of Protection and Sacred Ground, Sowing Salt to foil Tooth and Nail decks and an extra Genju for control decks.
As to what didn’t make the initial cut: Crack the Earth didn’t, because, while essentially being land destruction for one mana, it’s not card advantage, and it’s the last thing you want to draw when your opponent has a ton of permanents in play. I decided against Zo-Zu the Punisher, as I didn’t feel a fragile Ankh of Mishra variant was necessary to kill an opponent with all my land destruction. What about Shinka, the Bloodsoaked Keep? I am running one legend, after all. But I’m also depending on a Genju, and the promise of giving two cards out of sixty first strike while potentially boning myself on Genju-centric lands isn’t worth it in my book. Fireball? Sorcery-speed, expensive, but I’d never rule it out entirely.
Two obvious omissions from the original Big Red are Solemn Simulacrum, and Furnace Whelp. I don’t really miss the Whelp, as he required a big investment of mana for a creature easily burned, bounced or Banished after you sunk all your mana into it. As for the Fatbot…it was a difficult choice, as it is both mana fixer and a way to recoup the card dis-advantage from Chrome Mox, but in the end, I had to take into account that this is an aggro-control deck, and it’s just not very aggro. I’d rather throw down with a Molten Rain on turn three, not a four-casting-cost two-power chump blocker. Now, if I were to be running Shrapnel Blast, this might be a different story. But I’m not.
That’s the nuts and bolts of the deck. I ran it through my small initial testing gauntlet to see how it performed (you can refer back to my last article for my three decks of choice; U/G Tooth, Mono-Blue and B/G Cloud).
Vs. Mono-Blue
I made a few tweaks to the my mono-Blue deck since my last article, most notably re-upping the land count and dropping Reach Through Mists, which proved to be disappointing in testing.
I thought the matchup would be in favor of mono-Blue early, but once I brought in Boil, it would swing back towards mono-Red. It wasn’t even close – mono-Red beat its opposite on the color wheel like a, well, red-headed stepchild. An early Hearth Kami negates the otherwise obscene power of Vedalken Shackles, and, as previously mentioned, Echoing Truth can’t target Genju of the Spires, nor Stalking Stones for that matter. There’s just too much pressure, and the lack of true hard counters really hurts the Mono-Blue (I didn’t run either Rewind or Last Word). There’s just too much beatdown, and unless mono-Blue can ramp up to an early Keiga, the Tide Star to block, it rolls over in short fashion.
However, it’s not like mono-Blue doesn’t have answers; my version didn’t. Spectral Shift, the card Mind Bend wishes it was, hoses your hoser and Echoing Truth, while is offers a potentially global effect, could be replaced with the more general Boomerang, killing the Genjus.
Therefore, sideboarding might have to be altered accordingly. Originally, I would have suggested losing the land destruction element for the fourth Genju and Boils, but assuming mono-Blue evolves in this direction, I’d suggest losing the Arc-Sloggers and Kumanos – Bribery is an issue – in favor of Sowing Salt (kills the man-lands, don’t forget) and Boil and leave the land destruction in. Mono-Blue is very land-heavy, but if you can keep it off of double Blue mana, it can’t do much. I haven’t tested this scenario heavily as yet; draw your own conclusions.
If mono-Blue moves in this direction, the matchup goes from heavily lopsided in favor of mono-Red to just about a toss-up. However, based upon the very, very early results as seen from the Paris Regionals, Spectral Shift is nowhere to be seen – yet, so consider mono-Blue a favorable matchup. [It’s there now – the metagame moves quickly and everyone is talking about it. -Knut, all-knowing when it comes to Standard]
Vs. Tooth and Nail
Again, I went with my preferred U/G “Bluetooth” build, rather than the mono-Green Urzatron version or the rising-with-a-bullet B/G version. And, again, the pre-sideboarding matchup proved very favorable for the forces of hasty beats and “no land for you!” Sakura Tribe-Elders and Solemn Simulacrums are annoying, but if you take out the Cloudposts (or Urza’s lands of your choice), it’s almost impossible for Tooth and Nail to get to the nine mana it needs to win. Tooth does have Eternal Witness to retrieve dead lands, which is annoying but actually not that bad. The war against Tooth is time, and every land drop Tooth is set back swings the match in your favor. You just have to be able to clear out the chump blockers – Slith Firewalker is huge in this matchup.
I would sideboard in Sowing Salt for a Shock and a Pyrite Spellbomb in this matchup. Now, again, just as mono-Blue can evolve, so can Tooth and Nail. It’s not unthinkable to replace the Simulacra with Vine Trellis, something Tooth decks ran back when Goblin Warchief and his cohorts (not that Cohort) were running rampant in Standard, acting as both mana accelerator and defense, and against a Slith Firewalker, it’s an excellent defense. Med Red has no easy way to kill an 0/4 Wall save for two burn spells. There’s also the possibility of going the Vernal Bloom route, like Elf and Nail, thus eliminating the need for any non-basic lands, but that would also mean running the risk of accelerating any other G/x deck you ran into, and there’s enough of them out there to make this strategy most likely unviable.
The addition of Vine Trellis might improve the matchup for Tooth and Nail against mono-Red, but with Sowing Salt, I’d still put it as a good matchup for the forces of chaos.
Again, I’ll add the qualifier that I haven’t tried mono-Red against any other Tooth matchup, but I feel the matchup is strongly pro-Red, and not in a Silver Knight sort of way.
Vs. B/G Cloud/The Rock
I still say it’s a Rock deck. Feel free to disagree.
This is an odd matchup. One the one hand, B/G decks are very dependent upon both double Green and double (or even triple) Black mana, which should make them very vulnerable to land destruction. One the other hand, B/G will run, at bare minimum, Sakura-Tribe Elder and Kodama’s Reach, as well as Birds of Paradise and Solemn Simulacrum in some versions. Eight land destruction spells aren’t enough to really dent B/G mana, and their win condition – sometimes Death Cloud, more often than not a big hitter like Kokusho, the Evening Star – is generally cheaper than an entwined Tooth and Nail.
Eternal Witness is even better in B/G than Tooth and Nail. There are far juicer targets to pick out of the graveyard- Rend Flesh, Distress, Echoing Decay or Cranial Extraction, to name a few, not to mention the ubiquitous Sakura-Tribe Elder.
Quite simply, this is not a good matchup for ol’ Med Red. Guerilla Tactics doesn’t do the job it’s brought in to do; a Rock deck doesn’t need to cast a Cloud when it can ramp up to a turn 5 Kokusho, the Evening Star or turn 4 Phyrexian Plaguelord, and my version, sans Volcanic Hammer, can’t take out a 5/5 unless it uses up three burn spells – and as Alton Brown would say, that’s not card advantage.
Well, he would say it if he was a Magic player.
Now, mind you, there’s about a bajillion versions of B/G decks floating around out there, some with Death Cloud, some with Phyrexian Plaguelord, et cetera, so results could vary depending upon the decklist. I’ll still put this in the unfavorable category.
Vs. R/G Kiki-Control (Good Stuff)
And, hey, as an added bonus, I’ve got the R/G matchup tested, chock full of Eternal Witnesses, Sakura-Tribe Elders, and everyone’s favorite 2/2 Goblin, Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker!
Now, the version I tested against was very legend-centric, running Time of Need to fish out one-ofs like Kiki-Jiki and Kumano, running mana acceleration in the form of Birds of Paradise, Sakura Tribe-Elder, Solemn Simulacrum and Kodama’s Reach. Yeah, land destruction was pretty much worthless against this deck, although it’s worth attacking their red base to keep them away from the mana for a Kumano or Kiki-Jiki.
This matchup is about 50/50 in my testing. The faster you can go off, the better. A turn one Slith Firewalker or turn four Arc-Slogger is pretty darn good, and since R/G (the version I tested, at least) isn’t too heavy on the burn, if you can keep the path cleared, you should be able to carry the day. If you don’t have a good army on the ground by the time Plow Under is being cast, it’s time to head to the next game.
What could mono-Red use to fight this deck? Good question. The only thing that comes to mind is Scrabbling Claws to drain their graveyard, but that’s a very weak solution for a very strong problem.
That’s four matchups you can expect to see in the new metagame. How this deck would do against, say, Weenie White (probably pretty good if you live to get a five-mana beater into play), U/W Control (most likely favorable) or Beacon Green (ugh!) – that you can find out.
Based upon my testing to date, I’d recommend tweaking the build as such:
2 Genju of the Spires
4 Slith Firewalker
4 Hearth Kami
3 Arc-Slogger
2 Kumano, Master Yamabushi
4 Shock
4 Pyrite Spellbomb
4 Magma Jet
4 Stone Rain
4 Molten Rain
3 Chrome Mox
3 Stalking Stones
16 Mountain
1 Shinka, the Bloodsoaked Keep
Sideboard:
4 Boil
4 Culling Scales
3 Sowing Salt
3 Zo-Zu, the Punisher
1 Genju of the Spires
Not too many changes here. A lot of these decks I tested against, like mono-Blue and B/G, like to have a lot of land in play, so I’ve changed my mind and added Zo-Zu to the sideboard. He, ahem, punishes these decks for their mana-hungry ways. It can’t be worse than Guerilla Tactics, which proved to be all-but-worthless against B/G.
Mana wasn’t a real problem, however, there were times I was begging for a fifth mana source with a Kumano in my hand, so out went one Genju for an extra Mountain. And, since the potential legend count has gone up and a first-striking 2/2 is actually worth something, the worth of a lone Shinka, the Bloodsoaked Keep goes up marginally, enough to merit inclusion – for now.
I’ve seen weenie decks that are starting to run both Umezawa’s Jitte and Sword of Fire and Ice main in their decks, the latter not only being the bane of mono-Blue but no friend of mono-Red as well. You do have Hearth Kami to help out against equipment heavy decks, but if, indeed, equipment-heavy decks come to the fore, I’d suggest adding a Shatter or two (Demolish is too slow) or – call me crazy; you wouldn’t be the first – Unforge to combat these decks. Culling Scales might be effective against these weenie decks but is probably too slow to truly staunch the beats.
I recommend testing against this deck or something similar for your Regionals testing, because Med Red – or Ponza, or mono-Red, whatever you want to call it – will most likely be out there.