Playing Devil’s Advocate: An Analysis of Red Deck Wins in Anaheim

Has there been a more apt moniker for a deck than Red Deck Wins? It’s like the flavor text for Goblin Offensive – a perfect fit. All it does is lay a few creatures, lock down your land for a turn or two and beat you about the head and shoulders until dead. In the Extended environment before Pro Tour: New Orleans, this is what passed for”blazing speed.”

Then came New Orleans, and suddenly, a deck capable of a turn 4 kill was”too slow.”

Well, not entirely. Dan Cato came within a whisker of making the Top Eight with his version of Red Deck Wins, and in a format where artifacts are king, a deck that has as much artifact hate as Red does certainly is worth considering.

Several players certainly did, as Red Deck Wins posted an impressive showing at Grand Prix: Anaheim – the last heyday of Tinker and Oath – where 21% of the Day Two participants ran some variant of the deck, and two of the top 8 slots went to the Jackal Pup and his friends.

Red Deck Wins is often lumped in with other Sligh decks, but it’s really an aggro-control deck. Its creature base is cheap, centering around four creatures: Jackal Pup and Grim Lavamancer for one mana, the fast-growing Slith Firewalker for two and this generation’s Ball Lightning, Blistering Firecat. The rest of the deck is either burn or control elements (Tangle Wire, Rishadan Port, and Wasteland). It wants to win quickly, but Firebolt and Grim Lavamancer give it some gas for the long haul if needed.

Cursed Scroll used to be an automatic addition to the deck. In these days of one-turn Tinker kills, however, Scrolls are almost always relegated to the sideboard at best, as they’re just too slow.

Scrolls are too slow. I never thought I’d write that sentence.

In Anaheim, the Day Two RDW decks can be put into one of two categories: Those that added Chrome Mox for an extra burst of speed, or those that eschewed the Moxes and instead went for the mana denial element with additional land destruction. Finalist Nathan Saunders’ deck goes in the former category, semifinalist Nick Meves’ deck the latter.

What does it say when the fastest deck in the format needed to add Chrome Mox because, otherwise, it was too slow? Danger, Will Robinson, danger! Retarded format alert!

While RDW has no way to recoup the loss of card advantage via card drawing, it does accelerate the deck a turn and enable the deck to get around one of minor bugaboos I encountered with the deck – having an opening hand with a Slith Firewalker and only one Red source of mana (the curse of running Wastelands and Ports), and it also allows for turn 2 Pillages and Tangle Wires. It also means being able to run fewer lands, only twenty instead of the usual twenty-two or twenty-four.

Versions with Moxes generally only ran four to six of the Onslaught fetchlands, as opposed to the usual full complement of eight. Cameron Herzog’s eleventh place deck went the latter route, and did it one better, adding Great Furnace for some extra artifact punch to fuel Shrapnel Blast. It wasn’t quite enough to crack the top 8, but definitely an interesting idea that merits further attention.

Being able to drop a turn 1 Slith Firewalker is huge in most matchups, and when this can be followed up by a Wasteland, Rishadan Port or Tangle Wire, most other decks will fall so far behind that by the time they can deal with the Firewalker, they’re within range of being burned out.

Speed isn’t the only thing, though. The other RDW variant, instead of speeding itself up, tried to slow down the environment by packing more land and artifact destruction in the main deck. Nick Meves’ top 8 deck ran four Pillage and four Stone Rain in lieu of the Mox strategy, also effective against Tinker decks – Pillage is artifact destruction, after all, and having that main decked in this format isn’t a bad idea.

Thomas Wood’s eighteenth place version ran not only Molten Rain in addition to Pillage (and no Tangle Wires!), but went for a limited Burning Wish strategy – a strange strategy, with only three Wish targets in the sideboard – but it clearly worked for Thomas.

The Wish strategy seems a bit out of place for RDW, but there may be some merit to it. Only two decks out of sixty-four went with this mixing of Wish and RDW, though, so draw your own conclusions.

Another card I’ve always liked in RDW is Fire / Ice, either with or replacing Volcanic Hammer. It’s one less damage, but it is at instant speed and you have the ability to split the damage among two one-toughness creatures, which is great against the mirror. Three RDW decks found room for this card, and if you wanted to run it instead of the Hammer, I really couldn’t mount an argument otherwise.

Rob Bolick’s twelfth place deck also found room for Great Furnace and Shrapnel Blast, proving that those two cards can work outside of the Mox-ified version.

Two odd variants that didn’t place too well in Day Two. The first was Nathaniel Gapasin’s version, which is more Ponza-like than anything (running Avalanche Riders, for goodness sakes!) which he piloted to a forty-eighth place finish. Gabe Carlton-Barnes splashed Blue in his version for access to Stifle, Chain of Vapor and Alter Reality in his sideboard. He finished fifty-seventh.

Anaheim is a very small statistical sample, but if we can draw any lesson from this, it could be that there may not be that much flexibility to the skeleton of Red Deck Wins – you can pack a lot of artifact hate into the deck, but that might be as far as the archetype can bend.

Sideboards from Anaheim had a panoply of different defenses against the expected metagame. Against the potential threat of Twiddle-Desire, there was Pyrostatic Pillar – Nathan Saunders, however, went with the Chill-proof Psychogenic Probe.

You mean there’s actually a use for this card? Great googly moogly!

Against the hated Tinker decks, RDW had Mogg Salvage, Rack and Ruin, Pulverize and Shattering Pulse to choose from – that’s a lot of hate. The mirror match has Lava Dart and Fledgling Dragon. Don’t like large creatures beating you down? Ensnaring Bridge has long been a popular answer.

If you wanted the raw numbers, though, here’s a breakdown of the cards as they appeared in each Day Two RDW deck, all fourteen of them:

We’ve seen that RDW can either beat or at least stay competitive with everything else out there – almost. There is the matter of Ben Rubin“Dump Truck,” an odd mélange of cards built around the Fiends frame. It’s a horrible, horrible matchup for our favorite little Red dudes – almost unwinnable. However, it’s my feeling that Rubin’s deck has one-shot wonder written all over it, and will fall down to rogue status come January.

Speaking of which – what happens to Red Deck Wins come 2004? Do you keep the Chrome Moxes for that extra burst of speed, or do you revert back to the”original” makeup of the deck.

I’d be inclined to return the deck to its roots. Turn 4 will go back to being fast enough, and all that room made for artifact hate can now be reserved for other spells, like the”too slow” Cursed Scroll.

In fact, it’ll probably look something like this:

Red Deck Wins 2K4

4 Jackal Pup

4 Grim Lavamancer

4 Slith Firewalker

4 Blistering Firecat

4 Seal of Fire

4 Firebolt

4 Fire / Ice

4 Cursed Scroll

4 Tangle Wire

4 Wooded Foothills

4 Bloodstained Mire

4 Rishadan Port

4 Wasteland

8 Mountain

Sideboard

4 Pillage

3 Stone Rain

3 Ensnaring Bridge

2 Lava Dart

3 Fledgling Dragon

Remarkably unoriginal, true. If Twiddle-Desire ever becomes a true threat, room can be found in the sideboard for either Pyrostatic Pillar or Psychogenic Probe.

I also think that the combination of Shrapnel Blast and Great Furnace shows great promise, but I’m not ready to hitch my wagon to it yet. I’m fairly certain that The Rock will be making a resurgence in January, and I’m dubious about lands that can be victimized by Pernicious Deed. The numbers from Anaheim, however, do show the promise of these two cards.

But for now, the phrase is”if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” And come January, Extended won’t be broken.

At least, I don’t think so…