For some crazy reason, a lot of people I know associate me with Red decks. It’s funny to me, in a lot of ways, because I’ve spent different moments in time being associated with very different things. Blue was a big one for a long time. My favorite association is probably with Blue/Green, culminating for me with a series of phone calls from various people across the country when Gaea’s Blessing was printed, each person saying some variant of “they made this card that seems like it was for you”.
I’m pretty sure they didn’t. But it was nice to hear so many people that I respected at the time sharing that with me.
These days, I suppose there are good reasons that people have been unsurprised when I cast a Lightning Bolt at their face. I went into some of the reasons I love burn several years back (with “My Favorite Wrenches”). In essence, it boils down to the versatility of a burn spell. If I have a random Bolt, I can use it to clean up the board (control) or I can use it to finish someone off (aggro). The same thing is true of so many burn spells. A deck like Burning Ponza made great use of this during the Madness and Psychatog days. Versus Psychatog, it would often cast a turn 1 Firebolt straight at their dome — “Turn 1 Bolt, go!” was the classic idiot play, but it was so good here — and turns later just finish them off with Barbarian Ring and Petrified Field. Versus Madness, you’d hold those cards to kill off everything you possibly could, and wipe things up somewhere later on.
When Extended Burn fueled by Hellspark Elementals came out, I was particularly excited by the possibilities. Bolt’s recent reprinting came along with so many other incredible cards (notably Goblin Guide), and I tried very hard to come up with a great deck for Austin for a number of my friends going down there. In the end, one marathon playtest session with Gaudenis Vidugiris made it clear to me that I didn’t quite have the deck where it needed to be. Some players did find success with the archetype, but I knew that I hadn’t hit it, and in the end, the Wisconsin contingent, at large, all played somewhat lackluster decks. Their results, unsurprisingly, were somewhat disappointing.
Fast forward to States. I had been preparing for the event as best as I could. A painful surgery had put me on painkillers for days on end. Grad school was kicking my ass, and I just didn’t have near the time that I needed to take care of things like playtesting in person, as I would have preferred. Online playtesting was the option I gave myself, particularly for those post-surgery days where I had to stay in bed all day, laying down.
I started out with a deck that was quite radical. It was an Armillary Sphere-based Red deck playing 4 Chandra Nalaar and 3 Chandra Ablaze. The deck was quite good against controlling strategies, but things like Boros Deck Wins were a huge, huge problem. I also was working on Goblins, which also looked promising. As time passed, I started merging the lists, so that I had a “Big” Goblins deck. It was clearly very powerful, but seemed like it needed something. I talked to BK, and he told me about the Goblins list that he’d been working on. It was very similar to my own, except that his ran Goblin Shortcutter instead of the Ruinblasters I was sporting.
Here was the eventual list I came to:
Wisconsin Gobbos
4 Goblin Guide
3 Goblin Bushwhacker
4 Dragon Fodder
4 Goblin Shortcutter
4 Warren Instigator
4 Goblin Chieftain
4 Goblin Ruinblaster
4 Siege-Gang Commander
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle
2 Arid Mesa
1 Scalding Tarn
18 Mountain
Sideboard:
4 Goblin Artillery
4 Magma Spray
4 Seismic Strike
3 Chandra Ablaze
I never really found a sideboard that I exactly liked. The maindeck always seemed really good, though I was still unsure of the latter day change of shifting out 4 Burst Lightning, which sometimes seemed fantastic. It basically boiled down to 4 Shortcutter OR 4 Burst Lightning OR 4 Ruinblaster had to be cut. This version is the more romantic of the builds, certainly. I think the less romantic build would be the one that cut the Shortcutter, a great card that I often found myself siding out.
A lot of people have built versions of this deck with Teetering Peaks, but I honestly don’t think that that is what the deck needs to be doing. With Path to Exile, so many decks will help you into making your Valakuts very powerful. And further, this path gives you an alternate way of dealing with a lot of decks that might otherwise shut down your one path, and the Valakut does so without significantly detracting from that goal. The three sac-lands are partly there to “hold” a Lightning Bolt effect up until you want to use it.
This deck was potent, certainly, but while I’m sure that there is a good way to board it, I never found one that really made me happy. In the end, I basically came to the conclusion that I wasn’t doing well enough against specifically Jund (which constantly seemed like a coin-flip), and I needed to turn elsewhere.
The elsewhere I turned was a variant on the Big Goblins I had been working on before slimming it down.
The Big Goblins deck was basically a transitional deck I had made on MTGO before I had picked up 4 Instigator. I was missing a lot of cards that I wanted, but I had started using Obsidian Fireheart, and I was incredibly impressed by it. I dropped it right into the shell of another Red deck and was just amazed at how powerful the card seemed to be.
I decided it needed a home, and I started thinking about how it plugged into Burn decks. It seemed like a natural inclusion. It was a big monster for quite cheap, and it also gave the deck another path out of any number of bad situations. I tinkered around daily and nightly, playing as much as I could, and eventually started realizing that what I really wanted was another stable two-drop to join the crew. After a lot of hunting, I came to the conclusion that Goblin Shortcutter was my best bet.
Here was the list that I found myself playing at States:
Sully Sligh (at States)
4 Goblin Guide
4 Plated Geopede
4 Hellspark Elemental
2 Goblin Shortcutter
4 Ball Lightning
3 Hell’s Thunder
3 Obsidian Fireheart
3 Elemental Appeal
4 Burst Lightning
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Teetering Peaks
2 Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle
11 Mountain
4 Arid Mesa
4 Scalding Tarn
Sideboard:
1 Obsidian Fireheart
3 Punishing Fire
4 Chandra Nalaar
3 Earthquake
2 Volcanic Fallout
1 Hell’s Thunder
1 Elemental Appeal
I almost feel that my love of this deck is incredibly ironic given my ancient history with Ball Lightning/Lightning Bolt decks from the Chicago-dominated era of far, far back times. I hated these so-called “Sligh” decks that felt all the much more like a rush deck of sorts, and we took to calling them “Blitz” instead of Sligh to differentiate between them and the card advantage associated deck that had been made by Jay Schneider.
The numbers took a long while to settle. They were basically based on curve considerations. I wanted to make sure the curve came down as “purely” as possible. If Kicker and Unearth weren’t put into consideration, the curve came down like this:
1CC: 12 (+4 with Teetering Peaks, +2 if you count Valakut)
2CC: 8
3CC: 7
4CC: 6
The numbers in the deck were all settled into the constraints of curve considerations. So many games had put me to the point where six four-drops seemed like the total upper limit. I knew that I wanted three Obsidian Fireheart to be able to consistently count on its impact in a game. The rest of the slots went to Elemental Appeal (over Quenchable Fire) because it struck me as the best option, a choice which could be debated. At the three-drop, I only had room for about seven cards, and Ball Lightning just struck me as more important than Hell’s Thunder in all of my testing. With the land count I was looking for, I only had room for two Shortcutters to help increase my count there, though a part of me actually wanted more.
I loved how the land was laid out. Even with Teetering Peaks, the Valakuts felt right. I knew that I was definitely interested in an additional land, regardless. 25 just felt far more stable than 24. This is where the initial Valakut had come in during testing. After giving it a go, and very much liking how it had played out, I started testing with a second one in lieu of a Mountain to see how it played out. After having a ton of games in, the amount of times that this extra Valakut hurt me were by far outweighed by the amount of times that it came to be match-winning.
I was really pleased with how the deck performed, but I didn’t make Top 8. I lost a nail-biter to Boros, I lost a match against Jund to unfortunate mulliganing, and I lost a match to Unearth due to a double mulliganing into a keepable one-land hand that I almost won with, but didn’t.
I was happy with the deck, and at the time would have absolutely replayed the exact same list immediately if the tournament could have been restarted.
Then I looked at all of the results from all of the States and Regionals I could get my hands on.
Not a lot of people realize this, but the top performing deck in Top 8s from the weekend was Red. It wasn’t just the top performing deck in the Top 8, it was the top performing deck by a wildly significant margin, and that wasn’t even considering the help it would have had from Barely Boros, if you were to chose to include that deck in your figuring of Red.
I spent a while looking at all of the Red lists in the Top 8 of the weekend, and all that had done well in $5k and other events. All of them. There were quite a few, and it took a while. Based on several esoteric (and, truth be told, arbitrary) weighting that took into account how much I liked the deck, how well it placed, where it was played, who played it, and other things, I checked out card counts, curves, unusual sideboard choices, and crunched all of the numbers. Some of the results surprised me.
Here is the weighted curve of the lists:
1CC: 12.01
2CC: 7.94
3CC: 8.08
4CC: 3.98
5/XCC: 3.59
Land: 24.41
Total: 60.01 (Ah, rounding)
Stacking my initial list up against this, I came to some conclusions:
1) I had a lot more four-drops than the successful decks did.
2) I had zero main-deck sweep spells, when the vast majority of successful decks ran some.
3) Everyone ran 4 Hell’s Thunder.
4) I was running more 2CC (to accommodate Shortcutter), and no one else was.
With these thoughts in mind, I went about examining what I could do to modify the list. I knew that I still wanted Obsidian Fireheart. At the same point, an analysis of the various drops of decks had told me that I knew I needed to include some actual copies of cards with “immediate reach,” like Elemental Appeal or Quenchable Fire. I needed to fit in a sweep spell into the main. And I knew that I still loved the 25 land.
Dealing with the constraints brought me to this list:
Creatures (22)
- 4 Ball Lightning
- 4 Hell's Thunder
- 4 Hellspark Elemental
- 4 Goblin Guide
- 2 Obsidian Fireheart
- 4 Plated Geopede
Lands (25)
Spells (13)
Immediately, I could feel how it was slimmed down. Going from six four-drops to four is a very significant change. So often, getting a draw with two four-drops could just be death. The Earthquakes also made themselves felt.
On the other hand, a part of me kept wondering if maybe I was onto something with the Goblin Shortcutters in the deck. They felt good. They don’t look like much, but they often end up doing so much work, it’s surprising. In certain matchups, merely having a random bear is completely problematic for your opponent. At the same time, they did get boarded out for some other card in very nearly every matchup (Turbo-Fog being one of the rare exceptions).
The point could be raised that no one else was playing them, and that there was probably a reason. As much as there could be something to this, that perhaps the Hive Mind had found the deck at this point, another thing to remember is that someone has to take that step off of the beaten path first. If we look at something like Rubin Naya, with Punishing Fire and Grove of Burnwillows, and then the drastic turn away from Zoo into a Midrange archetype that comes with this, we can easily see how something new and valuable was gained by not simply going with the same ol’ same ol’. I know I plan on doing some work on trying to figure out if Shortcutter actually does belong in the deck, but the amount of work that that entails is pretty enormous when you’re not actively testing for a specific event.
The board in this deck bears a special note. First of all, the way that it is set up allows you to sideboard into numerous different decks. If you want to become a deck very similar to Big Red control you are fully able to.
One sample build puts your spells like this:
Anti-Emeria Angel Build
4 Burst Lightning
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Plated Geopede
3 Punishing Fire
2 Volcanic Fallout
4 Hell’s Thunder
3 Elemental Appeal
4 Obsidian Fireheart
4 Chandra Nalaar
3 Siege-Gang Commander
Or another controlling board for what you would look like against Boros:
4 Burst Lightning
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Plated Geopede
3 Punishing Fire
2 Volcanic Fallout
4 Hellspark Elemental
3 Earthquake
4 Obsidian Fireheart
4 Chandra Nalaar
3 Siege-Gang Commander
Or another if you want to take out most of your Edict targets (in some matches versus Vampires):
4 Burst Lightning
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Hellspark Elemental
3 Punishing Fire
2 Volcanic Fallout
4 Hell’s Thunder
4 Ball Lightning
2 Elemental Appeal
4 Chandra Nalaar
2 Siege-Gang Commander
2 Earthquake
Versus Jund, if you make your deck into something that can be both aggressive, and also resilient to the resistance that can be put up, you end up looking something like:
4 Goblin Guide
4 Burst Lightning
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Hellspark Elemental
4 Plated Geopede
2 Volcanic Fallout
4 Hell’s Thunder
3 Ball Lightning
3 Siege-Gang Commander
3 Earthquake
And versus a deck like Turbo-Fog, you want to be able to keep up the aggressive stance but without wasting full turns too often.
4 Burst Lightning
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Goblin Guide
4 Plated Geopede
4 Hellspark Elemental
3 Punishing Fire
2 Volcanic Fallout
4 Obsidian Fireheart
3 Siege-Gang Commander
3 Earthquake
Thinking about how the deck looks, as a deck, after boarding, becomes really important. You want the deck to be able to perform in the kinds of ways that a deck performs. This kind of holistic sideboarding is something that Brian Kowal has been talking about for years. In many ways, this means that it is really hard to say to someone, “sideboard like this versus x,” because you are sideboarding into your opponent’s plan when you’re doing holistic sideboarding. If, for example, a Vampire deck is one that decides it is going to try to slow the game down immensely, say, sideboarding into a deck that runs Feast and other cards, well, you want to be able to sideboard into a deck that can fight that kind of fight. On the other hand, if they are planning on going in a direction that doesn’t head that way so far, you really want to be able to stay lean and mean, and beat them over the head before they get to anything meaningful.
The way that this deck is built, right now, is exactly what I would play in any meaningful Standard tournament. It’s really a fantastic deck, even if it still isn’t as good as I’d like it to be; many of the card choices are really contingent card choices that are here for the now, and I’m hoping that WotC prints some new cards that completely assert themselves into positions in the deck, and are exactly the card that I want.
I’m excited about the coming year. 2010 is just on this side of happening, and I know that I’m expecting to ring in the New Year with a gong. When I think back to the over fifteen years of Magic I’ve been playing, I can’t help but smile and say how much I’m looking forward to 2020 and beyond.
Until next decade…