As a player who’s firmly in the Johnny camp when it comes to player psychographics, I
tend to have pet cards, and they always end up finding their way into decks that I build for Friday Night Magic — and, by association, this column.
Warp World. Dragonstorm. Battle of Wits. Jasmine Boreal.
(What can I say? I have a soft spot for hot Lindsay-Lohan lookalikes with ninja stars.)
(I’m actually bummed I can’t have Jasmine Boreal in my sideboard in Extended
this year!)
And now, my current card crush… is Chandra Ablaze. Chandra’s second version has
kind of flown under the radar — most likely pushed to the side by the furor over Jace, the Mind Sculptor — but I also know that she fails the four-
versus-five-mana-cost test that puts Jace, Elspeth, and Garruk into “highly played” and Liliana and Chandra Original Flavor into
“maybe played but probably too slow.” But her abilities are all very synergistic — the ‘+1′ is a road to victory and fuels the ultimate,
the ‘-2′ refills your hand and strips control down to a hand of unknown cards, and while her ultimate ability requires to you have
planned for it a bit, it should be at least as much of a guaranteed win as Garruk or Big Jace, if not more so.
I’ve built this deck before. I first built a R/W version with Ajani Vengeant, as
seen in
“Planeswalkin’,”
and then tried a few mono-red decks once M11 came along and gave us Inferno Titan and
Destructive Force. (The short answer: It hated Titans. Any kind.)
Now, with Scars having been absorbed into Standard, I wanted to take another stab at it.
Ablaze Of Glory
Step one to building with Chandra Ablaze: Determine the red instants and sorceries that
you want to play. In the past, I’ve used sweep spells like Pyroclasm or big destructive spells like D-Force or Lavaball Trap, but they never
seem to work out. You really want to top out at Chandra and not be stuck with a handful of six- and seven-drops coming up after her. What you want,
really, is as efficient of a burn suite as you can get; that way, you can feel okay with yourself for casting them early, knowing that they’ll just
be coming back once you get Chandra online.
3 Chandra Ablaze
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Burst Lightning
4 Staggershock
4 Galvanic Blast
(Given my druthers, I would’ve fit Arc Trail in there somewhere, but my local brick-and-
mortar store didn’t have any in the binders. It did make me wonder how often I’d end up targeting myself with the back end of an Arc Trail just to
deal the two damage to finish off my opponent.)
Step two: Have a brilliant flash of insight into a single card that has great synergy
with your “Plan A.” Not looking to pat myself on the back here or anything; I’m no Guillaume Wafo-Tapa or anything, and sometimes my
“brilliant flash of insight” consists of replacing Shard Phoenix with Reckless Ogre in CounterPhoenix. Thankfully, some of this work was
done for me. I played the Pyromancer Ascension deck at the StarCityGames.com Standard Open in Denver, and I’ve been keeping up with the new
innovations going forward. It seemed like Chandra Ablaze and Pyromancer Ascension had a weirdly cool synergy: both cards want burn spells in the
graveyard in order to do their thing, and both cards reward you later on for having played burn spells up front. It gives you another way to leverage all
those burn spells that will end in your graveyard — and heaven forbid you get both Ascension
and
Chandra’s ultimate going at the
same time.
Step three: Since Galvanic Blast is easily the highest bang-for-your-buck in terms of
burn spells, we need to pad out the deck with enough useful artifacts to ensure that we hit metalcraft and get the maximum output from
Chandra’s ultimate. Everflowing Chalice is easily an auto-include; ramping into Chandra earlier than turn 6 certainly works for me. I enjoyed Lux Cannon
when I played one in Mono-Black Control, and having one in this deck seemed like a good way to handle random non-creature things that might crop up.
…And it was about right now that I realized that, dang, that’s a lot of cards
that use counters to indicate their power level. Does proliferate fit into this shell? I think it does. Contagion Clasp is yet another burn spell (and
helps you not waste too many 2-3-4-damage spells on those one-toughness donks), and helps ramp up almost all your permanents. Everflowing Chalices
now start providing a lot more mana, making proliferating easier. Chandra can hit her ultimate, sometimes the turn she comes into play. Pyromancer
Ascension can go live from only one counter. Lux Cannon can become an absolute weapon of unparalleled destruction.
The synergy. It blinds!
Rounding the deck out is a smidge of card draw, and a couple of Voltaic Keys just to give
the deck the second copy of whatever artifact you have in play.
The whole deck:
Spells (50)
- 4 Lightning Bolt
- 16 Mountain
- 2 Voltaic Key
- 4 Burst Lightning
- 4 Pyromancer Ascension
- 4 Everflowing Chalice
- 4 Staggershock
- 3 Temple Bell
- 4 Contagion Clasp
- 4 Galvanic Blast
- 1 Lux Cannon
Sideboard
Rare Cost Summary:
Pyromancer Ascension ($2.99 x 4 = $11.96)
Chandra Ablaze ($3.99 x 3 = $11.97)
Temple Bell ($1.49 x 3 = $4.97)
Lux Cannon ($4.99 x 1 = $4.99)
Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle ($1.99 x 4 = $7.96)
Optional Sideboard Rare Cost Summary:
Goblin Guide ($5.99 x 4 = $23.96)
Kargan Dragonlord ($14.99 x 3 = $44.97)
The Mana Base:
Valakut actually gives you a sort of a “Plan C” and a long-game inevitability
even if you can’t get a Chandra to stick. Burn spells are cheap enough to work around late-game Mana Leaks, and even drawing a Mountain is like
drawing a Lightning Bolt. It also distracts your opponent, forcing them to try and fight you on yet another front. Tectonic Edge fights opposing
Valakuts and manlands, letting you conserve your burn for your opponent’s precious life points.
The Transformative Sideboard:
If there’s one thing my experience with this deck can bring to the table,
it’s that there just is no way to deal with a resolved Titan. You might (
might
) have been able to stockpile enough burn to handle the first one,
but the second one will kill you for sure. So how do you fight that? I say, race ‘em. If you can put them into single digits before they can find
a Titan, then your burn should be able to take you the rest of the way. I was siding out any of the artifacts that didn’t make sense to keep in.
I took this deck to Friday Night Magic this past week, and here’s the short
tournament report: Man can this deck beat Infect decks. As soon as I figured out I shouldn’t be relying on Contagion Clasp to kill them with their own
poison counters (cute but not as fast as their own poison clock), I’d side in the aggro package and dominate them with better creatures.
Unfortunately,
that’s all I played this week.
Seriously, Colorado Springs, pull it together. Get an innovative bone in your body. Here’s a
Chandra Ablaze deck you can play next week.
Ablazing Forward
I have two things that I want to try out moving forward.
First, Ratchet Bomb ($9.99). It works well with proliferate, it sweeps up weenie decks,
it handles obtuse permanents. I wouldn’t lose the Lux Cannon; I actually got it going once in playtesting with a Key, a pair of Clasps, and a
Chalice on seventeen, and just annihilated something every turn. But I’d like to explore having access to them, whether maindeck or sideboard.
Two, I read
Gavin Verhey article
this week with a great deal of interest — not so much the U/R version that he
ultimately ended up with, but the mono-red version at the beginning. I think Runeflare Trap could find a home in this deck as well, seeing as how I
also have the Temple Bell plus Voltaic Key engine, and a secondary way to make my opponent draw three cards — although, in Chandra’s
case, Runeflare Traps are just free Lightning Bolts.
I’m probably not going to spring the cash for Mox Opals any time soon though.
I like that Gavin even tried putting Pyromancer Ascension into that deck. It makes me
feel like I’m on the right path in terms of being a good deckbuilder. Or, at least, somewhere in the woods within shouting distance of anyone who
happens to be walking by.
Next Week
I started working on the Top Commons list for Scars of Mirrodin, but found out that I had
a bunch and that I wanted to write about Chandra Ablaze, so she took precedence. Next week! Scar’ top commons… and we’ll see what else
is out there. There’s a StarCityGames.com Open weekend in Charlotte this upcoming Halloween weekend — if you’re in the area, I
recommend getting out there and experiencing these great tournaments for yourself. If not — then gorge yourself on Tootsie Rolls (only
chocolate, please), and we’ll see you back here next week.
Until next week,
— dave
dave dot massive at gmail and davemassive on Facebook and Twitter