In the early days of Dominaria Standard, Jim Davis had some success with a
U/R Wizards deck that took full advantage of Adeliz, the Cinder Wind and
other prowess creatures. The deck had lots of powerful draws backed up by a
ton of burn because of the addition of Wizard’s Lightning to the usual
suspects of Shock and Lightning Strike.
However, it became clear that the deck was scraping the bottom of the
barrel for actual Wizards when it’s playing four copies of Spellweaver
Eternal in a format largely defined by Goblin Chainwhirler. But Adeliz is a
powerful card with only a couple other Wizards, and red is deep enough to
fill out a powerful aggressive strategy once you decide to stay away from
the mediocre blue cards.
In fact, at Pro Tour Dominaria, Mark Tobiasch brought a sweet
hyper-aggressive red deck with a Wizards sub-theme that utilized the
synergy between Goblin Chainwhirler and The Flame of Keld to form a mini
Plague Wind while the saga functions normally to refuel after you empty
your hand in the early turns. Those synergies are perfect for a prowess
aggro deck that’s trying to keep its hand full of spells to act as pump
spells as well as assemble a critical mass of Wizards to take advantage of
Adeliz.
Merging those two archetypes and you easily come to a list close to what
you see below, with few to zero weak cards depending on how you feel about
Ghitu Lavarunner and Warlord’s Fury. Lavarunner isn’t underpowered when you
consider this is a hyper-aggressive deck, and the floor on a cantrip that
helps your creatures attack is very high, even if the ceiling is fairly low
to compensate. They are perfect role players that support the deck’s heavy
hitters.
But rather than the untenably weak Wizards like Spellweaver Eternal, you
get to play proven staple Bomat Courier, which while vulnerable to opposing
Chainwhirlers is another card that keeps the gas flowing and synergizes
well with The Flame of Keld, letting you essentially discard your one hand
to both effects, mitigating their collective cost.
With so many powerful haste creatures and burn spells this deck is a
nightmare to play against, not giving the opponent any room to breathe from
the very start, nor ever letting them feel comfortable as Flame of Keld can
easily set up turns where you burn the opponent out from ten or more. This
is what a red deck is supposed to be. None of this all card advantage
midrange nonsense. Get ’em dead and get ’em dead fast.
Creatures (19)
Lands (20)
Spells (21)
Sideboard
