Red Deck Wins

Standard RDW

First turn mountain -> swing for game. Standard RDW, folks. This particular build focuses a little more on negating blocks (see Mugging, Fervent Cathar, Nightbird's Clutches), which can turn an opponent's well thought-out combat step into your alpha strike. And now here's a run-on paragraph of why Vexing Devil isn't such a bad guy:

Vexing Devil should NEVER be a first turn play in RDW. Indeed, many experienced red mages would go so far as to say VD doesn't belong in RDW at all (the argument being that VD gives your opponent control, as they'll nearly always pay 4 life if they don't have the cards to deal with it and conversely will feel comfortable letting it stick if they have an answer); I disagree. In this deck, you have such overwhelming board presence by turn 3-4 that (assuming your opponent is a rational player) YOU will have the choice of whether VD sticks or not; that is, taking in the entire state of the game (hand sizes, lands, creatures, life totals, etc) you can reasonably deduce the reaction to VD and plan accordingly. Try it. Trust me. Example: they're Jund control, 4 cards in hand, 11 life, 1 blocker; you have 2 creatures and drop VD...he's likely to have removal and is afraid of getting burnt out if he takes the 4 damage...it's going to stick. The example here is meant to demonstrate that by carefully choosing when to play VD, you can choose if he's sacrificed or not.

To those that would say "Man, that's a lot of assumption. It sounds like you might be cherrypicking data, resulting in some major confirmation bias." I'm a red mage. Fringe theorycrafting is our specialty.

Thanks for reading, may all your top-decks be miracles.

• Burn