strykerzero

You appear to have problems with your mana curve/ramp. You need to be able to get almost everything you need (land wise) into play by turn 4 or you will likely be given lethal damage by an aggro deck.

With 22 lands in your deck, you only have a 63% chance of drawing normally into 4 lands by turn 4. Raising your land count to 26 improves that to 80%. For a deck like this you need to ensure being able to make your normal land drop in addition to you acceleration (ie "explore")

http://stattrek.com/online-calculator/hypergeometric.aspx

You also need more tutor effects to pull the Valakuts out of your deck, if this is your win condition you need to get them more reliably.
Suggestions: Expedition Map, Primeval titan

Crucible of Worlds needs more synergistic cards/combos for the land fetch/graveyard-return theme:
Suggestions: Harrow (sorcery), Blighted Woodland, (non-basic land), Scapeshift (Sorcery)


You also should have some sort of backup to crucible of words itself:
Suggestions: Ramunap Excavator (creature), Tilling Treefolk (creature), Splendid Reclamation (sorcery).
Edit: The creatures might actually be better than artifact since you can use them as blockers....

Backup for Valkut (secondary win condition based on landfall)
Suggestions: Avenger of Zendikar, Rampaging Baloth.

Rampant Growth is probably better than sylvan scrying.

I found a video where someone tried to build a deck around your combo. maybe get some more ideas from it?

https://www.mtggoldfish.com/articles/against-the-odds-worldfire

Perhaps I am missing it, but I'm not seeing what the overall goal/strategy is. Nissa (and now the mul daya's as backup) will allow you to ramp out multiple creatures (or land) but what are you going to do with them?

If you are going to build this deck around Nissa as the lynch pin, try to take advantage for all her abilities.
The +1 re-arranges your library and increases the cmc of her +0 ability (eventually playing a "primeval titan" or "avenger of zendikar" without spending mana)
The Ultimate -6 Ability could be a win condition if you partner it with "overwhelming stampede"
The biggest challenge with Nissa is keeping her alive long enough to exploit the abilities. What are you defending her with?

You can shift into a green/blue control shell if you want. Just make sure to prioritize creatures/control spells with the "scry" mechanic if you go this route. Nissa puts creatures on the field for you for free, while you save all your mana for control instants.

The Mul Daya creatures (and nissa's +0 ability) lend themselves to going for a landfall/ramp strategy.

Which type of deck or your aiming for: Aggro, mid-range, control? what combination of cards is your win condition?

How About adding in:

Oracle of Mul Daya
Mul Daya Channelers

Those will interact with Nissa in some very beneficial ways (you are viewing and manipulating the top of your library).

You can then abuse it for landfall or miracle mechanics?

Worldfire isnt in the deck...

How about using a suspended "rift bolt" as the second imprinted card, when world fire resolve, the bolt hits the opponent on your next turn for the win.

Going Izzet (red/blue) for counterspells and sorcery/instant cost reduction could work as your backup.

Fated intuition, cackling counterpart and mirror match are some more instant spells that create copies of creatures already on the battlefield. Going this route though moves you away from a control deck into a mid-range one though... something else to think about.

Also just noticed that most of your remaining creatures are wizards..
That brings wizard tribal theme cards like sage's dousing, stonybrook banneret and sigil tracer, into consideration.

Turn 2 will be spent casting a creature, you wont be sitting on 2 mana. You can probably afford to upgrade essence scatter into a 3cmc+ instant spell.

Edit: Dual lands will help as well, but they get expensive....

looking pretty good, how about replacing counterlash with disolve and lightning strike with burst lightning (you can pay the kicker price later and this gives you the 1cmc spell for card slots 5-8)? You could also use spell pierce instead of burst lightning.

Void Shatter and counterflux I think are upgrades to "cancel".

Abrade is a good choice for the sideboard (but with cost reductions, shatterstorm may be better). You might want to (mainboard) those three cards with a few more creatures to help with the starting hand drawing chances.

How would Elemental Appear compare to Banefire in your opinion?

Since your creature count has dropped down, maybe look at Volt Charge + Pyromancers ascension?

Needs more proliferate:

Thrumingbird. (flying creature)
Fuel for the cause (counterspell + control)

Brain in a jar (artifact) might be an interesting option if you are running mutlple different cmc's of counterspells and proliferate....

Hitting you with a lot of post. I guess you really have gotten me thinking :)

Rize of Eldrazi had a bunch or spells with the "rebound" mechanic (plays itself again for free on your next turn). That gets you two triggers for one casting. Is there anything in that set that looks appealing to you?

I don't know if "Thing in the Ice" is a good fit for your deck. When you transform him, all your creatures get returned to your hand.

Now if you are planned on using that and/or the sorcery "Whelming Wave" as a form of mass bounce (control) that might make things different, but then you might want to focus on "when you cast a instant/sorcery" trigger creatures that do something other than create creatures, so that they actually will have an effect.

Not sure exactly how the "stack" would resolve casting whelming wave with young pyromancer on the field. would the token be placed on the battlefield post bounce?

Baral, Goblin Electromancer both do effectively the same thing. If you put 4 copies of each into your deck you have an extremely good chance of having one in your starting hand. I would suggest refining your deck with the expectation that one of those two creatures will be cast on your second turn. The flipped Curious Humnculous also has this effect but I don't think you have enough (cheap while useful) spells to flip him soon enough to make an impact.

With that in mind, what would be your ideal plays on turns 1 and 3? (try to think of at least 8 cards for each turn). Keep in mind, if its an instant/sorcery, on turn 3 you can cast something that normally costs 4 mana :)

You will need to be thinking about defense on at-least one of these turns, otherwise an aggro deck could likely put itself in position to win the game turns 4-5.

How about removing a big chunk of the creatures and focus on red instant burn spells and blue counterspells?
I would keep the following:
Electromancer (cost reduction)
Baral (cost reduction)
Guttersnipe (win condition)
Talrand (Win condition)

Everything else would be geared towards direct damage removal and counterspells. "Thing in the ice" would be a nice from of control but I don't believe you have enough instant/sorcery cards in the deck to pull of your goal. You might be able to get away with 20 lands though if you don't put in anything with a base mana cost greater than 4.

I really like the concept of what you are doing here. I do have have questions/concerns about the implementation.

1) The mana curve.
Turn 1 (1 mana): You have no useful plays
Turn 2 (2 mana): You have 16 creatures you can cast, but only 4 are worth using as attackers/blockers (1 toughness is a problem)
Turn 3 (3 mana): You gain guttersnipe or cancel as usable spells. Your sorcery's will only do 2 damage.Guttersnipe is probably not a
good option as a defender since you would value his ability too much to use as a blocker (he can almost work as a win condition if
you built a control deck around him.
Turn 4 (4 mana?). You might not have the four land to drop, but it seems you have full access to your deck. Unfortunately, you have played minimal defense the last three turns, against an aggro deck you might already be dead.....

Critical question: What are you doing Turn 4 to reset your opponent who has spent the last three turns building up?

2) Too much support, not enough action:
Most of your creature interacts with instant/sorcery's in cool ways. However until late game, you don't have the mana to play a instant/sorcery on the same turn as you cast the creature. You also are not going to want to attack with them because of their toughness. This results in multiple turns of not creating strength on the board. Try to limit your "do nothing" turns to no more than 2. You need to be either removing the opponents threats or damaging him yourself the rest of the time.

Have you considered the sorcery, "rite of replication"?
its a sorcery that creates up to 5 copies of any creature on the board. Since your creatures trigger things each time a sorcery/instant is cast, this could very easily become your win condition (6 guttersnipes?)

Sideboard should be saved to handle things you feel are the "silver bullet" or greatest danger to your deck.

I have spent a LOT of time trying to make pyromancer's ascension work (I ran a paper standard deck with it at one point in modern)
One of the big challenges I have had with it is the turn when you play it.

Without creatures to block for you, you need to hold of on playing it until the board is completely empty of enemy attackers. Otherwise they will have an second turn to reinforce toughness of their creatures to survive your later direct damage spells.

What is your big finishing play? The biggest hit I can see here is maybe a duplicated lightning bolt? I would also advice adding in even more of the multi creature targeting spells, you really need the card efficiency.

Consider putting in 4 copies of expedition map. its a 1cmc artfact that you can use to fetch Valakut from your library. (although with only 17 other land I dont see you getting beyond 5 lands on the field before the game ends)

Question: what are you ramping into with pyretic ritual and metamorphose? Would it be better to replace them with more burn (especially a high damage late game spell?)


I have my own version of a mono-red no-creature burn deck.
https://www.mtgvault.com/strykerzero/decks/chandra-burns-everything/

If You want to splash red,

Rain of gore as alternative to tainted remedy.

Wall of Essense instead of Wall of Omens.

As im looking more and more at this, iF i was doing it, I would focus more on a lifegain deck with Tainted Remedy and Sanguine Bond as the win-cons.

You also need more ways to get Tainted Remedy into your hand (ie Tutoring)

If you were rich I would suggest Idyllic Tutor (white sorcery)

The more budget option would be Dimir Machinations (average price $1.00)
You are using the card for the trasmute ability (discard the card from hand for 3 mana, and fetch a 3 mana card from library)

Serum Powder is an artifact you can use for its mulligan enhancement ability to better ensure you have one of the 2 key cards in starting hand.

What about Sanguine Bond as the Backup to tainted Remedy. That way you can target the life-gain at yourself and still hurt the opponent.

What about Chalice of life?

Based on my reading of your decklist, it seems you seem to be focused on mana ramping with forests and using 3 different creatures as your "beaters" (2 of which are treefolk). Without getting lands out quickly, those treefolk wont do much for you. but if you want to narrow in on them and mana ramping some more....:

24+ Treefolk Creatures
8-12 Landfetch Sorcery/Instants/Shaman creatures (keep them 3 mana or less)
4-8 Cards for the win condition (ex. Overwhelming Stampede, Door of Destiny,Rancor)

Creatures:
1cmc (4): Treefolk Harbinger (Library searching)
2cmc (4): Bosk Banneret (Cost reductions)
3cmc (4): Dungrove Elder (scaling damage based on forests)
4cmc (8): Dauntless Daurbark (scaling damage based on forests), Unstopable Ash (Champions a weaker treefolk and adds a bonus)
5cmc (4): Timber Protector (treefolk lord)
= 24 Creatures



Edit: Just realized this would basically be a complete rebuild. I apologize, I get obsessed over tribal themed decks.