Lol, Chandra just won me a game I had no business winning. He's at two life with a control deck and plenty of open mama. I'm holding infectious bloodlust and titans strength. I draw the orphan Nalaar herself.

Play it, then play infectious bloodlust on her. He pauses and thinks forever and lets it through. I tap her to hit him for one and he casts disperse on her, I play titan strength on her, untapping her and hit him again. Gg

Yay Chandra.

22-4

Does this mean Barney is coming around?


elk

I think the biggest thing you got going for your list is that I was a steady freedy rank 40 playing your list. After a 7-0 streak I decided to take a little break and played some different control builds. Hit rank 36 and turned off the Xbox.

I like ur deck.



And you too...

I'm not sure about others but I totally pictured Barney doing this after writing the post



Anyway....you're a nice guy and all....but...I just don't play for that team. I'm a happily married man.

Hopefully that counts as letting you down easy.





elk

Barney just wants to with you elk.

Don't let Hakeem find out his little parrot is flirting with other men.

Having fun with that list Elk. The opening hand I look for with it is 2 lands + a 1 drop and hopefully 1 pump. Keeping a hand gets tricky when you have 3 lands, and only 2 drops+.. Tempting to keep but can stall out.

Those pumps are so tricky to use. I think you gotta use them as burn to the face as soon as you can. The Scry is important and you have plenty of burn to finish later

Tough call sometimes. The hope is with a low land count, that the odds are in your favor to keep drawing gas. Aggressive mulligans are part of any RDW deck too.

Thanks for the spins. Any feedback on the deck or cards is appreciated.


elk

So within the current meta using the variations of RDW/Boss Sligh by what turn am I looking to pull a victory?

The short answer is as quick as possible.

The longer answer is turn 5 at most; longer than that, your chances at victory decline pretty significantly unless they are low on life and you draw several burn spells that go to the face.

With a good draw against minimal resistance (i.e. opponent playing a couple gatecreeper vines and acid moss) I'd say turn 5 at best, more realistically 6 or 7.


But you can build a deck with enough card advantage and mana sinks that you'll be able to play much longer games without running out of gas through repeated sweepers: thanks to cards like akoum firebird, the Nalaars, avaricious dragon, the abbots, foundry of the consuls and my favorite card - infectious bloodlust on which you can invest up to 8 mana.

T4 is rare but T5 and 6 are where you want to be based on the list I posted. The pool (currently) can't support T4 kills consistently.

For T4, I went (and I remember this because it was part of a debate Barney and I were having in PM's):

T1 Foundry
T2 SlideRunner - 2dmg
T3 Chandra - 5dmg
T4 Twin Bolt & Titan's Strength - I untapped Chandra with Bolt, then swung with all of them (no land drop for me), untapped her in combat after blocks with Titan (they ramped T3 with no T2 play so it didn't matter that it was the 'after blocks/damage' timer but it seems good form to play as you would if there were blockers), then +1 her for the win. That was 14 dmg on T4 for an overall total of 21dmg.

I'm sure there's some sort of combination with prowess and titan's strength in there too but I haven't hit it yet for a T4 kill. Regardless, T5 and 6 are the sweet spot. After that, you start to give mid-range/ramp too much time to answer.

elk

These fast win scenarios are certainly possible, but I don't think that raw speed against a goldfish is what really makes red good in this game.

Aside from the ability to close the game with burn, which I don't mean to understate, the huge advantage that red offers compared to , say, white weenies, is the card advantage. It's impossible to build a white deck that doesn't quickly run out of cards in hand after the first turns, and therefore is unable to rebuild after a sweeper; but red can do that thanks to the cards I was mentioning before (the intruder being foundry of the consuls which you can certainly play in white).
White didn't get squadron hawk, mentor of the meek or stoneforge mystic this year: instead, these cards all ended up in red under different names. To say that red has to win on turn 6 or probably lose means to do a great injustice to what is the real strength of the color in the current card pool.

I never play red mono red, but isn't this the thing that the deck tries to do ?

t1 Land, Foundry street denizen
t2 Land, Foundry street denizen, Foundry Street Denizen (3)
t3 Land, Dragon Fodder, Titan's Strength (12)
t4 Opponent better have lifegain because even a radiant flames will not lose you the game if you built sufficient reach into the deck, who cares what turn you win, barring lifegain, you've already won.

As Boh said above, goldfish is not a given, but great justice might be had for those that build the deck around doing that one trick. We don't have awesome dudes, we do have lots of dudes/spells that go to the face post t4. I feel Barney might add some better wisdom than mine though.

With the current card pool, T4 is the quickest kill possible.
Most of the time, I shoot for a kill between turns 5 and 7, as generally the longer the game goes, the more answers your opponent has. However, there are some cards that let you keep up the pressure for a while; mainly Molten Vortex, Abbot of Keral Keep, Chandra, Akoum Firebird and Avaricious Dragon.

As for the pumps, here's my take on them.
Looming Spires: I'll just play it when I think I don't need an extra mana that turn.
Titan's Strength: I'll use it if I really want the scry (mainly trying to avoid manascrew/-flood), want to save a creature (be it the one targeted or something that triggers Prowess) or think that my board does not see the next turn.
Call of the Full Moon: Generally I'll play it early, especially if I see very few or very many lands. It just does a lot more work early.
Infectious Bloodlust: This one on the other hand, I'll try to hold on to. Past a certain point in the match, your minions lose a lot of value as a topdeck; IB helps this a lot by giving them +2 attack and haste (and you even get an IB back if the small minion dies).

Thank you for the reply Elk, much appeciated especially on the speed of it. And Boh as i agree goldfish experience is never the way to go competitively, Elk's answer was backed by experience which is what im seeking for sure. Im not looking for what makes red good, just what my aim with a mono red boss sligh should be turn wise to look for victory. Modulo thank you for backing up Elk's reply, a second opinion always aids in my decision making drastically. My indecisiveness is a curse, such a horrible annoying curse

Since this is the game we are playing, I just had a turn 4 win against a turn 1 jaddi offshoot:

turn 1 goblin glory chaser
turn 2 infectious bloodlust, attack for 3
turn 3 glory chaser, bloodlust, attack for 7 and the opponent again chose not to chump-block with his offshoot
turn 4 twinbolt, titan's strength, attack for 11 bringing the total damage to 23

But in my experience, the turn 5 wins are much rarer than wins in very long games, where I bring the opponent to a low life total early, and finish him off with foundry of the consuls many turns later.

Thanks for the help peoples. Finally made 40. Took a lot longer than with Origins for some reason, but I guess I was trying a bunch of different decks due to this forum Elks' reg aggro got me most of way into 30's but then I bogged out and switched to that PureSynesthesia/Barney red burn list and it got me 35-40. It was weird, 9 of my last 10 matchups were against Jaddi Offshoots. Was like the matchmaking saw me using too much red

Congrats !

I'm actually pretty happy to see an offshoot on the other side of the table, it usually means that it's a good matchup for the red deck.

The one card I'm horrified to see is perilous myr