fbpx

Sullivan Library – The Tailoring of a Mono-Red Deck

Wednesday, September 1st – Mono-Red strategies come in all shapes and sizes. Adrian Sullivan explains their strengths, weaknesses, and differences.

You could already hear the grumbling around the room as U.S. Nationals was wrapping up. The tournament was going to be won by a Mono-Red deck. How embarrassing! What a stain on the nation! When Josh Utter-Leyton won, a huge portion of the room let loose a sigh of collective relief, not just because they viewed the pedigree of Josh Utter-Leyton as being much greater than Anthony Eason, but also because they viewed the pedigree of his deck as being that much greater.

Red, it seems, would be an embarrassment, notwithstanding the victory of Red in Japan. “Oh,” some would say, “that’s just because Katsuhiro Mori drew a Goblin Guide every game 1!” Or, some would say, that Japan didn’t have the benefit of M11 cards to make the best decks that saw play in the U.S. nearly as good.

While Eason certainly didn’t come to the table with as much of a resume as Utter-Leyton (only qualifying via a Regionals, versus Pro Points, and no Top 8s versus a Pro Tour Top 8), it doesn’t change the fact that Eason went undefeated in Standard with Red. This was not a tournament where the format was incredibly young. This was a format that had been widely explored by numerous Nationals before it. Going undefeated in such a format might be pure luck, but it seems to be more reasonable to look at it as a measure of the power of Red decks.

Graduate school has had two huge impacts on my Magic career as of late. First, and perhaps most importantly, I can’t go to as many events; it simply isn’t possible with my schedule. This impacts me in so many frustrating ways. I love the game, and I’d love to go to every Grand Prix, every StarCityGames.com Open, every Pro Tour, and every everything. I simply can’t. But, secondly, even my playtesting time is cut up into small chunks. I can’t just sit down for an eight or ten hour session like I used to. Hell, I can’t even enter into eight-man queues on MTGO, simply because I can’t expect to necessarily finish them because of my schedule.

As a result, I’ve been playing a lot more Red. Two-man queues and Red have kept me on a small train of profit to pay for more two-man queues and more cards to play more MTGO. Even before this, I’d been playing a ton of Red, simply because I liked it. Now, necessity was forcing me into playing it.

For many people who look at a Red deck, or someone playing it, as taking the easy way, I have to say that this can’t be further from the truth.

There’s an old saying in the game that if you get your opponent to one life with a Red deck and don’t win, you probably made a mistake. Sometimes these mistakes can be as simple as mistakes in the psychological game, where you give your opponent too much of a read that you are strong or weak, and they play accordingly. This is a game of hidden information, and as a result, these mistakes, even if they are only based on changing the course of play from your opponent, can be huge. Other mistakes can be more tactical, such as the decision to cast a Hellspark Elemental rather than Unearth one at a certain moment (or vice versa, depending on the situation).

The choice of burn spell is another example. People use the wrong card between their burn spell options constantly. Watching the Top 8 of U.S. Nationals, there were certainly a number of times that I thought Eason made some minor mistakes, to be sure (failure to kill an “elf” is usually greedy, and greed is a mortal sin), but mostly he did what a Red deck is supposed to do, and played to his outs. So often a Red deck needs to draw a card in three turns to win the game, or a series of cards, and without it they won’t win, but the player piloting it doesn’t go for the line of play that can make it happen.

These things deeply contribute to my suspicion when I hear people talk about their Red matchup. Usually when I see testing going on, the player handed the Red deck is the “lower ranked” player in the social hierarchy of the playtest session, and they give the Red deck such short shrift that the results might as well have a +10% or +15% adjustment made for the results.

This feeling is further contributed to by two other factors: players often either don’t test sideboard or they test them inappropriately. As a result, a deck either hedges so far into using anti-Red cards in their “sideboard” (a sideboard that will never actually be used) or the Red deck doesn’t get a chance to retool itself for the matchup. The other factor that impacts things is very simple: Red decks have a huge Glass Jaw.

Red deck’s have a huge Glass Jaw.

If you want to beat a Red deck, odds are that you will. This even goes for decks like Jund, which traditionally struggle with that matchup. The question is this: how much effort do you want to put into the attempt? Unless Red is really in ascendancy, typically, trying to put that much effort into it is foolhardy; there are so many archetypes right now that going after Red, a deck not likely to be more represented than it was at U.S. Nats, takes far too much effort. If the matchup is really poor, you might try to go with some incidentally hateful card like Obstinate Baloth, which is good against Jund as well. But typically, you simply can’t do it.

Red’s positioning is further improved by the sheer versatility of the archetype, at least within its matchup results. Take Anthony Eason’s build versus Katsuhiro Mori’s:



If we look at Eason’s build, it is a hater of a main deck. Twenty burn spells that it can use on a critter. If you compare this deck to Mori’s, you’ll see that Mori found room for several maindeck Quenchable Fire and for a pair of Kargan Dragonlord. Against a Green-based opponent, this would make Mori’s deck much weaker, because an Elf might live. Fifteen versus twenty makes a huge difference. Since Eason makes use of exactly zero M11 cards, it isn’t as if Mori couldn’t have played Eason’s list.

What is Mori gaining? Mori’s deck is at once both better against and worse against Jund. Kargan Dragonlord is not exciting against Jund. Quenchable Fire in the maindeck, on the other hand, is a metagame call that decides that Jund is just going to be a near-bye. With any otherwise reasonable build of Red that would choose to run Quenchable Fire in the main, this should basically be a knockout punch in that matchup. The trade-off? Blue/White becomes all the more difficult to beat, as well as several other matchups.

In a room that would likely be full of an incredible amount of Blue-based decks, a decision to play Quenchable Fire at U.S. Nationals would likely have been foolhardy in the extreme. Mori actually plays two more Quenchable Fire in the board, showing his dedication to wiping out a Jund player. Much of the rest of his sideboard is a smattering of direct answers. There’s Flame Slash to take out a big creature (particularly a wall), Cunning Sparkmage against “Elves,” Siege-Gang Commander to push through decks that can resist an onslaught with one-to-ones, and lifegain for near mirrors (with two Collars to pair with the fairly large number of pokers).

Eason, on the other hand, dedicates a lot of space in a very different way. He includes the Bushwhacker/Summons combo that would be seen in Devastating Red, presumably to gain an advantage in decks that are true dueling solitaire matchups (combo, for example), or to utterly decimate the near-mirror (Devastating Red, as a plan, trumps most other plans that an opposing aggressive Red deck can go with). This leaves him only seven slots. Two Forked Bolt bring the anti-creature package to a shocking 22 cards. Two Manabarbs are clearly there to punish mana-hungry decks of all sorts, particularly Blue/White or combo decks. Three Ricochet Trap seem most likely to be a part of the plan against Time Warp.

Eason, then, starts out as a Burn deck and sideboards, potentially into Devastating Red. As a quick aside, this is exactly the kind of reason that simply calling this deck “Red Deck Wins” does it a disservice. This deck will play out radically different from Red Deck Wins, which, in case you didn’t know, is an actual distinct archetype. Unless I see a little bit of mana disruption (more akin to Sped Red than to Ponza), I’m not going to tell someone that every Red deck is Red Deck Wins unless I want to contribute to them having a higher chance of losing in a tournament.

A great example of the distinctions in archetypes came into play when I sat down to play a ton of games against Sam Black. Sam was playing the deck that they took to Nationals, a Mythic Conscription/Fauna crossbreed. Zvi came up to ask how badly Sam was losing; he could see the burn spells in my hand, and Burn (like the base that Mori and Eason play) was apparently a bad matchup. But Sam wasn’t losing… in fact, he had a big edge. The build I was running only had eleven burn spells if you didn’t count Ember Hauler, and I was definitely more of a Sligh deck. I’d built the deck to be particularly powerful against Blue/White builds that I’d been seeing endlessly online. I loved my Blue/White matchup, where Eason viewed it as his worst matchup by far.

I’ve since modified the deck again to deal more with Green-based decks, an acknowledgment of the fact that I’d gone too far in one direction to be healthy, strictly speaking. Here is where my Sligh deck is at, now:


Compared to a Burn-based deck, which is seemingly the current standard for Red, this deck is better against metagames that are heavier in Blue/White, Red, Soul Sisters, and random creature decks that don’t cast Linvala. It is far weaker against Jund and Linvala decks, and quite similar (give or take very small amounts of percentage points) against most other decks.

A hugely important thing that is different about the two decks, though, is their very plan. This deck is a Midrange Aggro deck, albeit high on the Aggro portion of the curve, whereas Burn-based Red is just straight-up on the Aggro side. Take the card Rest for the Weary, a reasonable card to bring in against Burn-based Red; in the Burn matchup, this card can be huge, but against Sligh, the life gain really doesn’t accomplish very much, since the deck is looking to stick around. It’s this very reason that Soul Sisters is such a terrible matchup for Burn, and yet relatively trivial if you’re Sligh (provided you know how to save your burn for real threats).

Similarly, the Jund matchup, so trivial for most Burn-based Red, is incredibly difficult for Sligh. The Jund deck isn’t directly damaged, but is instead facing down powerful, aggressive creatures, i.e., the very same kinds of creatures it faces in the mirror. Where a Burn deck dodges Jund’s very strength, card advantage, by simply ending the game, Sligh opts instead for the “mirror match,” but without any Cascade to help things out.

Blue/White, particularly as built, has a similarly radical difference in placement, archetypically speaking. The Burn deck runs out of gas, typically, and the Mana Leaks and Condemns do enough work to keep Blue/White alive. The few spells that sneak through simply won’t be able to get the damage in, particularly once a Wall of Omens shows up to blunt Hellspark Elementals. Sligh, on the other hand, establishes a presence on the board, and the damage simply begins to mount up. Something big is likely to stick, and whether it is a Fireheart or a Dragonlord, it is going to cause problems.

If we compare these differences to Devastating Red, things become a little more radical. Devastating Red plays out quite similarly to a kind of explosive crossbreed of Burn and Sligh. Often, Devastating Red even fits in Kiln Fiend (though, of course, not always). Unfortunately for Devastating Red, it does the “immediate damage” part of a Burn deck’s game plan less well than the Burn deck, and it does the “establish a powerful board” part of Sligh less well than Sligh. It makes up for this with its combo, which can often deal so much damage that it is overwhelming. For most people that have spent a long time playing Red, though, we have shifted away from Devastating Red, if we ever adopted it in the first place, because when you really look at it, the times that Devastating Red actually gave you any wins that you wouldn’t have otherwise had is small. What it does do is occasionally give you games you had absolutely no business winning, but at the cost of making all of your matches more swingy.

Of course, if you are playing in a matchup where the odds are already quite bad for you, this can be incredibly helpful. Let’s pretend that you get to say, with Devastating Red, that you have a 25% chance of simply winning the game regardless, but, as a result, you’re going to also lose some percent of games regardless. If your matchup is bad, the random die roll can be far more of a good idea than trying to win on the merits.

This is one of the impressive calls of Eason’s build. It has the restraint to not just straight-up be the Devastating Red deck, because it thinks that it can do well enough on its own merits that it doesn’t want to add in a hugely random, out-of-control element. At the same time, it includes the combo as an “answer,” of sorts, against all kinds of problematic decks. Take a deck like Green Eldrazi, which can often just get a turn 3 Obstinate Baloth against a Burn deck, and clear the board against a more Sligh-like deck with All is Dust. There are a huge number of draws that it can get which just end the day of a Red deck of any stripe. By adding in the Devastating Summons package, Eason gets to put in an element that will blow out the opponent, provided they don’t Fog. At the same time, this change radically limits his sideboard. In so limiting it, he really can’t accidentally stop being a Burn deck, a mistake that a lot of people make in their sideboarding, unless he changes over into Devastating Red, which would be the plan in those cases anyway.

There are still some small details I don’t like about Eason’s deck, but they are fairly small.

If I were to rebuild Eason’s deck, I’d do the following:

-1 Smoldering Spires
-1 Arid Mesa
-1 Scalding Tarns
-1 Staggershock
+4 Mountain

Staggershock has just been incredibly underwhelming to me. Mori showed similar feelings about the card when he cut it down to one copy. In my playtesting, it is simply the worst card in the deck. Also, like Mori, I’ve found that the deck is incredibly mana hungry, and it wants 25 land. Smoldering Spires, a card that I initially loved more than nearly anything else in the deck, has started to become just a little bit more of a liability than I like, particularly with four other enters-the-battlefield-tapped lands. That, combined with only Searing Blaze to trigger landfall, means a retooling of the deck to include more Mountains. Again, like Mori, I found six was the proper number for so few effects.

Obviously, this is a really small shift in the deck.

One of my favorite things about Eason’s build is that he doesn’t have garbage like Dragon’s Claw in the board. I’m going to tell you right now, Red players: Dragon’s Claw is a bad call. Not only does it dedicate too much of your space to the mirror or near mirror, but it isn’t the best way to win the mirror. Preserving your life total is important, of course. Much of this can be done simply by choosing how you play the game, though. The Devastating Red package in the board is such a trouncing, it doesn’t care if your opponent has gained a bunch of life from a Dragon’s Claw, or even several Dragon’s Claws. I’ve done a lot of testing of mirrors and near-mirrors, and I can say with confidence that Dragon’s Claw for the mirror results in more losses than it does wins. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t provide wins sometimes, but it contributes to losses far more often, unless both players are using the Dragon Claw plan. Then, it helps immensely.

I’ve spent a serious amount of time playing pretty much nearly every archetype of Red that’s been in Standard, or any other format, for the last year or five (except Devastating Red, which I’ve only played a little of), and it is consistently one of my favorite decks to play. I like to joke that, for Nationals two years ago, I played Red when I made the Elf deck that Sam Black used to make the National Team… it was just that the best Red deck was Black/Green at the time (oh, the irony of that statement when he lost to Michael Jacob). I’ve always been hugely partial to Burn, period, because of the versatility of that style of card.

In Legacy, I loved where Patrick Sullivan updated Red, to the point where I’d consider playing it over my beloved Baron deck, albeit with a very slight change:

-4 Kiln Fiend
+4 Keldon Marauders

-1 Scalding Tarn
+1 Mountain

If I weren’t teaching classes and if I were playing in Amsterdam instead, I’d definitely consider a Burn deck high in my options, though that position is largely based on instinct since I haven’t done any testing of Extended since the format rotated. For the rest of the fall, I expect to be playing a lot of Red, just in general, but my teaching schedule does mean that I’ll only be able to consistently write every other week for a while. Every now and then, I’ll be sure to add in a bonus article.

May you always have burn in your hand when they die!

Adrian Sullivan