[SCROLL DOWN TO READ THE ARTICLE!]

Become a StarCityGames.com Premium Member and receive exclusive access to top-level strategies, new decklists and entertaining reports from many of the best players and writers that the game has to offer! This includes "The Innovator" & Worlds finalist Patrick Chapin, 2010 Player of the Year Brad Nelson, Classic Theorist Mike Flores, Hall of Famer Brian Kibler, GP and SCG Invitational Champion Gerry Thompson, StarCityGames.com Director of Sales Ben Bleiweiss ...and many, many more!

PLUS! StarCityGames.com Premium members now have an EXCLUSIVE WEEKLY NEWSLETTER sent just to them with the latest tech, exclusive content and exclusive deals along with unprecedented access into America's largest Magic: the Gathering sales database, and can view lists of StarCityGames.com's top-selling items - broken down by category, format legality, and rarity - in real time! When it comes to trading, increased knowledge equals increased profits - and increased knowledge is just one click away for our Premium members!

A StarCityGames.com Premium Membership gives you exclusive access to the best Magic: the Gathering content available and is an amazing bargain for just pennies a day! When you're ready to start getting more out of this game, click here to join StarCityGames.com Premium today!

If you are a valid StarCityGames.com Premium member and still cannot view the article, please consult this FAQ.

The natural reaction to seeing “the blue Burning Vengeance” is to try to use it as additional copies of Burning Vengeance in a deck that relies on the enchantment so you have more copies of your engine. The reason this is a bad idea is that Secrets of the Dead doesn't do anything for a Burning Vengeance deck.

Burning Vengeance decks look to take advantage of the ability to chain cards like Think Twice, Desperate Ravings, and Forbidden Alchemy together. It's easy to build a deck with those cards that can use all of its mana every turn. The deck isn't limited by number of cards it has access to; it's limited by mana. If you can already tap out every turn, why would you want to tap out for a card that just gives you more cards?

The problem with spending all of your mana casting Think Twice, Desperate Ravings, and Forbidden Alchemy is that it doesn't get you anywhere. You tear through your deck while your opponent tears through your life total. Burning Vengeance attempts to staple enough value onto every card you cast to let you pull ahead, but it's important that the kind of value it gives you can impact the board.

Dark Ascension gives this strategy a lot of tools, so there should be a deck here. The important thing is to be careful to avoid falling behind while you're stuck playing with your library.

Altar of the Lost offers exactly what you need, mana of different colors to fuel your deck, which will give you substantially more Burning Vengeance triggers.

The key to understanding all of this is to understand that cards that have flashback should be read roughly as if they have the line “draw a card” instead of the more confusing line “flashback X.” If all your cards say “draw a card,” the last thing you want is an enchantment that adds “draw a card” to each of them.

All of this needs to be understood within the framework of modern Magic design. The way card advantage plays out these days has little to nothing to do with the concept when it was invented. Early on in Magic, good, cheap counterspells made it very easy to trade a card for a card. Most creatures were just bodies, and most removal spells killed them. In a world where your opponent's deck is full of vanilla creatures, a deck full of Doom Blades, Divinations, and some way to win will be excellent. If all of those creatures offer some kind of natural card advantage, like Doomed Traveler, Kitchen Finks, Acidic Slime, and Grave Titan, you would find yourself playing a reactive deck full of two-for-ones and one-for-ones against a proactive deck that was nothing but two-for-ones. The control deck would never win.

The number of good sources of natural card advantage has gone through the roof in recent years, and mechanics like undying and flashback and cards like Moorland Haunt push that even further.

Magic is about tempo, board advantage, and trumps far more than it is about attrition the way it once was. “The Philosophy of Fire” works beautifully these days, since it has remained basically unchanged, but that's a topic for a very different article.

Despite the fact that card advantage is no longer king, flashback and Burning Vengeance is still a powerful engine, which is what decks need these days, so it's worth exploring.

The key is to look to maximize mana-efficient ways to impact the board. Toward that end, I have a feeling that Lingering Souls will be one of the best cards in a Burning Vengeance deck, even if that deck doesn't have access to white mana (though Shimmering Grotto seems pretty good to me). Similarly, I would hope to be able to get away from Forbidden Alchemy, as its flashback cost is prohibitively expensive, and we should be able to find enough to do without it.

Consider an approach based on keeping costs as low as possible:

Lingering Vengeance Featured by Sam Black on 2012-01-29 (Standard) As written about in http://www.starcitygames.com/php/news/article/23498.html Print this deck!
Maindeck: Artifacts 2 Altar of the Lost Creatures 4 Snapcaster Mage Enchantments 4 Burning Vengeance	Instants 1 Ancient Grudge 4 Desperate Ravings 1 Dream Twist 2 Gut Shot 4 Mana Leak Sorceries 1 Devil's Play 4 Faithless Looting 4 Gitaxian Probe 4 Lingering Souls 1 Past in Flames 1 Shattered Perception 3 Whipflare Basic Lands 3 Island 3 Mountain Lands 3 Blackcleave Cliffs 1 Copperline Gorge 2 Darkslick Shores 2 Seachrome Coast 2 Shimmering Grotto 4 Sulfur Falls	Sideboard: 3 Ratchet Bomb 2 Ancient Grudge 3 Galvanic Blast 1 Geistflame 2 Gut Shot 2 Negate 2 Surgical Extraction
Download this deck in Apprentice format!		Download this deck in Magic Online Text format!

It's very hard to build this deck. The biggest temptation is to add Thought Scour and Ponder—they help find Burning Vengeance and combo wonderfully together, and Thought Scour is just awesome value. The problem is that they just take up so much space on cards that don't do what I want. I started with four Dream Twists, which meant I wanted all my cards to do something when I randomly milled them, but now that I have a lot more control over what goes to my graveyard, since I'm just putting things there directly with Faithless Looting and Desperate Ravings, that's a little less important.

This is built to play toward the combo finish of Past in Flames flashing back several Gitaxian Probes and Gut Shots with Burning Vengeance (ideally two or three) in play.

The other thing that's happening here is that I may be trying to showcase too many ideas at once. It's possible that Lingering Souls is better in a more controlling graveyard deck with Forbidden Alchemy and that if you're not playing Forbidden Alchemy, it's better to just avoid black, especially if I'm just racing to Past in Flames people out. Maybe I want to be an even more streamlined combo deck:

Past in Flames Combo Featured by Sam Black on 2012-01-29 (Standard) As written about in http://www.starcitygames.com/php/news/article/23498.html Print this deck!
Maindeck: Artifacts 3 Altar of the Lost Enchantments 4 Burning Vengeance Instants 4 Desperate Ravings 3 Dream Twist 1 Forbidden Alchemy 4 Gut Shot 3 Mana Leak 4 Thought Scour	Sorceries 4 Faithless Looting 4 Gitaxian Probe 3 Past in Flames 4 Ponder Basic Lands 9 Island 2 Mountain Lands 3 Copperline Gorge 1 Darkslick Shores 4 Sulfur Falls	Sideboard: 3 Ratchet Bomb 2 Inferno Titan 2 Ancient Grudge 2 Mental Misstep 1 Negate 1 Psychic Barrier 4 Whipflare
Download this deck in Apprentice format!		Download this deck in Magic Online Text format!

This deck almost might not be interactive enough, and it might be too easy to hate out. Mental Misstep is a pretty awesome anti-graveyard hate measure when the hate is Nihil Spellbomb, Surgical Extraction, and Grafdigger's Cage though. Ratchet Bomb and Ancient Grudge also let you ignore the threat of the Cage. Inferno Titan also seeks to sidestep people's sideboard plans. It's slightly awkward to try to Inferno Titan people in a nineteen-land deck, but I think there's enough card draw that you won't miss land drops if you don't want to.

The bigger problem with all of these decks is that I just don't think you want to play a deck where so many of your cards just move cards between your hand, library, and graveyard these days. I want to be more proactive, or I want to be setting up something big.

It feels like the best graveyard cards are black/white—Unburial Rites and Lingering Souls—but the enablers are blue/red—Desperate Ravings and Faithless Looting. Does Evolving Wilds help the mana enough to let us do everything?

Four-Color Reanimator Featured by Sam Black on 2012-01-29 (Standard) As written about in http://www.starcitygames.com/php/news/article/23498.html Print this deck!
Maindeck: Artifacts 2 Ratchet Bomb 4 Sphere of the Suns Creatures 1 Grave Titan Instants 4 Desperate Ravings 2 Doom Blade 3 Forbidden Alchemy 2 Geistflame 2 Mana Leak Legendary Creatures 2 Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite 1 Olivia Voldaren 1 Sheoldred, Whispering One	Planeswalkers 1 Liliana of the Veil Sorceries 1 Day of Judgment 4 Faithless Looting 4 Lingering Souls 1 Slagstorm 3 Unburial Rites Basic Lands 2 Island 3 Mountain 3 Plains 3 Swamp Lands 4 Blackcleave Cliffs 1 Copperline Gorge 1 Darkslick Shores 1 Dragonskull Summit 4 Evolving Wilds 1 Isolated Chapel 1 Shimmering Grotto	Sideboard: 2 Nihil Spellbomb 1 Wurmcoil Engine 2 Curse of Death's Hold 2 Ancient Grudge 2 Flashfreeze 2 Mana Leak 2 Ray of Revelation 1 Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite 1 Day of Judgment
Download this deck in Apprentice format!		Download this deck in Magic Online Text format!

This deck is built to look something like a control deck, but really, you're just trying to Unburial Rites a fatty as soon as possible. Turn one Faithless Looting discarding Elesh Norn and Unburial Rites, turn two Sphere of the Suns, turn three flashback Unburial Rites is an example of a nut draw that's absolutely terrifying for a lot of decks. A more normal Faithless Looting start would be turn-one Faithless Looting, discarding Lingering Souls and some other flashback card or fatty, turn-three Forbidden Alchemy, turn-four ideally Unburial Rites, but playing a normal game of Magic is also realistic from there.

Having written out those possible starts, I wonder if the deck should be even more focused on doing that. It wouldn't be out of the question to play a few more fatties and a fourth Unburial Rites, and Thought Scour isn't bad, but I'm not sure it comes close enough to doing what Faithless Looting does to justify playing it.

This plan is highly vulnerable to cards like Vapor Snag and Oblivion Ring. Ray of Revelation from the sideboard is there largely to address Oblivion Ring but also to insure that our Curse of Death's Holds accomplish what we need them to against token decks, rather than just getting trumped by two-mana anthems. We hope to beat Vapor Snag by having cards like Ratchet Bomb, Curse of Death's Hold, and Elesh Norn that are good against Vapor Snag decks to begin with. If we Unburial Rites Elesh Norn and they Vapor Snag it, their entire team probably died in the process, and we can flashback our Faithless Looting to set up another Unburial Rites or just find lands to cast Elesh Norn the hard way.

Graveyard hate is a bigger issue. Depending on how much it sees play (honestly, I expect a lot), we might just find that every serious graveyard deck has to have access to four Mental Missteps, but that doesn't really seem like a problem. Mental Misstep is pretty phenomenal in the current Standard format and only looks to be getting better.

Thought Scour is interesting. It looks like it wants to go in decks with a lot of flashback, but I think it's hardest to fit it there. The card is amazing, but its best application is with Snapcaster Mage, who generally wants to be in decks with more spells that don't have flashback. Allowing Snapcaster to draw a card when you play it at the end of their turn after leaving mana up is such a big deal. In the past, if you just wanted to cycle your Snapcaster Mage into play, you had to do it as a sorcery on Ponder or Gitaxian Probe; the fact that you don't know is more significant than you may realize. Also, the synergies that Thought Scour has with U/W Delver decks don't stop there. Obviously it fills your graveyard to fuel Moorland Haunt, gives your Snapcaster Mages other options, and powers up your Runechanter's Pikes, but beyond that it offers actual card selection with Ponder and Delver of Secrets. Because it's an instant and you put two cards in the graveyard before drawing a card, in your upkeep after you look at the top card of your library with Delver of Secrets, you can Thought Scour it away if you don't want it.

Fitting yet another one-mana cantrip in those decks becomes something of a challenge, and I'm not sure if it's best to just try to play four each of Ponder, Gitaxian Probe, and Thought Scour, or if there's some other mix that's right, but the card should see a lot of play.

I've only barely scratched the surface of the graveyard options in Standard. Unburied Ruin is a card that might see a lot more play if people are looking to Thought Scour to set up Runechanter's Pike, since it means your milling will actively dig for the Pike itself, and I haven't even looked at green-based graveyard decks, which get Mulch and Tracker's Instincts, which saves you a massive five-mana on casting and flashing back compared to Forbidden Alchemy if you're willing to commit to finding creatures with it.

Nihil Spellbomb has never looked so good.

Thanks for reading,

Sam Black

@samuelhblack on Twitter