Its a slight twist on Trent Avera's SCG Modern Open Dallas list which I tested a few months back with success.
While I know most of you dislike Grim I rather like him as a unblockable manasink which can STILL do work when 4/4 or 5/5 are sitting on the other end.
[[The Searing Bloods are a flex slot, I'm running them for Free-Wins vs Aggro - though they could be swapped for Spree, Kor or Palm with ease.]]
I used to play 2 Grims but I went down to 1. I think Grim Lavamancer is a very powerful and still merits inclusion. It either dies fast or it runs away with the game, and I'm perfectly happy spending 1 mana on the possibility that I have an unblockable clock.
His opponent is on Scapeshift.
Game 1 he has the perfect burn hand and draws gas all the time. Deals 9 damage on his final turn.
Game 2 his opponent has Courser of Kruphix, reveals a land but Le Briand has Skullcrack in response to the lifegain trigger. Next turn draws Destructive Revelry on it... He casts double Boros Charm then topdecks and hardcasts a Rift Bolt for the win. No Shrine of Burning Rage drawn or cast in either game...
So 3 matches on camera and it had minimal impact in the slightest. IE as others have said, he won despite the card, not because of it.
Yes, he won a GP with it in his deck, great job, and we should be happy Burn did so well! But without further testing or results I'm sceptical of Shrine over Eidolon. His draws were very lucky and he didn't get mana screwed or flooded.
Thanks for digging this stuff up. This is why it's so important not to overreact to Le Briand's win with Shrine in the deck. He probably played 50-ish games, and that's just not enough to draw conclusions about a deck. A significant fraction of his games weren't impacted by Shrine of Burning Rage and were just won (or lost) on the Burn core that he was playing. You need thousands of games and multiple high performing results.
His draws were very lucky and he didn't get mana screwed or flooded.
I expect this is the case for a lot of people who make the top 8 of a tournament. There's certainly a skill element but you can't control statistics.
not overreact goes both ways, not everybody say the shrine is great just help. still some cannot give respect his win and take cheap shot like they do nothing wrong because it not the way they play maybe the way they play cannot win
His opponent is on Scapeshift.
Game 1 he has the perfect burn hand and draws gas all the time. Deals 9 damage on his final turn.
Game 2 his opponent has Courser of Kruphix, reveals a land but Le Briand has Skullcrack in response to the lifegain trigger. Next turn draws Destructive Revelry on it... He casts double Boros Charm then topdecks and hardcasts a Rift Bolt for the win. No Shrine of Burning Rage drawn or cast in either game...
So 3 matches on camera and it had minimal impact in the slightest. IE as others have said, he won despite the card, not because of it.
Yes, he won a GP with it in his deck, great job, and we should be happy Burn did so well! But without further testing or results I'm sceptical of Shrine over Eidolon. His draws were very lucky and he didn't get mana screwed or flooded.
Thanks for digging this stuff up. This is why it's so important not to overreact to Le Briand's win with Shrine in the deck. He probably played 50-ish games, and that's just not enough to draw conclusions about a deck. A significant fraction of his games weren't impacted by Shrine of Burning Rage and were just won (or lost) on the Burn core that he was playing. You need thousands of games and multiple high performing results.
His draws were very lucky and he didn't get mana screwed or flooded.
I expect this is the case for a lot of people who make the top 8 of a tournament. There's certainly a skill element but you can't control statistics.
Cards come and cards go out of decks. This discussion is fine. That is the point of these threads; to talk about the cards. However several users have made this about users and have made personal attacks. Its time to drop it and continue civilly.
Remember to keep it about the cards not the people.
On the other hand, we are better off being open about new cards coming in because if not, we will shut down the possibility of the deck ever developing. Just as the (current) lone GP win does not prove that Shrine is better than Eidolon in all cases, nor does the (currently) limited experience indicate that Shrine is strictly worse.
As such I much prefer testing over theory-crafting, because we can accidentally miss many considerations with our theories. Magic is a complex game and it seems very hard to demonstrate with reasoning alone why card A is superior than card B. I for one have no idea how the Shrine may fare, but will find out for myself over time. And even then, my results will be based on my own style of play, and my personal conclusions may differ from those of another player.
At the very least, a deck that wins a major GP has to be very good, even if it is not perfect. Winning a GP looks like very hard work! If we are not open to following up on such results with investigation then Shrine (or any other new inclusion) will have no chance at all.
Magic is the great game it is because there are few definite answers; it is in the discovery that we come to enjoy the game so much. Perhaps the ultimate Burn deck has yet to be put together- if there even is such a thing, given that the deck's success depends heavily on the other decks in the population.
The deck was very good. 56/60 maindeck cards were the core of a Burn deck.
You can go read Loic Le Briand's reasoning on Reddit and it's just backwards. He says it's a late game card and then extols the virtues of it against Affinity, fastest aggro deck around. If you make it to the late game against Affinity, it's because they kept an absurdly slow hand which made it res easy for you to control them where you needed to. You should win that game regardless of the last 4 cards you threw into your deck.
The same goes for the other decks he brings up: ETron and GDS, both fast decks. His whole reasoning is that he wants a late game card, and he brings up decks that you should never even see the late game against. There's no late game when tasigur is hitting you every turn.
Theory-crafting isn't a valueless exercise. It's important to be able to articulate shortcomings and to evaluate ways to shore them up.
Testing is valuable on cards that pass screening through theory crafting. 100 matches is more valuable data then 20, but it takes thousands to get the real picture.
If you want to thoroughly test it, I applaud that.
In a game today against Eldrazi Tron I killed my opponent from 13 life with Helix plus a Shrine on 10. Woo, very satisfying!
It was one of those games where I had more lands than necessary and less burn spells than I would like. I doubt any other card would have won me this one since my opponent was starting to really turn up the heat by that point and was miles from death.
If it comes out early then it is a very powerful card and can leave the opponent feeling nothing but despair. And after game 1, they will be uncertain as to whether you are keeping it in or not.
How did you get 10 counters on it while flooding against a deck that plays 4/4s and hasty 5/5s? That sounds like a bad opponent who kept a garbage hand.
I will check the game log tomorrow and let you know the exact details. An example would be where I have say a Swiftspear and he has a 5-5 Eldrazi; I block it and then use a bolt spell to kill it off. Then I am pumping up the Shrine while holding him at bay. Otherwise, I would not be able to race and win. By the end he had two large creatures ready, but they could not outpace the Shrine damage.
How did you get 10 counters on it while flooding against a deck that plays 4/4s and hasty 5/5s? That sounds like a bad opponent who kept a garbage hand.
I suppose everyone is aware of this, but I just wanted to point out that the Shrine also charges on every upkeep even if you don't do anything. So one way to have a big shrine is just not dying for a bit...
How did you get 10 counters on it while flooding against a deck that plays 4/4s and hasty 5/5s? That sounds like a bad opponent who kept a garbage hand.
I suppose everyone is aware of this, but I just wanted to point out that the Shrine also charges on every upkeep even if you don't do anything. So one way to have a big shrine is just not dying for a bit...
I know that. The opponent was at 13 and there was a Helix cast at the end. I assume that was something like Charm+Bolt, which gives you 2 counters. Helix was either the 9th counter with the 10th coming the next upkeep or it was the 10th counter. This means that there were 6-7 upkeep counters or there were some useless creatures cast along the way or bolts fired at Eldrazi. The Eldrazi player shouldn't be allowing the game to go that long unless they made a mistake.
If a significant number of Burn spells were fired at Eldrazi to combo with a creature to kill the Eldrazi for Shrine counters, I think that's a mistake. I think that a better play is to chump block and Bolt the player. If that happens, then the Shrine player doesn't need 10 counters to win. In this situation, Eldrazi would have been at 10 before the Helix, which means that the Burn player could win off of Charm+Bolt or 3 spells. If Burn spells were aimed at creatures more than once, the Burn player lost out on 3 more damage to the face and then only would have needed 3-4 damage to win. In that sense, the existence of Shrine is being used to manufacture a situation where you need an obscene number of counters to win and that sounds like a poor strategy. I understand that firing a bolt at a creature buys a turn, but it also costs you a draw step because it sets you back a card or in the case of block+bolt it costs you 2 cards.
It costs you a card, but every turn you bought with Shrine on the battlefield creates damage out of thin air. So if you survive 2 extra turns until you topdeck the next bolt, you've effectively gotten a 5-damage bolt.
I have to agree with ElConquistador’s assessment: if you were that flooded and got 10 counters on Shrine then the E-Tron player had a very bad hand or was playing too slowly, and burn should’ve been going to face and not the creatures...
Anyway, evidence we can all assess:
“Vincent Games” on Youtube (Vincent1988) has posted a 5 Match MTGO League playing Le Briand’s exact GP Birmingham winning 75. He posted this yesterday (23rd August) so its very much up to date information/testing. Link to Match 1 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p35Pcz_ctyY
What follows in this post are the games played and my thoughts on each, as well as the role (or not) that Shrine of Burning Rage played.
Match 1: Abzan Midrange – 2-1WIN
Game 1 he cast Shrine T2, it got 2 Counters but was Abrupt Decay’ed in his T3 endstep. He makes the comment “There’s no point using 3 mana to deal 1 point of damage”... Though he admits if he’d left mana open and cracked it in response he would’ve had lethal with Prowess on Monastery Swiftspear T4. His opponent stabilises with a LoTV and a Scavenging Ooze but he casts a 2nd Shrine and wins T8 with Lightning Helix + using Shrine's ability on 2 counters.
Game 2 Shrine gets cast T3 but destroyed EoT with 1 counter on it by Nature's Claim.
Game 3 No Shrine drawn or played, kills his opponent T4.
Match 2: RG Ponza – 0-2LOSS
Game 1 His opponent gets a T2 Stone Rain after he doesn't bolt T1 Birds of Paradise. Shrine gets to 3 counters then bounced with Primal Command. It gets recast but he loses the game with it on 2 counters due to Inferno Titan.
Game 2 Keeps a greedy 1-lander with double Kor Firewalker. He casts Shrine when he should’ve cast Searing Blaze on a Thragtusk, but gets his land destroyed by Mwonvuli Acid-Moss and Beast Within so can’t cast spells. He gets 2 land back (and doesn’t cast Searing Blaze again!) but his opponent has double Inferno Titan. Shrine ends the game on 5 counters but no land to activate.
Match 3: RW Prison – 0-2LOSS
Game 1 his opponent gets a T2 Chalice of the Void on 1. T4 he gets Chalice on 2. T5 he gets a Gideon of the Trials with the Emblem T6. Very much GG by this point, but his opponent casts Koth of the Hammer T6 then Chandra, Torch of Defiance T7. Shrine ends the game with 5 counters but Gideon locked it down for a turn, and he ends with 2 more in hand unable to be cast.
Game 2 he gets his opponent down to 5 life before they cast Chalice on 1, Ensnaring BridgeBlood Moon AND Leyline of Sanctity, he floods (6 land and 2 in hand) then opponent casts Stony Silence on T11. Then Gideon + Emblem T13. T14 he misclicks with Shattering Spree and doesn’t destroy the Chalice on 1. Footage skips to T19 and his opponent has 3 Blood Moons down and a 2nd Leyline. He has 2 Shrines down but can’t use them. He draws a 2nd Shattering Spree but his opponent Boros Charm indestructible in response.
Match 4: BW Smallpox 1-2 LOSS
Game 1 he has a Shrine on 4 but only 2 land after being Smallpoxed T2, and his opponent ultimates LoTV. Then Sorin, Solemn Visitor + Gideon, Ally of Zendikar ends the game with 6/6 lifelink.
Game 2 his opponent misplays casting Collective Brutality instead of Fulminator Mage to remove a white source, and he wins with Skullcrack + Lightning Helix.
Game 3 he loses 2 Grim Lavamancers, his opponent escalates Collective Brutality and then goes on the Lingering Souls beatdown. He floods, and Shrine ends on 3 counters and didn’t do anything. Eidolon of the Great Revel really would’ve done work in this game.
Match 5: UW Delver 1-2LOSS
Game 1, T2 goes for Shrine “He literally has to have Spell Snare, and Spell Snare isn’t in that many decks at the moment”, gets Spell Snared! Gets a bit loose with his lands and shocking, opponent has a flipped Delver and multiple counterspells and stabilises on 1 life.
Game 2 he has a perfect start of Goblin Guide into Searing Blaze on Delver of Secrets into T3 Shrine into T4 Shrine. His opponent has Timely Reinforcements + Snapcaster Mage + Delver, but he wins with 7 damage end step of T6 and 7 more beginning of his T7.
Game 3 he doesn’t bolt the T1 Delver thinking he has time but his opponent has a combination of Dispel, Spell Snare and Cryptic Command. He takes a lot of damage off Insectile Aberration and then Celestial Colonnade for lethal.
1-4 in the League (4-9 in games) is not great but I don’t know how experienced a Burn player this guy is. Nevertheless I’ve just watched 13 games of the “Shrine build” and in only 1 of them did Shrine of Burning Rage impress me, and in Match 4 and 5 in particular I strongly feel Eidolon of the Great Revel would’ve been a better card. Shrine feels very vulnerable just sitting there doing nothing, whereas Eidolon can attack for 2 if the coast is clear, and will do a guaranteed minimum 2 damage if removed by a 3CMC or less spell.
Seems to me that if you're going to use Shrine of Burning Rage in this deck, then why not use Manamorphose to give you the extra counter as well? If you have two mana, it effectively costs you nothing, but gives you an extra point of damage on each Shrine in play.
Same reason Manamorphose isn't run in every red or green deck ever - it makes your mulligans worse (you only see 6 relevant cards), your one-landers worse, your topdecks worse (if you're running 3 colors, do you get red green for atarka's or red white for boros? what if you'd want to hold an instant on their end step, then you manamorphose on their end step and draw a goblin guide?).
Manamorphose is only good for the mana filtering or as a pseudo-ritual in UR Storm.
1-4 in the League (4-9 in games) is not great but I don’t know how experienced a Burn player this guy is. Nevertheless I’ve just watched 13 games of the “Shrine build” and in only 1 of them did Shrine of Burning Rage impress me, and in Match 4 and 5 in particular I strongly feel Eidolon of the Great Revel would’ve been a better card. Shrine feels very vulnerable just sitting there doing nothing, whereas Eidolon can attack for 2 if the coast is clear, and will do a guaranteed minimum 2 damage if removed by a 3CMC or less spell.
I have to question the credentials of someone who didn't board out Shrines and boarded in Kor Firewalkers in against RG Ponza. If he was running Le Briand's list, he should have probably swapped the Shrines for PoE and Grim Lavamancer.
Shrine all but fizzles against aggro decks (where Eidolon would shine outside of Affinity), and trying to go long against decks built for disruption plays right into what they want. I'll be honest, it feels like a no brainer.
Shrine is BETTER then Eidolon in the aggro MUs because we're in the control role.
- - -
If we ONLY care about reducing the opp. down into zero as quickly as possible then Mardu Burn would be the best burn deck (since it has the highest chances for goldfishes). I believe the rise of Boros burn shows that grinding out victories is a thing, we should hope for the best (T4 wins) but prepare for the worse (T5+ games due to discard, land denial, taxes, bad draws, counters, life-gain and critical creature kills).
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This is in agreement with my early testing results. Shrine is a comfortable fire-and-forget T2 play against aggressive decks we are trying to contain, putting massive pressure on the opponent to finish the game quickly or succumb to it later on. Heck, it even helped me power through some lifegain on the part of a Jeskai Control opponent's Blessed Alliance and Lightning Helix (Eidolon would have been less than ideal in both situations, as I was racing and my life total was under pressure). I need to keep testing, but early returns look better than I expected.
Mardu Burn
Monogreen Stompy
Legacy
Burn
Pauper
Dimir Flicker
Monowhite Tokens
2 Stomping Ground
2 Scalding Tarn
2 Arid Mesa
2 Sacred Foundry
2 Mountain
3 Wooded Foothills
3 Bloodstained Mire
4 Inspiring Vantage
Creatures 14
4 Monastery Swiftspear
4 Goblin Guide
4 Eidolon of the Great Revel
2 Grim Lavamancer
4 Lava Spike
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Rift Bolt
4 Boros Charm
4 Lightning Helix
4 Searing Blaze
2 Skullcrack
4 Atarka's Command
3 Path to Exile
3 Destructive Revelry
2 Searing Blood
2 Rest in Peace
1 Ensnaring Bridge
While I know most of you dislike Grim I rather like him as a unblockable manasink which can STILL do work when 4/4 or 5/5 are sitting on the other end.
[[The Searing Bloods are a flex slot, I'm running them for Free-Wins vs Aggro - though they could be swapped for Spree, Kor or Palm with ease.]]
Enjoy Standard, Modern and Music (also some Pauper, Momir, Gaming, Animations and Legacy)? Then visit my channel:Here
Thanks for digging this stuff up. This is why it's so important not to overreact to Le Briand's win with Shrine in the deck. He probably played 50-ish games, and that's just not enough to draw conclusions about a deck. A significant fraction of his games weren't impacted by Shrine of Burning Rage and were just won (or lost) on the Burn core that he was playing. You need thousands of games and multiple high performing results.
I expect this is the case for a lot of people who make the top 8 of a tournament. There's certainly a skill element but you can't control statistics.
Remember to keep it about the cards not the people.
Ulka
As such I much prefer testing over theory-crafting, because we can accidentally miss many considerations with our theories. Magic is a complex game and it seems very hard to demonstrate with reasoning alone why card A is superior than card B. I for one have no idea how the Shrine may fare, but will find out for myself over time. And even then, my results will be based on my own style of play, and my personal conclusions may differ from those of another player.
At the very least, a deck that wins a major GP has to be very good, even if it is not perfect. Winning a GP looks like very hard work! If we are not open to following up on such results with investigation then Shrine (or any other new inclusion) will have no chance at all.
Magic is the great game it is because there are few definite answers; it is in the discovery that we come to enjoy the game so much. Perhaps the ultimate Burn deck has yet to be put together- if there even is such a thing, given that the deck's success depends heavily on the other decks in the population.
You can go read Loic Le Briand's reasoning on Reddit and it's just backwards. He says it's a late game card and then extols the virtues of it against Affinity, fastest aggro deck around. If you make it to the late game against Affinity, it's because they kept an absurdly slow hand which made it res easy for you to control them where you needed to. You should win that game regardless of the last 4 cards you threw into your deck.
The same goes for the other decks he brings up: ETron and GDS, both fast decks. His whole reasoning is that he wants a late game card, and he brings up decks that you should never even see the late game against. There's no late game when tasigur is hitting you every turn.
Theory-crafting isn't a valueless exercise. It's important to be able to articulate shortcomings and to evaluate ways to shore them up.
Testing is valuable on cards that pass screening through theory crafting. 100 matches is more valuable data then 20, but it takes thousands to get the real picture.
If you want to thoroughly test it, I applaud that.
It was one of those games where I had more lands than necessary and less burn spells than I would like. I doubt any other card would have won me this one since my opponent was starting to really turn up the heat by that point and was miles from death.
If it comes out early then it is a very powerful card and can leave the opponent feeling nothing but despair. And after game 1, they will be uncertain as to whether you are keeping it in or not.
I suppose everyone is aware of this, but I just wanted to point out that the Shrine also charges on every upkeep even if you don't do anything. So one way to have a big shrine is just not dying for a bit...
I know that. The opponent was at 13 and there was a Helix cast at the end. I assume that was something like Charm+Bolt, which gives you 2 counters. Helix was either the 9th counter with the 10th coming the next upkeep or it was the 10th counter. This means that there were 6-7 upkeep counters or there were some useless creatures cast along the way or bolts fired at Eldrazi. The Eldrazi player shouldn't be allowing the game to go that long unless they made a mistake.
If a significant number of Burn spells were fired at Eldrazi to combo with a creature to kill the Eldrazi for Shrine counters, I think that's a mistake. I think that a better play is to chump block and Bolt the player. If that happens, then the Shrine player doesn't need 10 counters to win. In this situation, Eldrazi would have been at 10 before the Helix, which means that the Burn player could win off of Charm+Bolt or 3 spells. If Burn spells were aimed at creatures more than once, the Burn player lost out on 3 more damage to the face and then only would have needed 3-4 damage to win. In that sense, the existence of Shrine is being used to manufacture a situation where you need an obscene number of counters to win and that sounds like a poor strategy. I understand that firing a bolt at a creature buys a turn, but it also costs you a draw step because it sets you back a card or in the case of block+bolt it costs you 2 cards.
Anyway, evidence we can all assess:
“Vincent Games” on Youtube (Vincent1988) has posted a 5 Match MTGO League playing Le Briand’s exact GP Birmingham winning 75. He posted this yesterday (23rd August) so its very much up to date information/testing. Link to Match 1 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p35Pcz_ctyY
What follows in this post are the games played and my thoughts on each, as well as the role (or not) that Shrine of Burning Rage played.
Match 1: Abzan Midrange – 2-1WIN
Game 1 he cast Shrine T2, it got 2 Counters but was Abrupt Decay’ed in his T3 endstep. He makes the comment “There’s no point using 3 mana to deal 1 point of damage”... Though he admits if he’d left mana open and cracked it in response he would’ve had lethal with Prowess on Monastery Swiftspear T4. His opponent stabilises with a LoTV and a Scavenging Ooze but he casts a 2nd Shrine and wins T8 with Lightning Helix + using Shrine's ability on 2 counters.
Game 2 Shrine gets cast T3 but destroyed EoT with 1 counter on it by Nature's Claim.
Game 3 No Shrine drawn or played, kills his opponent T4.
Match 2: RG Ponza – 0-2LOSS
Game 1 His opponent gets a T2 Stone Rain after he doesn't bolt T1 Birds of Paradise. Shrine gets to 3 counters then bounced with Primal Command. It gets recast but he loses the game with it on 2 counters due to Inferno Titan.
Game 2 Keeps a greedy 1-lander with double Kor Firewalker. He casts Shrine when he should’ve cast Searing Blaze on a Thragtusk, but gets his land destroyed by Mwonvuli Acid-Moss and Beast Within so can’t cast spells. He gets 2 land back (and doesn’t cast Searing Blaze again!) but his opponent has double Inferno Titan. Shrine ends the game on 5 counters but no land to activate.
Match 3: RW Prison – 0-2LOSS
Game 1 his opponent gets a T2 Chalice of the Void on 1. T4 he gets Chalice on 2. T5 he gets a Gideon of the Trials with the Emblem T6. Very much GG by this point, but his opponent casts Koth of the Hammer T6 then Chandra, Torch of Defiance T7. Shrine ends the game with 5 counters but Gideon locked it down for a turn, and he ends with 2 more in hand unable to be cast.
Game 2 he gets his opponent down to 5 life before they cast Chalice on 1, Ensnaring Bridge Blood Moon AND Leyline of Sanctity, he floods (6 land and 2 in hand) then opponent casts Stony Silence on T11. Then Gideon + Emblem T13. T14 he misclicks with Shattering Spree and doesn’t destroy the Chalice on 1. Footage skips to T19 and his opponent has 3 Blood Moons down and a 2nd Leyline. He has 2 Shrines down but can’t use them. He draws a 2nd Shattering Spree but his opponent Boros Charm indestructible in response.
Match 4: BW Smallpox 1-2 LOSS
Game 1 he has a Shrine on 4 but only 2 land after being Smallpoxed T2, and his opponent ultimates LoTV. Then Sorin, Solemn Visitor + Gideon, Ally of Zendikar ends the game with 6/6 lifelink.
Game 2 his opponent misplays casting Collective Brutality instead of Fulminator Mage to remove a white source, and he wins with Skullcrack + Lightning Helix.
Game 3 he loses 2 Grim Lavamancers, his opponent escalates Collective Brutality and then goes on the Lingering Souls beatdown. He floods, and Shrine ends on 3 counters and didn’t do anything. Eidolon of the Great Revel really would’ve done work in this game.
Match 5: UW Delver 1-2LOSS
Game 1, T2 goes for Shrine “He literally has to have Spell Snare, and Spell Snare isn’t in that many decks at the moment”, gets Spell Snared! Gets a bit loose with his lands and shocking, opponent has a flipped Delver and multiple counterspells and stabilises on 1 life.
Game 2 he has a perfect start of Goblin Guide into Searing Blaze on Delver of Secrets into T3 Shrine into T4 Shrine. His opponent has Timely Reinforcements + Snapcaster Mage + Delver, but he wins with 7 damage end step of T6 and 7 more beginning of his T7.
Game 3 he doesn’t bolt the T1 Delver thinking he has time but his opponent has a combination of Dispel, Spell Snare and Cryptic Command. He takes a lot of damage off Insectile Aberration and then Celestial Colonnade for lethal.
1-4 in the League (4-9 in games) is not great but I don’t know how experienced a Burn player this guy is. Nevertheless I’ve just watched 13 games of the “Shrine build” and in only 1 of them did Shrine of Burning Rage impress me, and in Match 4 and 5 in particular I strongly feel Eidolon of the Great Revel would’ve been a better card. Shrine feels very vulnerable just sitting there doing nothing, whereas Eidolon can attack for 2 if the coast is clear, and will do a guaranteed minimum 2 damage if removed by a 3CMC or less spell.
Manamorphose is only good for the mana filtering or as a pseudo-ritual in UR Storm.
I have to question the credentials of someone who didn't board out Shrines and boarded in Kor Firewalkers in against RG Ponza. If he was running Le Briand's list, he should have probably swapped the Shrines for PoE and Grim Lavamancer.
Shrine is BETTER then Eidolon in the aggro MUs because we're in the control role.
- - -
If we ONLY care about reducing the opp. down into zero as quickly as possible then Mardu Burn would be the best burn deck (since it has the highest chances for goldfishes). I believe the rise of Boros burn shows that grinding out victories is a thing, we should hope for the best (T4 wins) but prepare for the worse (T5+ games due to discard, land denial, taxes, bad draws, counters, life-gain and critical creature kills).
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Legacy: Merfolk U; Shadow UB; Eldrazi Stompy C
Pauper: Delver U
Vintage: Merfolk U
Primers: