MTG Salvation

With GRN coming into standard there are going to be 2 browbeat effects. We've got Risk Factor and Sword-Point Diplomacy. The rest of the deck would need to be cards that are guaranteed sources of damage to make this choice much less of a choice. The best they can do is hope we draw lands and not spells.

Here is a really simple rough draft of the idea, with each non brow-beat spell being worth at least 2 damage. I've only included creatures that always deal damage, or can chump to deal damage, because attacking through blockers is not guaranteed even though we run all this burn.



Obviously this is a very rough cut at it, and the limiting factor will always be mana until you start chaining together brow beats to make land drops.
Possible includes are Runaway Steam-Kin, Angrath, the Flame-Chained, Banefire, and probably a lot more that I'm missing. There are a ton of sideboard options in black and red that buy time, including the new static wall, and all of the various board sweepers in black and red.


Has anyone else looked at this?

I have considered this deck ever since sword-point diplomacy was released, and even had some success with it in the past.

The two main disadvantages this deck has is no BR shockland and the fact that lifegain is a deck - as soon as opponent has some sort of consistent lifegain, our job becomes so much harder.
Our main advantage coming GRN is besides the new browbeat, the fact that most decks will run shocklands so in an average match the enemy starts on effectivly 16 life.



Here are some potential cards:

• Demanding Dragon
  
• Vicious Conquistador
  

I don't like the cards that NEED to attack to get value. Our opponents will be running removal and creatures. Demanding Dragon seems like it would do nothing most of the time.

I'm thinking something like this:

It's funny that you landed on Angrath as well, I actually had him in my deck and then decided against him in favor of Chainer's Torment, but that was probably a mistake. I think more expensive cards are good because of the 8 draw effects. If I was pretending to have a tuned list it would look like this.

I think that this deck wants to be low on the curve so that the opponent has to face the maximum number of these decisions as quickly as possible. The first one is easy to take the damage and deny you cards, but you have to keep the pressure up so that your opponent eventually gets down to a life total that makes it impossible for them to deny you the cards; once that happens, the cards need to be relatively cheap so that you can actually get value from them. Pehaps The Flame of Keld could work in this deck?

The problem with that is that The Flame of Keld wants you to discard your hand, and I just don't see that as a good idea in this deck. I mean, if you have Flame and a Browbeat, which do you play? Flame is very good, and I started brewing this deck by looking at the Flame of Keld burn deck, but I didn't feel they went together. Add to it that Flame of Keld only buffs red spells, and I don't think its the best fit.

This deck has now put up 5-0 finishes in consecutive releases on magic online:



Is this deck for real? The structure feels a lot like modern burn, with bad cards replacing good cards (Lavarunner instead of Goblin Guide, Firebrand instead of Monastery Swiftspear, Pyromancer instead of Eidolon, Lava Coil instead of Path to Exile, and Browbeat effects replacing a lot of the burn spells). Even with the power downgrade I guess the deck can still be a force if standard gets too durdly.

The sideboard is interesting. It looks like they don't even really bother sideboarding against control with something like Sarkhan to filter and threaten an ultimate. Instead it's all about fighting off go wide strategies (I'd imagine this deck doesn't like to see lifelink tokens running around), and then a couple banefires as an uncounterable finisher.

This feels like one of those decks that looks terrible right up until it beats you.

Just have to wait and see if these decks continue to crop up.

Overall these are good burn decks. Kinda puts the wizards decks to shame.

Rakdos Risky Diplomacy

I created that without seeing this post, most of the info is pretty much the same, but I'll link it over to this post.

Has anyone tried a non-permanent build of this? (only lands + spells)
I was testing with a buddy and it was mostly just to blank a lot of main deck spells that gain life. It also opens up a more transforming sideboard into a more creature heavy build once they take all those out. However I'm not sure if that brings enough benefit for that, probably just a meta call.

What about Inescapable Blaze in addition or instead of Banefire. Sure its always 6 mana, but I've found that with Sword-Point Diplomacy they nearly always give you lands regardless of their life total, and the Instant speed can be quite relevant.


Finally, with the current excellent mana bases, has anyone leaned into Grixis? Ionize and Firemind's Research seem like a near perfect fit, as well as some of the UB cards. Jump-Start as a mechanic has great synergies with Sword-Point Diplomacy.

I haven't looked at a 3 color deck but I feel like burn decks should be low to the ground as possible and really should aim to carry a lot of 1/2 cmc spells. Split mana/double mana spells clog up the process and uptick the land count which I don't think the deck wants.

I'm glad this caught on, and more than a little excited that I spotted something that might be a good deck before the full spoiler was even done. I'm going to build this on Arena asap and see what I can muster with it.

Jump-Start as a mechanic has great synergies with Sword-Point Diplomacy.

You've gotta read the card again. You "exile the rest". It DOES have synergy with those drake cards and Beacon Bolt, but those don't seem worth it. The mana isn't actually that good, and we need to guard our life total slightly because our plan is mana intensive and every time we interact it slows us down. You need a flurry of spells, and at least a few of those are going to have to be 3 CMC or more, so we're talking about turn 8-9+ here for winning.

When I imagined this deck, I originally wanted to go Wizards. But since Wizards is lacking in the 1 and 2 drop slots, I switched to Pirates. It's a rough draft, but it's been performing better than wizards has. Still seems a little lacking though. I'll post more when/if I tune it more.


From my early and very rough playtesting, I can say I'm unimpressed with Sovereign's Bite. These 4 slots could/should probably be 4 more Pirates. I'm leaning towards Fathom Fleet Captain, but I'm kind of feeling risky too, and Wanted Scoundrels could be fun.

Been running a version of this deck to varying success on Magic Arena. Heres the list:






So far I've found that the really good matchups are control (Both Jeskai and Dimir) and aggro, while it struggles a bit against more midrangy decks, such as selesnya tokens and golgari midrange/reanimator. Versus control they can't afford to be negating all your burn spells, and you can cast the risk factors at the end of your turns when they cast their draw spells, or at the end of theirs forcing them to tap out going into your turn in the earlier stages of the game. Banefire is also just the perfect finisher against control. Since they will often just give you cards with both punisher spells, you usually hit all your land drops allowing for some heavy banefires. I also will bring in the arclights against control, since it is pretty easy to cast 3 spells with this deck in one turn once you get to the midgame. They essentially become 4 mana 3 damage burn spells with recursion which is really sweet. The sentinel totems also help here in the jeskai matchups where they run drakes. It at least affects the one drake, and can hit a bunch of their jumpstart cards as well, hindering their card advantage.

Against aggro the deck fares pretty well, as long as you can hit the sweepers. It's not too difficult to race when you can pick and choose what creatures of theirs survive to attack (if any). The diamond mares can help with life gain (though they often just suck up a lightning bolt so maybe there's something better for this sd slot). The sovereign's bite is a definite mvp in this matchup, the lifegain is just sooo good with the aggro-y matchups.

The midrangy matchups can really go either way. The problem is they have a good spread of creatures so the sweepers often don't hit everything. The graveyard excursion means they are always resource heavy, and they have incidental lifegain through vraska and vraska's contempt. It's hard to build up enough damage against them while controlling the board-state effectively to finish them off with a kicked fight with fire or banefire. The totems help with some of the recursion shenanigans but its hard to win once they have a vraska out and are sacking lands for life and cards. Selesnya can be a bit too aggro for this deck with their go wide if you don't hit a sweeper quickly enough, and the elephant can be a huge annoyance, bringing the tokens out of cannonade range at times.

If anyone has more suggestions for the sideboard that would be appreciated, what im thinking of changing right now is adding a couple Zhalfirin Void's, potentially going down to 22 Lands, adding another arclight in the side, and maybe another couple targeted kill cards in the side. Another idea is to splash for white in order to bring in deafening clarions and/or settle the wreckages. It may slow down the deck a bit, with the clunkier manabase, but it adds some much needed help against the midrangy decks. I could see doing something like cutting the fiery cannonades or ritual of soots for some of the white sweepers, as well as giving access to some lifegainy options as well as exile power (Ixalan's bindings maybe?).

Brewed up a deck around this:

Anyone still working with this deck?
been thinking about putting together a budget version of this deck.

This is the list I’ve been test playing. Only had an opportunity to test vs a few decks so uncertain about many match ups. Also games played were no sideboard because I haven’t settled on one yet but I have a general idea of what I’d play seeing that the deck kind of builds itself.



Uncertain with what I’m doing wrong with the formating... Followed the posting guidelines.

have to keep playing it.