RUG simply has everything I want in a combination. I enjoy doing what the three colors are best at. I like looking at these colors. When I look at the bottom of the screen where my hand is laid out, I greatly enjoy seeing Tarmogoyf, Cryptic Command, and Lightning Bolt. I like the way RUG decks look. There's just something that clicks, something that speaks to me. Take the above trio for example. Each has a role they play in the deck, and each performs that role to the utmost of its ability. You attack with Goyf, you defend with Command, and you Bolt does a little of both. There's a certain balance here that I see in the RUG combination. Each color compensates for a weaknesses inherent in the others.
Blue is a great color for controlling the game, but when comes to actually winning it is sorely lacking. Although Delver of Secrets can morph into a 3/2 flier (though less consistently, what with the lack of Brainstorm and all) this pales in comparison to what green has to offer: Tarmogoyf. 'Goyf will consistently be a 3/4 to 4/5 beater for two that is very easily cast with mana open for countermagic. Tarmogoyf is the measuring stick for efficiency. If there is ever a creature moreso than it, then that creature should have never been printed.
But green needs blue just as much as blue needs green. The green mage can cast Tarmogoyfs all day but if they are simply picked off with efficient removal then you aren't actually getting anywhere. The green mage will simply run out of creatures to play and then promptly lose the game. Green needs blue to provide much-needed back-up. Green needs cover fire in the form of countermagic and plenty of library manipulation to keep its weapons locked and loaded.
Red is very much the same. Although it suffers less from removal due to using less creatures and less from countermagic because if the density and efficiency of its spells, it does lack efficient, reliable library manipulation much the same as green. Blue provides a handful of goodies to both colors.
In return, red provides a service that neither green nor blue do with any real finesse: removal. Repeal is a fine card but Lightning Bolt is perhaps the third best removal spell in the format, unfortunately falling short of the ridiculous efficiency of Path to Exile and the almost inexorable reliability of Smother. Bolt is a little of both. Costing one red mana makes it extremely efficient while three damage is just enough to hit a suitably wide breadth of targets, including, but not limited to, Wild Nacatl, Mirran Crusader, Vendilion Clique, Snapcaster Mage, Dark Confidant, and many more. What's more, these Bolts can also be turned directly toward your opponent. A deck with Lightning Bolt in it only need reduce it's opponent's life total to three, rather than zero.
On the other hand, while red is great at firing Bolts at Tiago, it suffers from lacking a board presence. Tarmogoyf isn't only a beater, but it's also a presence. It blocks all day. It discourages attacking. A purely red and blue deck has little to no method of securing presence and is forced to spend all of it's resources on protecting the board. Whereas, if you had Tarmogoyf, you simply play it and protect it. It's large body allows you some sense of security in that you have something to block with, to attack with, to apply pressure so that erstwhile empty hands may fill up instead of being forced to waste every last card in your grasp to protect your precious life total.
So there's a three-way balance. Green compensates for red's lack of board presence, red compensates for blue and green's's lack of removal options, and blue compensates for green and red's lack of protection and library manipulation, and green and red compensate for blue's inability to survive the harsh conditions of the Modern format.
This is why I love RUG. It's nearly perfect. Perhaps the best combination of colors available in the Modern format.
Which brings us to my latest creation.
As I've said before, I get a lot of my ideas from Standard. Right now, there is a card in Standard that I've kind of had my eye on. It's been lurking in the back of my head. Lightly gnawing at the fringes of my consciousness, never quite venturing so far that I figured out just what it was. Until this afternoon, when I realized what I wanted.
Are you ready? It's a doozie.
Yes, that thing.
This card struck me as grossly underestimated and underappreciated in the format. It provided so much reach, so much inevitability. You could so very easily just sit back and stay alive while it slowly ticked up to lethal. You never had to do anything else after you resolved it. I would even compare it to Bitterblossom in this respect. All I had to do was resolve the thing and it would eventually win the game for me. It's also very good against Planeswalkers, which is quite nice. Otherwise, Elspeth and Gideon would be nearly impossible to get rid of.
It all started coming together when I got it into my head that I wanted to build a deck I could call RUG Burn (as in, the hot abrasions you get from sliding bare skin over carpet). I wanted a RUG deck that leaned a little more toward red, with more options to burn the opponent out in spectacular fashion. The Shrine came very quickly to the forefront of my attention as this deck came together. I knew then what had been nagging at me and that I wanted to use it here. But then another thought came to mind. Patrick Chapin's nearly unbeaten Grixis list he'd sleeved up for Worlds this year. I was reminded of his words on Desperate Ravings. He spoke highly of the card, and felt it would see use even in formats outside of Standard. Always open to try new things, I threw a few in and had at it. I wasn't much afraid of the random discard because not only could I flashback quite a few of the cards I could possibly discard, but also because I was running multiples of all of my cards. If I lost one, I could very easily find another as I sifted through my deck with Ravings.
It didn't take long for me to realize that I'd stumbled across something pretty nifty. The use and reuse of red spells ticked up my Shrines are a fevered pace. Although some play mistakes would cost me games I felt extremely confident in the build. It performed admirably, and many hiccups were because of human error rather than lax construction. Even Ravings performed at or above expectations. Though I may fall victim to an untimely discard here and there, stringing the spells together always found me a very playable set of cards. What's more, later in the game, I found myself discarding lands more often than spells because I could play more than one of them a turn. Land buffered my playables against the random discard. This deck didn't need too much land anyway. I found six to be the most optimal number.
The final piece was, of course, Punishing Fire. A card that not only ticked up my Shrine with each repeated use but also did not mind being discarded to a Ravings.
Much thanks, again, to my good friend Pinhead/The Labyrinth who would assist me in fine-tuning the list to the sleek, sexy machine it is now.
| RUG BurnMagic OnlineOCTGN2ApprenticeBuy These Cards | ||
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Lands: 1 Island 1 Forest 1 Mountain 4 Scalding Tarn 4 Misty Rainforest 2 Breeding Pool 2 Steam Vents 1 Stomping Ground 2 Cascade Bluffs 4 Grove of the Burnwillows 2 Academy Ruins | Creatures: 4 Tarmogoyf 4 Snapcaster Mage 3 Bloodbraid Elf Planeswalkers: 3 Jace Beleren Instants: 4 Mana Leak 4 Lightning Bolt 3 Punishing Fire 3 Desperate Ravings 2 Cryptic Command 2 Spell Pierce Artifacts: 4 Shrine of Burning Rage | Sideboard: 3 Flashfreeze 3 Molten Rain 3 Engineered Explosives 3 Ancient Grudge 2 Kitchen Finks 1 Cryptic Command |
My next entry will focus on the evolution of my Trinisphere deck. We'll go through the various methods of disruptive burn it utilized all the way up to the four-color monstrosity that it is now.
Until then.
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Posted Nov 20, 2011-
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Posted Nov 20, 2011you said something like that about wolf run rug.
then, you tested with it.