I think this (always bolting 'the bird' on the draw) is a really bad rule of thumb. You should always lead with a creature instead, if that is available. If not, the only time I will consider bolting a one drop might be against humans (champion of the parish), affinity (vault skirge), infect (G elf), the mirror (GG or SS) or if I have an eidolon in hand that will lose value if they produce a big 3 drop or several small creatures. Other than that it really depends on the MU and the speed of my hand. Thoughts?
I'm often inclined to let the bird live, especially if I have blaze next turn. I'll definitely kill it if my opponent has mulliganed, because that bird might have been the key to making their have keepable. If it's a Finks deck, I'll probably kill it because I can't deal with t2 Finks after I just played a goblin guide. If it's elves, Druid and Ezuri are more important than Llanowar Elves. If it's Infect, it's more important to kill the creature with Infect that comes later.
Another one is Dark Confidant. I generally just let Bob live and I remind my opponent of their triggers.
Mono red is 6th. Nice. And I've advocated that we play our splash lands in the side a long time ago but we didn't rly have a choice then. We needed the main deck splash at that time
Some have called to Treasure Cruise as an analogy for LUtS (I shared what's written below on Reddit the other day). I think that they aren't as close as people would like to believe, because draw 3 is significantly better than draw 2. Let's assume that a deck is 2/3 Burn spells, which assumes that creatures are always live draws (which isn't necessarily true) and let's ignore that Rift Bolt is almost a dead draw with LutS. We'll also assume that whatever we draw with LutS is definitely getting played this turn it next turn, rather than left in exile.
With draw 2, your outcomes are 1/9 to draw 0 spells, 4/9 to draw 1 spell, and 4/9 to draw 2 spells. LutS draws 1.33 Burn spells on average, but with some variance. It's worth 2 only 44% of the time. When you draw 1, you're basically adding a tax of R to that spell and that happens 44% of the time. That's too high for my liking.
With draw 3, it's 1/27 to draw 0, 2/9 to draw 1, 4/9 to draw 2, and 8/27 to draw 3. Treasure Cruise draws 2 Burn spells on average, also with some variance. It's worth more than 1 almost 75% of the time. I'm willing to pay a tax of 1/2U or 1/3U for the spells I draw, and the tax of U for 1 spell only happens 22% of the time.
Put another way, LutS has a 55% probability of what I consider to be bad outcomes (0 or 1 spell) because those outcomes imply that simply playing Lightning Strike in place of LutS would have been an equal or better outcome. TC has only a 25% of those same bad outcomes.
In order for me to accept that playing LUtS is worth it, I'd have to convince myself that "R: draw 2 lands" is a good outcome for the reason of "you just moved them off the top of the deck". At present, I regard that as a bad outcome. Think of it this way, instead of paying mana for a burn spell and drawing lands the next 2 turns, you pay mana to move 2 lands off you're deck and get a slightly higher probability to draw a non-land next draw step. The first situation may cause a loss, or it could cause a win if the burn spell you had instead of LUtS wins now.
And now I know why card draw failed me everytime I tried it in burn. That was a fantastic post. Saving this quote for any time I get the wrong urge to run card draw/filtering in my burn.
6th place in Indy had 4 LutS in the main... I still don't think it's correct. Especially as a 4 of. I'm looking at mono red ATM and theroy crafting a list and you shouldn't need it imo. Honestly... I'm gonna build mono red with t wrath as a 2-of and sb my splash
So i've been trying out the spectacles cards as 4-ofs each, cutting some 2 mana cards. However, i can't help but notice that with so many 1 mana spells, Eidolon is hurting us A LOT.
The philosophy behind Eidolon for me was always that despite the effect being symmetrical, you'd still win the race because all of your spells deal damage.
But with 4 [[Light up the Stage]] in, that isn't true anymore.
On the other hand, [[Shrine of Burning Rage]] actually REWARDS you instead of punishing you foe casting a lot of 1 mana spells, including LutS that doesn't deal damage. Additionally, LutS inherently makes us want to play a slightly longer game and helps us make our land drops, whis is exactly what Shrine wants.
Am I crazy thinking that a mono-red version with Shrine could be the besy way to use those Spectacles cards?
Maybe I'm crazy but the wording on eidolon hasn't changed and it says anything with converted Mana cost 3 or less so tell me how the spectacle cards has changed the fact that every spell in our deck that we play hurts us if eidolon is in play. From what I'm understanding you're making it seem like the fact that we have two additional one drops means that eidolon is hurting us more when it shouldn't be considering that if you're taking out two drops those two drops would be hurting us as well from eidolon. And even with eidolon hurting us you should still be winning the race since it's only doing to to us while we are doing three to them. Tumi skewer should work in just about any build of burn as a for of because our deck is designed to deal them damage not to mention it will make them do stuff on their turn as far as paying life two things such as shock lands. It is essentially another one Mana 3 damage spell in our Deck. The questionable card should be staged as it doesn't necessarily help us count to 20 and that may be a better card suited for mono red or rakdos burn in my opinion. As far as shrine is concerned it may fit in a mono red but I probably won't play it in mine due to it not impacting the board the turn it comes into play and yes it is inevitability but I I think it is more of a metagame choice
If I cast Lightning Helix, it's a 6 point life swing. If I cast Light Up the Stage into two Bolts, it's also a 6 point life swing. The difference is Eidolon deals 2 damage to me if I make the first play and 6 damage if I make the second.
You know how Eidolon *****s on Storm and Phoenix when they start spamming cantrips? Light Up the Stage is like that, only it's happening to yourself.
If I cast Lightning Helix, it's a 6 point life swing. If I cast Light Up the Stage into two Bolts, it's also a 6 point life swing. The difference is Eidolon deals 2 damage to me if I make the first play and 6 damage if I make the second.
You know how Eidolon *****s on Storm and Phoenix when they start spamming cantrips? Light Up the Stage is like that, only it's happening to yourself.
I would like to nitpick a bit ...
a) the life swing in your example would only be 4 points
b) let's say you're both at 9 life, with Helix and Eidolon you'd be at 10 and the opponent at 6, with LutS and 2 1-Mana Bolts both would be at 3 life, and since we're in Magic Wonderland, having the Eidolon in play and even if the opp has removal, your 3 life are most probably better than his 3 life, given the fact that our deck is supposed to "deal 3".
If I cast Lightning Helix, it's a 6 point life swing. If I cast Light Up the Stage into two Bolts, it's also a 6 point life swing. The difference is Eidolon deals 2 damage to me if I make the first play and 6 damage if I make the second.
You know how Eidolon *****s on Storm and Phoenix when they start spamming cantrips? Light Up the Stage is like that, only it's happening to yourself.
I would interpret this argument as "LUtS is bad with Eidolon, therefore don't play LUtS", especially because it's also bad with Rift Bolt.
I don't think that Shrine is worth playing at all because it's an expensive "do nothing" and requires you to hold mana open to pop it in demand or it'll get destroyed and you wasted 2 mana for nothing. Eidolon is part of the reason the deck is strong in the first place. I think that LUtS is inconsistent with a Burn strategy because it doesn't deal damage on its own and has a greater than 50% probability to fizzle. The above estimate I gave is 55% to be a bad outcome, but it's 75% if you assume that creatures are dead draws (reality is somewhere between "creatures are always live draws" and "creatures are always dead draws"). Any straight draw spell is high variance and has strong potential to be a wasted spell and wasted mana. This is why I'm adamant that we'd need something like a Shock with impulsive draw 1 or something like that in order to be a playable draw spell in Burn. Even Needle Drop without the pseudo-Spectacle clause might be good enough. It needs to further the game plan and replace itself or be a busted amount of card advantage (Treasure Cruise).
Ok. I get ya but even then, we can just not run LutS since it isn't something we HAVE to run. Eidolon is sorta an auto include due to it's ability to just deal tons of damage in certain mus and others it can deal 2 minimally. Personally I won't be taking out eidolons and def won't be running any kind of draw spell unless it deals dmg as well or is a better version of magma jet I think they should have done some kind of deal "x" dmg and surveil "x"
I've never personally been a big fan of it except maybe when eldrazi was everywhere. It just comes down too late because it's so expensive. I think you can do just fine with different sideboard cards and you don't have to drop that money on bridge (I have no interest in buying foils of it for my deck).
Blaze, blood, and path can do just fine in spots where you'd like bridge.
Eidolon as an autoinclude is being close-minded imo. Sure, sometimes it's amazing, but some other times it's really meh, especially on the draw.
Right now i have put the 4 Eidolons in the sideboard and even though it's space-consuming i think Burn's doesn't need that much SB slots anyway because you don't want to dilute your maindeck too much with SB'ed answers.
I SB in the Eidolons when i'm on the play and against turbo-cantrips decks like Phoenix or Storm, and I have not really missed them in the MD.
On the topic of LuTS being inconsistent, I believe it is non-sense. Card draw spell can only make your deck more consistent, not less, by nature. Sometimes you'll LUTS into 2 lands : so what ? You make your land drops and that's 2 lands you're not going to draw in the next 2 turns. The argument against LutS would be that it makes the deck slower, which arguably isn't something that Burn wants.
The question isn't that LuTS doesn't deal damage. The real question we should be asking ourselves is if paying R for pseudo-draw-2 is good enough of a card or not. I don't know the answer, but what I do know is that you won't get the answer by theorycrafting only without testing the card for real.
I trully believe that Risk factor is way better than Shrine of burning rage. Shrine needs time, needs mana, is vulnerable. RF is faster, is as violent, can draw a bunch of cards and makes you resilient against counter strategies of Burn. I have fun actually at playing Risk factor in my mono-red.
By the way, I am really worried by Leyline sanctity and Chalice and tons of lifegain I see in many sideboards, at less on cockatrice. It seems that Destructive revelry should be back, so I inspirated myself from what Ryan Ferries did on last SCG: put shockland in his sideboard because he says that shocklands might causes him to die against agressive strategies, and because to catch people with his sideboard.
Open hypergometric calculator: at having 8 fetchlands + 1 shockland (9 sources), we have 70% chances to hit the color in a seven cards opening hand. With 10 sources, it is 74%. With 11 sources (like did Ryan), it is 77%. Just to say that for budget purpose, it might be acceptable to play 8 fetchlands.
I am curious to see what will happens next week at GP Toronto.
Maybe you will constat a huge difference in your analysis that you share each month elcon. More creatures that regain life, more Leylines, more Kor firewalker, more chalice. It would be intersting to see also how many burn players would see their day 1 ruined either by those hoses cards, either because they choose to not run any solutions like Revelry and Skullcrack.
Finally to see how will perform the best between Boros, Red/x, and Rakdos.
Until now, with two datas from SCG and Challenge, it's Red/x >= Rakdos > Boros. Will Boros claims back his superiority ?
Eidolon as an autoinclude is being close-minded imo. Sure, sometimes it's amazing, but some other times it's really meh, especially on the draw.
Right now i have put the 4 Eidolons in the sideboard and even though it's space-consuming i think Burn's doesn't need that much SB slots anyway because you don't want to dilute your maindeck too much with SB'ed answers.
I SB in the Eidolons when i'm on the play and against turbo-cantrips decks like Phoenix or Storm, and I have not really missed them in the MD.
On the topic of LuTS being inconsistent, I believe it is non-sense. Card draw spell can only make your deck more consistent, not less, by nature. Sometimes you'll LUTS into 2 lands : so what ? You make your land drops and that's 2 lands you're not going to draw in the next 2 turns. The argument against LutS would be that it makes the deck slower, which arguably isn't something that Burn wants.
The question isn't that LuTS doesn't deal damage. The real question we should be asking ourselves is if paying R for pseudo-draw-2 is good enough of a card or not. I don't know the answer, but what I do know is that you won't get the answer by theorycrafting only without testing the card for real.
Is it closed-minded to say Lightning Bolt is an auto include? I consider all of the best cards in the deck to be auto includes. Eidolon is one of those.
A draw spell does not make Burn "more consistent" in the way that a draw spell makes a combo deck more consistent. Combo decks are not redundant, and Burn is. Almost half of the deck deals direct damage to the opponent, and you are losing consistency when you take away some of those redundant cards and replace them with the variance of a draw spell. Burn is already consistent. You're diluting that consistency when you start swapping out redundant pieces for high variance pieces.
LUtS more or less says "Choose one at random with weird weighting: Lay of the Land for random lands twice, add R tax to a random spell and Lay of the Land once, add 1/2R tax to two random spells." Two of those outcomes are terrible to me.
The question isn't that LuTS doesn't deal damage. The real question we should be asking ourselves is if paying R for pseudo-draw-2 is good enough of a card or not.
Is that not what we were doing? My assessment so far is that you get a bad outcome more than half of the time, and it's not based on it not dealing damage. It's based on evaluating what happens when you cast it and seeing that I consider the outcome to be bad most of the time. "R: get something bad about 60-ish percent of the time" is not something I want to play.
Eidolon in modern is sort of like Price of Progress in legacy. Sometimes it's a house, sometimes it's awful, usually it's at least decent to above average. If nothing else, it makes the opponent either take a decent amount of damage, or play suboptimally. It's one of the cards most boarded out depending on the match up, but that doesn't necessarily mean it doesn't belong in the main.
With draw 2, your outcomes are 1/9 to draw 0 spells, 4/9 to draw 1 spell, and 4/9 to draw 2 spells. LutS draws 1.33 Burn spells on average, but with some variance. It's worth 2 only 44% of the time. When you draw 1, you're basically adding a tax of R to that spell and that happens 44% of the time. That's too high for my liking.
The whole argument is quite sound, but I disagree with the conclusion a bit. 1.33 Burn = 4 damage, which is exactly the same rate as Boros Charm. At 2 mana for 4 damage, both LUTS and Boros Charm are very comparable.
Pros:
Doesn't require white
Draws you 1-2 lands when it's worse than Boros Charm (which are often not completely useless)
Combo with Swiftspear
Cons:
Requires Spectacle
Nonbo with Eidolon and Rift Bolt
Pressures you to play more 1 mana cards
No Indestructible mode
Added variance (it is really a con, or is it neutral?)
Edit: Actually costs ~2.5 mana to get 4 damage on average.
In the end, Boros Charm looks like the safe choice, but I'm not entirely convinced. Lots of these are hard to evaluate.
Another one is Dark Confidant. I generally just let Bob live and I remind my opponent of their triggers.
By the way, 4 Burn in the SCG Indy top 16. 2 playing Skewer (one Rakdos, one Boros), 1 playing neither, 1 mono R with a Mardu sideboard and Volley, LutS, and Skewer main (in 6th) and the lands are in the side. http://www.starcitygames.com/decks/results/format/28/start_date/27-01-2019/end_date/27-01-2019/city/Indianapolis/state/IN/country/US/start/1/finish/16/w_perc/0/g_perc/0/r_perc/0/b_perc/0/u_perc/0/a_perc/0/order_1/finish/limit/25/start_num/0/
(W/B)BW Tokens(W/B) | (B/R)Rakdos Burn(B/R) | (U/R)Gift Storm(U/R)
The philosophy behind Eidolon for me was always that despite the effect being symmetrical, you'd still win the race because all of your spells deal damage.
But with 4 [[Light up the Stage]] in, that isn't true anymore.
On the other hand, [[Shrine of Burning Rage]] actually REWARDS you instead of punishing you foe casting a lot of 1 mana spells, including LutS that doesn't deal damage. Additionally, LutS inherently makes us want to play a slightly longer game and helps us make our land drops, whis is exactly what Shrine wants.
Am I crazy thinking that a mono-red version with Shrine could be the besy way to use those Spectacles cards?
Modern : Abzan Cocowisp Primer
You know how Eidolon *****s on Storm and Phoenix when they start spamming cantrips? Light Up the Stage is like that, only it's happening to yourself.
| Ad Nauseam
| Infect
Big Johnny.
I would like to nitpick a bit ...
a) the life swing in your example would only be 4 points
b) let's say you're both at 9 life, with Helix and Eidolon you'd be at 10 and the opponent at 6, with LutS and 2 1-Mana Bolts both would be at 3 life, and since we're in Magic Wonderland, having the Eidolon in play and even if the opp has removal, your 3 life are most probably better than his 3 life, given the fact that our deck is supposed to "deal 3".
I would interpret this argument as "LUtS is bad with Eidolon, therefore don't play LUtS", especially because it's also bad with Rift Bolt.
I don't think that Shrine is worth playing at all because it's an expensive "do nothing" and requires you to hold mana open to pop it in demand or it'll get destroyed and you wasted 2 mana for nothing. Eidolon is part of the reason the deck is strong in the first place. I think that LUtS is inconsistent with a Burn strategy because it doesn't deal damage on its own and has a greater than 50% probability to fizzle. The above estimate I gave is 55% to be a bad outcome, but it's 75% if you assume that creatures are dead draws (reality is somewhere between "creatures are always live draws" and "creatures are always dead draws"). Any straight draw spell is high variance and has strong potential to be a wasted spell and wasted mana. This is why I'm adamant that we'd need something like a Shock with impulsive draw 1 or something like that in order to be a playable draw spell in Burn. Even Needle Drop without the pseudo-Spectacle clause might be good enough. It needs to further the game plan and replace itself or be a busted amount of card advantage (Treasure Cruise).
Blaze, blood, and path can do just fine in spots where you'd like bridge.
Right now i have put the 4 Eidolons in the sideboard and even though it's space-consuming i think Burn's doesn't need that much SB slots anyway because you don't want to dilute your maindeck too much with SB'ed answers.
I SB in the Eidolons when i'm on the play and against turbo-cantrips decks like Phoenix or Storm, and I have not really missed them in the MD.
On the topic of LuTS being inconsistent, I believe it is non-sense. Card draw spell can only make your deck more consistent, not less, by nature. Sometimes you'll LUTS into 2 lands : so what ? You make your land drops and that's 2 lands you're not going to draw in the next 2 turns. The argument against LutS would be that it makes the deck slower, which arguably isn't something that Burn wants.
The question isn't that LuTS doesn't deal damage. The real question we should be asking ourselves is if paying R for pseudo-draw-2 is good enough of a card or not. I don't know the answer, but what I do know is that you won't get the answer by theorycrafting only without testing the card for real.
Modern : Abzan Cocowisp Primer
By the way, I am really worried by Leyline sanctity and Chalice and tons of lifegain I see in many sideboards, at less on cockatrice. It seems that Destructive revelry should be back, so I inspirated myself from what Ryan Ferries did on last SCG: put shockland in his sideboard because he says that shocklands might causes him to die against agressive strategies, and because to catch people with his sideboard.
Open hypergometric calculator: at having 8 fetchlands + 1 shockland (9 sources), we have 70% chances to hit the color in a seven cards opening hand. With 10 sources, it is 74%. With 11 sources (like did Ryan), it is 77%. Just to say that for budget purpose, it might be acceptable to play 8 fetchlands.
I am curious to see what will happens next week at GP Toronto.
Maybe you will constat a huge difference in your analysis that you share each month elcon. More creatures that regain life, more Leylines, more Kor firewalker, more chalice. It would be intersting to see also how many burn players would see their day 1 ruined either by those hoses cards, either because they choose to not run any solutions like Revelry and Skullcrack.
Finally to see how will perform the best between Boros, Red/x, and Rakdos.
Until now, with two datas from SCG and Challenge, it's Red/x >= Rakdos > Boros. Will Boros claims back his superiority ?
Is it closed-minded to say Lightning Bolt is an auto include? I consider all of the best cards in the deck to be auto includes. Eidolon is one of those.
A draw spell does not make Burn "more consistent" in the way that a draw spell makes a combo deck more consistent. Combo decks are not redundant, and Burn is. Almost half of the deck deals direct damage to the opponent, and you are losing consistency when you take away some of those redundant cards and replace them with the variance of a draw spell. Burn is already consistent. You're diluting that consistency when you start swapping out redundant pieces for high variance pieces.
LUtS more or less says "Choose one at random with weird weighting: Lay of the Land for random lands twice, add R tax to a random spell and Lay of the Land once, add 1/2R tax to two random spells." Two of those outcomes are terrible to me.
Is that not what we were doing? My assessment so far is that you get a bad outcome more than half of the time, and it's not based on it not dealing damage. It's based on evaluating what happens when you cast it and seeing that I consider the outcome to be bad most of the time. "R: get something bad about 60-ish percent of the time" is not something I want to play.
// 16 Creature
4 Goblin Guide
4 Grim Lavamancer
4 Vexing Devil
2 Dark Confidant
2 Rix Maadi Reveler
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Skullcrack
// 20 Land
4 Blood Crypt
4 Bloodstained Mire
9 Mountain
3 Swamp
4 Bump in the Night
4 Lava Spike
4 Sovereign's Bite
4 Skewer the Critics
// 9 Instant
1 Rakdos Charm
4 Smash to Smithereens
4 Flames of the Blood Hand
4 Collective Brutality
2 Pyroclasm
Tried some stuff with the new Spectacle cards. I didn't know what to do with my sideboard, so criticism on that is welcome!
The whole argument is quite sound, but I disagree with the conclusion a bit. 1.33 Burn = 4 damage, which is exactly the same rate as Boros Charm. At 2 mana for 4 damage, both LUTS and Boros Charm are very comparable.
Pros: