MTG Salvation

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.

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.

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 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.

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'm not sure. I think both of those cards are likely bad, but we're playing plenty of bad cards. The reason I give Ghitu Lavarunner the nod over it is because the difference between a 1/1 and a 2/2 is huge. The reason I give Firebrand the nod over it is because firebrand is at least one damage, and a guaranteed 3 damage when keld is triggered. Also, you don't want to be saccing your creatures when your game plan is to hit with as many red sources of damage as possible.


I think Experimental Frenzy is just a bad Flame of Keld. You draw a card every turn that you can't use without paying a 4 mana tax. You have to pay a 4 mana tax to try and chain spells together off the top of your deck. How many can you get a turn? 2? And theyre just going to be mediocre burn spells. At least with Flame, your burn spells are a LOT better at finishing off the game after you draw them.

I'm currently trying to brew this up again. I'm starting with a simple rule of 9, and the idea that all of our cards should be worth some amount of damage. I don't know how much life gain is in Standard right now, and we don't have a way to prevent it, so this might just suck. But, I'm a sucker for burn and at every rotation I try to brew it again. We have enough to make it B/R or just straight Red, but I'm gonna post some of my "Rule of 9" deck lists below. (Rule of 9 means we're just going with 9 4 ofs and 24 lands.)



Mono Red Burn


Mono Red Sly-kin


B/R Browbeat

The build doesn't have to be extremely different to get Nahiri in, but the problem is protecting her. In Kikichord you have LOTS of walls and fatter creatures to protect her, but here we have a couple of wall of omens and the four felidars, but in this scenario we're talking about not playing felidar till nahiri is down so thats useless. I don't like it, and if I was into the nahiri plan i would still be on kiki chord.



The thing I am most interested in right now is Ramunap Excavator. I play Courser of Kruphix already, and one could replace the other, but I don't want to pretend they do the same thing. Courser essentially draws cards to get you closer to action, and gains you a bunch of life in the process. Ramunap uses cards you've already drawn to get value. I'm leaning towards Courser being better in almost every matchup, but I don't want to count out Ramunap as a sideboard card at least. We have an awful Tron matchup, as most GW decks do, so is including the Ramunap just futile?

Burn is not a match up you can ever lose as a GW deck. If you're having trouble it's on your end, not the deck. I have two kitchen finks, a thragtusk, a courser of kruphix, and three Eldritch evolutions to find them. That's all sideboard level hate that's main deck, and great no matter what. That's excluding our voices that block twice, the walls you might run, the birds that eat bolts, paths etc. There really isn't a dead card in the deck. Spend your mana and fetch basics and you'll be fine.

Are the Lotus Cobras better than the Hierarchs? I've been playing your 11-4 list and it has been working really well for me, and the Hierarchs help put on a surprising amount of pressure. I was going to slot a Reflector Mage into it but it didn't seem worth messing up the consistent feeling mana. Bring to Light is probably ok, but I don't think cutting a Saheeli is worth it. Most of the time you won't draw it, and you can't get it off of Oath. When you draw it you have a great toolbox card, but you might as well have played Eldritch Evolution since you're only getting creatures.



From your 11-4 list I've been thinking about tweaking the board, and came to pretty much the same conclusion as you did.

I have been feeling a lot better about the deck since ditching the counter magic. This deck doesn't really play at instant speed so there is no benefit to their inclusion, and no way to leverage them past a straight up one for one trade.

Anyone have advice on the UW control matchup? I think I get too aggressive and just lose on card advantage, but boy does that matchup feel like an uphill battle. I think this is again due to our sorcery speed only plays, but I know I'm not playing the matchup right yet.

I feel bad saying this but I don't believe you haven't had mana problems with that list. 10 basics is incredibly greedy when youre on 4 colors. You have 1 source of red mana that isn't a birds of paradise, and you've got a Kiki-Jiki. Have you never played against a Ghost Quarter deck? Do people never bolt your birds? You have Saheelis, Nahiris, Blood Moons and a Kiki. A well timed bolt (i.e. any time) or a ghostquarter on your red source turns off 8 cards in your deck and completely prevents you from comboing. You also don't have ralliers or eternal witnesses to mitigate the risk of losing a land. I don't understand how you've been avoiding what looks like a glaring issue in your list, and is a huge problem for me in what I feel is a list that is less susceptible to it.


I suppose you have 4 extra sources for your planeswalkers, but needing two birds or a blood moon in play to cast a Kiki-jiki seems really really ambitious.

I've been playing the deck using AutmnLily's list linked a few pages back and theres a few things I noticed that I would like other people's takes on.

First, our mana is god awful and could be a lot better. I often find myself screwed on colors because I either fetched wrong or got ghost quartered. What can we do about this? I dont think 10 fetches and five different shocks is right. We are too fragile in this regard.

Second, we don't play nearly enough things at instant speed to get our combo through reliably. Instead of wondering if the coast is clear and just going for it or deciding not to, I want to be able to threaten them with something that will value them at instant speed. As it stands, you basically have to just repeatedly tap out and hope they waste their cards or that you out-value them. I'm not sure this is the best.