I tend to believe low cost (especially for 1 mana) high power fits into mono red. It's the key to make the deck successful. Sure haste is awesome but not every creature has haste. But *we are often limiting ours to haste bears (2/2 creatures), and sometimes get trampled over during the longer gameplay. *we as in burn players...
I think Icehide is a rotten creature compared to Goblin Guide and Swiftspear. Because it's power level is closer to those creatures and it has no haste. But on the other hand, I'm not sure if Icehide would suck if it's a 3/3 or a 3/x because it would offer additional point of attack for the lost cost of 1 mana. Sadly, the only creature that comes close to this is VD. I know most players don't like VD because of the browbeat clause, I feel that they don't understand how to make it work for their advantage. But I'm not getting into that argument because it's a bash your head against the wall battle. I get it that nobody on this form likes VD... I do see my self dropping VD if icehide was a 3/3 or a 3/x and the only thing I had to do to my deck was add snowlands.
Please note if Delver of Secrets was red, it would be a main burn creature in our burn deck! This is why I believe that RU Devler is a stronger burn deck
If your remark on Delver was true, we would have been playing copies of Zurgo Bellstriker back when that card was first released right alongside Monastery Swiftspear. Or better yet, we would have been splashing black to run Bump in the Night and possibly even Death's Shadow for a way better late game, Burn really wants to come out of the gate swinging and we like to start our opponents off at 18 or 17 when possible. Burn was never meant for the longer game. Sure, things like canopy lands and Grim Lavamancer give us extra reach later in the game, but you need to play this deck aware that your chances of winning drop dramatically for each subsequent turn beyond turn 5 no matter what. That's just how aggro has been set up and balanced throughout Magic's history. You either win fast or you don't win at all.
U/R delver is not a burn deck at all. It's a tempo deck that relies on blue to stay one step ahead of your opponent. Delver would be a no go in burn if it was mono red because not only is it not hasty, but the 1/1 body is way too easy to remove and we don't have library manipulation to make it flip. We can't protect delver with Daze or make Delver flip during our upkeep with Brainstorm; and thus there's no guarantee that Delver would give us the damage we paid our mana for. The point of the deck is that it uses blue cards to interfere with the opponent's gameplan just enough to stay ahead and win a damage race; while we try and win damage races through early brute force and sheer threat density. The blue cards in that deck are supposed to make up for it being slower than us (they're slower in exchange for consistency through library manipulation and so they can run Force of Will) and having less threat density than us. Thinking U/R Delver is a burn deck that just runs blue and not a full blown tempo strategy is a mistake, both as a pilot and as an opponent playing against the deck.
Agree... though if Icehide was a 3/3 or a 3/2 maybe...
I'm still not sure about the use of snow lands. I know my mono red EDH build has snow lands. Yeah, I have +30 snow mountains in the deck, but I'm doing it because of scrying sheets, but I wouldn't use scrying sheets in a legacy burn build because it's too damn slow.
I like running snow lands bc they look cool and sometimes I get the occasional opponent that gets thrown off for a bit and thinks I'm running some secret skred tech. Even the golem was a 3/x it still wouldn't be good enough without haste. For reference, not even creatures as efficient as tarmogoyf are worthy of inclusion in the deck. The creatures we do run just happen to be burn spells on a stick due to either their haste abilities, or in the case of Eidolon, immediately dealing damage to your opponent if they try to play anything. Without these abilities, it's too easy for a creature to get bolted/plowed/pathed/pushed/decayed before your next turn rolls around, and then you've just spent mana on a card that dealt zero damage.
I'm not sure about the Horizon land because you cannot fetch them. So you have no control in having them in play. And at worst it would suck if you have 3 lands in play, 1 mountain and 2 Horizon lands and your stuck with a fireblast in your hand.
in that situation, wouldn't you just sacc one of the horizon lands to draw into either more gas or a mountain? i don't really think it's going to be bad, per se, but being locked out by moons, or worse yet BTB seems pretty bad.
Makes splashing a second colour possibly worth it though. Not sure what the best would be. Blue for card draw, i guess? black for discard?
Blood moon against us is useless even with the canopy lands. If your board is really just 2 canopy lands and a mountain, a blood moon would be a bad play because it lets us play fireblast, and if it doesn't, all it does is stop us from using the land to drawing cards. It doesn't keep us off mana like it would against Sultai. As for B2B, it doesn't prevent us from sacing the lands to let us draw cards. I don't think the hate would be as bad as you guys think. Worst that could happen is we play one early and it gets wastelanded, which isn't the worst thing when you're running a couple extra land cards anyway.
I'd personally rather not have control over when we have these lands in play than not have control over being flooded out with no possible way to convert excess land into extra cards. If we only run 4 of them I don't think we're going to end up in a situation where we can't fireblast someone very often.
Regarding the Horizon land, I think BasedFuster might be missing part of why the Horizon land are good.
This type of land allows land to be converted into spells.
Having the ability to convert land into spells, means more land than normal can be played. It allows more stability, less mana screw, and less mulligans.
I literally said you could go up from 18-19 lands to 20-21 lands in an earlier post. I didn't miss anything.
My Burn deck BEATS Dark Depths.
I just looked at a meta study of the latest big tournament, and burn is going about 1/3rd. Bad Times.
Against Dark Depths it went 0/6. (cant be arsed looking for it, besides, eh.)
ZERO wins from Six matches for the big boys, and My Burn Deck just beat it.
Okay, cool, you can beat turbo Depths (except for the times in your tournament reports where you didn't). How do you do against other decks in the format? Can you beat DNT? Delver? U/W/x variants? I've come across those decks way more often than turbo Depths and while my odds of beating those decks are better than beating turbo Depths, I still need help from my sideboard to win consistently. I am genuinely curious to know how well you do against other decks with your current sideboard configuration.
Because of the Fireblast clash, I think decks that play them wont play the full 4 Fireblasts.
Fueling Lavamancer is good, they also help Barbarian Ring .
They are a minor improvement, as always, but they will become a standard part of the deck in a level similar to the use of Barbarian Ring.
They are definitely good enough to be in basedeck.
I would go for about 2 of them basedeck, replacing a land and a spell.
They're untapped lands that give us red mana. I would just cut mountains, no spells. I also personally think 4 should be the minimum we use assuming a standard 20 land build, but I think it could be possible to run 5 or 6. It may actually be possible that the correct number is meta dependent and not static, where running more than 4 while cutting copies of Fireblast for Grim Lavamancer is correct if the meta favors longer games, while running 4 or less and retaining all 4 fireblast copies is correct if the meta favors shorter games.
I think red canopy lands are going to work with modern burn, unless there's a modern version of fireblast. If we really want free draws, we have Street Wraith and at one time we had Gitaxian Probe - and these cards were almost never used in burn. I think using a non-basic lands (unfetchable and unblastable) just to maybe draw a card (which cost mana to activate) is not a good idea in legacy burn.
I doubt it... Think of this, tap a land for mana and lose another land to draw a card... When are you going to play this on turn 4. Burn is mana sensitive, every mana is counted. why not play 4 Street Wraith all you need to do is pay 2 life and discard a Street Wraith to draw a card...
The reason we don't play Street Wraith is because it makes our mulligan decisions horrible. We either have to cut land or cut threat density to run that card, which is not what you want when presented with a sketchy hand that contains one or more copies of Wraith. With the canopy lands, since they are also lands that tap for red mana, we can straight up just cut mountains for them and not screw up our ratios.
You're also not looking at these lands with the right mindset. The vast majority of games I've lost with burn have been to mana flooding. I still remember a match in this local tournament I was in 2 years ago against Pox that I lost because I flooded hard all 3 games. On one of the games I ended up drawing 6 mountains in a row without seeing another spell before I got cursed scroll'd to death. Needless to say I'm still salty about losing what should have been an excellent matchup due to mana flood, especially since that was my only loss that night. The draw ability is meant for those situations. If you go past turn 4, you're out of gas, and you're starting to flood, you can use the ability to give yourself another chance to draw more gas. Running these lands also means we're most likely okay going up to 20-21 land from 18-19, reducing our odds of mana screw early on in the game as well. These lands are not meant to be used to draw cards early on; they're meant to be used in the late game as a way to address what is arguably Burn's biggest weakness as a deck.
Stage can be tutored/loamed for, Hexmage cannot so a depths player would have to draw her naturally. If you only have one needle, just hit the card that's more likely to show up.
Any thoughts on the new canopy lands and quantity we should run? That was the big meat and potatoes of my post actually and I think we should address it ASAP in order to further improve and evolve burn.
I'm surprised magic geek didn't consider Pithing Needle already. It works against a lot of other good decks that use activated abilities like DNT, and you can just plop it down turn 1 and name Thespian's Stage to stop the combo. Win-win in my book, but yeah anyway if you're a serious competitive player, getting attached to a pet deck is just bad and if you know your local meta is stacked against you, the best way to adapt is to play something else. You play burn because there's certain decks it's very good against and if the meta is mostly those certain decks, burn is the best deck to exploit those deck's weaknesses.
Anyway, the main thing I want to post about is the new canopy lands that got spoiled in Modern Horizons. We now have access to up to 8 lands that we can sacrifice to draw us cards (Sunbaked Canyon and Fiery Islet), which is huge for us, as using our lands to draw extra cards shores up a major weakness with this deck. However, since they're nonbasic, make Price of Progress and Fireblast worse, and using them for mana costs us life (Negligible at first but if you get 2-3 of them out early, it adds up), I don't feel like 8 canopy lands is the right number for us. I wonder what everyone else who plays this deck thinks the right number should be?
My gut feeling is telling me that 4-6 is the sweet spot for us, but maybe someone here with more experience with the deck or more experience number crunching can give me a better or more statistically sound answer. I'm not worried about them not being fetchable, firstly because my deck is built with 20 mountains anyway, and secondly if I decide I want to put Grim Lavamancer back in my deck again, these canopy lands fuel him just like fetches do.
Fetch Lands for Lavamancer and a Single Taiga for sideboard options that hit artifacts and enchantments. Have to have an out against Laylines.
In my experience, we don't need to care about leylines. No well-designed legacy deck (the ones that will do well at GP's and such) is actually running them. Even if we do come across some scrub that does run Leylines in the board, we can still probably get there with our creatures and non-targeted burn.
In conclusion, we lose more win % to decks that run Wasteland than we gain against decks that run Leyline of Sanctity.
Lol death's shadow. Seems pretty easy to wreck with burn if they're going out of the way to power out a big Death's Shadow. Miracles seems a lot easier to play against now that they can't countertop lock us. The only deck I've been having trouble with is DNT and it's mostly just because I can't draw enough answers for their threats most of the time despite running 4 Smash and 3 Searing Blood in the SB.
So I'm curious, how does burn now stack up in the current meta since Deathrite was banned? Since delver and elves have been neutered and I've already been stomped by DNT enough times, I guess the deck I'm most curious about is Mono red prison, but I'd still love a look at the overall field.
I've been playing at this store close to my new house with Tatyova, Benthic Druid and it seems like the meta at my new store is a solid 50/50 split right now for both types of aggro with a good dose of combo mixed in and one prison style enchantment deck that ended up winning in points tonight. I haven't fully assembled this deck and thus haven't played it yet, but I get the impression that decks here can switch between going big or going wide. Tonight I went through several pods and played decks like Kaalia, Maelstrom wanderer, The Ur-Dragon, Tasigur, Marath, and Estrid among other things. I think my decision to have cards that work against either type of aggro works well here.
Indeed. Those cards are all pretty satisfactory in my opinion for your meta. For the Maze of Ith vs. Silent Arbiter, I think that this particular selection goes to which type of Aggro you're facing: wide or tall. Tall Aggro decks (decks that are Voltron or pump up a single creature to massive proportions) can kill you quickly and the Maze will be great in turning those decks off. For Wide Aggro decks (decks that swarm the field with creatures), the Arbiter will be better. The same argument would be made for the Karn Liberated vs. Propaganda choice as well. And since you're facing mostly green decks, which typically swarm the battlefield rather than generate Tall creatures, I think that Propaganda and the Arbiter are better choices for you.
I think for an unknown/new meta it might just do me well to include Ith and Propaganda/arbiter. I'm leaning more towards arbiter because it can be tutored. This way I'll have something for either type of aggro deck.
I already own Time Spiral, so as of right now the only big money cards I don't have are Timetwister, Tabernacle, Candelabra, Power artifact, and Grim monolith (that card spiked up way too much recently omg). I also don't have Mox Diamond, but I'll substitute a Lotus petal for it instead. I chose to run Silent Arbiter and Propaganda because I already own those cards, and I think I'll just end up splurging for Grim Monolith. I could probably also run City of Traitors since I have 2 copies, and I think I'm gonna run Karn Liberated too since he's good removal.
There's numerous creature strategies I've play against, ranging from Omnath (both versions), Animar, elf tribal, Krenko, Zur, Muldrotha (this guy's been really popular as just a goodstuff deck recently), dino tribal, and a lot of other ones I can't remember off top. All I remember is they can either combo or just swing with big boards, and I kind of want it to be more generalized anyway since I just moved into a new area.
I guess I could consider evacuation, but I'm not sure if I have a free slot for that card as of right now.
I see more decks going wide, not so much focusing on buffing 1 dude because removal is very popular here. Both boardwipes and targeted removal get played, but players here figure they might as well go wide and reduce the value of targeted removal rather than losing a big dude to both targeted removal and boardwipes. Out of my collection I have both Silent Arbiter and Propaganda. I don't feel like dropping 20 dollars on what's essentially a 4cmc tabernacle. Maybe I can just run either one or maybe both of those cards.
You'd rather run windfall and not re-use the graveyard than pay 2 extra mana in Time Reversal? Is the 2 extra that big a difference in a scenario where you need to play the card? I know twister is 1000x more expensive than Time reversal for a good reason, but still, it's maybe $2 versus $2000.
If your remark on Delver was true, we would have been playing copies of Zurgo Bellstriker back when that card was first released right alongside Monastery Swiftspear. Or better yet, we would have been splashing black to run Bump in the Night and possibly even Death's Shadow for a way better late game, Burn really wants to come out of the gate swinging and we like to start our opponents off at 18 or 17 when possible. Burn was never meant for the longer game. Sure, things like canopy lands and Grim Lavamancer give us extra reach later in the game, but you need to play this deck aware that your chances of winning drop dramatically for each subsequent turn beyond turn 5 no matter what. That's just how aggro has been set up and balanced throughout Magic's history. You either win fast or you don't win at all.
U/R delver is not a burn deck at all. It's a tempo deck that relies on blue to stay one step ahead of your opponent. Delver would be a no go in burn if it was mono red because not only is it not hasty, but the 1/1 body is way too easy to remove and we don't have library manipulation to make it flip. We can't protect delver with Daze or make Delver flip during our upkeep with Brainstorm; and thus there's no guarantee that Delver would give us the damage we paid our mana for. The point of the deck is that it uses blue cards to interfere with the opponent's gameplan just enough to stay ahead and win a damage race; while we try and win damage races through early brute force and sheer threat density. The blue cards in that deck are supposed to make up for it being slower than us (they're slower in exchange for consistency through library manipulation and so they can run Force of Will) and having less threat density than us. Thinking U/R Delver is a burn deck that just runs blue and not a full blown tempo strategy is a mistake, both as a pilot and as an opponent playing against the deck.
I like running snow lands bc they look cool and sometimes I get the occasional opponent that gets thrown off for a bit and thinks I'm running some secret skred tech. Even the golem was a 3/x it still wouldn't be good enough without haste. For reference, not even creatures as efficient as tarmogoyf are worthy of inclusion in the deck. The creatures we do run just happen to be burn spells on a stick due to either their haste abilities, or in the case of Eidolon, immediately dealing damage to your opponent if they try to play anything. Without these abilities, it's too easy for a creature to get bolted/plowed/pathed/pushed/decayed before your next turn rolls around, and then you've just spent mana on a card that dealt zero damage.
It's not worth playing unfortunately. No haste means it is easily removed before it has a chance to deal damage.
Blood moon against us is useless even with the canopy lands. If your board is really just 2 canopy lands and a mountain, a blood moon would be a bad play because it lets us play fireblast, and if it doesn't, all it does is stop us from using the land to drawing cards. It doesn't keep us off mana like it would against Sultai. As for B2B, it doesn't prevent us from sacing the lands to let us draw cards. I don't think the hate would be as bad as you guys think. Worst that could happen is we play one early and it gets wastelanded, which isn't the worst thing when you're running a couple extra land cards anyway.
I'd personally rather not have control over when we have these lands in play than not have control over being flooded out with no possible way to convert excess land into extra cards. If we only run 4 of them I don't think we're going to end up in a situation where we can't fireblast someone very often.
I literally said you could go up from 18-19 lands to 20-21 lands in an earlier post. I didn't miss anything.
Okay, cool, you can beat turbo Depths (except for the times in your tournament reports where you didn't). How do you do against other decks in the format? Can you beat DNT? Delver? U/W/x variants? I've come across those decks way more often than turbo Depths and while my odds of beating those decks are better than beating turbo Depths, I still need help from my sideboard to win consistently. I am genuinely curious to know how well you do against other decks with your current sideboard configuration.
They're untapped lands that give us red mana. I would just cut mountains, no spells. I also personally think 4 should be the minimum we use assuming a standard 20 land build, but I think it could be possible to run 5 or 6. It may actually be possible that the correct number is meta dependent and not static, where running more than 4 while cutting copies of Fireblast for Grim Lavamancer is correct if the meta favors longer games, while running 4 or less and retaining all 4 fireblast copies is correct if the meta favors shorter games.
The reason we don't play Street Wraith is because it makes our mulligan decisions horrible. We either have to cut land or cut threat density to run that card, which is not what you want when presented with a sketchy hand that contains one or more copies of Wraith. With the canopy lands, since they are also lands that tap for red mana, we can straight up just cut mountains for them and not screw up our ratios.
You're also not looking at these lands with the right mindset. The vast majority of games I've lost with burn have been to mana flooding. I still remember a match in this local tournament I was in 2 years ago against Pox that I lost because I flooded hard all 3 games. On one of the games I ended up drawing 6 mountains in a row without seeing another spell before I got cursed scroll'd to death. Needless to say I'm still salty about losing what should have been an excellent matchup due to mana flood, especially since that was my only loss that night. The draw ability is meant for those situations. If you go past turn 4, you're out of gas, and you're starting to flood, you can use the ability to give yourself another chance to draw more gas. Running these lands also means we're most likely okay going up to 20-21 land from 18-19, reducing our odds of mana screw early on in the game as well. These lands are not meant to be used to draw cards early on; they're meant to be used in the late game as a way to address what is arguably Burn's biggest weakness as a deck.
Any thoughts on the new canopy lands and quantity we should run? That was the big meat and potatoes of my post actually and I think we should address it ASAP in order to further improve and evolve burn.
Anyway, the main thing I want to post about is the new canopy lands that got spoiled in Modern Horizons. We now have access to up to 8 lands that we can sacrifice to draw us cards (Sunbaked Canyon and Fiery Islet), which is huge for us, as using our lands to draw extra cards shores up a major weakness with this deck. However, since they're nonbasic, make Price of Progress and Fireblast worse, and using them for mana costs us life (Negligible at first but if you get 2-3 of them out early, it adds up), I don't feel like 8 canopy lands is the right number for us. I wonder what everyone else who plays this deck thinks the right number should be?
My gut feeling is telling me that 4-6 is the sweet spot for us, but maybe someone here with more experience with the deck or more experience number crunching can give me a better or more statistically sound answer. I'm not worried about them not being fetchable, firstly because my deck is built with 20 mountains anyway, and secondly if I decide I want to put Grim Lavamancer back in my deck again, these canopy lands fuel him just like fetches do.
In my experience, we don't need to care about leylines. No well-designed legacy deck (the ones that will do well at GP's and such) is actually running them. Even if we do come across some scrub that does run Leylines in the board, we can still probably get there with our creatures and non-targeted burn.
In conclusion, we lose more win % to decks that run Wasteland than we gain against decks that run Leyline of Sanctity.
I think for an unknown/new meta it might just do me well to include Ith and Propaganda/arbiter. I'm leaning more towards arbiter because it can be tutored. This way I'll have something for either type of aggro deck.
Timetwister -> Propaganda or Karn Liberated
Copy artifact -> Phyrexian Metamorph
Power Artifact -> Worn Powerstone
Tabernacle -> Silent Arbiter or maybe Maze of Ith??
Mox Diamond -> Lotus Petal
Seems decent enough right?
There's numerous creature strategies I've play against, ranging from Omnath (both versions), Animar, elf tribal, Krenko, Zur, Muldrotha (this guy's been really popular as just a goodstuff deck recently), dino tribal, and a lot of other ones I can't remember off top. All I remember is they can either combo or just swing with big boards, and I kind of want it to be more generalized anyway since I just moved into a new area.
I guess I could consider evacuation, but I'm not sure if I have a free slot for that card as of right now.
You'd rather run windfall and not re-use the graveyard than pay 2 extra mana in Time Reversal? Is the 2 extra that big a difference in a scenario where you need to play the card? I know twister is 1000x more expensive than Time reversal for a good reason, but still, it's maybe $2 versus $2000.