Postby misterbojingles » Sun Mar 16, 2014 7:41 pm
Long time lurker, first time commenter.
I'm a bit of a black sheep in my group, but I have a great paper-record with the deck archetype (with an exception of being blown out by a completely wacky meta at one store event), I'm around 67% with the deck against an open (albeit Jund Monsters heavy) field since I started playing it. I thought I would just extol the virtues of a few unpopular cards that have turned out to be role-players for me for purposes of discussion. The first of which is Fated Conflagration.
The card has moved around in my deck both in the main and the SB as a two of (yes, sometimes even a 2-of in the main depending on the meta) and it's never disappointed me. There's never any fear of Obzedats, Blood Barons etc. and it muscles through the first or second big play of G/R monsters while letting you potentially set up your next two turns. Yes it's expensive, and we all want to lower our curves, but
I'll say this much--although the speed, cost and agility of burn are primary reasons this deck is good, red's ability to scry as aggressively as they do is nearly as good/important in my own experiences, and adding the ability to kill things we otherwise have no business killing without two-for-oneing ourselves to a deck with a very tempo-oriented agenda seems solid. It's not a 'wow' card, surely, and there'll be times where it collects dust in the SB, but I'm just suggesting it's perhaps worth more serious consideration as a 2 of in the SB against an open meta. When you call on it though, it delivers.
This brings me to another (pretty big) black sheep pick. I know the number of shocks we ought to have is occasionally debated because sometimes it feels like we're drawing too many, it feels a bit underpowered at times etc., but this is where I feel the scry element comes into play again. I am a huge fan of Magma Jet. HUGE....huge. And because of that, I've been (don't laugh? okaaaayy, laugh)
running 1-2 Spark Jolts over shocks for a while in order to further augment my scry and help dig me to my haymaker spells. It sounds underpowered at first, but frankly, with 1-2 jolts (and some additional temples), I've pushed my scry count in the deck up to 14 and it's felt...blissful. I don't have any numbers to back up this particular one since it's a recent addition, but the inspiration came in large part because of our addition of Blind Obedience (and my goodness, what an ace that card is), and again, I find SJ often does the job of shock for me in many cases anyway. Frankly I've bought into "in scry we trust" as one of the core principles that makes this deck tick.
Anyway, obviously not being dogmatic about any of this stuff, it's all testing/discussion fodder, but I figured I'd say something rather than lurk in the shadows shamefully with my oddball card selections.
