[Primer/Deck] Burn

[mistercakes]

that's fair, he seems like a pretty strong turn 3 though

[Brael]

Haven't posted here in awhile since I haven't been able to play Legacy very often. I like that dropping Lava Spikes is catching on with more people, I remember an argument about that a few months ago.

Not a fan of Abbot because despite the card he's still 0 guaranteed damage and there's too many blanks on his ability in my opinion. I think that cards like Lavamancer are a much better source of card advantage and being a mana sink. Plus, you really need to think of Abbot as a 3 drop so it's competing with something like Sulfuric Vortex for deck slots. Vortex is the stronger card by far.

Personally, I've been playing with Atarka's Command, I'm still not sure if I like it but it hasn't been horrible. On one hand it's a much better Skullcrack but on the other hand Taiga's sure are vulnerable. I've found I really want 2 Tagia's to go with my 10 fetches and that gives Wasteland a lot of power.

[Jon]

Played burn again for the first time in a month. My list from a few pages back -1 Mountain +1 Taiga main deck and SB was 3 Firecraft, 3 Cage, 3 Pyroblast, 3 Bridge, 3 Relvery.

Went 3-1 basically beat Aluren, Esper Stoneblade, and 4 Color Delver, lost to Grixis ( I drew dumpster ). All of my previous thoughts are still valid, Swiftspear sucks, you want a minimum of 2 Rings, and a minimum of 3 Searing Blazes.

Highlights of the Night

Eidelon into play off of Aluren

Barb Ring killing a Firewalker

Casting Lightning Bolt


I have fat fingers and I am posting from my iPhone.

[Brael]

Played burn again for the first time in a month. My list from a few pages back -1 Mountain +1 Taiga main deck and SB was 3 Firecraft, 3 Cage, 3 Pyroblast, 3 Bridge, 3 Relvery.

Went 3-1 basically beat Aluren, Esper Stoneblade, and 4 Color Delver, lost to Grixis ( I drew dumpster ). All of my previous thoughts are still valid, Swiftspear sucks, you want a minimum of 2 Rings, and a minimum of 3 Searing Blazes.

Highlights of the Night

Eidelon into play off of Aluren

Barb Ring killing a Firewalker

Casting Lightning Bolt


I have fat fingers and I am posting from my iPhone.

Disagree completely on Swiftspear. Assuming a 4 turn game Swiftspear is worth 8, 7, 5, and 3 damage if it connects depending on the turn you cast/resolve it compared to Goblin guides 8, 6, 4, and 2. This makes Swiftspear a higher damage creature than Goblin Guide. I think Guide is still slightly better because of the information and less reliance on the rest of your hand but Swiftspear is very good.

The two are very easy to compare too due to having the same mana cost. Assuming you see 10 cards in the game, you're 70% to cast either of them on turn 1 if you're casting them in that game because that's 7/10 cards total. and then 1/10 on turns 2, 3, and 4. So you can factor this in a handy little chart, this same thing is in my burn spreadsheet I've posted once or twice.
Swiftspear
T1 - .7*8
T2 - .1*7
T3 - .1*5
T4 - .1*4
Total - 7.2

Guide
T1 - .7*8
T2 - .1*6
T3 - .1*4
T4 - .1*2
Total - 6.8

So looking at that, Swiftspear is worth about half a point more damage during a typical game than Guide is worth.

Swiftspear calculations are assuming you draw 4 spells out of your 10 cards, 3 lands, Swiftspear, and 2 blanks. So there's plenty of room there to assume it's even better, mana becomes the real constraint.

On the Barbarian Ring question, I've thought a bit about it combined with the responses I got a couple pages back. What I came up with is the real constraint is in the number of Mountains you have. You have to assume your Taiga gets destroyed so you need to hit 2 basic Mountains (or fetches) in order to cast Fireblast. I run 19 lands, and 1 of those is a Taiga which leaves me 18 possible slots to play with. If I go 10-7-1 or 9-8-1 I'm left with 17 hits for Fireblast which is 84.7% to hit which is about the minimum I'm willing to accept in Burn. So that leaves me with 1 slot for Barbarian Ring. A second Ring would add two damage to what my deck can deal, but it would also drop me to 81.7% on Fireblast so it starts to trade 4 damage for 2 which isn't something I'm interested in doing.

This is the list I played most recently, but like I said I've found Taiga to be pretty vulnerable I almost feel like I need 2 of them MB, but every Taiga makes opposing Wastelands better and my PoP worse so maybe the correct solution is to go back to mono red, Atarka's Command is just so good though.

Land 19
1 Arid Mesa
4 Bloodstained Mire
4 Wooded Foothills
7 Mountain
1 Taiga
1 Barbarian Ring

Creatures 13
4 Monastery Swiftspear
4 Goblin Guide
4 Eidolon of the Great Revel
1 Grim Lavamancer

Spells 28
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Chain Lightning
4 Rift Bolt
3 Atarka's Command
4 Price of Progress
3 Searing Blaze
2 Sulfuric Vortex
4 Fireblast

Sideboard 15
3 Faerie Macabre
2 Volcanic Fallout
2 Ensnaring Bridge
2 Destructive Revelry
2 Red Elemental Blast
1 Grim Lavamancer
3 Exquisite Firecraft

[bigwerdz]

Inspired by the holiday I just want to say what I am thankful for. I am thankful for non basic lands, spells with a converted mana cost 3 or less, and creatures with less then 3 toughness.

[echofish]

https://www.reddit.com/r/MTGLegacy/comments/3v5z0h/complete_legacy_burn_in_foil_almost/

I think you guys will enjoy this :]

[kuroko16]

this list make 4-0 legacy daily


FREEZEY42 (4-0)
LEGACY DAILY #9074633 ON 11/30/2015



4 Eidolon of the Great Revel
4 Goblin Guide
4 Monastery Swiftspear

4 Chain Lightning
2 Exquisite Firecraft
4 Lava Spike
4 Rift Bolt

4 Fireblast
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Price of Progress
2 Searing Blaze

4 Bloodstained Mire
12 Mountain
4 Wooded Foothills

Sideboard
1 Searing Blaze
3 Angel of Despair
3 Pyrostatic Pillar
2 Red Elemental Blast
2 Searing Blood
2 Smash to Smithereens
2 Sulfuric Vortex

why 3x Angel of Despair in side?? :confused:

[turbo]

to fight show and tell decks...

[SecondSunrise]

to fight show and tell decks...

I think that Ashen Rider is the consensus best choice if you're in the market for that kind of effect, since exile > destroy and 2 triggers > 1 trigger (literally/mathematecally).

I am thinking about taking Burn to a big Legacy tournament in Italy on sunday, the discussion on these last pages has been very useful. Before the recent bannings I ran 2 copies of Flame Rift since there was a lot of Miracles and not as much Delver decks around, so the 4 dmg for 2 mana came with almost no drawback. Now I will have to look for something else for those slots.

A question for the supporters of Swiftspear: Is this card a 4 of if you play it, or can it make sense to play just 1 or 2 of them? Does this diminish their usefulness? Also, is it worth it to play them without Atarka's Command?

As for the SB, I have never been a huge fan of the REB effects, but maybe I am just not using them correctly... I know that I will want 2-3 GY hate effects, is Cage just the best one right now?

[Brael]

A question for the supporters of Swiftspear: Is this card a 4 of if you play it, or can it make sense to play just 1 or 2 of them? Does this diminish their usefulness? Also, is it worth it to play them without Atarka's Command?


You don't have to play 4 but I don't see why you wouldn't. I posted some numbers above showing that Swiftspear is worth more damage than Goblin Guide, but if you have the choice on T1 play the Guide first. The only real restriction on Swiftspear is that you need to hit atleast 4 out of 10 cards to pump it (assuming a turn 4 plan). Simple math would say that's 40% spells or 24 cards that trigger prowess but that's not quite accurate.

If you use a hypergeometric calculator you need 27 spells for a 77.1% chance (I wouldn't go lower than this) or 30 spells for an 86.4% chance. So the real downside to Swiftspear is that if you run it you have a maximum on the number of creatures you can afford and with 4 Guide/Eidolon the number of Swiftspears and Lavamancers is rather limited. Personally I run 13 creatures (4 Swiftspear, 4 Guide, 4 Eidolon, 1 Lavamancer) and 19 land which leaves me with 28 spells or a 80.6% chance of hitting what I need on Swiftspear... 75%-80% is usually where you want to be on card interactions.

Note that because of this I think Swiftspear is actually quite bad at maximizing Atarka's Command value because you can't go very wide. That said Command is still fine with Swiftspear because worst case Command is 3 damage+no life gain and best case around 5 damage. It's quite versatile with high upside so even if Swiftspear doesn't let you maximize it, it's good enough. Then again, I heavily favor having some answers to lifegain.


As for the SB, I have never been a huge fan of the REB effects, but maybe I am just not using them correctly... I know that I will want 2-3 GY hate effects, is Cage just the best one right now?

It depends on what you want the GY hate for. Faerie Macabre is my preferred hate because it only loses to Stifle and takes no mana. That said, it can't stop everything such as being a bit weak against Dredge.

[jrsthethird]

The better question is, is Swiftspear better than Lava Spike?

[Brael]

The better question is, is Swiftspear better than Lava Spike?

I think so, having creatures tends to make other creatures better because your opponent reaches a point where they can't remove them. For example, Guide on his own was playable as the only creature but he's much better in a 13 creature list since you have a reasonable chance of your opponent just running out of removal. If Swiftspear were your only creature I would rather have the Lava Spikes but in the typical list these days with Guide, Eidolon, and others I'm fine with the Swiftspears instead.

[Dr. No Face]

Hi everyone, I will be going to a (relatively) small tourney next weekend and I was thinking of slinging red spells. I'm kinda nervous, since I haven't really been to many tournaments, and I wanted to get your opinion of this against a (relatively, I know what at least 3 people going with me will be playing,) unknown field:

Creatures (13)
4 Goblin Guide (https://deckbox.org/mtg/Goblin%20Guide)
4 Monastery Swiftspear (https://deckbox.org/mtg/Monastery%20Swiftspear?printing=26182)
4 Eidolon of the Great Revel (https://deckbox.org/mtg/Eidolon%20of%20the%20Great%20Revel?printing=24430)
1 Grim Lavamancer (https://deckbox.org/mtg/Grim%20Lavamancer)

Sorceries (12)
4 Chain Lightning (https://deckbox.org/mtg/Chain%20Lightning)
4 Rift Bolt (https://deckbox.org/mtg/Rift%20Bolt?printing=660)
4 Lava Spike (https://deckbox.org/mtg/Lava%20Spike)

Instants (15)
4 Lightning Bolt (https://deckbox.org/mtg/Lightning%20Bolt)
4 Price of Progress (https://deckbox.org/mtg/Price%20of%20Progress)
4 Fireblast (https://deckbox.org/mtg/Fireblast)
3 Searing Blaze (https://deckbox.org/mtg/Searing%20Blaze)

Enchantments (2)
2 Sulfuric Vortex (https://deckbox.org/mtg/Sulfuric%20Vortex)

Lands (18)
10 Mountain (https://deckbox.org/mtg/Mountain?printing=29780)
4 Wooded Foothills (https://deckbox.org/mtg/Wooded%20Foothills)
3 Bloodstained Mire (https://deckbox.org/mtg/Bloodstained%20Mire)
1 Arid Mesa (https://deckbox.org/mtg/Arid%20Mesa)

Sideboard (15):
2 Searing Blood (https://deckbox.org/mtg/Searing%20Blood?printing=22429)
2 Volcanic Fallout (https://deckbox.org/mtg/Volcanic%20Fallout?printing=23254)
2 Smash to Smithereens (https://deckbox.org/mtg/Smash%20to%20Smithereens?printing=28238)
2 Pyrostatic Pillar (https://deckbox.org/mtg/Pyrostatic%20Pillar?printing=11704)
2 Tormod's Crypt (https://deckbox.org/mtg/Tormod's%20Crypt?printing=20034)
1 Grafdigger's Cage (https://deckbox.org/mtg/Grafdigger's%20Cage?printing=19464)
4 Exquisite Firecraft (https://deckbox.org/mtg/Exquisite%20Firecraft?printing=28303)


If I could make changes before the tournament, it would probably go like this:
-1 Lava Spike
-1 Fireblast
+2 Barbarian Ring

-1 Mountain
+1 Bloodstained Mire

Volcanic Fallout are for the delver decks, elves, and D&T (yes, 3 is a lot against them, and 4 is virtually impossible, but it also burns the opponent, which can be nice.)

4 Firecraft so I can race miracles and stuff like RUG Delver.

[Zoomer3989]

I top 16'd the PIQ today. Cast many bolts. Here is my list.

http://sales.starcitygames.com//deckdatabase/displaydeck.php?DeckID=92685

Creatures (10)

4 Goblin Guide
2 Grim Lavamancer
4 Eidolon of the Great Revel
Lands (20)

7 Mountain
3 Arid Mesa
3 Barbarian Ring
3 Scalding Tarn
4 Wooded Foothills
Spells (30)

1 Sensei's Divining Top
2 Sulfuric Vortex
4 Fireblast
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Price of Progress
3 Searing Blaze
4 Chain Lightning
4 Lava Spike
4 Rift Bolt
Sideboard

3 Ensnaring Bridge
2 Grafdigger's Cage
3 Pyrostatic Pillar
3 Pyroblast
1 Smash to Smithereens
3 Exquisite Firecraft

Top was awesome everytime I drew it, The 3 rings did real work. Anyone wants a list of my matches I can give em..

I started 0-2 and then rattled off 5-0 to get a sweet 100$ and 3 open points.

What are your thoughts on 2 Sensei's Divining Top? I like the idea of less then 4 Grims, but drawing into a 1-of with no draw in the deck seems optimistic. I like the idea of 3 Grims, 2 Tops, and 19 lands (11/8 fetches/mountains).

Also, how was Vortex mained? I'm not a fan of it as there are more creatures in Legacy these days, but Miracles is also roughly 15-20% of the field.

[LeoCop 90]

I usually tend to play 20 lands, and i think you absolutely want 20 if you are going to play 3 grims 2 tops because they make use of a lot of mana. You don't want a top or a grim in play with only one land.

[echofish]

http://tcdecks.net/deck.php?id=18930&iddeck=143683

Thoughts?

[Chatto]

http://tcdecks.net/deck.php?id=18930&iddeck=143683

Thoughts?

16 lands? That's bold.

[Brael]

http://tcdecks.net/deck.php?id=18930&iddeck=143683

Thoughts?

It's a very low curve which compliments the 16 lands but it looks to me like it would be too inconsistent. A 44.9% chance to cast Ensnaring Bridge on curve is just way too low to be running that card. Your mana development is also going to look something like 1-2-2-2 which means extra Fireblasts are dead cards and your Swiftspear isn't going to pump for much. Overall I think it just doesn't have the mana. If you play a 2 drop, 5 1 drops, and 2 lands that's 9 cards by turn 4 but you'll have drawn 10 cards meaning you don't have enough mana to play your whole hand quickly enough.

[echofish]

It's a very low curve which compliments the 16 lands but it looks to me like it would be too inconsistent. A 44.9% chance to cast Ensnaring Bridge on curve is just way too low to be running that card. Your mana development is also going to look something like 1-2-2-2 which means extra Fireblasts are dead cards and your Swiftspear isn't going to pump for much. Overall I think it just doesn't have the mana. If you play a 2 drop, 5 1 drops, and 2 lands that's 9 cards by turn 4 but you'll have drawn 10 cards meaning you don't have enough mana to play your whole hand quickly enough.

The plan is not to cast Bridge, but to show to Show and Tell, but there is also 4x Firecrafts in main. Anyways, he still got 1st place of 84 players.

[Chatto]

Either he was really lucky or really really skilled. I like the firecraft main. I just can't help but think he sometimes missed a landdrop, and those cards got stick in his hand. Still, fact is he got first. Sure would like to see a report.

[Jon]

What are your thoughts on 2 Sensei's Divining Top? I like the idea of less then 4 Grims, but drawing into a 1-of with no draw in the deck seems optimistic. I like the idea of 3 Grims, 2 Tops, and 19 lands (11/8 fetches/mountains).

Also, how was Vortex mained? I'm not a fan of it as there are more creatures in Legacy these days, but Miracles is also roughly 15-20% of the field.

The local burn expert has been playing my list and loving it. I'm close to putting two tops and testing that. I'll get back with you . If I play two tops I may want to play Swiftspear in the deck. Idk yet


I have fat fingers and I am posting from my iPhone.

[kuroko16]

SCG Legacy Premier IQ Denver, 5th Place

http://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/349066#online


2 blood moon in side.


opinion?

blood moon in some meta is amazing

[Zoomer3989]

The local burn expert has been playing my list and loving it. I'm close to putting two tops and testing that. I'll get back with you . If I play two tops I may want to play Swiftspear in the deck. Idk yet


I have fat fingers and I am posting from my iPhone.

I actually tried a 2-2 split of Grim and Top this weekend playing against my friends on 4C/Grixis Delver. I never drew the Tops, but Grim even as a pair felt better then Swiftspear at times. I sadly never drew Top, except for one game where I lost to T1 Stifle on my only land.

I think you do need 20 land though. I also think we should consider Volcanic Fallout as a SB card, it's pretty good against most Delver variants, and can be brought in reasonably in most other creature matchups (Merfolk, Goblins, Elves, D/T, Stoneblade) without losing too much.

[paeng4983]

http://tcdecks.net/deck.php?id=19015&iddeck=144413

OLA burn lovers!

:cool:

[Chronatog]

Hello everyone! I'm a new Burn player and just started with the deck. I played Magic in the 90s, stopped playing in 2001, and got back earlier this year. I always played mono-blue or blue-something decks (e.g. my current decks are Merfolk and OmniTell), but recently I decided to try something new. And since Red is my second favorite color after Blue, Burn was a natural choice.

Below is my current deck that I tried and liked. I don't use fetches, landfall spells, Goblin Guide, and Grim Lavamancer because I don't like to expose myself to Stifle, inflict unnecessary pain (though I quickly learned that in absence of fetch lands Stifle can find another easy pray - suspended Rift Bolt). I also don;t like to give the opponent and advantage of drawing lands and building board quickly; this is a huge risk for me in the Miracles infested environment.

Main:

4 Eidolon of the Great Revel
4 Monastery Swiftspear
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Chain Lightning
4 Forked Bolt
4 Rift Bolt
4 Price of Progress
4 Fireblast
2 Exquisite Firecraft
2 Sulfuric Vortex
2 Smash to Smithereens
2 Sudden Shock
1 Searing Blood
18 Mountain
1 Barbarian Ring

Sideboard:

2 Exquisite Firecraft
2 Smash to Smithereens
2 Searing Blood
2 Ensnaring Bridge
2 Grafdigger's Cage
2 Relic of Progenitus
3 Pithing Needle


There are several questions I have:

First, does it really make sense to use Forked Bolt instead of Lava Spike? I don't have any mass removal and somehow need to deal with small creatures (tokens, for example). However, a counter argument I have is that it is better to finish the game by damaging the opponent rather than cleaning up the table.

Second, does it make sense to have 2x Smash to Smithereens in main? I'm concerned mostly about Chalice of the Void in game one, but Umezawa's Jitte and Batterskull are also unpleasant.

Third, does it help to have Sudden Shock in main? I liked its split-second ability as it avoids Counterbalance shenanigans. It also works around some game changing activation, as I expect my opponent to have only a few LP left by the time I'm out of gas and there is some control is established. But RR for two damages is quite expensive. So still unsure here.

Fourth, Exquisite Firecraft is expensive (3 cmc) and slow (sorcery), but basically provides guaranteed four damages. In older conversations I noticed a split opinion on Exquisite Firecraft in main, but still like having it. Though, again, not sure. So what is the most recent take on this?

Fifth, how is to get rid of Leyline of Sanctity without splashing green or using something like Apocalypse? I won two games over Leyline with help of my creatures, Price of Progress, and Searing Blood but it was tough and I attribute my victory to luck.

Finally, what is the best strategy against Sneak and Show and Reanimator? Other than having 2x Sulfuric Vortex, siding in Ensnaring Bridge to stop fatties and/or Pithing Needle to limit Griselbrand or suppress Sneak Attack. I was able to kill Griselbrand twice but at great price - ending up with no lands and my next top-decks weren't good. Are any red cards (post-Odyssey) that can kill big creatures or have Diabolic Edict effect to deal with Emrakul, the Aeons Torn?

Any feedback/opinions/answers are welcome.

Update: One more questions, what about Vexing Devil as an additional creature?

[Jon]

I'll write a complete response when I get off work but your reasoning for not using fetches and guides is very poor and shows you have no understanding of the deck or card choices we have been using forever.


I have fat fingers and I am posting from my iPhone.

[Ace/Homebrew]

First, does it really make sense to use Forked Bolt instead of Lava Spike?
No.


Is it better to finish the game by damaging the opponent rather than cleaning up the table?
Yes.
Increase the number of 'Searing' effects to at least 4 and get rid of shocks and main deck artifact removal.


Does it make sense to have 2x Smash to Smithereens in main?
No.


I'm concerned mostly about Chalice of the Void in game one, but Umezawa's Jitte and Batterskull are also unpleasant.
A fraction of the meta uses these cards. Your plan is strictly to bring your opponent's life total from 20 to 0 as quickly as possible, then you adjust as needed games 2 & 3. Besides, you run Sulfuric Vortex for a reason. :wink:


Does it help to have Sudden Shock in main?
No


Exquisite Firecraft is expensive (3 cmc) and slow (sorcery), but basically provides guaranteed four damages. In older conversations I noticed a split opinion on Exquisite Firecraft in main, but still like having it. Though, again, not sure. So what is the most recent take on this?
Seems playable, but probably best as a sideboard card against :u:.


How do I get rid of Leyline of Sanctity without splashing green or using something like Apocalypse?
Can't! Anarchy is better than Apocalypse, but neither are playable in Burn.
Best ways around the Leyline are creatures and non-targeting damage. Here's where Goblin Guide shines.


What is the best strategy against Sneak and Show and Reanimator? Other than having 2x Sulfuric Vortex, siding in Ensnaring Bridge to stop fatties and/or Pithing Needle to limit Griselbrand or suppress Sneak Attack.
Seems like a good strategy. No deck can beat all other decks. Sometimes you have bad matchups. Yours include decks that play Show and Tell.


What about Vexing Devil as an additional creature?
Great in your opening hand, bad all other times. So, bad overall...


You don't have to play with Goblin Guides or fetch lands to win, but most lists use them because it has proven to help get wins.
You do have to start using Lava Spike immediately!

[Chronatog]

You don't have to play with Goblin Guides or fetch lands to win, but most lists use them because it has proven to help get wins.
You do have to start using Lava Spike immediately!
Thank you. You answers are helpful.

I will get some Lava Spikes and the rest is easy to adjust for me as I have all cards I need. However, I will wait with Goblin Guides and fetches because don't want to commit capital to too many cards/decks. At the end of the day, I need to practice with Burn for a while before I will need to get more powerful cards. At this point I think familiarity with the deck and skills playing it are more critical for me than access to more cards.

[Chronatog]

I'll write a complete response when I get off work but your reasoning for not using fetches and guides is very poor and shows you have no understanding of the deck or card choices we have been using forever.
That's a pity that you weren't able to enlighten me on how to choose cards wisely. Wouldn't want you to waste any more of your time time on this, so please don't bother providing a complete response. Someone else already answered all my questions in a pretty constructive manner. However, thank you for your participation.

[Brael]

Below is my current deck that I tried and liked. I don't use fetches, landfall spells, Goblin Guide, and Grim Lavamancer because I don't like to expose myself to Stifle, inflict unnecessary pain (though I quickly learned that in absence of fetch lands Stifle can find another easy pray - suspended Rift Bolt). I also don;t like to give the opponent and advantage of drawing lands and building board quickly; this is a huge risk for me in the Miracles infested environment.

Lots of things here, first of all your decklist needs a lot of work. You need to play efficient burn spells, other people have different approaches to this (I take a very formulaic approach to this deck) but we all come to mostly the same conclusions (there are some areas of debate), so I'll lay out the formula approach since that's what I'm good at. In Burn you're trying to win no later than turn 4 which means you'll see 10 cards on the play and 11 on the draw. You're also playing only a few lands which means you're mana development is going to be somewhere in the realm of 1-2-2-3 or 8 mana, in your optimal scenario it's 1-2-3-4 or 10 mana. So putting this together that means you need to deal 20 damage with 10 cards and 8 total mana or a ratio of 2.5:1. To extend this from 10 cards to 60 it means your deck needs to hold 120 damage with a total cost no higher than 48 optimally or 60 maximum (note that you do actually hit this at ~131 damage in 60 mana but you're right on the edge... see my note below on dealing with lifegain)

This means that you need very efficient cards and you have to be careful with your manasinks, you can only run them when you make other areas of your deck cheap.

So lets go through some of your concerns 1 by 1:

Fetchlands - In mono red you don't need fetches unless you're running Grim Lavamancer. If you're running Lavamancer though fetches help a lot, they represent 2 more cards in your graveyard which means 1 more activation. Really your choice to run these should revolve around two decisions: Do you want to use Lavamancer and how many mana sinks can you afford to run? Note that the recent craze has been to play Top as a manasink (it's fantastic in that role) and fetchlands are very, very good with Top.

Landfall - Searing Blaze kills a few things that Searing Blood cannot such as Monastery Mentor, opposing Monastery Swiftspears, an early Goyf, and a few others. It is very bad to aim a regular burn spell at a creature, sometimes you have to do it but if you do it too much you're going to lose a lot of games. Additionally, Searing Blood can be countered by another removal spell while Blaze cannot. Every time you aim a regular burn spell at a creature you are getting 2 for 1'ed. In Burn 3 life is worth 1 card (actually it's getting pretty close to 4 life these days). If you aim a burn spell at their creature you're down a card and they're effectively up 3 life. It will take 2 more burn spells to catch up to where you should be. If you do this, you will lose due to essentially giving your opponent a lot of card advantage.

Goblin Guide - Burn has evolved from it's origins of being non interactive, the best spells these days are all interactive and Guide is near the top of the list. You're thinking about Guide all wrong, he doesn't give the opponent extra cards because they're dead before they ever get to make those land drops, in part thanks to his efficiency. In general, you don't care if your creatures are killed in Burn, if they swing twice you got solid value out of them and if they swing once you'll have gotten enough value because it means your opponent slowed themselves down to deal with your card while they're under the threat of your clock. Guides trigger is all upside... for you. He's a hasted 2 power 1 drop and he even lets you look at your opponents cards, even against something like Miracles where they're manipulating their library into drawing cards he reveals when the coast is clear for your spells and when it isn't he eats up a bunch of their mana because you can do silly things with making them put a land on top, then making them move something on top for Counterbalance, and then making them put the land on top again.... all while they continue to take damage from him.

Grim Lavamancer - He's really good but he uses a ton of mana. He kills things like Deathrite Shaman without costing you cards, lets you play the control role that you have to play against a deck like Infect, still does things in the face of a Batterskull, prevents Batterskull by killing Stoneforge Mystic without costing you a card, gives you more time by shrinking Goyf, trades 1:1 with Liliana of the Veil, stops Delver of Secrets, and much more. If your opponent wastes half their mana for the turn casting Stifle on Lavamancer are you really going to be upset? That's 1 less mana they have to do other things, and if they do have Stifle and you know it you can just swing with him for 1 damage or use him at the end of your opponents turn to tap them out and ensure your higher impact plays resolve.


First, does it really make sense to use Forked Bolt instead of Lava Spike? I don't have any mass removal and somehow need to deal with small creatures (tokens, for example). However, a counter argument I have is that it is better to finish the game by damaging the opponent rather than cleaning up the table.

It doesn't make sense to use Forked Bolt at all. Look at my guidelines above, it's below the ratio you need and usually even worse than Shock. Others will disagree with me but Lava Spike isn't worth running either in my opinion. The deck has evolved well beyond the point where a card that does literally nothing until the turn you win is playable. Tokens shouldn't be much of an issue for you if any, by the time they come down you've moved past the stage of the game where your creatures are important but if you need to deal with them use Volcanic Fallout, it's a good sweeper and it even has applications as an uncounterable card against decks that lengthen the game like Miracles.


Second, does it make sense to have 2x Smash to Smithereens in main? I'm concerned mostly about Chalice of the Void in game one, but Umezawa's Jitte and Batterskull are also unpleasant.

Smash to Smithereens makes no sense mainboard and it makes even less sense in your list. Currently you are running almost no 1 drops so only Chalice on 2 is going to effect you and Smash happens to be a 2 drop. If you want to deal with Jitte you can kill the creature it's on (Searing effects and Lavamancer are great for this). If you want to deal with Batterskull, Sulfuric Vortex comes down before it can swing, Skullcrack can work in a pinch, and Atarka's Command is amazing (note that Command also plays well with Lavamancer since it means you want fetches). Additionally, if you pump the damage output of your deck enough you should be able to still win the game through 1 Batterskull hit (see my damage calculations above, personally I aim for 24 life instead of 20 and realistically your opponents will take ~2 per game from fetches so that can leave you a lot of cushion for lifegain).


Third, does it help to have Sudden Shock in main? I liked its split-second ability as it avoids Counterbalance shenanigans. It also works around some game changing activation, as I expect my opponent to have only a few LP left by the time I'm out of gas and there is some control is established. But RR for two damages is quite expensive. So still unsure here.

Sudden Shock makes no sense. First of all it doesn't avoid Counterbalance as the ability still triggers, it just means they have to blind flip it, but 2 is the cost they're most likely to keep on top anyways so that's easy to do. Second of all, you should never play a burn spell worse than Incinerate. The logic for this is pretty simple (and these days it could probably be changed to something better than Incinerate). Basically, Incinerate is a spell that barely sees play as it is and it's the best of the 2 mana for 3 damage spells. So a pretty simple guideline is that if your spell is worse than Incinerate you should just be playing Incinerate instead. And if you're desperate enough that you're playing Incinerate you should really be asking yourself why you're playing it in the first place instead of something else. Or to put this in terms of the formula... do you really want to be spending 1/4 of the total mana you have available in a game to deal just 1/10 of the damage you need to be dealing? If you're trying to beat a Counterbalance/Top lock (which really isn't that hard, you don't need to go out of your way to do it) why wouldn't you play a Shock instead, make your opponent put Top on top to counter (hint: Use Goblin Guide here to know when to go for it) and then in response to tapping the top play something else like a 2 drop. Either way you're going to get something through, and you might even make them shuffle their Top down some cards if you do it right.


Fourth, Exquisite Firecraft is expensive (3 cmc) and slow (sorcery), but basically provides guaranteed four damages. In older conversations I noticed a split opinion on Exquisite Firecraft in main, but still like having it. Though, again, not sure. So what is the most recent take on this?

It's expensive and you can't run very many 3 drops. Mainboard I would run Vortex because beating a little bit of lifegain is way more common than needing to beat a counter. It's a great sideboard option though.


Fifth, how is to get rid of Leyline of Sanctity without splashing green or using something like Apocalypse? I won two games over Leyline with help of my creatures, Price of Progress, and Searing Blood but it was tough and I attribute my victory to luck.

There's a few ways to beat Leyline of Sanctity. The first is to run Anarchy but that's a pretty bad idea unless you just need to beat Enchantress. The second is to burn your opponents blockers and hit them in the face with your creatures. The third is to use cards that don't target like Volcanic Fallout, Price of Progress, Flame Rift, Eidolon of the Great Revel, Sulfuric Vortex, and Tyrant's Choice (if you run black), note that green (which you said you don't want to play) also gives you Atarka's Command which doesn't target and conveniently enough has 2 modes that are good against Leyline. The fourth and best way is to use a mix of options 2 and 3. There is a 5th option if you really want to go deep which is playing Chaos Warp, but I would recommend against that.


Finally, what is the best strategy against Sneak and Show and Reanimator? Other than having 2x Sulfuric Vortex, siding in Ensnaring Bridge to stop fatties and/or Pithing Needle to limit Griselbrand or suppress Sneak Attack. I was able to kill Griselbrand twice but at great price - ending up with no lands and my next top-decks weren't good. Are any red cards (post-Odyssey) that can kill big creatures or have Diabolic Edict effect to deal with Emrakul, the Aeons Torn?


Ensnaring Bridge doesn't do much, I would take a Skullcrack or Atarka's Command over an Ensnaring Bridge every time if Griselbrand is the enemy (it's still good against Emrakul though). Griselbrand even without gaining life will very effectively race you and Pithing Needle is not where you want to be, a single hit means they gain 7 life and at that point the card draw doesn't matter (in burn each of your cards equate to 3 damage, getting hit by Griselbrand is essentially the same thing as making you discard 3 cards... except you still have to use the mana to pay for them). Sneak and Show is slightly unfavorable but they're inconsistent and you can capitalize on that and race. Against Reanimator I wouldn't ever expect to win a match. Personally I use a couple Faerie Macabre but it's really for other decks, against Reanimator they simply budge your game win rate from 1% to 5%. If you want something else to fight Show and Tell use Red Elemental Blast



Update: One more questions, what about Vexing Devil as an additional creature?

Vexing Devil is quite bad, on turn 1 it's going to represent 4 damage but it drops in value every turn after that. 2 power with haste is much more effective than 4 power without haste (turns+1 they both deal 4, but the hasted creature got some in sooner which gets around removal) and if Vexing Devil is ever going to do more than 4 they'll just take the 4 instead. You also only have so many creature slots to run. So with Vexing Devil let me play through the turns for you. To start with you get 10 cards, that's 7 in your opener, and 1 on each subsequent turn. So we can say that in a game where you see the card you're 70% to see it on turn 1, 10% on turn 2, 10% on turn 3, and 10% on turn 4. Now lets also compare something like Swiftspear which will deal ~2 damage per turn (actually with good sequencing and other creatures to play it's closer to 2.5). Finally lets say that the creature can only swing for 1 turn after it's cast before it's dead or able to be blocked. So here's the damage each creature deals over that game based on the turn it's cast:



Turns 1 2 3 4
Devil 4 4 4 0
Swiftspear 4 4 4 2


Now lets overlay that with the chances to draw it


Turns 1 2 3 4 Total
Devil 2.8 .4 .4 0 3.6
Swiftspear 2.8 .4 .4 .2 3.8


But that's in a realistically optimal situation for the Devil. Lets instead say that whenever your opponent untaps they're going to kill or wall your creature. Now it looks like this



Turns 1 2 3 4
Devil 0 0 0 0
Swiftspear 2 2 2 2


While technically the worst case scenario for both creatures is 0 damage, it's much easier to achieve that for the Devil than the Swiftspear, instead the above is a more realistic case. Vexing Devil just isn't good enough.

[Brael]

Bleh, double post... oh well.


I actually tried a 2-2 split of Grim and Top this weekend playing against my friends on 4C/Grixis Delver. I never drew the Tops, but Grim even as a pair felt better then Swiftspear at times. I sadly never drew Top, except for one game where I lost to T1 Stifle on my only land.

I think you do need 20 land though. I also think we should consider Volcanic Fallout as a SB card, it's pretty good against most Delver variants, and can be brought in reasonably in most other creature matchups (Merfolk, Goblins, Elves, D/T, Stoneblade) without losing too much.

After the discussion I had a page or two back about Swiftspear and it's costs on deck construction I came to the realization that Swiftspear should not be a 4 of card. I still maintain that it's our strongest 1 drop creature dealing even more damage than Guide (if the deck is built properly) while being more resilient, but there's just not enough room in the deck for it. After doing a few hypergeometric calculations it looks like our plan and requirements for Swiftspear need us to have 29 cards to trigger prowess in order to make it consistently strong enough. Additionally we're probably playing 19 lands so Swiftspear means there's only 12 slots total for creatures.

Eidolon is usually a 4 of creatures too, so that means there's 8 slots to split between Guide, Lavamancer, and Swiftspear. Before I was running 4 Guide, 4 Swiftspear, 4 Eidolon, and 1 Lavamancer, but with this realization that 18 lands means 12 creatures is optimal if you're supporting a T1 prowess I need to rethink things. Looking at it from a position of 1 drops first, I'm 100% certain that I want 4 Guides. So if I put Eidolon on the chopping block I still have 9 desired includes for the other 8 creature slots. Lavamancer has the biggest downside but when he's good he's really good so there's a high upside too and Eidolon is always great. So by default that leaves Swiftspear as the odd one out that's getting dropped to 3, despite it having the highest max damage.

This also means that if I want to go up to a second Lavamancer dropping Swiftspear to 2 would be the first look, but at 2 prowess triggers I don't want to warp the deck. Perhaps in concession to the mana Eidolon #4 is the cut for Lavamancer #2... something to think about in a creature base, I've always preferred 14 or so but Swiftspear seems to demand 12. I'm not sure if a second Lavamancer MB plays well with a second Top though, that's a lot of mana sinks in addition to the 3 drops. But I suppose one factor that mitigates top costs is that it really only needs to be activated for us every 2-3 turns while mana is tight where other decks often activate every turn.

I really like the idea of Top, I may even consider going up to 3 and adding in more fetchlands to shuffle (thinking something like 6 Mountain, 1 Taiga, 1 Barbarian Ring, 11 fetch). It's a bit of a mana sink and definitely hurts on life, but it's just so good in this deck because the difference between our cards is so huge these days, cards either do 4 damage or 0 damage. Plus, just once I want to pull off the Miracles combo with double tops+prowess on a Swiftspear.

[Chronatog]

Lots of things here, first of all your decklist needs a lot of work. You need to play efficient burn spells, other people have different approaches to this (I take a very formulaic approach to this deck) but we all come to mostly the same conclusions (there are some areas of debate), so I'll lay out the formula approach since that's what I'm good at.
First of all, thank you for your very detailed and thoughtful response. Appreciate your time and efforts. It looks like you know what you are talking about so, if you don't mind, I would like to ask some more questions.


In Burn you're trying to win no later than turn 4 which means you'll see 10 cards on the play and 11 on the draw. You're also playing only a few lands which means you're mana development is going to be somewhere in the realm of 1-2-2-3 or 8 mana, in your optimal scenario it's 1-2-3-4 or 10 mana. So putting this together that means you need to deal 20 damage with 10 cards and 8 total mana or a ratio of 2.5:1. To extend this from 10 cards to 60 it means your deck needs to hold 120 damage with a total cost no higher than 48 optimally or 60 maximum (note that you do actually hit this at ~131 damage in 60 mana but you're right on the edge... see my note below on dealing with lifegain)
Understood, efficiency is crucial for Burn and obviously I have some deadweight in my deck. How did you derive 131 damage? I got totally 58 mana, assuming Rift Ball cost one and Fireblast zero, and 138 damage, assuming that Swiftspear will be able to deal five, Eidolon only two (removal that removes it), Price of Progress and Sulfuric Vortex both will deal four on average, and Barbarian Ring is a zero cost spell with two damages, resulting in 2.3 damage per mana (rounding down). Doesn't look very efficient, but not bad.


Fetchlands - In mono red you don't need fetches unless you're running Grim Lavamancer. If you're running Lavamancer though fetches help a lot, they represent 2 more cards in your graveyard which means 1 more activation. Really your choice to run these should revolve around two decisions: Do you want to use Lavamancer and how many mana sinks can you afford to run? Note that the recent craze has been to play Top as a manasink (it's fantastic in that role) and fetchlands are very, very good with Top.
I figured out that if I have no use for Lavamancer because he looks a bit slow, why bother with fetchlands and landfall. However, I see your point about Searing Blaze below and it looks like only because of Blaze it worth using fetches.


Landfall - Searing Blaze kills a few things that Searing Blood cannot such as Monastery Mentor, opposing Monastery Swiftspears, an early Goyf, and a few others. It is very bad to aim a regular burn spell at a creature, sometimes you have to do it but if you do it too much you're going to lose a lot of games. Additionally, Searing Blood can be countered by another removal spell while Blaze cannot. Every time you aim a regular burn spell at a creature you are getting 2 for 1'ed. In Burn 3 life is worth 1 card (actually it's getting pretty close to 4 life these days). If you aim a burn spell at their creature you're down a card and they're effectively up 3 life. It will take 2 more burn spells to catch up to where you should be. If you do this, you will lose due to essentially giving your opponent a lot of card advantage.
I liked how Searing Blood works well around Leyline of Sanctity, but agree with your point that all possible damage should be directed to the opponent. I just wanted to keep things simple as with Blazes I will need to use fetches. How many fetches would you recommend to use?


Goblin Guide - Burn has evolved from it's origins of being non interactive, the best spells these days are all interactive and Guide is near the top of the list. You're thinking about Guide all wrong, he doesn't give the opponent extra cards because they're dead before they ever get to make those land drops, in part thanks to his efficiency. In general, you don't care if your creatures are killed in Burn, if they swing twice you got solid value out of them and if they swing once you'll have gotten enough value because it means your opponent slowed themselves down to deal with your card while they're under the threat of your clock. Guides trigger is all upside... for you. He's a hasted 2 power 1 drop and he even lets you look at your opponents cards, even against something like Miracles where they're manipulating their library into drawing cards he reveals when the coast is clear for your spells and when it isn't he eats up a bunch of their mana because you can do silly things with making them put a land on top, then making them move something on top for Counterbalance, and then making them put the land on top again.... all while they continue to take damage from him.
Guides trigger perhaps is upside for me in situations when there is no land on the top of the deck. Otherwise, I still play don't know what was below that land the opponent just put into his hand. But I see how it is still beneficial for me in other situations.


Grim Lavamancer - He's really good but he uses a ton of mana. He kills things like Deathrite Shaman without costing you cards, lets you play the control role that you have to play against a deck like Infect, still does things in the face of a Batterskull, prevents Batterskull by killing Stoneforge Mystic without costing you a card, gives you more time by shrinking Goyf, trades 1:1 with Liliana of the Veil, stops Delver of Secrets, and much more. If your opponent wastes half their mana for the turn casting Stifle on Lavamancer are you really going to be upset? That's 1 less mana they have to do other things, and if they do have Stifle and you know it you can just swing with him for 1 damage or use him at the end of your opponents turn to tap them out and ensure your higher impact plays resolve.
In my understanding, Lavamancer is efficient against all those fast decks when he comes into play on T1, so I can activate it on T2. He needs cards in my graveyeard, and potentially I will have three on T2 (two fetches and one spell, keeping one land untapped for Lavamancer activation). However, this means loosing speed and missing totally six damages. Does it make sense to loose speed and efficiency?

Additionally, against Infect, two damages doesn't help much as all they need is to activate Inkmoth Nexus and pump it. Sudden Shock, by the way, kills Inkmoth instantly.


It doesn't make sense to use Forked Bolt at all. Look at my guidelines above, it's below the ratio you need and usually even worse than Shock. Others will disagree with me but Lava Spike isn't worth running either in my opinion. The deck has evolved well beyond the point where a card that does literally nothing until the turn you win is playable. Tokens shouldn't be much of an issue for you if any, by the time they come down you've moved past the stage of the game where your creatures are important but if you need to deal with them use Volcanic Fallout, it's a good sweeper and it even has applications as an uncounterable card against decks that lengthen the game like Miracles.
Yes, Forked Bolt is just ok, but it can kill two birds with the same stone. Or two elves, most likely. Anyway, I liked this idea, but it is a bit narrow approach.

I saw Volcanic Fallout and was not sure about cmc of 3. Plus it kills my creatures. Perhaps it can be used in sideboard, but I am not sure I have space for it. Do you use Volcanic Fallout? What is your experience with it?


Smash to Smithereens makes no sense mainboard and it makes even less sense in your list. Currently you are running almost no 1 drops so only Chalice on 2 is going to effect you and Smash happens to be a 2 drop. If you want to deal with Jitte you can kill the creature it's on (Searing effects and Lavamancer are great for this). If you want to deal with Batterskull, Sulfuric Vortex comes down before it can swing, Skullcrack can work in a pinch, and Atarka's Command is amazing (note that Command also plays well with Lavamancer since it means you want fetches). Additionally, if you pump the damage output of your deck enough you should be able to still win the game through 1 Batterskull hit (see my damage calculations above, personally I aim for 24 life instead of 20 and realistically your opponents will take ~2 per game from fetches so that can leave you a lot of cushion for lifegain).
I play Merfolks, and must say that Chalice on one on T2 is very helpful. Since my Burn deck has 16 spells with cmc of 1, I was keeping Chalice in mind. However, I agree with you that normally most of the decks don't use Chalices, so I will move Smash to Smithereens to sideboard.


Sudden Shock makes no sense. First of all it doesn't avoid Counterbalance as the ability still triggers, it just means they have to blind flip it, but 2 is the cost they're most likely to keep on top anyways so that's easy to do.
Yes, that is why in case of Counterbalance in play I intended to cast Sudden Shock after casting any other cmc 1 spell in the same chain.


Second of all, you should never play a burn spell worse than Incinerate. The logic for this is pretty simple (and these days it could probably be changed to something better than Incinerate). Basically, Incinerate is a spell that barely sees play as it is and it's the best of the 2 mana for 3 damage spells. So a pretty simple guideline is that if your spell is worse than Incinerate you should just be playing Incinerate instead. And if you're desperate enough that you're playing Incinerate you should really be asking yourself why you're playing it in the first place instead of something else. Or to put this in terms of the formula... do you really want to be spending 1/4 of the total mana you have available in a game to deal just 1/10 of the damage you need to be dealing
I agree that Incinerate is pretty weak in comparison with other alternatives. However, I would disagree with your comparison. Regeneration was a thing back in the days and paying one additional mana to finally getting of any annoying creature with regeneration was not expensive at all. As I don't see any creatures with regeneration these days, so Incinerate is just irrelevant.


If you're trying to beat a Counterbalance/Top lock (which really isn't that hard, you don't need to go out of your way to do it) why wouldn't you play a Shock instead, make your opponent put Top on top to counter (hint: Use Goblin Guide here to know when to go for it) and then in response to tapping the top play something else like a 2 drop. Either way you're going to get something through, and you might even make them shuffle their Top down some cards if you do it right.
Why would Miracles player put a spell with cmc of 2 on the top of his deck? Other than Price of Progress, there is nothing else I can think about that can scary Miracles and they either fetch/play basics (and with help of Goblin Guide, they will have more options to choose from), or have Force of Will ready. It makes more sense to have one mana spell on the top and three and six mana spells floating in case of Vortex or Fireblast.


It's [Exquisite Firecraft] expensive and you can't run very many 3 drops. Mainboard I would run Vortex because beating a little bit of lifegain is way more common than needing to beat a counter. It's a great sideboard option though.
Makes sense. I think I will move all Exquisite Firecraft to sideboard and add more Vortices to main.


There's a few ways to beat Leyline of Sanctity. The first is to run Anarchy but that's a pretty bad idea unless you just need to beat Enchantress. The second is to burn your opponents blockers and hit them in the face with your creatures. The third is to use cards that don't target like Volcanic Fallout, Price of Progress, Flame Rift, Eidolon of the Great Revel, Sulfuric Vortex, and Tyrant's Choice (if you run black), note that green (which you said you don't want to play) also gives you Atarka's Command which doesn't target and conveniently enough has 2 modes that are good against Leyline. The fourth and best way is to use a mix of options 2 and 3. There is a 5th option if you really want to go deep which is playing Chaos Warp, but I would recommend against that.
I completely forgot about Anarchy and Ace/Homebrew also reminded me about this card. And I understand why I don't see players using it anymore. However, you mentioned Flame Rift and I initially was thinking about addis some of them into my deck, but when realized that nobody plays them anymore decided to think about them more. Why Flame Rift is not popular anyway?

I saw Chaos Warp and though it looks interesting at the first look, I don't think I can efficiently incorporate it into Burn. This card is just too narrow and expensive.


Ensnaring Bridge doesn't do much, I would take a Skullcrack or Atarka's Command over an Ensnaring Bridge every time if Griselbrand is the enemy (it's still good against Emrakul though). Griselbrand even without gaining life will very effectively race you and Pithing Needle is not where you want to be, a single hit means they gain 7 life and at that point the card draw doesn't matter (in burn each of your cards equate to 3 damage, getting hit by Griselbrand is essentially the same thing as making you discard 3 cards... except you still have to use the mana to pay for them). Sneak and Show is slightly unfavorable but they're inconsistent and you can capitalize on that and race. Against Reanimator I wouldn't ever expect to win a match. Personally I use a couple Faerie Macabre but it's really for other decks, against Reanimator they simply budge your game win rate from 1% to 5%. If you want something else to fight Show and Tell use Red Elemental Blast
Skullcrack looks very useful. Somehow I missed this card. However, it looks more like a sideboard card to use instead of Searing Blaze.

Why do you use a couple of Faerie Macabre instead of a couple of Grafdigger's Cage? Cage can help against elves as well.

Also, does it make sense for Burn to fight back and use REB or Pyroblast? I was thinking about having a few in sideboard, but couldn't justify space.

The same is with Vexing Shusher. I got a playset, but realized that using them contradicts to the idea of winning quickly since most likely Shusher will be removed quickly, if not immediately and it makes sense to cats it on T3, followed by uncounterable Firebalst. What do you think about Shusher?


Vexing Devil is quite bad
I see. You assume that if Devil is cats on T4, it will be removed or walled. Ok. Why Swiftspear can be walled if it was cast on T4?

And how did you calculate "chances to draw" by turn x? Are these numbers probabilities of drawing by Tx or probabilities of drawing and casting?

[RhoxWarMonk]

I can help answer at least a few of your questions.



I figured out that if I have no use for Lavamancer because he looks a bit slow, why bother with fetchlands and landfall. However, I see your point about Searing Blaze below and it looks like only because of Blaze it worth using fetches.

I liked how Searing Blood works well around Leyline of Sanctity, but agree with your point that all possible damage should be directed to the opponent. I just wanted to keep things simple as with Blazes I will need to use fetches. How many fetches would you recommend to use?


Lavamancer is definitely slow but extremely powerful against creature decks. The absolute max I'd run is 2 but 1 is probably the right number depending on the rest of your deck's configuration. You probably want to run 8-10 fetches if you are running both Lavamancer and Searing Blaze. You can run much less (or none at all) if you're omitting both of these cards, though I strongly recommend running at least Searing Blaze if nothing else.



Guides trigger perhaps is upside for me in situations when there is no land on the top of the deck. Otherwise, I still play don't know what was below that land the opponent just put into his hand. But I see how it is still beneficial for me in other situations.


Its true you don't know what's under the land card but it actually doesn't matter because of how much damage the guide can potentially do in the run of a match. It's almost guaranteed 2 damage for 1, which isn't great but when it has the potential for 6 or even 8 damage for a single mana, you really see the explosiveness it gives this deck. No one likes feeding your opponent lands, but the knowledge is invaluable and they still have to address the guide AND they still need time to play these lands as well. Most of the time they're dead before giving them the lands really matter, guide feels like an auto include 4 of, it's probably one of the last cards in the entire deck I'd cut.




In my understanding, Lavamancer is efficient against all those fast decks when he comes into play on T1, so I can activate it on T2. He needs cards in my graveyeard, and potentially I will have three on T2 (two fetches and one spell, keeping one land untapped for Lavamancer activation). However, this means loosing speed and missing totally six damages. Does it make sense to loose speed and efficiency?


Again, you're absolutely right in that Lavamancer is slow. That's why I wouldn't recommend playing more than 1 or 2 copies. What makes Lavamancer so good is reusable, targetted damage. As mentioned above, you do not want to use burn spells on creatures... lavamancer enables you to get rid of pesky creatures (deathrites, Delvers, Thalia's, etc) without having to dedicate another card, a card you want to point at your opponent. This is what makes lavamancer so strong but it's also a card that's far less productive with multiple copies in hand or in play.



Additionally, against Infect, two damages doesn't help much as all they need is to activate Inkmoth Nexus and pump it. Sudden Shock, by the way, kills Inkmoth instantly.


Infect is actually my main legacy deck, so I can comment on this one a little... While sudden shock will potentially give you blowouts against inkmoth or blighted agent and IS a good card in some situations, it's really a SB card at best because of the 2 mana for 2 damage equation. You are really ONLY going to use it against infect as well, since there isn't much else that can kill you out of no where, at least through creatures anyways. Also, keep in mind, you have to hold back 2 mana in order to accomplish this.... so I seriously question if it's even worth it at all. If I'm playing infect and have a turn 2-3 inkmoth and see my opponent play a second mountain and pass the turn, leaving 2 mana up, I'd be very happy as an infect player. That means, you're giving me one more turn to dig for answers, play more threats and since I know you'll most likely have something like sudden shock (or at worst, searing blaze), I'll play around it. Burn doesn't play the long game, I can easily establish the board and have multiple infect creatures attacking and then playing around Sudden shock becomes much easier.



Yes, Forked Bolt is just ok, but it can kill two birds with the same stone. Or two elves, most likely. Anyway, I liked this idea, but it is a bit narrow approach.

I saw Volcanic Fallout and was not sure about cmc of 3. Plus it kills my creatures. Perhaps it can be used in sideboard, but I am not sure I have space for it. Do you use Volcanic Fallout? What is your experience with it?


Forked Bolt is narrow and because of that, I too would recommend volcanic fallout. If you want a way to combat Elves, DnT, even infect, fallout is better than all the cards mentioned above.



I play Merfolks, and must say that Chalice on one on T2 is very helpful. Since my Burn deck has 16 spells with cmc of 1, I was keeping Chalice in mind. However, I agree with you that normally most of the decks don't use Chalices, so I will move Smash to Smithereens to sideboard.


Chalice for 1 is brutal against burn, so you are right - it sucks. That said, Chalice for 1 is brutal against most decks :) It's not played very often (Merfolk, Aggro Loam, maybe a few others), so I wouldn't worry about it. Every deck will have bad matchups and ironically, Aggro Loam is actually a very GOOD matchup for Burn, despite having Chalice main.



Why would Miracles player put a spell with cmc of 2 on the top of his deck? Other than Price of Progress, there is nothing else I can think about that can scary Miracles and they either fetch/play basics (and with help of Goblin Guide, they will have more options to choose from), or have Force of Will ready. It makes more sense to have one mana spell on the top and three and six mana spells floating in case of Vortex or Fireblast.


They usually only float a 1 if they don't have a top in play. If they have a top, they can simply put the sensei's top of top of their deck in response and counter any of your 1 cc spells played. I do agree though, it's questionable if they'll float a 2 or a 3 and that will depend on the player and how experienced they are playing against burn.



Makes sense. I think I will move all Exquisite Firecraft to sideboard and add more Vortices to main.


Firecraft in the board is absolutely amazing. I run 3x and really like it.... likely not good enough in the main deck but certainly an argument can be made to run it MD depending on your meta.



I completely forgot about Anarchy and Ace/Homebrew also reminded me about this card. And I understand why I don't see players using it anymore. However, you mentioned Flame Rift and I initially was thinking about addis some of them into my deck, but when realized that nobody plays them anymore decided to think about them more. Why Flame Rift is not popular anyway?


Really good question, I'd like to know more about Flame Rift as well from people more experienced with this decktype. It SEEMS like it could be a decent card here but for whatever reason, not very popular (I suspect there simply isn't room but I don't wish to speculate).



Skullcrack looks very useful. Somehow I missed this card. However, it looks more like a sideboard card to use instead of Searing Blaze.


Agreed, good SB card, could replace something like blaze post board.



Why do you use a couple of Faerie Macabre instead of a couple of Grafdigger's Cage? Cage can help against elves as well.


Faerie costing zero is the biggest draw, where as cage you have to spend a mana (and potentially a turn) to put into play. The reanimator matchup is absolutely horrible to begin with, don't ever expect to win a match. I use surgical extraction instead, similar functionality as the faerie and it being "free" helps a lot as well. Honestly though, I feel any of these cards are acceptable, depending on what your meta is. If you have a lot of elves and dredge, play the cage instead.



Also, does it make sense for Burn to fight back and use REB or Pyroblast? I was thinking about having a few in sideboard, but couldn't justify space.


Personally, I don't feel they are worth it but lots of people have had success with them. For me, if I am spending a red mana, I want it to deal damage.... again, very much a meta call, if you have a ton of show and tell decks (for example), it might be worth running REB.



The same is with Vexing Shusher. I got a playset, but realized that using them contradicts to the idea of winning quickly since most likely Shusher will be removed quickly, if not immediately and it makes sense to cats it on T3, followed by uncounterable Firebalst. What do you think about Shusher?


Not a fan of Shusher at all personally, can't justify it. If it had haste or something I'd be all for it but I can't justify the huge mana requirements it requires.



I see. You assume that if Devil is cats on T4, it will be removed or walled. Ok. Why Swiftspear can be walled if it was cast on T4?


I'm very much in the minority but I don't think Vexing Devil is a terrible card... the problem is, your opponent is always going to choose "what's better" in the given situation. It's insanely good turn 1-2 but after that it's just meh because it doesn't have haste and it doesn't have any guarantee of really doing any damage. With burn, you ALWAYS want to do damage with every card. Swiftspear at least has haste, and if you play it turn 4, likely they didn't leave a blocker up, so that's 1 damage. Turn 4 will also have more mana available, so that 1 damage is really 2 or possibly even 3 damage. The Devil doesn't guarantee you any damage and while you can argue the swiftspear may not either, you at least have an opportunity to do so. Remember, burn is a quick game of math - hit 20 damage ASAP. Devil doesn't accomplish this unless it's in your opening hand (most likely), making it an awful top deck. I feel this is why it doesn't see a lot of constructive play but I also don't think it's quite as bad as some others speculate.

Just some of my random thoughts on the subject, hope they were helpful and good luck with your deck! :)

[Chatto]

I read a lot about SDT in this thread, but I must be missing some kind of secret tech because I can't see why you would run 2-3 cards that don't do damage. Could some one enlighten me?

[Brael]

Understood, efficiency is crucial for Burn and obviously I have some deadweight in my deck. How did you derive 131 damage? I got totally 58 mana, assuming Rift Ball cost one and Fireblast zero, and 138 damage, assuming that Swiftspear will be able to deal five, Eidolon only two (removal that removes it), Price of Progress and Sulfuric Vortex both will deal four on average, and Barbarian Ring is a zero cost spell with two damages, resulting in 2.3 damage per mana (rounding down). Doesn't look very efficient, but not bad.

It was an approximation, it might be off by a couple points and it depends on how you count creatures. A bolt is easy to calculate as always being 3 damage but creatures are a bit more questionable. The way I like to count creatures is assuming they're good for one combat step past the time you cast them plus any guaranteed damage (Keldon Marauder and Eidolon are both pretty safely 2 guaranteed for example). So I look at Goblin Guide as 4, Eidolon as 4 (trigger+2 damage), etc. Yes creatures can die and do less, but for everyone one that does, another lives.


I figured out that if I have no use for Lavamancer because he looks a bit slow, why bother with fetchlands and landfall. However, I see your point about Searing Blaze below and it looks like only because of Blaze it worth using fetches.

Lavamancer is very slow, that's why I only run 1 (plus 1 SB as a hedge). Basically, Lavamancer trades time for versatility. If your opponents board is something you have to worry about he's very good, but when you're racing them stabilizing he just slows you down. For years I didn't run Lavamancer but I've changed my opinion on that in the last 1.5 years or so because fetchlands+lavamancer+green splash (first Revelry, now Atarka's Command) just makes for such a potent package.



I liked how Searing Blood works well around Leyline of Sanctity, but agree with your point that all possible damage should be directed to the opponent. I just wanted to keep things simple as with Blazes I will need to use fetches. How many fetches would you recommend to use?

I'm not sure what's optimal. It depends on how much other damage you're doing to yourself which means you need to weigh things like Eidolon's and Price of Progress hitting you. Right now I use 9.


Guides trigger perhaps is upside for me in situations when there is no land on the top of the deck. Otherwise, I still play don't know what was below that land the opponent just put into his hand. But I see how it is still beneficial for me in other situations.

Learning half a card per turn is still very beneficial. Having information for your plays is perhaps more powerful in Burn than in most blue decks that usually get it and the thing about the card advantage is that it doesn't matter if your opponent dies with 4 cards in hand, because an unplayed card is effectively a card not drawn. So while they do get about 1/3 a card per turn off of Guide (say 20 lands out of 60 cards so 1/3 chance) they're also taking 2 damage per turn. If you remember what I said before about 3 damage being equal to a card in burn, Guide deals 6 damage to get the opponent a card, but Guide was worth 2 cards for you due to dealing 6 damage so you're still ahead.


In my understanding, Lavamancer is efficient against all those fast decks when he comes into play on T1, so I can activate it on T2. He needs cards in my graveyeard, and potentially I will have three on T2 (two fetches and one spell, keeping one land untapped for Lavamancer activation). However, this means loosing speed and missing totally six damages. Does it make sense to loose speed and efficiency?

Lavamancer needs to be played on turn 1 or 2, on turn 3 he'll only get 1 activation if things go to plan and on turn 4 he won't activate at all. Additionally you'll probably not get 3 activations worth of cards into your graveyard. For this reason I prefer Lavamancer as a turn 2 play purely based on damage output (your turn 1 play can be a haste creature unless you have an Eidolon), but on the draw against a Stoneforge deck he needs to be a turn 1 play.


Additionally, against Infect, two damages doesn't help much as all they need is to activate Inkmoth Nexus and pump it. Sudden Shock, by the way, kills Inkmoth instantly.

True, but that's only one deck.


I saw Volcanic Fallout and was not sure about cmc of 3. Plus it kills my creatures. Perhaps it can be used in sideboard, but I am not sure I have space for it. Do you use Volcanic Fallout? What is your experience with it?

My local meta is full of fair decks, Fallout is amazing. I probably wouldn't take Fallout to something like an SCG Open but I do like it where I play. I run 2.



Why would Miracles player put a spell with cmc of 2 on the top of his deck? Other than Price of Progress, there is nothing else I can think about that can scary Miracles and they either fetch/play basics (and with help of Goblin Guide, they will have more options to choose from), or have Force of Will ready. It makes more sense to have one mana spell on the top and three and six mana spells floating in case of Vortex or Fireblast.


Well, preferably they put a Wear // Tear on top which is near unbeatable, but before that point a 2 on top is optimal because Top itself always represents a 1 and we only run a handful of 3's (most of which can't even be countered in Fallout/Firecraft).


I completely forgot about Anarchy and Ace/Homebrew also reminded me about this card. And I understand why I don't see players using it anymore. However, you mentioned Flame Rift and I initially was thinking about addis some of them into my deck, but when realized that nobody plays them anymore decided to think about them more. Why Flame Rift is not popular anyway?

Flame Rift has lost popularity because there's an upper limit to how much damage we can do to ourselves, things like DRS, Snapcaster Mage, and so on can hit us for a few points, fetchlands hit us, Price might hit us for 2, and Eidolon burns us for a lot. Eidolon is the big offender here, we just can't afford to take damage from Flame Rift and Eidolon.


Skullcrack looks very useful. Somehow I missed this card. However, it looks more like a sideboard card to use instead of Searing Blaze.

I actually used to mainboard Skullcrack, the Stoneforge package gives so many decks some incidental lifegain and the ones that don't have that get it off of DRS. Stopping 2 points and hitting them for 3 is like hitting them for 5. It's very powerful.



Why do you use a couple of Faerie Macabre instead of a couple of Grafdigger's Cage? Cage can help against elves as well.


Manaless, it can't be countered (except by Stifle), destroyed, or bounced.


Also, does it make sense for Burn to fight back and use REB or Pyroblast? I was thinking about having a few in sideboard, but couldn't justify space.

It depends, I think that with Burn, picking counter wars usually isn't where we want to be. We can sometimes beat Show and Tell with them but that's about it.



The same is with Vexing Shusher. I got a playset, but realized that using them contradicts to the idea of winning quickly since most likely Shusher will be removed quickly, if not immediately and it makes sense to cats it on T3, followed by uncounterable Firebalst. What do you think about Shusher?


I used to play Shusher, then Firecraft came out, people here realized it's better (more mana efficient mainly) and I haven't looked back.


I see. You assume that if Devil is cats on T4, it will be removed or walled. Ok. Why Swiftspear can be walled if it was cast on T4?

Because if you don't have a board, they're much less likely to leave blockers back. Haste creatures get around that because your opponent doesn't see them coming. They see a Vexing Devil and will make sure it never hits you.


And how did you calculate "chances to draw" by turn x? Are these numbers probabilities of drawing by Tx or probabilities of drawing and casting?

Those aren't chances to draw, those are chances to see the card on each turn, in the games you do see the card. To simplify the logic, if you see 10 cards in a game, then 70% of what you see is in your opening hand (7 cards) and 10% is in your final draw step (1 card).


I read a lot about SDT in this thread, but I must be missing some kind of secret tech because I can't see why you would run 2-3 cards that don't do damage. Could some one enlighten me?

It indirectly does a lot of damage. In Burn there is a very high difference between your good cards and your bad cards. The bad cards are lands that do 0 damage while the good cards all do 3-4. It's a costly way of dealing more damage usually costing you 2-3 mana for that extra card, but it's worth it. If the game does somehow go long the selection really helps too.

[Chatto]

@ Brael: thanks for the reply, still I'm not convinced. It is the opposite of going for the quick kill, and can be 2-3 dead cards drawn. It is like a self-fulfilling prophecy: put in SDT, because we could be in for the long haul, instead of really burning my opponent. Dark Burn with Bob makes a lot more sense: drawing you extra gas instead setting up your drawstep.

But in the end: I haven't tried it, so it is just my mind speaking freely. It is good to experiment, so maybe I'll be trying SDT in my main as a 3-of (go large!), going against my own intuition. At least, that way I know for sure.

[Jon]

1 is great, 2 is pushing it. I'd never play more then 2.


I have fat fingers and I am posting from my iPhone.

[jrsthethird]

@ Brael: thanks for the reply, still I'm not convinced. It is the opposite of going for the quick kill, and can be 2-3 dead cards drawn. It is like a self-fulfilling prophecy: put in SDT, because we could be in for the long haul, instead of really burning my opponent. Dark Burn with Bob makes a lot more sense: drawing you extra gas instead setting up your drawstep.

But in the end: I haven't tried it, so it is just my mind speaking freely. It is good to experiment, so maybe I'll be trying SDT in my main as a 3-of (go large!), going against my own intuition. At least, that way I know for sure.

I've been playing 1-2 Abbot of Keral Keep in the Top spot and enjoyed it. I admittedly haven't done much testing with Top, but the couple times I drew it it was terrible and wanted to keep trying Abbot instead. It provides a body and an extra card, which can really swing the late game, or at the very least, get a land out of the way.

[Brael]

@ Brael: thanks for the reply, still I'm not convinced. It is the opposite of going for the quick kill, and can be 2-3 dead cards drawn. It is like a self-fulfilling prophecy: put in SDT, because we could be in for the long haul, instead of really burning my opponent. Dark Burn with Bob makes a lot more sense: drawing you extra gas instead setting up your drawstep.

But in the end: I haven't tried it, so it is just my mind speaking freely. It is good to experiment, so maybe I'll be trying SDT in my main as a 3-of (go large!), going against my own intuition. At least, that way I know for sure.

Top never draws a dead card. The worst case scenario is that you draw it and it's 0 damage on a turn you need to kill the opponent. When that happens you still play it, activate it, put something on top that does what you need, and then tap the top to grab it. The absolute worst case scenario is that it adds 2 to the cost of your spell for that turn, but when that happens it's still digging 3 deep for a Fireblast or something.

Even in the scenario where you draw multiple tops you can play them, manipulate a fetchland to the top (or just draw one), put the top back on top, and shuffle it away.

Because of that it's mainly an issue of spending more mana for higher quality cards. Lists will of course vary, I know that in mine almost every card that does damage has the potential to deal 4. Lightning Bolt doesn't and neither does Rift Bolt (which I don't run a full playset of) but everything else can (though admittedly a potential 4+ is stretching the description on Chain Lightning). In general I'm pretty content to use the filtering of Top once and pay 2 mana to get 4 extra damage by not drawing a land. If two activations get me 8 for 3 mana, that's even better... that's approaching Bolt efficiency, even a mere 5 damage for 3 mana (upping a Bolt to a Price or something off 1 activation) is a better ratio than Exquisite Firecraft.

Cards in Burn either deal 3-4 or they deal 0. We don't really have any middle ground for 1-2 damage cards, that's why I like top it's fantastic when there's a very big difference between your good and bad draws.

I've never played more than 2 Tops but if I can find a configuration I like, next week I might play Burn and test out 3 or even 4 just to confirm for myself if that's too many, assuming the mana cooperates.

[paeng4983]

i'd stick to grim than akk because chances of you hitting a non burn spell is big as compared to grim. you'll just have to wait for a full turn in order for you to enjoy him.

[Brael]

So I have a (probably bad) idea (basically I want Pyrostatic Pillar, Eidolon, and Flame Rift in the deck) and to accomplish it cards are required that dodge those triggers. And I came across Inferno Trap. Has anyone ever played this card? I'm thinking that on the basis of Eidolon triggers being one of the creatures dealing damage to us, it might be easy to fire off.

[elconquistador1985]

Seems like an extraordinary effort to go through to get an instant speed Flame Slash. The trap can't hit players, so you're taking 2 damage from Eidolon plus taking damage from an opponent's creature just to deal 4 to a creature? Seems very bad.

[jrsthethird]

Honestly he probably missed the fact that it can't target players.

[Brael]

Seems like an extraordinary effort to go through to get an instant speed Flame Slash. The trap can't hit players, so you're taking 2 damage from Eidolon plus taking damage from an opponent's creature just to deal 4 to a creature? Seems very bad.

Oh, right you are. Lesson of the story, don't read cards at 3 am. I completely missed that it only hit creatures.

[Chatto]

Top never draws a dead card. (...)

Indeed, but it can be a dead turn. Again, just speaking my mind, and I will test in the near future.

[Brael]

So I have a burn spreadsheet I use in order to quantify a lot of cards and figure out what is and isn't optimal. I've come to the realization though that it's hard coded in some ways that I don't like such as looking at mana fed to it but not mana curves so it only gives the average game but can't give a breakdown of a 3 vs 4 vs 5 turn game and needing some SDT specific calculations. Plus, I really want to set up some variable creature tuning to get different outputs based on how friendly the format is for a creature (eventually this could be extended to matchups). All in all I need to fully revamp it, and coincidentally I'm on a winter break with nothing to do other than catch up on my Steam library and fun self projects. So like the other one I posted a while back (or you can have it again here https://www.dropbox.com/s/xr4i44ypigzjwbt/burn.ods?dl=0) I'll post this one incase anyone is interested, and likes this approach to try and build powerful lists (a warning, I currently assume a best case scenario for creatures, that's obviously not realistic).

But before I start building a new one, if anyone is willing I would like a list of cards to add for comparison. Ideally it should be easy to add cards, Lava Spike and Lightning Bolt are functionally identical in this approach. Others though like Magma Jet, Sensei's Divining Top, and Countryside Crusher require work to make usable, which is why I would like to identify interesting ones and include them early on. These are my cards on the list right now, some of these are a stretch but I went back in the past 5 years of burn looking for cards that saw play.

Recurring damage
Goblin Guide
Monastery Swiftspear
Keldon Marauder
Hellspark Elemental
Grim Lavamancer
Vexing Devil
Sulfuric Vortex
Eidolon of the Great Revel
Black Vise (this was proven bad pretty fast, but for the sake of completeness I'm leaving it on for now)
Mogg Fanatic
Kiln Fiend
Pyrostatic Pillar
Spike Jester

1 shot damage
Fireblast
Flame Javelin
Incinerate
Lightning Bolt
Price of Progress
Chain Lightning
Rift Bolt
Barbarian Ring
Lava Spike
Flame Rift
Tyrant's Choice
Searing Blaze
Searing Blood
Skullcrack
Atarka's Command
Volcanic Fallout
Thunderous Wrath
Destructive Revelry
Boros Charm
Lightning Helix

Library Manipulation
Magma Jet
Countryside Crusher
Sensei's Divining Top

Is there anything I've missed that should be under consideration?

[Offensive_username]

So I have a burn spreadsheet I use in order to quantify a lot of cards and figure out what is and isn't optimal. I've come to the realization though that it's hard coded in some ways that I don't like such as looking at mana fed to it but not mana curves so it only gives the average game but can't give a breakdown of a 3 vs 4 vs 5 turn game and needing some SDT specific calculations. Plus, I really want to set up some variable creature tuning to get different outputs based on how friendly the format is for a creature (eventually this could be extended to matchups). All in all I need to fully revamp it, and coincidentally I'm on a winter break with nothing to do other than catch up on my Steam library and fun self projects. So like the other one I posted a while back (or you can have it again here https://www.dropbox.com/s/xr4i44ypigzjwbt/burn.ods?dl=0) I'll post this one incase anyone is interested, and likes this approach to try and build powerful lists (a warning, I currently assume a best case scenario for creatures, that's obviously not realistic).

But before I start building a new one, if anyone is willing I would like a list of cards to add for comparison. Ideally it should be easy to add cards, Lava Spike and Lightning Bolt are functionally identical in this approach. Others though like Magma Jet, Sensei's Divining Top, and Countryside Crusher require work to make usable, which is why I would like to identify interesting ones and include them early on. These are my cards on the list right now, some of these are a stretch but I went back in the past 5 years of burn looking for cards that saw play.

Recurring damage
Goblin Guide
Monastery Swiftspear
Keldon Marauder
Hellspark Elemental
Grim Lavamancer
Vexing Devil
Sulfuric Vortex
Eidolon of the Great Revel
Black Vise (this was proven bad pretty fast, but for the sake of completeness I'm leaving it on for now)
Mogg Fanatic
Kiln Fiend
Pyrostatic Pillar
Spike Jester

1 shot damage
Fireblast
Flame Javelin
Incinerate
Lightning Bolt
Price of Progress
Chain Lightning
Rift Bolt
Barbarian Ring
Lava Spike
Flame Rift
Tyrant's Choice
Searing Blaze
Searing Blood
Skullcrack
Atarka's Command
Volcanic Fallout
Thunderous Wrath
Destructive Revelry
Boros Charm
Lightning Helix

Library Manipulation
Magma Jet
Countryside Crusher
Sensei's Divining Top

Is there anything I've missed that should be under consideration?

Would you please add Abbot of Keral Keep to the creature list? I am curious if it is up-to-snuff...

Also, is it possible to calculate for Fork or Reverberate?

[Jon]

Why do you need a formula to figure out if a card is dumpster? Play the deck and you will see you never want Abbot.


I have fat fingers and I am posting from my iPhone.

[MGB]

Why do you need a formula to figure out if a card is dumpster? Play the deck and you will see you never want Abbot.


I have fat fingers and I am posting from my iPhone.

Abbott of Kheral Keep is like a red Snapcaster mage. Are you kidding me?

[paeng4983]

Abbott of Kheral Keep is like a red Snapcaster mage. Are you kidding me?

Well, almost... except if it hits a land. ^_^

[Brael]

Would you please add Abbot of Keral Keep to the creature list? I am curious if it is up-to-snuff...

Also, is it possible to calculate for Fork or Reverberate?

Fork and Reverberate are a bit more difficult, I'll see if I can come up with an approach for them, they're very reliant on what else is in your deck so I might not come up with a good approach for that. My instinct is to count it as 3 damage (4 for a 2 damage spell+Fork is too unreliable), but that puts it in the classic "worse than Incinerate" territory, which perhaps is where it belongs. Even when you're getting 4 off of it I have to ask the question, why would you run a conditional 4 damage spell when we have so many unconditional ones to pick from? It seems to me that in order to make it work you need to be getting 5+ damage from it every time.

That said I'll include Abbot of Keral Keep, I'll also include Dualcaster Mage because I think that comes closer to doing what you want Abbot to do. Though I'm not all that optimistic on either one. I think Hellspark Elemental does what Dualcaster is trying to do at the same mana investment and Abbot is just too slow.


Well, almost... except if it hits a land. ^_^

Well, there is Top to manipulate what Abbot hits (and you can always tap top to ensure there's something to hit) but assuming you have 3 mana total. You're using a point to set up Abbot (probably on turn 2-3, meaning no 2 mana spell that turn), 2 to cast Abbot on the following turn (leaving 1 left for that turn), getting a free 1 drop, and casting that for 3 damage. If Abbot doesn't swing you'll have spent 4 mana to get 3 damage, and if it can swing on the following turn you'll have spent 4 mana to get 7 damage over 3 turns (assuming 2 prowess triggers). That just doesn't feel very fast or efficient to me, especially since it's cutting you off of so many 2 drops that give you faster returns.

[jrsthethird]

Dualcaster could be better in a meta with lots of other Burn decks, RUG Delver, and Jund (i.e. Bolt decks). Late game it can copy a Brainstorm or whatever or help punch an Eidolon through countermagic. With our own spells though, Abbot requires a minimum 3 mana to do anything, but Dualcaster requires 4. That seems a bit much to be reliable.

Has anyone done hard testing with it?

[Brael]

Dualcaster could be better in a meta with lots of other Burn decks, RUG Delver, and Jund (i.e. Bolt decks). Late game it can copy a Brainstorm or whatever or help punch an Eidolon through countermagic. With our own spells though, Abbot requires a minimum 3 mana to do anything, but Dualcaster requires 4. That seems a bit much to be reliable.

Has anyone done hard testing with it?

I've never tested it, 3 mana for a creature without haste is a really tough sell (personally it's one of my favorite cards, just not in this deck). There are ways to play with the cost a bit such as setting up a Rift Bolt or a Fireblast and then using it, but it comes back to the same problem Reverberate has, if I'm doing all this setup for a 0 damage body, in order to get 3-4 free damage, why not just play another 4 damage spell and save some mana?

[Offensive_username]

Fork and Reverberate are a bit more difficult, I'll see if I can come up with an approach for them, they're very reliant on what else is in your deck so I might not come up with a good approach for that. My instinct is to count it as 3 damage (4 for a 2 damage spell+Fork is too unreliable), but that puts it in the classic "worse than Incinerate" territory, which perhaps is where it belongs. Even when you're getting 4 off of it I have to ask the question, why would you run a conditional 4 damage spell when we have so many unconditional ones to pick from? It seems to me that in order to make it work you need to be getting 5+ damage from it every time.

That said I'll include Abbot of Keral Keep, I'll also include Dualcaster Mage because I think that comes closer to doing what you want Abbot to do. Though I'm not all that optimistic on either one. I think Hellspark Elemental does what Dualcaster is trying to do at the same mana investment and Abbot is just too slow.



Well, there is Top to manipulate what Abbot hits (and you can always tap top to ensure there's something to hit) but assuming you have 3 mana total. You're using a point to set up Abbot (probably on turn 2-3, meaning no 2 mana spell that turn), 2 to cast Abbot on the following turn (leaving 1 left for that turn), getting a free 1 drop, and casting that for 3 damage. If Abbot doesn't swing you'll have spent 4 mana to get 3 damage, and if it can swing on the following turn you'll have spent 4 mana to get 7 damage over 3 turns (assuming 2 prowess triggers). That just doesn't feel very fast or efficient to me, especially since it's cutting you off of so many 2 drops that give you faster returns.

I'd think Fork and Reverberate would average out to 3.5 or so. You shouldn't run any burn spell below 3 damage, so that's the bottom end for copying. You'll also have Fireblast and potentially fringe cards (Like a miracle'd Thunderous Wrath) that will push the average up slightly.

On a non-damage (and therefore not part of the equation) note they also provide a bit of flexible reach in some aspects, but that is unreliable since it depends on what you're playing against.

[Ace/Homebrew]

I'd think Fork and Reverberate would average out to 3.5 or so. You shouldn't run any burn spell below 3 damage, so that's the bottom end for copying.
You've used all the cards in your hand to get your opponent to 1 life. Their turn just ended with a massive attack and you are staring at lethal damage if you let them untap. You untap your cards, breeze through your upkeep, and draw... Fork.

Well, good game. :frown:

[Brael]

I'd think Fork and Reverberate would average out to 3.5 or so. You shouldn't run any burn spell below 3 damage, so that's the bottom end for copying. You'll also have Fireblast and potentially fringe cards (Like a miracle'd Thunderous Wrath) that will push the average up slightly.

On a non-damage (and therefore not part of the equation) note they also provide a bit of flexible reach in some aspects, but that is unreliable since it depends on what you're playing against.

Besides the fact that they do nothing on their own, Fork and Reverberate each cost 2 mana, the 4 damage spells also cost 2 mana (aside from Fireblast). You're much more likely only going to have 1 mana to spend which means you're going to copy a 3 damage spell which pushes it much closer to 3 than to 4.

Thunderous Wrath's big issue is it being in your opening hand. Of the times you draw it, 70% of the time (in a 4 turn game) it will be in your opening 7. In order to push that to 50% you need to see 14 cards or +4 over what you naturally see. In order to get that to 25% you need to see 28 cards. or +18 cards. At being dead 25% of the time it's still only worth 3.75 damage on average. In order to make it worthwhile you probably need to be seeing in the 40 card range which I'm not sure is possible.

[Brael]

Finished the sheet
https://www.dropbox.com/s/6nwrdp1g9n01egp/burn2.ods?dl=0

I ended up not including Thunderous Wrath, Fork, or Reverberate into the sheet. If we get something in the future that makes them good they'll go back in. Basically, they were excluded because they don't fit into time constraints. The approach involves setting the turn you want to win, how much damage you need to deal, and how many cards you see. The typical rate there is 10 cards for a turn 4 win, though I actually use 9 cards in order to account for the worst case scenario of a mulligan to 6 on the play. Basically what this means is you have 3 draw steps... turns 2, 3, and 4 to hit Thunderous Wrath. At any other time it's a dead card, so it's a little too narrow. Fork and Reverberate are strictly worse than Incinerate at 3 damage, and when copying a 4 damage spell, they need 4 mana which goes past the mana limitations I'm assuming (1-2-2-3 for land drops). Thus, as a good play it would only be a turn 5 or 6 play when we're looking to win on 4.

The biggest changes are that creatures are calculated a little more conservatively, and I added support for Tops and other library manipulation, plus a few more cells to easily change whatever estimates I'm using, because some of this is subjective. The main things I noticed is that it's really difficult to work Lavamancer+Top into the same deck and if you want to do that you have to make sacrifices elsewhere such as in anti lifegain effects like Sulfuric Vortex, which is a sacrifice I'm willing to make since I assume I need to deal 24 damage in the first place. Recalculating creatures actually made Eidolon look better than it already was.

The recurring sources of damage that came in at above 3 damage/card and above a 3:1 standard efficiency (thus putting out damage, and doing it cheap) were:
Eidolon of the Great Revel - 3.933 ratio
Pyrostatic Pillar - 3.7 ratio
Monastery Swiftspear - 3.675 ratio
Goblin Guide - 3.35 ratio
Vexing Devil - 3.132 ratio

Also worth pointing out, Abbot of Keral Keep looks like it outperforms any 4 for 2 spell (better ratio, higher damage/card) but it requires a high top count (probably maxing out on them) and a lower curve than normal. Plus it doesn't play well with Swiftspear, getting enough Prowess triggers on an uncontested Swiftspear is actually a very real issue, and there's the issue that Eidolon/Pillar are just way more powerful so you're giving those up to play Abbot (remember, Abbot needs a low curve). I do think there's a way to make it work, I'm just not sure what that way is or if it's better than the cheap haste creatures, due to the fetches/tops it needs it's not even a budget option for those without Guides.

This is the 60 I'm considering trying next time, I haven't settled on a SB yet.

Land 19
4 Bloodstained Mire
4 Wooded Foothills
2 Scalding Tarn
1 Arid Mesa
1 Taiga
6 Mountain
1 Barbarian Ring

Creatures 12
4 Goblin Guide
4 Monastery Swiftspear
3 Eidolon of the Great Revel
1 Grim Lavamancer

Spells 25
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Chain Lightning
2 Rift Bolt
4 Fireblast
4 Price of Progress
3 Atarka's Command
4 Searing Blaze

Enchantment 1
1 Pyrostatic Pillar

Artifact 3
3 Sensei's Divining Top

3 tops might be high, but I'm really curious to see if the theory matches up with reality. The Pyrostatic Pillar is because I needed slightly more Prowess triggers to make Swiftspear good enough and it might be nice to have a non dying copy of that effect. One thing that makes me ok with 3 tops is that it's not too hard to shuffle extras away. Also, 2 tops with a Swiftspear gives you 3 pumps/turn (assuming 3 lands) when there's no other ways to spend your mana.

This build I'm trying just barely hits my damage threshold preferences and comes in just slightly overbudget on mana but I think tops can solve the mana issue since we're talking about less than 1 point across the whole decks cost. That's something I'll need to play with, how reliably can tops make our mana curve 1-2-3-3 or 1-2-3-4 rather than 1-2-2-3. If a single top activation can consistently get the third land drop a turn sooner we break even on mana, and if it gets us the 4th land on curve as well we net 1 mana minimum or 2-3 in a longer game, or again break even at worst if it takes a second activation.

[echofish]

How is this even possible? This is the worst burn list I have ever seen: http://tcdecks.net/deck.php?id=19190&iddeck=145861
Spark Elemental, Shoal, Cave-in (and Eidolon main), Wrath, Ancient Grudge (without access to green)

[Brael]

How is this even possible? This is the worst burn list I have ever seen: http://tcdecks.net/deck.php?id=19190&iddeck=145861
Spark Elemental, Shoal, Cave-in (and Eidolon main), Wrath, Ancient Grudge (without access to green)

Variance happens.

[MrMonday]

Hey guys, my main Legacy deck is Dredge, but I had Modern Burn and figured that I'd spend the extra $100 or so to grab the pieces for the Legacy version since it seems to be much more competitive in the current meta. However, I've run into a bit of a problem with tweaking the number of certain cards. I've read the last few pages, but I figured I'd throw my questions out here to get some more specific advice.

For reference:

Lands (20)
1 Barbarian Ring
7 Mountain
4 Wooded Foothills
4 Bloodstained Mire
4 Scalding Tarn

Creatures (14)
2 Grim Lavamancer
4 Goblin Guide
4 Monastery Swiftspear
4 Eidolon of the Great Revel

Spells (26)
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Price of Progress
4 Fireblast
2 Searing Blaze
4 Chain Lightning
4 Lava Spike
4 Rift Bolt

My questions:

Searing Blaze, how many? I've seen anywhere from two to four and I've settled on two, but I'm not sure about this. People have been trying to set up a Legacy group in my local area and I know one guy is on Infect and one on Jund, which makes me want to go up to three, but I'm kinda scared of running into decks like Storm or Miracles (which one guy is likely on) where it's completely dead. Is three a better choice?
Barbarian Ring, same deal. I'm on one right now but I've seen some people go up to two. To be honest, I don't like dealing damage to myself in racing situations against decks like UR Delver and whatnot and I don't like further reducing the number of mountains in my deck. If I do add another, would I have to change around my land numbers to make sure that I still have 7-8 mountains in my deck for Fireblast, or is that going a bit too deep?
Monastery Swiftspear, yay or nay? I know this is a bit of a touchy subject, but I've seen a lot of lists running the monk and I've come to side with them after seeing how great she is in Modern. It seems to me that the consensus is yes, run her, but I could be totally wrong here.
On a related note, is Sulfuric Vortex good in the maindeck right now? It seems to me that there's a bit of a split between lists running Swiftspear and no Vortex and vice versa.


Hopefully these aren't too stupid.

[paeng4983]

@MrMonday


1. Searing Blaze, how many? I've seen anywhere from two to four and I've settled on two, but I'm not sure about this. People have been trying to set up a Legacy group in my local area and I know one guy is on Infect and one on Jund, which makes me want to go up to three, but I'm kinda scared of running into decks like Storm or Miracles (which one guy is likely on) where it's completely dead. Is three a better choice?

Three is a good number. Just make sure you’ll have a land available for its landfall ability when it reaches your hand. Miracles run: Vendilion Clique, Snapcaster Mage and others have Monastery Mentor in their main deck. So do not worry having three S.Blaze in your main.

2. Barbarian Ring, same deal. I'm on one right now but I've seen some people go up to two. To be honest, I don't like dealing damage to myself in racing situations against decks like UR Delver and whatnot and I don't like further reducing the number of mountains in my deck. If I do add another, would I have to change around my land numbers to make sure that I still have 7-8 mountains in my deck for Fireblast, or is that going a bit too deep?

It is nice to have a free shock damage awaiting for your opponent off your land. But I’d rather replace it with a mountain/ or fetch because I wanted to maximize my chances of ending the game with Firablast.

3. Monastery Swiftspear, yay or nay? I know this is a bit of a touchy subject, but I've seen a lot of lists running the monk and I've come to side with them after seeing how great she is in Modern. It seems to me that the consensus is yes, run her, but I could be totally wrong here.

It’s a yes, for me. On average, Swiftspear deals 5-7 damages (thanks to its prowess) as compared to Goblin Guide’s 4-6.

4. On a related note, is Sulfuric Vortex good in the maindeck right now? It seems to me that there's a bit of a split between lists running Swiftspear and no Vortex and vice versa.

I’d keep the vortex. Now that DTT and T.Cruise are out of the picture, expect an increase of attendance from Stoneforge into Batterskull/ Jitte decks, not to mention Griselbrands too. Life gain really is a problem for us.

[MrMonday]

Hey, thanks for the response! What would you recommend cutting for the Vortexes? It looks like most lists seem to cut Swiftspear for it.

[paeng4983]

Hey, thanks for the response! What would you recommend cutting for the Vortexes? It looks like most lists seem to cut Swiftspear for it.

10 mountains / 9 fetches

4 l.bolt / 4 chain / 4 l.spike / 4 rift / 3 s.blaze
4 pop / 4 fireblast / 2 vortex

4 guide / 4 swiftspear / 4 eidolon

SB
3 f.exquisite
2 relic of progenitus
2 s.blood
2 smash to smithereens
3 e.bridge
3 vexing susher

sometimes if the meta shifts to a clog of stoneforge / delver / YP / deathrite / elves / dnt variants, I do this config
3 fireblast / 4 s.blaze

enjoy burning your way to the top mate!
post us your tourney results!

^_^

[Krimson Viper]

Had a bad month and looked to Magic to maybe bring me some happiness to no avail. Was a little fun, but the floor was wiped with me at the quarterly twenty-five hundred dollar ChannelFireball event today. Played six of the seven rounds available. I arrived late to the event and received a round one loss to even play, that pretty much set the tone for the day. Lands I needed were a turn too late. However, I feel as if I targeted planeswalkers and creatures more often than I should have, and being short a damage or two to win the game.

4 Goblin Guide
2 Grim Lavamancer
4 Eidolon of the Great Revel

4 Lightning Bolt
4 Chain Lightning
4 Lava Spike
4 Searing Blaze
4 Price of Progress
4 Rift Bolt
2 Sulfuric Vortex
4 Fireblast

9 Mountain
4 Bloodstained Mire
4 Wooded Foothills
2 Scalding Tarn
1 Arid Mesa

Sideboard
2 Tormod's Crypt
2 Pithing Needle
1 Grim Lavamancer
2 Searing Blood
3 Smash to Smithereens
3 Exquisite Firecraft
2 Mindbreak Trap

I need some advice taking notes as I would like to pass on more information to help other players, but I am a terrible note taker and memory recall.

Round two loss to Infect. Lost die roll, lost in two games, didn't see any hate, mull to six game two. Out Lava Spike and in Pithing Needle, Lavaman, one Firecraft.

Round three loss to Shardless BUG. Lost die roll, lost in three games, did see hate in both side larded games, but I just didn't have the mana to get them off. I took out Guides and Lavamen for Firecraft, Pithing Needle, and a single Smash. Game three was a mull to five and on a single mana the whole game.

Round four win against Suicide Black. Won die roll, won in three games, did see sideboard cards. Out Price and Vortex, in Lavaman, Blood, Firecraft.

Round five or six. Can't remember an entire round to be honest. Was against Lands. Won die roll, won in three games, did see hate cards. Out Searing Blaze, in Needle and two Smash.

Final round was against a GW Post deck. Won die roll, loss in three games. Did see sideboard cards. Out Guide, three Blaze, in Needle, Grim, Smash and a single Firecraft. I've played against him before and know his deck is in the making so he could have almost anything in this deck and throws me off. Lost game three to mama screw and two Trinisphere.

Honestly, I feel like Lava Spike keeps letting me down, and I keep bringing the mana curve up. I was expecting to come across roughly the same meta as GP Tacoma, but I came across a myriad of decks a lot of my side didn't work for. Thinking the sideboard needs more work to tune for sure, but I still feel like twenty-one mana is where my deck wants to be at. Maybe if I play again, drop a Blaze and raise land by one. I dunno. Who knows when I'll play again, but playing wasn't all that fun, but kicking it with friends was the real benefit. Maybe I'm truly done with Magic..?

[Nina]

Hey people, i'd like to hear your opinion on how to deploy your threats againt daze.
Monastery Swiftspear, Goblin Guide, Eidolon of the Great Revel (and to a lesser extend Sulfuric Vortex) are best when deployed as soon as possible. Of course this is when they are vulneralbe to Daze.
My motto so far was and still is to conciously run them into Daze, as the higher reward is probably worth the risk. Goblin Guide and Eidolon get a lot worse delayed a turn.

How do you feel? Is it right to "always" risk your most powerful sources of recurring damage getting dazed early?
What are your reasons?

[echofish]

Hey people, i'd like to hear your opinion on how to deploy your threats againt daze.
Monastery Swiftspear, Goblin Guide, Eidolon of the Great Revel (and to a lesser extend Sulfuric Vortex) are best when deployed as soon as possible. Of course this is when they are vulneralbe to Daze.
My motto so far was and still is to conciously run them into Daze, as the higher reward is probably worth the risk. Goblin Guide and Eidolon get a lot worse delayed a turn.

How do you feel? Is it right to "always" risk your most powerful sources of recurring damage getting dazed early?
What are your reasons?

Good question, but I'm afraid the answer is: "It depends".

It depends on the board state, your land count and what deck you are playing against.

[Nina]

Good question, but I'm afraid the answer is: "It depends".

It depends on the board state, your land count and what deck you are playing against.

I was under the impression that the situation is narrowed down enough already to deserve more specific answers.
As I said we are on one land for the one drop creatures or two for the two drop creatures respectively (and 3 for the sulfuric vortex if you want) , we are playing a deck running Daze (so it's most likely some (delver) tompo deck).
I think that is a lot less vague than you got it here, and therefore a good topic to talk about.

[Ultrab77]

I would play the following with in hand : Guide or Rift Bolt, Swiftspear, Eidolon, Bolt

My purpose would be to keep Swiftspear and Eidolon in.

- T1: Guide or Rift Bolt (Guide dazed? OK)
- T2: if T1 Dazed: Eidolon, if no answer Swiftspear (mana up) and then Bolt
- T3: Eidolon (mana up) and then Bolt if I have it

[LeoCop 90]

This is a good article on the topic in general, in case you missed it : http://www.starcitygames.com/article/27944_Burn-vs-Counters.html

[Nina]

I would play the following with in hand : Guide or Rift Bolt, Swiftspear, Eidolon, Bolt

My purpose would be to keep Swiftspear and Eidolon in.

- T1: Guide or Rift Bolt (Guide dazed? OK)
- T2: if T1 Dazed: Eidolon, if no answer Swiftspear (mana up) and then Bolt
- T3: Eidolon (mana up) and then Bolt if I have it

Interesting as that is the opposite of what I have been doing so far.

------------

I am well aware of PSullivan's general article on the subject of burn vs counters,
but I'd like to talk specifically about playing against daze in the first few turns.
(Playing around general counters is what I consider a skill you just can get better at, while playing Goblin Guide into daze or not etc seems to be a strategic decision worth some talk.)

[LeoCop 90]

Well, i tend to just jam creatures. As you said, they're really good just in the first turns of the game... i don't think there is any value in holding a goblin guide when your opponent just played a blue dual land and passed the turn. If they immediately daze it, it think this is just fantastic for you because bouncing the only land you have in play in an empty board is such a bad tempo play that it's like getting stone rained... sure, guide will not deal any damage, but you will have more time to draw and resolve burn spells now that your opponent decided to reset his first land drop.

[Nina]

Well, i tend to just jam creatures. As you said, they're really good just in the first turns of the game... i don't think there is any value in holding a goblin guide when your opponent just played a blue dual land and passed the turn. If they immediately daze it, it think this is just fantastic for you because bouncing the only land you have in play in an empty board is such a bad tempo play that it's like getting stone rained... sure, guide will not deal any damage, but you will have more time to draw and resolve burn spells now that your opponent decided to reset his first land drop.

Pretty much my reasoning, thanks for the post. Also illustrates why this is not about playing around counters, but a strategic decision we have to make.
Keep it coming guys.

___

So I've read this article on sideboards (http://www.theepicstorm.com/how-to-build-a-sideboard/) and as I plan on attending a small event next week I am reconsidering my sideboard.

For reference this is the main I settled on:

4 Goblin Guide
4 Monastery Swiftspear
4 Eidolon of the Great Revel

4 Lightning Bolt
4 Chain Lightning
4 Rift Bolt
4 Lava Spike

4 Price of Progress
4 Fireblast

3 Sulfuric Vortex
1 Searing Blood

20 Mountain

For a meta snapshot: Last 30 player event had in top 8: 3 Miracles, 2 ANT, 1 OmniTell, 1 BUG Delver and 1 Red Stompy (he he).
As thats to small to gone for it specifically I will take the Decks to Beat section into account as well.

So.
Sidboard-lile stuff we have in the main:
4 Eidolon for Storm
3 Sulfuric Vortex for Miracles
(1 Searing Blood, DnT, Stoneblade, Delver, Elves)

Sideboard cards I am sure of:
2 Pyrostatic Pillar and 1 Mindbreak Trap
3 Smash to Smithereens (even tho Stoneblade isn't Dtb it is just a hallmark, DnT and Stompy are targeted)

most likely some number of Pyroblasts.

It looks like we don't want any gravehate (looking at he meta) and it might even be the Reanimator Matchup is just for the Acceptance section... What do you think?

[Speedbump]

For reference this is the main I settled on:

4 Goblin Guide
4 Monastery Swiftspear
4 Eidolon of the Great Revel
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Chain Lightning
4 Rift Bolt
4 Lava Spike
4 Price of Progress
4 Fireblast
3 Sulfuric Vortex
1 Searing Blood
20 MountainNo access to fetchlands at all? If you do have access to them, I would recommend running at least 8, so then you can run Searing Blaze instead of Searing Blood. Even if you don't kill the creature, getting the 3 points of damage in can be more useful.

In terms of sideboard plans, there's a few ways you can go. Burn should have 3-5 Searing effects and/or removal spells in the 75, 3 Smash to Smithereens, 2-3 anti-combo slots (typically Pyrostatic Pillar), 3-4 Exquisite Firecraft, and 2-4 metagame slots. I prefer running some amount of Relic of Progenitus, for their role in RUG Delver and other non-Reanimator graveyard-based match-ups, although some number of Surgical Extraction/Ensnaring Bridge isn't a bad idea if there is some Reanimator presence.

[Gollus]

i played with Burn 2 tournaments now. Here are my thoughts to it.


Isn't Vexing Devil better than Swiftspear?
i mean yeah he gets to choose but one mana 4 dmg is always welcome and otherwise its a big creature. Swiftspear is just dmg if the opponent has no blocker and if he has one a 4/3 will be better anyways. So the only advantage is haste on Swiftspear or what do i miss in my thoughtprocess?



The same goes for Vortex. You play it very late so you have dealt all dmg you can to the opponent beforehand. So Vortex does only 4 dmg in average. Isn't maindeck Exquisite Firecraft strictly better? Uncounterable is a huge advantage against all the blue decks. Both cards deal the same amount of dmg most of the time, but Vortex deals it over 2 turns and you get dmg as well which can be crucial in a race. Exquisite Firecraft also can target creatures if needed. And the lifegain prevention is very limited as well. So i would put Exquisite Firecraft main and Vortex Sideboard because you will see more counters than Batterskulls.

In one game i lost to Storm with him having 2 times a first turn kill. It is a bad beat but with burn you can't do anything against that so i would have needed a Mindbreak Trap. Is it worth playing them instead of Pyrostatic Pillars?

[Nina]

So after quiet some testing and vivid discussions this is my final decklist for the time being.
It is tuned for a Meta where neither maindeck Grim Lavamancer nor Searing effects are worth it (and therefore the fetchlands get obsolete.).

4 Goblin Guide
4 Monastery Swiftspear
4 Eidolon of the Great Revel
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Chain Lightning
4 Rift Bolt
4 Lava Spike
4 Price of Progress
4 Fireblast
3 Sulfuric Vortex
1 Flame Rift
20 Mountain

Sideboard:

2 Prostatic Pillar
1 Mindbreak Trap

3 Smash to Smithereens

2 Searing Blood
1 Volcanic Fallout

3 Exquisite Firecraft

3 Faerie Macabre


Questions, comments, complaints welcome.

Edit:
Maybe actually not so final, as there is a Show and Tell sized hole on this Sideboard. (Maybe we can go down on the Firecrafts with Sulfuric Vortex and Flame Rift main...)

(Also is Anarchy really the best thing we could (theoretically) do against Enchantress? [Not worth the Sideboard slots I know, but is there anything?)

Edit2:
@Speedbump (and others)
Looking at your most recent decklists it looks like you don't pack any cards for Show and Tell.
What is the reasoning there?

[Brael]

(Also is Anarchy really the best thing we could (theoretically) do against Enchantress? [Not worth the Sideboard slots I know, but is there anything?)


These days Destructive Revelry is also an option. I run RG largely for Revelry but I've been finding Atarka's Command to be pretty solid too. You can think of Atarka's as taking a 2 damage 4 mana slot, but also that it can occasionally get in for 5 by stopping some lifegain or pumping 2 guys.

[paeng4983]

http://sales.starcitygames.com//deckdatabase/displaydeck.php?DeckID=99558

Yeah baby! Good job! :cool:

[Speedbump]

@Speedbump (and others)
Looking at your most recent decklists it looks like you don't pack any cards for Show and Tell.
What is the reasoning there?Nothing too complex in the reasoning.

I just think that the match-up is unfixable, especially with the amount of cards Burn needs to dedicate to make the match-up 50/50. Much better for me to chalk up this match as a write-off, and focus on the actual match-ups I can win. (This is the reason my SB is heavily anti-Miracles instead)

[Brael]

Nothing too complex in the reasoning.

I just think that the match-up is unfixable, especially with the amount of cards Burn needs to dedicate to make the match-up 50/50. Much better for me to chalk up this match as a write-off, and focus on the actual match-ups I can win. (This is the reason my SB is heavily anti-Miracles instead)

I went all the way up to 4 Tops MB and it has really helped. SB game percentages go up across the board and even game 1's are strong. Actually just beat S&T in a 10 game set (all preboard) winning 8-2 and then 5 game set postboard winning 3-2. I realize that's a small sample size but Tops help a lot.

What really pushes top over is tapping to put it on top of your library, it's guaranteed prowess triggers (and gets pretty dumb with two of them if you can keep a Swiftspear alive), it gives a way to always cash extra mana in for damage, even without prowess triggers it ensures you draw useful cards, it lets you get utility and then cash it in for damage later, and it nicely solves the problem of needing too many SB cards for a match. Based on the results I've had I've got a strong Miracles and a strong S&T matchup right now but I'm a little weaker to the mirror and Delver, largely on the back of Eidolons getting a bit worse.

[Speedbump]

I went all the way up to 4 Tops MB and it has really helped. SB game percentages go up across the board and even game 1's are strong. Actually just beat S&T in a 10 game set (all preboard) winning 8-2 and then 5 game set postboard winning 3-2. I realize that's a small sample size but Tops help a lot.

What really pushes top over is tapping to put it on top of your library, it's guaranteed prowess triggers (and gets pretty dumb with two of them if you can keep a Swiftspear alive), it gives a way to always cash extra mana in for damage, even without prowess triggers it ensures you draw useful cards, it lets you get utility and then cash it in for damage later, and it nicely solves the problem of needing too many SB cards for a match. Based on the results I've had I've got a strong Miracles and a strong S&T matchup right now but I'm a little weaker to the mirror and Delver, largely on the back of Eidolons getting a bit worse.That might be the other part of the equation, as I'm not on the Swiftspear plan. I'm on the Grim Lavamancer + 4 Searing Blaze plan, which is good against Delver and most variants of Miracles, at the expense of the Show and Tell-based match-ups.

I think 4 SDT is probably 1-2 too many, even in the Swiftspear build. While having multiple sources of Prowess triggers is always nice, I feel that this specific upside that multiple SDTs gives Burn doesn't out-weigh the fact that multiples without Swiftspear are pretty mediocre.

This might just be conjecture though, as I'm much less comfortable playing the Swiftspear builds compared to the Lavamancer builds.

[Brael]

That might be the other part of the equation, as I'm not on the Swiftspear plan. I'm on the Grim Lavamancer + 4 Searing Blaze plan, which is good against Delver and most variants of Miracles, at the expense of the Show and Tell-based match-ups.

I think 4 SDT is probably 1-2 too many, even in the Swiftspear build. While having multiple sources of Prowess triggers is always nice, I feel that this specific upside that multiple SDTs gives Burn doesn't out-weigh the fact that multiples without Swiftspear are pretty mediocre.

This might just be conjecture though, as I'm much less comfortable playing the Swiftspear builds compared to the Lavamancer builds.

I went down to 1 Lavamancer due to Top. It's nice to still have one just to keep the option open of hitting it, but at the same time Top uses such a large chunk of your available mana in a game that you can't really afford to run both of them together. This is my current list

Land 18
4 Scalding Tarn
3 Bloodstained Mire
2 Arid Mesa
1 Taiga
1 Barbarian Ring
7 Mountain

Creatures 13
4 Goblin Guide
4 Monastery Swiftspear
1 Grim Lavamancer
4 Eidolon of the Great Revel

Spells 23
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Chain Lightning
4 Price of Progress
3 Atarka's Command
2 Searing Blaze
2 Rift Bolt
4 Fireblast

Artifact 4
4 Sensei's Divining Top

Enchantment 2
2 Sulfuric Vortex

Sideboard 15
1 Grim Lavamancer
2 Faerie Macabre
4 Exquisite Firecraft
3 Volcanic Fallout
2 Destructive Revelry
2 Red Elemental Blast
1 Searing Blaze

[Kl'rt]

What's the Elves matchup like for this deck? Favoured, unfavoured or about even?

Seems there are mixed opinions on Swiftspear in this thread. If I know I'm running into Elves often, is it better to have Swiftspear or not?

What are strong sideboard options for fighting Elves? Is Pyroclasm a bad idea?

[LeoCop 90]

I'd say it's an even matchup, mostly dependant on who wins the die roll. When they are on the play is very difficult to win before they kill you with craterhoof behemoth.
Swiftspear is not good against elves, they have thousands of blockers that can also survive the fight if they bounce them with wirewood symbiote.
Your best cards against elves are Grim lavamancer, Eidolon, Searing Blaze, Searing Blood. Any sweeper is fantastic, i prefer volcanic fallout to pyroclasm because damages also players and is good against delver decks too because it's uncounterable.
Be sure to practice a bit against them because you absolutely need to understand when you must aim your burn spells to the face and when you have to kill their creatures.... any mistake can result in a loss because they can kill you out of nowhere.

[Brael]

What's the Elves matchup like for this deck? Favoured, unfavoured or about even?

Seems there are mixed opinions on Swiftspear in this thread. If I know I'm running into Elves often, is it better to have Swiftspear or not?

What are strong sideboard options for fighting Elves? Is Pyroclasm a bad idea?


Elves isn't too popular locally, but I do run into it from time to time. I use Volcanic Fallouts against them, they're a good include in fair metas anyways (can also do double duty against Miracles). Though that has the disadvantage of needing to get to turn 3 to cast it. Ensnaring Bridge can slow them down a turn, but they can destroy a Bridge if given enough time.

Guide and Swiftspear are at their weakest here, you're rarely if ever going to connect with a creature. Instead you want to either use Blaze effects on them or board wipes, while going directly at their face. My list is a couple posts up, my strategy is roughly (changes game to game) +1 Lavamancer, +1 Blaze, +3 Fallout, +3 Firecraft, -4 Guide, -4 Swiftspear. I treat Atarka's Commands a little different here too. If I have a land heavy hand I'll fire them for 3+acceleration or for 3+no life if DRS is eating guys.

One thing you can do when they bounce their guys in the face of a Fallout, is to cast the Fallout on the end of their turn, then untap and drop an Eidolon. It will get in a bunch of free damage as they redeploy. Given they can usually kill an Eidolon anyways off a GSZ, you sometimes want to hold it for this sort of moment.

[Sidneyious]

http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/legacy-burn-12-09-12-1/

Want to stay close to creature less, but most mass creature decks are a weak point of the deck.

I have had mana issues and inconsistencies.

[Speedbump]

http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/legacy-burn-12-09-12-1/

Want to stay close to creature less, but most mass creature decks are a weak point of the deck.

I have had mana issues and inconsistencies.Why aren't you running Eidolon of the Great Revel? Deck seems pretty weak without it, especially with Flame Rift maindeck.

EDIT: 4 Grim Lavamancer is probably 1-2 too many, as they don't work well in multiples.

[movingtonewao]

anyone think skin invasion is good enough for burn? a 3/4 for 1 mana doesn't look too shabby.

[Sidneyious]

Why aren't you running Eidolon of the Great Revel? Deck seems pretty weak without it, especially with Flame Rift maindeck.

EDIT: 4 Grim Lavamancer is probably 1-2 too many, as they don't work well in multiples.
I don't like him, kills me before I kill them.
I could swap 2 glm for skullcrack, but it works for an old style burn deck.

I like cheap 4 damage spells.

[LOLWut]

I don't like him, kills me before I kill them.

Yet you run Flame Rift.

Every single placing Burn deck since 2014 has run Eidolon and it's correct.

[Sidneyious]

I'm more for burn, not creatures.
Flame rift don't kill me as fast as he does.

[Dressedspring1]

I'm more for burn, not creatures.
Flame rift don't kill me as fast as he does.

Eidolon should never kill you faster than he kills your opponents. All your spells do more than 2 damage, Eidolon does 2 damage to you per spell, the math is in your favour. Your opponent is going to be casting their own spells, outside of the burn mirror eidolon will very rarely kill you unless your gameplan has gone seriously awry. It's by far the best card in the deck and is about as much a staple as lightning bolt at this point.

[Sidneyious]

I'm not sure about that.
Very rarely did he do any better than glm in the mid game.

[Jon]

It's a fact and it's proven with results. You are free to disregard actual results and facts in order to live in your fantasy world.

Sent from my XT1080 using Tapatalk

[Darkenslight]

I'm not sure about that.
Very rarely did he do any better than glm in the mid game.

Seriously: Eidolon is the best BS hater in Red. He hates the majority of the Blue tempo package from Delver decks, he absolutely wrecks Storm's plan (unless you've been utterly stupid), and he irritates the majority of decks out there. IMO, there's only one match he absolutely horrible against, and that's the Mono-Brown plan (Eldrazi and MUD).

[Sidneyious]

What works on mtgo does not always work in my lgs.

[Ace/Homebrew]

What works on mtgo does not always work in my lgs.
The replies you've received in this thread are based on the assumption that you play in a competitive meta where the decks listed in the Decks to Beat section make up a notable portion of the decks you'll face, while the remainder are likely to be found in the Established Decks section of the forum. The replies from Speedbump, LOLWut, Depressedspring1, Jon, and Darkenslight are all accurate statements based on the assumption in my opening statement. This has been proven by hundreds (thousands?) of tournament results. While it is subject to change based on meta-shifts and newly printed cards, it is currently 100% accurate.

If your list is tuned to your meta and your meta is atypical due to budget or casual-minded players (or other reasons), you should mention what your meta looks like rather than just posting a link to your list. A post like yours (without context) is assumed to be asking for advice on how to improve it. This advice was provided. If you just posted it to share, thank you for sharing!

[Chatto]

What works on mtgo does not always work in my lgs.

You made me curious... What does your meta look like? Eidolon is by far one of the best cards printed for a deck like Burn, so please explain :smile:

EDIT: ninja'd

[Lyle Hopkins]

What works on mtgo does not always work in my lgs.

While it is always important to consider your metagame, Eidolon of the Great Revel was one of the printings that helped Burn become a competitive strategy. I wouldn't go to a larger Legacy tournament without a playset.

[Nina]

The replies you've received in this thread are based on the assumption [...] While it is subject to change based on meta-shifts and newly printed cards, it is currently 100% accurate.

If your list is tuned to your meta and your meta is atypical due to budget or casual-minded players (or other reasons), you should mention what your meta looks like rather than just posting a link to your list. A post like yours (without context) is assumed to be asking for advice on how to improve it. This advice was provided. If you just posted it to share, thank you for sharing!

Great quality post, that is meant to bring everybody together, doesn't weaken actual facts and keeps the peace, cheers.

@Sidneyious
I recently posted (http://www.mtgthesource.com/forums/showthread.php?25772-Primer-Deck-Burn&p=934254&viewfull=1#post934254) my "new" updated List adjusted for a specific local meta, that holds up to conventional wisdom, but significantly cuts on creature hate (so I decided to forgo fetchlands for that list.) The reasoning of a Miracles and Storm heavy meta was provided.
Therefore I got the chance to recive actual useful feedback (http://www.mtgthesource.com/forums/showthread.php?25772-Primer-Deck-Burn&p=938108&viewfull=1#post938108) (thanks to Speedbump).

@all As an update to that I cut the last 2 Searing Effects from the Sideboard and am now free to have the full 4 Exquisite Firecraft and Sulfuric Vortex in the 75, up the number on Pyrostatic Pillars, or the choice to board a pair of Anarchy for the absolutely awful Enchantress matchup, if I see the need.


(Also a fun (and obvious, I guess) fact: When Sideboarding against Miracles, Miracles players like the Red Elemental Blast the most for their mirror, while for Burn the statement of it's mediocrity has been made multiple times, and I consider Sulfuric Vortex, Firecraft and Sensei's Top to be better.)

[JohnBell]

I see this (http://www.tcdecks.net/deck.php?id=19620&iddeck=149346) list by Ali Aintrazi.

2 Grim Lavamancer
4 Monastery Swiftspear
4 Eidolon of the Great Revel
8 Mountain
4 Arid Mesa
1 Barbarian Ring
2 Bloodstained Mire
1 Scalding Tarn
4 Wooded Foothills
2 Sulfuric Vortex
4 Fireblast
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Price of Progress
4 Chain Lightning
4 Lava Spike
4 Rift Bolt
//Sideboard
2 Ensnaring Bridge
3 Pyrostatic Pillar
4 Searing Blaze
2 Smash to Smithereens
4 Exquisite Firecraft

I never play Burn and I want try, but I've a problem with the side...
How he side Vs the Deck to Beat?:confused:

[Scott]

I see this (http://www.tcdecks.net/deck.php?id=19620&iddeck=149346) list by Ali Aintrazi.


I never play Burn and I want try, but I've a problem with the side...
How he side Vs the Deck to Beat?:confused:

Eldrazi or Miracles?

[JohnBell]

Eldrazi or Miracles?
Grixis Delver, Eldrazi Stompy, UWr Miracle, BUG Shardless, Infect, ANT, Team America... :tongue:

[Brael]

Grixis Delver, Eldrazi Stompy, UWr Miracle, BUG Shardless, Infect, ANT, Team America... :tongue:

Well, I don't run the same sideboard. In general though, I bring in Volcanic Fallout and Searings against creature based decks, can't be countered against Miracles, REB against Shardless, and Faerie Macabre against GY decks. Against ANT I just mulligan aggressively for Eidolon (or Pillar if you run it), it's the only way you can possibly win.

[JohnBell]

Thanks anyway for the answers, but with that list I think I do:
Grixis Delver: -2 Rift Bolt -2 Sulfuric Vortex +4 Searing Blaze
Eldrazi Stompy: -2 Eidolon of the Great Revel -2 Sulfuric Vortex +2 Ensnaring Bridge +2 Smash to Smithereens
UWr Miracle: -4 Lava Spike -2 Grim Lamancer +4 Exquisite Firecraft +2 Pyrostatic Pillar
BUG Shardless: -4 Rift Bolt -2 Sulfuric Vortex +4 Searing Blaze +2 Ensnaring Bridge
Infect: -4 Rift Bolt +4 Searing Blaze
ANT: -2 Grim Lavamancer -1 Barbarian Ring 3 Pyrostatic Pillar
Team America: -4 Rift Bolt -2 Sulfuric Vortex +4 Searing Blaze +2 Ensnaring Bridge

I'm not sure... Can you siding better?

[Brael]

Thanks anyway for the answers, but with that list I think I do:
Grixis Delver: -2 Rift Bolt -2 Sulfuric Vortex +4 Searing Blaze
Eldrazi Stompy: -2 Eidolon of the Great Revel -2 Sulfuric Vortex +2 Ensnaring Bridge +2 Smash to Smithereens
UWr Miracle: -4 Lava Spike -2 Grim Lamancer +4 Exquisite Firecraft +2 Pyrostatic Pillar
BUG Shardless: -4 Rift Bolt -2 Sulfuric Vortex +4 Searing Blaze +2 Ensnaring Bridge
Infect: -4 Rift Bolt +4 Searing Blaze
ANT: -2 Grim Lavamancer -1 Barbarian Ring 3 Pyrostatic Pillar
Team America: -4 Rift Bolt -2 Sulfuric Vortex +4 Searing Blaze +2 Ensnaring Bridge

I'm not sure... Can you siding better?

Take out Price against Miracles, leave Lava Spike in. They usually fetch basics, especially once they know the opponent is on burn.

Smash is good against Infect since they can't use pump spells to get out of it. Again I don't like Price in that matchup either, I put a high premium on things that can target creatures.

[TonTo]

I strongly disagree with ever taking out Lava Spike or Rift Bolt. The cards that deal 3 damage for R should always remain, as they are the backbone of the deck. I am by no means an expert on this deck, but I believe wholeheartedly that the core principle of this deck is "3 dmg for R? Yes please"

Here is what I would do off the top of my head:

Grixis Delver: -2 Sulfuric Vortex, -1 Barbarian Ring -1 Fireblast; +4 Searing Blaze
Taking out Vortex means your curve is a lot lower so you can cut one land. Barbarian Ring is the worst land here. Vortex doesn't do much in this matchup as they're pretty aggressive and you don't want to be taking hits yourself. I'm cutting 1x Fireblast because every other card seems quite good, but drawing 2x Fireblast in your opening hand is bad.

Eldrazi Stompy: -2 Sulfuric Vortex -1 Barbarian Ring -1 Fireblast; +2 Smash to Smithereens, +2 Ensnaring Bridge
Same reasoning as above, just different tech coming in.

UWR Miracle: -4 Price of Progress -1 Fireblast; +3 Pyrostatic Pillar; +2 Exquisite Firecraft
I think a miracles player will play around Price of Progress quite handily after they realise we're on burn, so the effectiveness drops. I'm taking out one Fireblast for the same reason as before. Pillar and Firecraft are in for obvious reasons, but I don't think 4 Firecraft is necessary. This is a hard one, I'm never too sure about this matchup. I'm kinda thinking a Smash or two might be good for top, but what if they never get it? Creatures are essential I think, if you can get a couple down early and start swinging, the game will go a lot better for you, so never take creatures out. Very welcome to suggestions on this one...

Shardless BUG: No changes
I wouldn't change anything here, the mainboard is near perfect for this matchup. Burn eats this deck for dinner. Could make a case for a couple of Searing Blazes, but I think we just kill them with fire before they can do anything here.

Infect: -2 Sulfuric Vortex -2 Price of Progress; +4 Searing Blaze
Removal in, expensive non-removal cards out.

ANT: -2 Sulfuric Vortex, -1 Fireblast; +3 Pyrostatic Pillars
Resolve a Pillar/Eidolon on turn two and win the game.

Team America
Similar to Grixis?

[Scott]

UWR Miracle: -4 Price of Progress -1 Fireblast; +3 Pyrostatic Pillar; +2 Exquisite Firecraft
I think a miracles player will play around Price of Progress quite handily after they realise we're on burn, so the effectiveness drops. I'm taking out one Fireblast for the same reason as before. Pillar and Firecraft are in for obvious reasons, but I don't think 4 Firecraft is necessary. This is a hard one, I'm never too sure about this matchup. I'm kinda thinking a Smash or two might be good for top, but what if they never get it? Creatures are essential I think, if you can get a couple down early and start swinging, the game will go a lot better for you, so never take creatures out. Very welcome to suggestions on this one...

I've seen successful lists that run 3 Fireblast, so that number isn't the worst thing, but in this match up you're gonna want as many high CMC cards as you can get past CounterTop, so I think if you're running 4, you keep them all in.

[jrsthethird]

I've seen successful lists that run 3 Fireblast, so that number isn't the worst thing, but in this match up you're gonna want as many high CMC cards as you can get past CounterTop, so I think if you're running 4, you keep them all in.

Just remember to play around Terminus.

[JohnBell]

I strongly disagree with ever taking out Lava Spike or Rift Bolt. The cards that deal 3 damage for R should always remain, as they are the backbone of the deck. I am by no means an expert on this deck, but I believe wholeheartedly that the core principle of this deck is "3 dmg for R? Yes please"

Here is what I would do off the top of my head:

Grixis Delver: -2 Sulfuric Vortex, -1 Barbarian Ring -1 Fireblast; +4 Searing Blaze
Taking out Vortex means your curve is a lot lower so you can cut one land. Barbarian Ring is the worst land here. Vortex doesn't do much in this matchup as they're pretty aggressive and you don't want to be taking hits yourself. I'm cutting 1x Fireblast because every other card seems quite good, but drawing 2x Fireblast in your opening hand is bad.

Eldrazi Stompy: -2 Sulfuric Vortex -1 Barbarian Ring -1 Fireblast; +2 Smash to Smithereens, +2 Ensnaring Bridge
Same reasoning as above, just different tech coming in.

UWR Miracle: -4 Price of Progress -1 Fireblast; +3 Pyrostatic Pillar; +2 Exquisite Firecraft
I think a miracles player will play around Price of Progress quite handily after they realise we're on burn, so the effectiveness drops. I'm taking out one Fireblast for the same reason as before. Pillar and Firecraft are in for obvious reasons, but I don't think 4 Firecraft is necessary. This is a hard one, I'm never too sure about this matchup. I'm kinda thinking a Smash or two might be good for top, but what if they never get it? Creatures are essential I think, if you can get a couple down early and start swinging, the game will go a lot better for you, so never take creatures out. Very welcome to suggestions on this one...

Shardless BUG: No changes
I wouldn't change anything here, the mainboard is near perfect for this matchup. Burn eats this deck for dinner. Could make a case for a couple of Searing Blazes, but I think we just kill them with fire before they can do anything here.

Infect: -2 Sulfuric Vortex -2 Price of Progress; +4 Searing Blaze
Removal in, expensive non-removal cards out.

ANT: -2 Sulfuric Vortex, -1 Fireblast; +3 Pyrostatic Pillars
Resolve a Pillar/Eidolon on turn two and win the game.

Team America
Similar to Grixis?

First of all thank you for that comprehensive answer.
In some MU I thought I was side out Rift Bolts because the opponent can Stifle they.

Second point, I played a lot the list and I think 20 lands is too many as well as 4 Fireblast.
I cut one land and one Fireblast for 2 Sudden Shock.
Might be a good idea?

[TonTo]

2dmg for 2 mana seems very inefficient for a legacy burn mainboard. You could make a case for bringing it in from the side if you're up against Grixis Delver or something with lots of x/1s?

Regarding Stifle, I'm pretty sure most decks would board that out against us as it's mostly useless. Even if they leave Stifle in, if they don't have it when it triggers, they take 3 damage. If they do have it, they spend a card and some mana at the very start of your turn, making the rest of your plays somewhat easier to resolve.

I'm going to a Legacy tournament in an hour or so, here is what I'm running:

10 Fetch Lands
10 Mountains

4 Goblin Guide
4 Monastery Swiftspear
4 Eidolon of the Great Revel
2 Grim Lavamancer

2 Sulfuric Vortex

4 Lightning Bolt
4 Rift Bolt
4 Chain Lightning
4 Lava Spike
4 Price of Progress
4 Fireblast

SB: 3 Smash to Smithereens
SB: 3 Pyrostatic Pillar
SB: 3 Searing Blaze
SB: 2 Ensnaring Bridge
SB: 1 Relic of Progenitus
SB: 1 Tormod's Crypt
SB: 1 Pyroblast
SB: 1 Sulfuric Vortex

I'm expecting Reanimator, some variation of Storm, Delver, Lands, Shardless BUG, Stoneblade and maaaaybe Eldrazi or Merfolk. There might be one Miracles player. I don't anticipate a mirror.

Wish me luck! Hopefully I don't go 0-x drop :( I made top 4 last time out of a field of about 20.

EDIT: Got wrecked by Grixis and BUG Delver, let's not talk about it :P

[James718]

Hello, this is my burn list (http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/19-04-16-AEP-burn/). Any suggestions on improving it. I have an extra slot in my SB as well. My meta sees a lot of grixis delver, storm, reanimator and miracles


Land (20)
3x Arid Mesa
1x Barbarian Ring
4x Bloodstained Mire
7x Mountain
1x Scalding Tarn
4x Wooded Foothills

Enchantment (3)
3x Sulfuric Vortex

Creature (14)
4x Eidolon of the Great Revel
4x Goblin Guide
1x Grim Lavamancer
4x Monastery Swiftspear
1x Varchild's War-Riders

Instant (12)
4x Fireblast
4x Lightning Bolt
4x Price of Progress

Sorcery (12)
4x Chain Lightning
4x Lava Spike
4x Rift Bolt

Sideboard (14)
3x Grim Lavamancer
4x Pyrostatic Pillar
4x Searing Blaze
1x Skullcrack
2x Vexing Shusher

[Speedbump]

Hello, this is my burn list (http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/19-04-16-AEP-burn/). Any suggestions on improving it. I have an extra slot in my SB as well. My meta sees a lot of grixis delver, storm, reanimator and miracles


Land (20)
3x Arid Mesa
1x Barbarian Ring
4x Bloodstained Mire
7x Mountain
1x Scalding Tarn
4x Wooded Foothills

Enchantment (3)
3x Sulfuric Vortex

Creature (14)
4x Eidolon of the Great Revel
4x Goblin Guide
1x Grim Lavamancer
4x Monastery Swiftspear
1x Varchild's War-Riders

Instant (12)
4x Fireblast
4x Lightning Bolt
4x Price of Progress

Sorcery (12)
4x Chain Lightning
4x Lava Spike
4x Rift Bolt

Sideboard (14)
3x Grim Lavamancer
4x Pyrostatic Pillar
4x Searing Blaze
1x Skullcrack
2x Vexing ShusherI've got a few questions.

1) Any reason for the Varchild's War-Riders? While it seems decent enough as a 3/4 beater that can enable Searing Blaze or Searing Blood, I find that having more creatures gunking up the board against your own Monastery Swiftspear/Goblin Guide/other ground creatures being much more punishing with your build.

2) Somewhat based off of point 1, but is the meta prevalence of Storm/Reanimator significant enough to keep Searing effects in the SB? (This call is also somewhat dependant on the Miracles builds your metagame has, with more weighting for inclusion of them against Mentor/Legends variants)

3) How has the fourth Grim Lavamancer been treating you? Personally, I've found the fourth copy to be a little bit redundant, but that might be preference. I don't think there's a significant metagame reason as to why you'd need thr fourth copy, either.

4) I like the copy of Skullcrack in the sideboard, although I tend to run into more Lands decks than most people. It's probably the best way to get around Glacial Chasm, as I've found that it's not as expected. Not quite sure you need it from your metagame description though, as it's weak against all four of the decks you mentioned having the most prevalence.

5) You might need some form of graveyard removal, if either Storm or Reanimator is prevalent in your metagame. I'd go for Faerie Macabre over Surgical Extracion or Relic of Progenitus, because it deals with Reanimator the best of the three.

Overall, I'd make the following changes:

MD: -1 Varchild's War-Riders, +1 Grim Lavamancer
SB: -2 Grim Lavamancer, +1 Skullcrack or +1 Searing Blood, +2 Faerie Macabre

[Brael]

Hello, this is my burn list (http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/19-04-16-AEP-burn/). Any suggestions on improving it. I have an extra slot in my SB as well. My meta sees a lot of grixis delver, storm, reanimator and miracles

I don't like the War Rider at all. I don't think it does enough damage. Lets look at the various scenarios:

Scenario 1, you pay 2 mana, swing once, don't pay an upkeep. You've gotten an Incinerate that can be blocked.
Scenario 2, you pay 2 mana, swing twice paying 1 upkeep. You've gotten 5 damage. That's a Keldon Marauder that's worse against removal.
Scenario 3, you pay 2 mana, swing twice paying 1 upkeep, but you also swing with another creature. You get 6 damage through here, but the blocker costs you 2-3 on your other creature for a net damage of 4. Is 2 mana for 4 damage that can be removed good enough?

In the worst case scenario with #3 you pay the upkeep, they remove your guy, and they block you so you get 0 damage through.

I think you have much better options.

[Svyelunite]

New Episode of Legacy's Allure! We're talking Burn and we got one of the masters, Patrick Sullivan. Check it out!

Webcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUl6XmxqC5U&feature=youtu.be
Podcast: https://archive.org/details/LegacysAllureEp.10BurnWithPatrickSullivan

[Brael]

Well, this threads been pretty dead lately so I guess I'll talk about this ongoing project I've got. Originally I wasn't going to say anything until it's finished, but it's 80% there (it runs, it's mostly just recording data at this point) and this forces me to finish it while getting this thread off off page 3 so win/win.

In my spare time (which I have lots of now that it's summer) I've been writing a Magic simulator that takes a range of certain cards to put into a deck, and runs a predefined number of games in goldfish mode using all possible permutations of those numbers of cards. I originally built this simulator for a deck in Modern but I've been rewriting it and changing it over to Burn. What it does after running all of these games is it records various data such as the turn each game wins on and so on, and tracks what cards lead to faster games. My main goal with this is to try and determine with something a bit more valuable than anecdotal evidence how many Tops (and Magma Jets) if any are worth playing.

When it's all done, does anyone here have interest in seeing the results? It writes it all to a sqlite database so if anyone knows how to get information from them and wants to look at the raw data for themselves, I could post the database somewhere as well.

[Speedbump]

Well, this threads been pretty dead lately so I guess I'll talk about this ongoing project I've got. Originally I wasn't going to say anything until it's finished, but it's 80% there (it runs, it's mostly just recording data at this point) and this forces me to finish it while getting this thread off off page 3 so win/win.

In my spare time (which I have lots of now that it's summer) I've been writing a Magic simulator that takes a range of certain cards to put into a deck, and runs a predefined number of games in goldfish mode using all possible permutations of those numbers of cards. I originally built this simulator for a deck in Modern but I've been rewriting it and changing it over to Burn. What it does after running all of these games is it records various data such as the turn each game wins on and so on, and tracks what cards lead to faster games. My main goal with this is to try and determine with something a bit more valuable than anecdotal evidence how many Tops (and Magma Jets) if any are worth playing.

When it's all done, does anyone here have interest in seeing the results? It writes it all to a sqlite database so if anyone knows how to get information from them and wants to look at the raw data for themselves, I could post the database somewhere as well.I'm somewhat curious as to how much an optimal goldfish build differentiates from one that works in paper tournaments.

[Brael]

I'm somewhat curious as to how much an optimal goldfish build differentiates from one that works in paper tournaments.

I am too, there's a few limitations based on the fact that I only own a pretty nice gaming computer rather than a super computer to run the simulations on. What I can say though is that when I ran my previous version of the simulator on the Modern deck Knightfall it came up pretty different from the established builds in that it listed lands as being worth far more than most people feel they're worth (it would perform best with 28-29 land when most were running 22).

I could see a situation where Barbarian Ring turns out to be better than we normally treat it as being, in a goldfish atleast.

[Eldariel]

I am too, there's a few limitations based on the fact that I only own a pretty nice gaming computer rather than a super computer to run the simulations on. What I can say though is that when I ran my previous version of the simulator on the Modern deck Knightfall it came up pretty different from the established builds in that it listed lands as being worth far more than most people feel they're worth (it would perform best with 28-29 land when most were running 22).

I could see a situation where Barbarian Ring turns out to be better than we normally treat it as being, in a goldfish atleast.

I've said this before, but Barbarian Ring is a way to increases the consistency of getting to 3 mana without compromising your ability to close out games. Indeed, in match-ups like Miracles or various Delver match-ups, having the last few points in play as an uncounterable source (now that Stifle has all but vanished from all the popular Delver-variants) is just amazing. When I was optimizing my Burn-list years ago, I came to the conclusion that I liked a manabase of 18 Mountains/Fetches with 3 Barbarian Rings. This meant I basically never had trouble finding the first two lands and could hit the 3rd one quite reliably in the first 4 turns enabling casting all my spells (I've always run a number of Sulfuric Vortexes as it provides inevitability against various unexpected decks, gets past almost all countermeasures and of course crucially stops lifegain from DRT/Ooze/Jitte/whatever that would normally demolish us). Unfortunately, you'd need a 22nd mana source to hit 3 lands 90% of the time on turn 3-4 (21 sources gives you 90% rate on turn 5) which I could never find a way to add. 22/4 is possible, but BRings need cards in grave to go active which is a real problem with multiples.


Either way, my reasoning for such a manabase is that Burn is a deck that really cannot afford to mulligan. Every card contributes towards the lethal number of Burn-spells and while creatures provide somewhat more recursive sources of damage, Burn's creatures aren't such that they can be relied upon to finish the game. Thus, mulliganing essentially slows your kill down by one turn even at the best of times (the only real variable is Price of Progress). Thus, the deck absolutely needs to maximize the number of keepable hands; that's not just to avoid starting the game at a disadvantage, the deck actually just often cannot win if it mulligans heavily and it has no ways aside from PoP to recover from a disadvantage. The two most common reasons Burn has unkeepable hands, and indeed why it loses games, are manaflood and manascrew; as the curve is superlow and almost half the cards cost 1 mana, it's exceedingly rare to have to mulligan due to the hand being too slow.

However, a 5-land hand is an instant mulligan and a 4-land hand is borderline. Similarly, 0-land hands are instant mulligans though 1-landers are generally keepers (but then rely on having a sufficient chance of drawing out of it). Barbarian Ring is a land and a burn-spell; a 4-lander with Barbarian Ring is much better than a 4-lander with a Mountain (you'll draw on average 1 more land over the first 3 turns too). Yeah, 2-landers with only Barbarian Rings for mana are pretty bad and far away from casting Fireblast but that's only a problem if we're replacing normal lands with them; a 2-lander with only Barbarian Rings is far more keepable than a 0-lander.


The cost of Barbarian Ring is obvious: life hurts in races (basically all aggro match-ups; Delver, Eldrazi, D&T), it makes PoP hurt more if you can't pop the Ring before casting PoP, and it requires cards getting into grave to shine. Modern lists are far worse about that since all the creatures don't reliably end in the grave. They might get RFGd, shuffled away or just blocked and stay in play. Further, an active Grim Lavamancer reliably ensures you'll never pop any Bings you might draw (and Scooze/DRT might do it too, but you kinda want to get rid of those anyways).

I find that a list built to accommodate Bings has substantial advantages though, that I feel outweigh the disadvantages: more reliable mana and an easier time closing out games that come down to attrition. And as basically all popular decks right now somehow trade with your Burn-spells making each one count, I find that such a place is probably where you want to be at - less speed and more robust reliability. Combo is at a long-time low so there are fewer and fewer match-ups where speed is the primary consideration. To win you'll generally have to play through counters, discard, chalice, tax effects, lifegain or such and especially against the first 3, Bings perform very well.

[Brael]

I've said this before, but Barbarian Ring is a way to increases the consistency of getting to 3 mana without compromising your ability to close out games. Indeed, in match-ups like Miracles or various Delver match-ups, having the last few points in play as an uncounterable source (now that Stifle has all but vanished from all the popular Delver-variants) is just amazing. When I was optimizing my Burn-list years ago, I came to the conclusion that I liked a manabase of 18 Mountains/Fetches with 3 Barbarian Rings. This meant I basically never had trouble finding the first two lands and could hit the 3rd one quite reliably in the first 4 turns enabling casting all my spells (I've always run a number of Sulfuric Vortexes as it provides inevitability against various unexpected decks, gets past almost all countermeasures and of course crucially stops lifegain from DRT/Ooze/Jitte/whatever that would normally demolish us). Unfortunately, you'd need a 22nd mana source to hit 3 lands 90% of the time on turn 3-4 (21 sources gives you 90% rate on turn 5) which I could never find a way to add. 22/4 is possible, but BRings need cards in grave to go active which is a real problem with multiples.

The main issue I've found so far comes down to the reliability of Fireblast. If you have a double Fireblast hand one is dead until you hit 5 mana if you're using a Ring.

I don't think it's that important to hit 3 lands on turn 3 either, whenever I build my decks I assume my mana curve goes 1-2-2-3, so that I hit my third land drop on turn 4, which also means that I'm assuming I have 9 mana total to work with in a standard game (of course flood/screw happens which you should prepare for as well). Anyways, I assume my opponent has 24 life to work with and I'm on a mulligan to 6. I built a spreadsheet for this a long time ago to help with card choices now I'm trying the simulation approach. For what it's worth, with the spreadsheet approach what I'm looking for in the deck with those constraints is 148 damage in the deck (creatures make this a little murky), in less than 52 total mana.

[Sidneyious]

I mull if I have dbl fireblast, I want a 2 land hand 90% of the time.

I'll chance 3-4 land hands more often than not but I run this list.

http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/legacy-burn-12-09-12-1/

[Eldariel]

The main issue I've found so far comes down to the reliability of Fireblast. If you have a double Fireblast hand one is dead until you hit 5 mana if you're using a Ring.

I don't think it's that important to hit 3 lands on turn 3 either, whenever I build my decks I assume my mana curve goes 1-2-2-3, so that I hit my third land drop on turn 4, which also means that I'm assuming I have 9 mana total to work with in a standard game (of course flood/screw happens which you should prepare for as well). Anyways, I assume my opponent has 24 life to work with and I'm on a mulligan to 6. I built a spreadsheet for this a long time ago to help with card choices now I'm trying the simulation approach. For what it's worth, with the spreadsheet approach what I'm looking for in the deck with those constraints is 148 damage in the deck (creatures make this a little murky), in less than 52 total mana.

Yeah, it's true that multi-Fireblast hands get even worse if you replace any Mountains with BRings. I've generally found 18 Mountains enough; casts the 1st Fireblast with extreme reliability but the second one is far worse; maybe 50-70% in the first 5 cards? That's an unfortunate cost on Fireblast but I find both pieces are valuable enough that I'd be willing to eat up the inconsistency (especially since Fireblast makes it very easy to use Barb Ring, putting 3 cards in the grave). I believe you get more consistency elsewhere and I believe that makes up for the inconsistency of double FB. The games where you draw 1 or less Fireblasts over the first 5-6 turns form the majority, after all (drawing 2+ Fireblasts by turn 6 is like 20%).

[Brael]

I mull if I have dbl fireblast, I want a 2 land hand 90% of the time.

I'll chance 3-4 land hands more often than not but I run this list.

http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/legacy-burn-12-09-12-1/

Almost always mulliganing if you have an extra Fireblast isn't the right move. You should remove a Fireblast from the hand and evaluate if that's better than the average hand from that point. A second Fireblast is basically -1 card in hand, but if your 7 with double fireblast is stronger than the average 6 it's still a keep.

[MasterBlaster]

It has been years since I ran a burn deck and I have a couple questions about current incarnations.

1st off, my build from years back was burn heavy with the only creature being Spark Elemental. How often are topdecked creatures dead cards when you are trying to go for the last few points?

2nd. No Browbeat? Is it just too slow in todays meta?

[Sidneyious]

Almost always mulliganing if you have an extra Fireblast isn't the right move. You should remove a Fireblast from the hand and evaluate if that's better than the average hand from that point. A second Fireblast is basically -1 card in hand, but if your 7 with double fireblast is stronger than the average 6 it's still a keep.
I have 1 barbarian ring and I'm trying to make a old burn list that Sullivan ran because I hate sleigh and most burn lists are actually sleigh decks.

I can see the point for EtGR but it's at best IMO a SB card for combo and tempo.

I love dbl fireblast if I ha e the lands and other "bolts" to keep the mojo going.

Yes GG can deal 2+ damage over turns but it's just a shock afaic.

GLM is mostly creature removal if the games goes too long.

I want to win by t4 and most of my opponents are non basic so to me pop is the worse card for my list.

Yes I run rift but it don't deal as much damage to me as EtGR does.

If I can replace GLM with a better 1cmc burn spell that's not shock I'd do it.

If we get another "bolt" GLM is gone, GG is still the best 1cmc creature a burn deck can use but I'd want a second new 1 cmc "bolt".

I dont like creatures when I just want to " bolt".
The more turns we go the greater chance we lose.

[Brael]

It has been years since I ran a burn deck and I have a couple questions about current incarnations.

1st off, my build from years back was burn heavy with the only creature being Spark Elemental. How often are topdecked creatures dead cards when you are trying to go for the last few points?

2nd. No Browbeat? Is it just too slow in todays meta?

Good creatures are rarely dead, Swiftspear, Guide, and Eidolon are all pretty close to guaranteed damage on a topdeck. Lavamancer and Vexing Devil are the worst cards to topdeck on turn 4 or later but Top is pretty good at making sure that doesn't happen.

[Brael]

I have 1 barbarian ring and I'm trying to make a old burn list that Sullivan ran because I hate sleigh and most burn lists are actually sleigh decks.


The only problem is that the interactive decks with creatures have been proving themselves to be more powerful. Perhaps I'll have more data on this point than what we can get off of high placing tournament lists and anecdotal evidence once my simulator is finished but for now I'll just state that Goblin Guide, Eidolon, Swiftspear, Top, and several others exist are better positioned than Rift Bolt and Lava Spike. The decks old strategy of being non interactive just isn't what wins games anymore.

[Sidneyious]

The only problem is that the interactive decks with creatures have been proving themselves to be more powerful. Perhaps I'll have more data on this point than what we can get off of high placing tournament lists and anecdotal evidence once my simulator is finished but for now I'll just state that Goblin Guide, Eidolon, Swiftspear, Top, and several others exist are better positioned than Rift Bolt and Lava Spike. The decks old strategy of being non interactive just isn't what wins games anymore.
I do realize creatures are a thing now but I'd add top over a creature because draw is a problem for us because we have nothing really good. If we draw lands then yes faithless looting is good but for "creature less" burn we don't want to many lands.

I'm so curious about your findings because I want to be non interactive.

[Brael]

I'm so curious about your findings because I want to be non interactive.


My findings won't be able to answer that question all that well because it's a goldfish, there will inevitably be some correlation between the cards that represent the most damage offering the quickest clock, but in a goldfish that's creatures 100% of the time because a T1 Goblin Guide represents 8 damage (though I am reducing that to a somewhat more accurate level).

My feelings on being non interactive just come from playing the deck. Being non interactive just isn't where you want to be right now.

[MasterBlaster]

My feelings on being non interactive just come from playing the deck. Being non interactive just isn't where you want to be right now.

If it is enemy creatures that make you want to be interactive, why not simply maindeck Flamebreak?

[Speedbump]

If it is enemy creatures that make you want to be interactive, why not simply maindeck Flamebreak?Because:

1) It's not good enough to kill most creatures in Legacy.
2) The creatures it is good enough to kill are the ones we typically run.
3) It costs 3 to cast, and is a sorcery.
4) It is bad against decks without creatures.
5) Even if all 4 of those, through some major miracle, happen to not coincide, I'd rather cast Sulfuric Vortex.

[Sidneyious]

Most of the time gg nets me 4 damage and is a blocker after that.

I do feel I have to many lands in my deck but reliability for vortex and fireblast I could drop maybe 1-2 lands.

I want to run 3 barbarian rings buy its no bueno with fireblast so maybe just 2 is the right pick.

[Jaytron]

What does a stock burn list look like these days?

Assume a very fair meta, with lots of creatures.. So I suppose Swiftspear is not as good

[Krimson Viper]

Swiftspear really shines in metas where Miracles and combo decks are present, and fair decks are harder to come by. At least, that's what I discovered when I played awhile back.

Base lists:
4 GG
4 Eidolon

4 Bolt
4 Chain
4 Spike
3 Searing effects
4 Price of Progress
4 Rift Bolt
2 Vortex
3 Fireblast

[Jaytron]

Swiftspear really shines in metas where Miracles and combo decks are present, and fair decks are harder to come by. At least, that's what I discovered when I played awhile back.

Base lists:
4 GG
4 Eidolon

4 Bolt
4 Chain
4 Spike
3 Searing effects
4 Price of Progress
4 Rift Bolt
2 Vortex
3 Fireblast
I hope whoever won the CFB 1K posts today. I left as the finals was starting but Burn was OTP vs Gobs. I assume Burn won it.

[Krimson Viper]

Finals was Burn v. Goblins? Nice. If I went, I might have made it to top eight as well.

Ha. Who am I kidding? I'm super rusty.

[Speedbump]

Swiftspear really shines in metas where Miracles and combo decks are present, and fair decks are harder to come by.Haven't tested Swiftspear enough to make a claim for the Miracles side, although it feels like having another creature that gets hit by Terminus, Swords to Plowshares, and Counterbalance isn't the greatest card to have in that match-up. It might just be useful as Goblin Guide 5-8, as another creature to go underneath the Counterbalance soft-lock/hard-lock.

I feel that in metagames where Swiftspear would shine in, would typically be an environment in which Burn is a pretty mediocre metagame choice. If it's the best deck you have for that metagame, then still run it, although it is advised to switch to UR Delver if you still want to play an aggressive deck with Price of Progress+Swiftspear.


What does a stock burn list look like these days?

Assume a very fair meta, with lots of creatures.. So I suppose Swiftspear is not as goodMy list of core cards is as follows:
8 Fetchlands
8 Mountain
4 Goblin Guide
4 Eidolon of the Great Revel
1 Sensei's Divining Top
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Chain Lightning
4 Lava Spike
4 Rift Bolt
4 Price of Progress
4 Fireblast
2 Sulfuric Vortex

This leaves 9 spots for metagame choices, of which 2-4 are lands.

[Brael]

Haven't tested Swiftspear enough to make a claim for the Miracles side, although it feels like having another creature that gets hit by Terminus, Swords to Plowshares, and Counterbalance isn't the greatest card to have in that match-up. It might just be useful as Goblin Guide 5-8, as another creature to go underneath the Counterbalance soft-lock/hard-lock.

Swiftspear is really, really good in most matchups. It does a very similar amount of damage as Goblin Guide. I find that against Miracles the first thing I take out is my Lavamancer and my Searings. After that I start trimming on other creatures, a mid-late game Swiftspear though is usually just bait to get a 1 on top (ideally their top) in order to clear the way to get something else through Counterbalance. Post board things get a lot better since you can load up on uncounterable spells and Miracles doesn't usually have the clock to punish you for bringing in a bunch of 3's and 4's.

[Krimson Viper]

Haven't tested Swiftspear enough to make a claim for the Miracles side, although it feels like having another creature that gets hit by Terminus, Swords to Plowshares, and Counterbalance isn't the greatest card to have in that match-up. It might just be useful as Goblin Guide 5-8, as another creature to go underneath the Counterbalance soft-lock/hard-lock.

I feel that in metagames where Swiftspear would shine in, would typically be an environment in which Burn is a pretty mediocre metagame choice. If it's the best deck you have for that metagame, then still run it, although it is advised to switch to UR Delver if you still want to play an aggressive deck with Price of Progress+Swiftspear.

My list of core cards is as follows:
8 Fetchlands
8 Mountain
4 Goblin Guide
4 Eidolon of the Great Revel
1 Sensei's Divining Top
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Chain Lightning
4 Lava Spike
4 Rift Bolt
4 Price of Progress
4 Fireblast
2 Sulfuric Vortex

This leaves 9 spots for metagame choices, of which 2-4 are lands.

When I was playing regularly, I used to chat with a lot of Miracles players and they do actually fear repetitive damage like our creatures. It forces them to find Terminus in time before our spells start to finish the game. Get it under a counterbalance lock and it's something they'll have to deal with, especially if Spear can grow even through counters. I've had games against Miracles where i wouldn't have closed it out if it weren't for the creature damage.

However, I don't particularly like Spear because I feel like it takes away from our fair match ups and I want to keep that match up right where it is.

[Brael]

However, I don't particularly like Spear because I feel like it takes away from our fair match ups and I want to keep that match up right where it is.

I find spear to be good. Because of prowess it has a better shot at swinging into an opponents board than Guide does.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JT0DECsD-d-Bm61bNeNzu1L1oyIEIPw9ec3qUUN1SOk

That's my Burn sheet as it currently stands, if you want to play with some numbers yourself on the Google sheet go file/download, download as the spreadsheet of your choice, then go into your program and play with it (you'll actually have to save it, open with will open in read only mode). What I've found from this, at least with the configuration I'm using right now is that 4 Swiftspears are worth about 1 point of additional damage in your deck than 4 Goblin Guides are.

The basic instructions if you want to mess with it, the third tab (results) contains some cells to adjust deck numbers. At the top is your opponents total life that game, how many cards you'll have to play with, how much mana, and some other stuff. Some of it is an educated guess on my part rather than fully calculated like the extra cards seen per game field (cell A2). The deck requirements are determined by your average damage/card based on the total in your deck, and how many cards you need to hit the opponents life.

If you want to get into how some of that stuff is derived use either the recurring or one shot pages depending on the card. The one shot stuff is pretty straight forward aside from Atarka's Command which is using a conservative but subjective assumption of a 3 damage mode, then an additional 1 damage half the time. Recurring damage is a bit more complex, at the top are the average number of combat phases a creature will be live for depending on the turn it's cast for both normal and haste. Below is the creatures themselves based on the chance you will see that card (and presumably cast it) on that turn in the game. Goblin Guide is .7/.1/.1/.1 here because in the 10 card cycle this is tuned for your initial 7 will comprise 70% of the cards you see that game, so 70% of the time you draw a Guide it will be on T1, 10% of the time on T2, and so on. These chances are multiplied by the max damage the creature will deal if cast on that turn, times the number of rounds it's live for. So Goblin Guide has a power of 2 (cell F11), is hasted (G11), and will be good for 2 rounds (B2), so 2*2=4 damage when seen on T1, 3 damage on T2, 1.5 damage on T3, 1 damage on T4 (meaning half the time he can swing for 2, half he can't), which averages to Guide being worth 3.35 damage in your deck.

If anyone plays with it and has any other questions feel free to ask. I've been using some variation of this sheet for a couple years now and it hasn't steered me wrong yet. Still working on the simulation approach though and will hopefully be done soon which I intend to have replace this since it's a bit less subjective.

The most interesting part I find in it, is that 4 creatures beat the 3:1 ratio of Lightning Bolt: Goblin Guide, Monastery Swiftspear, Eidolon of the Great Revel, and Vexing Devil, but there doesn't seem to be enough slots to run 4 of each even in something more sligh oriented.

[Speedbump]

Swiftspear is really, really good in most matchups. It does a very similar amount of damage as Goblin Guide. I find that against Miracles the first thing I take out is my Lavamancer and my Searings. After that I start trimming on other creatures, a mid-late game Swiftspear though is usually just bait to get a 1 on top (ideally their top) in order to clear the way to get something else through Counterbalance. Post board things get a lot better since you can load up on uncounterable spells and Miracles doesn't usually have the clock to punish you for bringing in a bunch of 3's and 4's.I actually quite like Grim Lavamancer in the Miracles match-up, probably as much if not more-so on Turn 1 than Goblin Guide. It's a repeatable source of damage, and makes good use of the otherwise dead cards in your graveyard. The only cards that require Burn to have conditions set in the graveyard are Grim Lavamancer (have 2+ cards in GY), Exquisite Firecraft (2+ Burn spells in GY), and Barbarian Ring (7+ cards in GY), so there's no real cost to keeping Grim Lavamancer in on that ground.

I feel like the match-ups where Swiftspear really shines in is the uninteractive match-ups, where you need to dome by Turn 3. It seems pretty weak against decks like Shardless BUG, Eldrazi, D&T, or any other deck where their creatures are designed to be better than yours.

Regarding your spreadsheet: Looks very good! The only contentions I have is with the valuing of cards like Price of Progress and Grim Lavamancer (where the damage values assigned to these seem lower than experienced in gameplay), compared to Vexing Devil and Pyrostatic Pillar. (where the damage values assigned to these seem higher than experienced in gameplay) The main problem might just be that it's quite hard to accurately measure the value of damage these cards deal out, as they change values quite consistently based on the board state, and what deck you're playing against.


When I was playing regularly, I used to chat with a lot of Miracles players and they do actually fear repetitive damage like our creatures. It forces them to find Terminus in time before our spells start to finish the game. Get it under a counterbalance lock and it's something they'll have to deal with, especially if Spear can grow even through counters. I've had games against Miracles where i wouldn't have closed it out if it weren't for the creature damage.

However, I don't particularly like Spear because I feel like it takes away from our fair match ups and I want to keep that match up right where it is.The last part has been the reason I haven't been on the Swiftspear plan at all. Considering my metagame was full of Shardless BUG, D&T, Delver variants, Miracles, and a smattering of A+B Combo decks and Elves, it wasn't worth throwing the good match-ups to the wayside.

[Brael]

Regarding your spreadsheet: Looks very good! The only contentions I have is with the valuing of cards like Price of Progress and Grim Lavamancer (where the damage values assigned to these seem lower than experienced in gameplay), compared to Vexing Devil and Pyrostatic Pillar. (where the damage values assigned to these seem higher than experienced in gameplay) The main problem might just be that it's quite hard to accurately measure the value of damage these cards deal out, as they change values quite consistently based on the board state, and what deck you're playing against.


Pillar has the same value as Eidolon minus combat damage, or it should atleast. But that's the problem, a lot of these cards have a maximum and it changes based on deck, so I went with slightly more conservative values across the board. That approach skews things towards creatures, because the creatures we play all essentially have a minimum damage of 2 or more while the spells don't. It's possible I'm being too optimistic still in how many combat rounds each creature will get.

[Brael]

Played our Legacy night tonight, rather than a tournament though it seemed to devolve into people testing for Columbus so I only spent half the night playing Burn. On the other hand, I got some pretty good games in against Miracles going 5-1 winning both preboard and 3/4 postboard. Despite the performance though, I can't seem to convince anyone locally that SDT is amazing. Here's what I was playing, alongside the SB plan I had against Miracles. It's pretty similar to my default list on my spreadsheet.

Land 19
4 Bloodstained Mire
4 Wooded Foothills
2 Arid Mesa
1 Taiga
1 Barbarian Ring
7 Mountain

Creatures 13
4 Goblin Guide
4 Monastery Swiftspear
4 Eidolon of the Great Revel
1 Grim Lavamancer

Spells 25
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Chain Lightning
4 Price of Progress
3 Searing Blaze
4 Fireblast
2 Sulfuric Vortex
2 Atarka's Command
2 Rift Bolt

Artifact 3
3 Sensei's Divining Top

Sideboard 15
2 Ensnaring Bridge
1 Grim Lavamancer
2 Faerie Macabre
2 Volcanic Fallout
4 Exquisite Firecraft
2 Red Elemental Blast
1 Destructive Revelry
1 Sulfuric Vortex

Out went
1 Grim Lavamancer
4 Price of Progress
3 Searing Blaze
2 Atarka's Command

In comes
2 Volcanic Fallout
4 Exquisite Firecraft
2 Red Elemental Blast
1 Destructive Revelry
1 Sulfuric Vortex

A couple things are going on with this plan. I'm trying to avoid the Wear // Tear lock by reducing my 2's and increasing my 3's. Also trying to go for fewer counterable cards and rely less on board presence. Spell Mastery actually gets a little difficult to turn on here with only 16 cards to do so (not counting Fireblast) but Miracles is more about a slow burn than flash frying them. If you can land a Top it becomes very difficult for them to win, to the point that I think it's correct to mulligan from 7 to 6 in search of one given the ability to scry another card, especially if you're on the draw.

[Krimson Viper]

I'm very interested in Sensei's Divining Top in the deck. Pros and cons? How's the mana, as in do you find its a sink sometimes? Any particular tricks?

[Brael]

I'm very interested in Sensei's Divining Top in the deck. Pros and cons? How's the mana, as in do you find its a sink sometimes? Any particular tricks?

The pro's are that it gets you more damage, you're less at the mercy of your top decks, every useless card you push out of the way represents 3-4 more damage you're getting in. You'll usually only activate Top a couple of times, outside of a slow game like Miracles I'm usually only activating it twice in a game (maybe once depending on curve), so it represents 2-3 total mana spent. As an upside though it's never a lost card because you can always tap it to cash it in for something. Sometimes if I have more mana than business I'll even tap it every turn just to generate prowess triggers. The final pro is that because you dig, you see more of your SB and that can change your SB numbers so the deck is a little less narrowly focused. Your games 2/3 improve across the board as a result.

The cons are that it slows you down in the mirror or against other aggressive decks that just don't give you time. To cast and activate top once represents 2 mana, which means you're giving up some board control. It also means that you need to play fewer mana sink cards. I board some extra Lavamancers to bring in during these situations, and take my Tops out. I also sometimes board extra Searing effects (what I played last night used Bridges instead), again to bring in when Top comes out.

Top plays a bit different in Burn than in say Miracles. In Burn you have to evaluate your clock, you always want to cash the Top in for another card so you still get your damage from it plus the advantage (unless you're using it for Prowess triggers). So once the clock is established and I have things to do with my mana I'll frequently tap it and shuffle it away. When you do that remember to do it in the order of activate top, in response tap top (with something you want on top), after top taps and is on top, crack a fetch. Then when things resolve you'll get to stack your top 3.

Remember that it's only as much of a sink as you want it to be, if you can't use it due to the mana situation you can always cash it in and shuffle it away but I find it's usually pretty easy to get some advantage out of it. I like landing top on T1 because only FoW usually stops it, but I find that I usually don't activate it until T3 unless I have a Rift Bolt or something that I would like to suspend on 2. It's always better to land Eidolon on 2 than activate Top when you have that choice and if keeping a 1 lander (top makes this a bit more viable) I prefer to go T1 Top, T2 hope for a topdeck, and only on T3 upkeep dig for another land, but I'm not sure if that line is right... I just like getting a 1 drop creature down if I can.

Basically, the main trick is to just get used to the timing, most decks never cash their Top's in, but here that Top almost always represents additional damage for your clock. I would say that in the average game I'm spending 3 mana on Top to get around 10 damage (because it gets a 4 dmg) through better draws and then cashing it in. Of course that's 3 mana to find rather than to cast that damage, but you can get some of that mana back if Top gets you a land earlier than you would otherwise get it... particularly if it's the third land on turn 3. Don't under estimate the value of getting another land earlier, I won't know more until my simulator is done and I can look at millions of generated games, but experience is telling me SDT can get pretty close to mana neutral just in smoothing land drops.

[Krimson Viper]

Would you say three is the magical number? I know many players advocate lower lands in the deck, but I like having twenty. In my current build, I've been trying to squeeze in twenty-one, but I just can't seem to figure that out. I bring this up because I wouldn't mind trading in a land and a couple of Lavaman slots for three Tops.

[Brael]

Would you say three is the magical number? I know many players advocate lower lands in the deck, but I like having twenty. In my current build, I've been trying to squeeze in twenty-one, but I just can't seem to figure that out. I bring this up because I wouldn't mind trading in a land and a couple of Lavaman slots for three Tops.

I've been using 3, it's not particularly a line of logic I like that 3 of's are best when you want to see a card but not multiples of that card, but that's what I'm doing. I've found that the second top can always get cashed in, but that it takes long enough that it does cost you time if you draw it and I want to remain as fast as possible, so that's why I trimmed to 3. I always like having one though.

If you want a 21st land, maybe go for a Barbarian Ring over Fireblast #4? That way you're still getting some damage out of the slot.

[Sidneyious]

Blast

[Lord Darkview]

The pro's are that it gets you more damage, you're less at the mercy of your top decks, every useless card you push out of the way represents 3-4 more damage you're getting in. You'll usually only activate Top a couple of times, outside of a slow game like Miracles I'm usually only activating it twice in a game (maybe once depending on curve), so it represents 2-3 total mana spent. As an upside though it's never a lost card because you can always tap it to cash it in for something. Sometimes if I have more mana than business I'll even tap it every turn just to generate prowess triggers. The final pro is that because you dig, you see more of your SB and that can change your SB numbers so the deck is a little less narrowly focused. Your games 2/3 improve across the board as a result.

The cons are that it slows you down in the mirror or against other aggressive decks that just don't give you time. To cast and activate top once represents 2 mana, which means you're giving up some board control. It also means that you need to play fewer mana sink cards. I board some extra Lavamancers to bring in during these situations, and take my Tops out. I also sometimes board extra Searing effects (what I played last night used Bridges instead), again to bring in when Top comes out.

Top plays a bit different in Burn than in say Miracles. In Burn you have to evaluate your clock, you always want to cash the Top in for another card so you still get your damage from it plus the advantage (unless you're using it for Prowess triggers). So once the clock is established and I have things to do with my mana I'll frequently tap it and shuffle it away. When you do that remember to do it in the order of activate top, in response tap top (with something you want on top), after top taps and is on top, crack a fetch. Then when things resolve you'll get to stack your top 3.

Remember that it's only as much of a sink as you want it to be, if you can't use it due to the mana situation you can always cash it in and shuffle it away but I find it's usually pretty easy to get some advantage out of it. I like landing top on T1 because only FoW usually stops it, but I find that I usually don't activate it until T3 unless I have a Rift Bolt or something that I would like to suspend on 2. It's always better to land Eidolon on 2 than activate Top when you have that choice and if keeping a 1 lander (top makes this a bit more viable) I prefer to go T1 Top, T2 hope for a topdeck, and only on T3 upkeep dig for another land, but I'm not sure if that line is right... I just like getting a 1 drop creature down if I can.

Basically, the main trick is to just get used to the timing, most decks never cash their Top's in, but here that Top almost always represents additional damage for your clock. I would say that in the average game I'm spending 3 mana on Top to get around 10 damage (because it gets a 4 dmg) through better draws and then cashing it in. Of course that's 3 mana to find rather than to cast that damage, but you can get some of that mana back if Top gets you a land earlier than you would otherwise get it... particularly if it's the third land on turn 3. Don't under estimate the value of getting another land earlier, I won't know more until my simulator is done and I can look at millions of generated games, but experience is telling me SDT can get pretty close to mana neutral just in smoothing land drops.

Greeting! I'm back to The Source since I was recently reminded why, compared to everywhere else, The Source was superior for Legacy discussion.

I want to discuss SDT a bit. It's inclusion confuses me, since I was always of the understanding that our philosophy was that things which aren't mana-for-damage, in as near a 1-for-3 ratio as possible, aren't for us. I think the SDT interaction is clever, but it just made mean uneasy. I remember Magma Jet was a staple way back when and played a similar role, so I did a more detailed analysis.

The analysis is here (http://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/the-game/legacy-type-1-5/established-legacy/aggro-tempo/488613-burn?comment=2482), but the gist is that once you hit the "only to-the-face" stage, a random nonland card plus a random draw is about 3.5 damage, a Magma Jet plus fixed draw is 4.7 damage (at a cost of basically 1 extra mana), and an SDT-swapped draw plus SDT-stacked draw is worth 5.5 damage (at a cost of 3 extra mana and 1 life).

Now, I'm not sure that analysis is right. If it is right, it seems that SDT is only marginally better than Jet, but at much higher mana cost. People on the other boards were adamant that SDT is good, but couldn't really explain why. I'm a very analytical person, and sort of like to have a good, logical reason for my card selection.

Can someone point out the flaw in my analysis? I'm sure there's one, or SDT wouldn't be so popular. Am I undervaluing the likely power of the card found with SDT? Do we really play so many games that run long enough that we're using SDT tons (all my analysis says getting to 20 is more of a mana-bottleneck than card-shortage, which SDT would make worse)?


Also, my decklist is here (http://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/the-game/legacy-type-1-5/established-legacy/aggro-tempo/488613-burn?page=99#c2473), and I'll take any feedback you're willing to offer. I'm considering -1 Mountain, -1 GLM, -2 Searing Blood, +4 Magma Jet.

[Sidneyious]

I'd love to run sdt but I want damage.

I have been looking at more 4 damage spells to replace sulfuric vortex, I run SV for obvious reasons but like creatures can be removed easy and at 3 mana I'd rather run skullcrack in the side if I face lifegain stuff.

Thoughts in
flame javelin
pulse of the forge
sonic burst

Now the sorcery speed cards that gained interest
Exquisite firecraft
Skull scorch

Now my list, many of you know I'm no fan of creature.

Sure that can deal 2-6 damage before removed but like most decks I play I'd rather their removal be useless.

3x Arid Mesa
4x Bloodstained Mire
4x Chain Lightning
4x Fireblast
4x Flame Rift
4x Goblin Guide
4x Grim Lavamancer
4x Lava Spike
4x Lightning Bolt
9x Mountain
4x Price of Progress
4x Rift Bolt
1x Scalding Tarn
3x Sulfuric Vortex
4x Wooded Foothills

[Lord Darkview]

I'd love to run sdt but I want damage.

I have been looking at more 4 damage spells to replace sulfuric vortex, I run SV for obvious reasons but like creatures can be removed easy and at 3 mana I'd rather run skullcrack in the side if I face lifegain stuff.

Thoughts in
flame javelin
pulse of the forge
sonic burst

Now the sorcery speed cards that gained interest
Exquisite firecraft
Skull scorch

Now my list, many of you know I'm no fan of creature.

Sure that can deal 2-6 damage before removed but like most decks I play I'd rather their removal be useless.

3x Arid Mesa
4x Bloodstained Mire
4x Chain Lightning
4x Fireblast
4x Flame Rift
4x Goblin Guide
4x Grim Lavamancer
4x Lava Spike
4x Lightning Bolt
9x Mountain
4x Price of Progress
4x Rift Bolt
1x Scalding Tarn
3x Sulfuric Vortex
4x Wooded Foothills

I've found that it is very unlikely that Vortex gets removed before it deals at least 2 points during game 1. That said, Skullcrack is certainly a possible alternative in this case, as it is more raw damage than the 1st turn and more mana efficient than the 2nd. The problem for Skullcrack has always been timing: a lot of our best spells are Sorcery speed, and always being forced to hold up mana as if I'm playing countermagic just feels wrong.

As for creatures, I notice you have 4x GG, 4x GLM, and 0x EotGR. I generally find the 4th GLM doesn't do much. EotGR pretty much always does at least 2, even if they immediately remove him, and more frequently does 4. This also dilutes their removal, so it won't be focused squarely on GLM.

In the 4-for-3 category, the only ones I'd seriously consider are Vortex (usually good for 4) and Exquisite Firecraft.

[SecondSunrise]

After scrubbing out of the main event with Eldrazi, I played Burn in the Enter the Arena event on Sunday at GP Prague. Ended up going 3-1, winning against RUG Delver, ANT and Reanimator (!) and loosing only in the burn mirror :laugh:

The list I'm testing now runs 4 Swiftspears, 3 Searing Blaze and 0 Vortex MD, as well as a Barbarian Ring (that promptly lost me the game against the mirror :rolleyes: ). Raised the Blaze count since it is better with Swiftspear than Vortex and there are many Deathrites running around right now. The Swiftspears especially have been really good for me, giving me ways to win games I had no business winning, for example beating a Turn 2 Griselbrand against Reanimator:

My opponent went to 8 in order to get Griselbrand with Reanimate after I passed the turn with 2 Swiftspears he attacked me to go back up to 15. On my turn I then went Lava Spike + Chain Lightning + Fireblast. My opp had FoW for the Fireblast, but still took exactly 14 since the Swiftspears attacked for a total of 8 dmg! This win was very satifying and left my opponent quite flabbergasted, who said he had (understandably) never lost to Burn.

I enjoyed playing the current configuration very much, although squeezing in a SDT could be awesome to get more Prowess triggers and filter away excessive creatures. Will try to find room for it.

[MTGeezy]

After scrubbing out of the main event with Eldrazi, I played Burn in the Enter the Arena event on Sunday at GP Prague. Ended up going 3-1, winning against RUG Delver, ANT and Reanimator (!) and loosing only in the burn mirror :laugh:

The list I'm testing now runs 4 Swiftspears, 3 Searing Blaze and 0 Vortex MD, as well as a Barbarian Ring (that promptly lost me the game against the mirror :rolleyes: ). Raised the Blaze count since it is better with Swiftspear than Vortex and there are many Deathrites running around right now. The Swiftspears especially have been really good for me, giving me ways to win games I had no business winning, for example beating a Turn 2 Griselbrand against Reanimator:

My opponent went to 8 in order to get Griselbrand with Reanimate after I passed the turn with 2 Swiftspears he attacked me to go back up to 15. On my turn I then went Lava Spike + Chain Lightning + Fireblast. My opp had FoW for the Fireblast, but still took exactly 14 since the Swiftspears attacked for a total of 8 dmg! This win was very satifying and left my opponent quite flabbergasted, who said he had (understandably) never lost to Burn.

I enjoyed playing the current configuration very much, although squeezing in a SDT could be awesome to get more Prowess triggers and filter away excessive creatures. Will try to find room for it.

You got a list by chance? curious to see what your layout is.

[Brael]

Greeting! I'm back to The Source since I was recently reminded why, compared to everywhere else, The Source was superior for Legacy discussion.

I want to discuss SDT a bit. It's inclusion confuses me, since I was always of the understanding that our philosophy was that things which aren't mana-for-damage, in as near a 1-for-3 ratio as possible, aren't for us. I think the SDT interaction is clever, but it just made mean uneasy. I remember Magma Jet was a staple way back when and played a similar role, so I did a more detailed analysis.

The analysis is here (http://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/the-game/legacy-type-1-5/established-legacy/aggro-tempo/488613-burn?comment=2482), but the gist is that once you hit the "only to-the-face" stage, a random nonland card plus a random draw is about 3.5 damage, a Magma Jet plus fixed draw is 4.7 damage (at a cost of basically 1 extra mana), and an SDT-swapped draw plus SDT-stacked draw is worth 5.5 damage (at a cost of 3 extra mana and 1 life).

Now, I'm not sure that analysis is right. If it is right, it seems that SDT is only marginally better than Jet, but at much higher mana cost. People on the other boards were adamant that SDT is good, but couldn't really explain why. I'm a very analytical person, and sort of like to have a good, logical reason for my card selection.

Can someone point out the flaw in my analysis? I'm sure there's one, or SDT wouldn't be so popular. Am I undervaluing the likely power of the card found with SDT? Do we really play so many games that run long enough that we're using SDT tons (all my analysis says getting to 20 is more of a mana-bottleneck than card-shortage, which SDT would make worse)?


Also, my decklist is here (http://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/the-game/legacy-type-1-5/established-legacy/aggro-tempo/488613-burn?page=99#c2473), and I'll take any feedback you're willing to offer. I'm considering -1 Mountain, -1 GLM, -2 Searing Blood, +4 Magma Jet.

I think your analysis is off. There's more good cards left than 24/60, using my list there would be 30/60 good cards on T4. Those 30 cards comprise about 114 damage so that's 3.8 damage/card on the good cards and 0 damage/card on the rest. Assuming we use your suggestion for playing Top you have an 87.5% chance of hitting on the first card so .875*3.8 or you get 3.325 damage. You have an 86.3% chance to hit on the second card or 3.279 damage on average. So that's 1 life and 3 to generate 0 damage but get 6.6 damage into your hand. Including the mana cost of the cards you hit (in my list this would be 39 total for 1.3 mana/card... this is all in my spreadsheet I uploaded before for my current list) you're looking at 5.6 mana for 6.6 damage. Not the greatest ratio but I did claim it was a mana sink. More importantly though, it's 6.6 damage in 2 cards.

If you just take a random draw it's 2.67 damage/card on average in my list so you'll get 5.34 damage in 2.6 mana. So with top you're paying an additional 3 mana for 1.3 damage. If you can stack it with an early prowess trigger though it's 3 mana for 2.3 damage.

I think this approach ignores the branching options though because the deck relies heavily on critical mass. If you miss on either spell you risk going below the critical mass and not killing your opponent. The SDT route will hit those 2 burn spells much more often than random chance will. In reality it looks more like 25% of the time you hit 2 burn spells, 50% of the time you hit 1 burn spell, and 25% of the time you hit 0 burn spells. In that scenario, there's a considerable overlap where Top gets you more damage than the 1 burn spell and 1 dead card will. So more than just being slightly more damage, it smooths the games.

Also remember, that if your Top gets you your third land drop, it breaks even on mana because the mana to fuel it is something that you wouldn't have otherwise had.

I'm hoping to get my simulations for this running soon, it ended up being a bit more bug ridden than I thought, so I've been tracking all those down. The idea is that it can give a lot of games worth of info once it's all done.

[Meester Roboto]

Figured I would post a short recap of my GP Columbus Experience.

I ended up 9-6, a big solid average.

Day 1:
Round 1: Grixis Delver
Round 2: Lands
Round 3: RUG Delver
Round 4: Infect (L)
Round 5: Infect
Round 6: Jund
Round 7: RUG Delver (L)
Round 8: BUG Thing in the Ice
Round 9: TES- Bryant Cook (L)

Day 2:
Round 10: Grixis Delver
Round 11: Sneak and Show (L)
Round 12: Infect
Round 13: Red Stompy (L)
Round 14: Miracles
Round 15: BUG Delver (L)

Overall I feel that my losses were to variance rather than misplays. The only exception was keeping a sketchy hand game 3 against SnT instead of mulling to Bridge.

Here is the list I ran. I used every card in the SB except the cages as I never ran up against a matchup needing them. Will be happy to answer questions about any of my numbers, card choices, or matches.

Lands:
10 Mountain
4 Bloodstaind Mire
4 Wooded Foothills
1 Barbarian Ring

Creatures:
4 Goblin Guide
4 Eidolon of the Great Revel
2 Monastery Swiftspear
1 Grim Lavamancer

Spells:
4 Fireblast
4 Price of Progress
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Chain Lightning
4 Lava Spike
4 Rift Bolt
3 Searing Blaze
2 Sulfuric Vortex
1 Exquisite Firecraft

Sideboard
1 Pyrostatic Pillar
2 Grafdiggers Cage
2 Ensnaring Bridge
2 Pithing Needle
3 Exquisite Firecraft
1 Grim Lavamancer
1 Searing Blood
3 Smash To Smithereens

[MTGeezy]

Figured I would post a short recap of my GP Columbus Experience.

I ended up 9-6, a big solid average.

Day 1:
Round 1: Grixis Delver
Round 2: Lands
Round 3: RUG Delver
Round 4: Infect (L)
Round 5: Infect
Round 6: Jund
Round 7: RUG Delver (L)
Round 8: BUG Thing in the Ice
Round 9: TES- Bryant Cook (L)

Day 2:
Round 10: Grixis Delver
Round 11: Sneak and Show (L)
Round 12: Infect
Round 13: Red Stompy (L)
Round 14: Miracles
Round 15: BUG Delver (L)

Overall I feel that my losses were to variance rather than misplays. The only exception was keeping a sketchy hand game 3 against SnT instead of mulling to Bridge.

Here is the list I ran. I used every card in the SB except the cages as I never ran up against a matchup needing them. Will be happy to answer questions about any of my numbers, card choices, or matches.

Lands:
10 Mountain
4 Bloodstaind Mire
4 Wooded Foothills
1 Barbarian Ring

Creatures:
4 Goblin Guide
4 Eidolon of the Great Revel
2 Monastery Swiftspear
1 Grim Lavamancer

Spells:
4 Fireblast
4 Price of Progress
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Chain Lightning
4 Lava Spike
4 Rift Bolt
3 Searing Blaze
2 Sulfuric Vortex
1 Exquisite Firecraft

Sideboard
1 Pyrostatic Pillar
2 Grafdiggers Cage
2 Ensnaring Bridge
2 Pithing Needle
3 Exquisite Firecraft
1 Grim Lavamancer
1 Searing Blood
3 Smash To Smithereens

Would you make any changes to your list or did it feel pretty solid? Got a legacy fnm tonight so I'm trying to decide on a final decklist.

[SecondSunrise]

You got a list by chance? curious to see what your layout is.

Sorry for answering so late; this is the list I'currently running:

10 Mountain
8 Fetches
1 Barbarian Ring

4 Goblin Guide
4 Monastery Swiftspear
4 Eidolon of the Great Revel
2 Grim Lavamancer

4 Lava Spike
4 Rift Bolt
4 Chain Lightning
4 Lightning Bolt
3 Searing Blaze
4 Price of Progress
4 Fireblast

SB

4 Exquisite Firecraft
4 Pyrostatic Pillar
3 Smash to Smithereens
2 Sulfuric Vortex
2 Ensnaring Bridge

I notice that my MD is almost identical to Meester Roboto's, 57/60 MD! :cool: The SB is notably different, how was your experience with Needle? I have stopped bothering with putting in GY hate for the moment, as I just don't feel like the small increase in win% those 1-2 cards give us are worth the SB slots. Running 4 Pillars might be slightly excessive, but I just like having 8 of that effect against the various storm decks; furthermore, they can do work against decks like Miracles where my list has lots of dead MD cards (even if we maybe dont need more help after the printing of EF).

[Sidneyious]

I think your analysis is off. There's more good cards left than 24/60, using my list there would be 30/60 good cards on T4. Those 30 cards comprise about 114 damage so that's 3.8 damage/card on the good cards and 0 damage/card on the rest. Assuming we use your suggestion for playing Top you have an 87.5% chance of hitting on the first card so .875*3.8 or you get 3.325 damage. You have an 86.3% chance to hit on the second card or 3.279 damage on average. So that's 1 life and 3 to generate 0 damage but get 6.6 damage into your hand. Including the mana cost of the cards you hit (in my list this would be 39 total for 1.3 mana/card... this is all in my spreadsheet I uploaded before for my current list) you're looking at 5.6 mana for 6.6 damage. Not the greatest ratio but I did claim it was a mana sink. More importantly though, it's 6.6 damage in 2 cards.

If you just take a random draw it's 2.67 damage/card on average in my list so you'll get 5.34 damage in 2.6 mana. So with top you're paying an additional 3 mana for 1.3 damage. If you can stack it with an early prowess trigger though it's 3 mana for 2.3 damage.

I think this approach ignores the branching options though because the deck relies heavily on critical mass. If you miss on either spell you risk going below the critical mass and not killing your opponent. The SDT route will hit those 2 burn spells much more often than random chance will. In reality it looks more like 25% of the time you hit 2 burn spells, 50% of the time you hit 1 burn spell, and 25% of the time you hit 0 burn spells. In that scenario, there's a considerable overlap where Top gets you more damage than the 1 burn spell and 1 dead card will. So more than just being slightly more damage, it smooths the games.

Also remember, that if your Top gets you your third land drop, it breaks even on mana because the mana to fuel it is something that you wouldn't have otherwise had.

I'm hoping to get my simulations for this running soon, it ended up being a bit more bug ridden than I thought, so I've been tracking all those down. The idea is that it can give a lot of games worth of info once it's all done.
If I ran my list with top (4) I'd drop 2 GLM and 2 lands(basic and the 1 ring), I can see swiftspear doing more for me than EotGR will.

I'd rather run him in a sideboard against cantrip heavy decks.

[Brael]

If I ran my list with top (4) I'd drop 2 GLM and 2 lands(basic and the 1 ring), I can see swiftspear doing more for me than EotGR will.

I'd rather run him in a sideboard against cantrip heavy decks.

I would drop Lava Spike for creature space long before Eidolon. Lava Spike is the worst card in the deck that frequently sees play.

[Dio]

What do you guys think about replacing Barbarian Ring with Keldon Megaliths? I don't have much experience with burn and I know Barbarian Ring can deal the final damage, but I was wondering if it would be better to deal 1 damage each turn after emptying our hand.

[Speedbump]

What do you guys think about replacing Barbarian Ring with Keldon Megaliths? I don't have much experience with burn and I know Barbarian Ring can deal the final damage, but I was wondering if it would be better to deal 1 damage each turn after emptying our hand.Too slow, too mana intensive, just not good enough.

Burn can't afford lands entering the battlefield tapped, let alone one that requires two other lands just to activate.

[Brael]

Update on that simulation I've written about a few times. All my code for it is written, all that's left really is to let it run with numerous deck permutations and generate data, then extract that data from the database, which is relatively simple though a bit tedious. Looking over the logs not all of the lines appear to be optimal, but they look to be good enough.

They're pretty long so I don't want to post any sample logs for people to scrutinize the lines, but if someones interested I can PM a couple games worth of output.


What do you guys think about replacing Barbarian Ring with Keldon Megaliths? I don't have much experience with burn and I know Barbarian Ring can deal the final damage, but I was wondering if it would be better to deal 1 damage each turn after emptying our hand.

Last year I think it was, or maybe the year prior someone managed to top 8 an SCG with Keldon Megaliths, if I remember correctly he made it all the way to the finals. In general though it's just not very good. We actually have a lot of uncounterable damage right now with Exquisite Firecraft and Volcanic Fallout, plus we can usually sneak some in as well. That reduces the value of just how many cards like Barbarian Ring you need. There's definitely not a high enough demand on the effect to use it.

[Lord Darkview]

Update on that simulation I've written about a few times. All my code for it is written, all that's left really is to let it run with numerous deck permutations and generate data, then extract that data from the database, which is relatively simple though a bit tedious. Looking over the logs not all of the lines appear to be optimal, but they look to be good enough.

They're pretty long so I don't want to post any sample logs for people to scrutinize the lines, but if someones interested I can PM a couple games worth of output.



Last year I think it was, or maybe the year prior someone managed to top 8 an SCG with Keldon Megaliths, if I remember correctly he made it all the way to the finals. In general though it's just not very good. We actually have a lot of uncounterable damage right now with Exquisite Firecraft and Volcanic Fallout, plus we can usually sneak some in as well. That reduces the value of just how many cards like Barbarian Ring you need. There's definitely not a high enough demand on the effect to use it.

Still looking forward to seeing what it generates on the random draw vs Magma Jet vs SDT (vs Brainstorm) question. I know simulations are hard work, thanks for working on it and volunteering to share results.

[Sidneyious]

I would drop Lava Spike for creature space long before Eidolon. Lava Spike is the worst card in the deck that frequently sees play.
I'd never get rid of lava spike

[Brael]

Still looking forward to seeing what it generates on the random draw vs Magma Jet vs SDT (vs Brainstorm) question. I know simulations are hard work, thanks for working on it and volunteering to share results.

I enjoy working on it, plus it's good practice for me. It's just taking longer than expected because getting the motivation to work on it for long stretches of time during a summer where I'm trying to enjoy my time off is difficult since I have another project I'm working on too which competes for attention.


I'd never get rid of lava spike

I fully cut Lava Spike and I'm at less than 4 Rift Bolt. I find that neither card is flexible enough these days. I'm typically trying to deal 18-24 damage, not simply play as a combo deck that resolves 7 spells to win and something that only sends 3 at their face isn't strong enough then.

[Sidneyious]

http://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20160628/576c88ac22e1fbef06747877b964c8c5.jpg
Thoughts? I'm rather intrigued.

[LegacyIsAnEternalFormat]

@Sidneyious
I think you missed that it says target creature not target creature or player...

Edit:Even if it said player it would still be horrible because youd need 2 of it in the grave for it to be better than lightning bolt.

[Speedbump]

http://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20160628/576c88ac22e1fbef06747877b964c8c5.jpg
Thoughts? I'm rather intrigued.No.

[Brael]

Thoughts? I'm rather intrigued.

Absolutely terrible card. To begin with it's creatures only. Next, it's only 2 damage on the first one and then 4 damage on the second one. You need to draw two of them for them to be as good against creatures as Lightning Bolt is individually. Assuming it could hit players it wouldn't beat out Lava Spike until you cast the third copy.

[Brael]

Yay, at long last this simulator is finished. I'm taking a couple different approaches with it, one is running a large number of deck permutations at fewer decks each. This will take quite a while to finish (days, maybe even weeks). But I'm also running one using preset decks at a larger number of runs. I can get in about 1000 games in 20 minutes or so, but I can't really automate the process of setting up the decks so it's one of those situations where I can set it, forget it, and then come back to it later on when I'm near the computer. I have 1000 games complete with a deck list using Tops right now and I'll post those results here later, and then post a few other deck configurations with Magma Jet, Vexing Devil, and neither later, maybe some combinations of those cards too. I'm going to wait on any data though until there's multiple decks worth so that they can be looked at in relation to each other. The data with top for example is suggesting slow games, but the lines my simulator takes could be a bit slower in general.

Here is an example of the type of output I can generate
http://imgur.com/a/tKA8D

In this example you can see in the first image a deck with an ID of 2 and a deck list of 6 fetchlands, 6 lands, 4 eidolon, 4 goblin guide, 4 vexing devil, 4 flame rift, 4 fireblast, 4 atarka's command, 4 incinerate, 12 lava spikes, 4 magma jets, and 4 tops.

In the second image, we're looking at games instead of decks. It's filtered to only games played with deckID 2. Here is where all the mulligan information is stored. You can see in gameID 3 it mulliganed to one card, 3 of which were caused by no land hands (as you would expect from a 12 land deck). We're going to focus on gameID 8 though because it looks interesting.

In the third image we're looking at turns, and it's filtered to turns taken in game8, which itself is a subsection of deck 2. We can see that game 8 consisted of 6 turns and by looking at it's max mana the mana development went 1-1-2-2-3-3, so it was a 1 land keep off of a mulligan to 5 (the mulligan information having come from the games table). What we can also see, is that turn 5 was the big turn having dealt 11 damage. The prowess count tells us that two spells were cast and that there was 3 mana available.

Going a level deeper we can see the hand and board states in the next 2 images. On the board is 3 lands and an Eidolon and in the hand is 2 Bolts, Incinerate, and Flame Rift so we can tell that the 11 damage came from Flame Rift+Lightning Bolt (7), a swing from Eidolon (2), and a trigger from Eidolon (2)

If anyone knows their way around SQL and is interested I'll be happy to share the data and the program.

[Brael]

The dreaded triple post, but as promised, some data... scroll to the dotted line if you just want the results.
It turns out I have a bug in my SDT code (SDT is pretty complicated, so no surprises there... though oddly my deck ordering logic is sound, it's keeping it on the board that's messed up) so I'm leaving that out for now. Instead I'm giving data on three decks trying to answer the Magma Jet question, there's 4 cards that change between them
Deck 1: 4 Magma Jets
Deck 2: 4 Vexing Devils
Deck 3: 4 extra Bolts (16 total vs 12 in the others)

The Magma Jet deck took 5.600 turns on average to win the game
The Vexing Devil deck took 5.434 turns to win
The Bolt deck took 5.375 turns to win

Additionally, because it's somewhat relevant (higher curve on the Jet deck) here's some mulligan data.
The Jet deck mulliganed in 30.2% of games taking 850 total mulligans. This means that 70% of the time the deck was playing on 7 cards, but in the other 30% of games it was down an average of 2.81 cards meaning if you go to 6, you're probably also going to 5. This suggests that a mulligan for a proper hand is worth around 2 cards or 6 damage so you don't want to take one unless 2 cards are bad and the rest are below average. If you have one bad card, you're better off keeping it.

The Vexing Devil deck took mulligans in 29.2% of games with 854 total mulligans. While the chance of a mulligan was reduced here, it suggests that the effect of the mulligan is greater. This probably isn't a surprise because Magma Jet provides some manipulation to scry out of a bad hand.

Additionally, the Bolt deck also took a mulligan in exactly 29.2% mulligans (it's very odd that both were equal) but took the fewest total mulligans at 839.

-----------------------------------------
This data is very interesting to me because it suggests something much different from my spreadsheet and how I've built the deck in the past which claims creatures beat burn spells. Here a Lava Spike proved to be superior to Vexing Devil, and the library manipulation proved to be weaker than both.

The next question I want to answer is lifegain. A game of Legacy that we haven't lost can range anywhere from 17 life (3 fetches) to 26 life (Batterskull hit+DRS activation+no fetches) and I'm curious how the creature vs burn relationship looks at those extremes.

[snorlaxcom]

Absolutely terrible card. To begin with it's creatures only. Next, it's only 2 damage on the first one and then 4 damage on the second one. You need to draw two of them for them to be as good against creatures as Lightning Bolt is individually. Assuming it could hit players it wouldn't beat out Lava Spike until you cast the third copy.

The cumulative damage from 3 of these would be 2+3+4 = 9 (3bolts). Only casting the 4th would have any cumulative advantage of damage output by a whopping 2 points (5 damage from the last copy). So if you play 4 each game then yeah it's better.

[Brael]

The cumulative damage from 3 of these would be 2+3+4 = 9 (3bolts). Only casting the 4th would have any cumulative advantage of damage output by a whopping 2 points (5 damage from the last copy). So if you play 4 each game then yeah it's better.

It's still not better because it only hits creatures, not players.

Also, the damage from this burn spell does 2/4/6/8. Cumulative that's 2/6/12/20. Bolts go 3/6/9/12. It's on the third cast of this where you've done more total damage, assuming of course there's no overkill.

[Speedbump]

It's still not better because it only hits creatures, not players.

Also, the damage from this burn spell does 2/4/6/8. Cumulative that's 2/6/12/20. Bolts go 3/6/9/12. It's on the third cast of this where you've done more total damage, assuming of course there's no overkill.Not quite. It's X+2 damage, not 2X damage.

It's still a jank card though, and should never have been brought up for discussion anyway.

Regarding your analysis on Magma Jet vs Vexing Devil vs 4th Bolt, it's quite interesting. What sort of conditions do you have for the deck, both in terms of land count and mulligan conditions? (I'm assuming a base of 20 lands (8-12 fetches, rest Mountains), and mulligan 0/5/6/7 land hands) It would make some sense that the deck with less 2-drops would in theory have to mulligan less, just based of the average CMC of the deck being reduced. SDT will be quite hard to program into damage calculations, especially as it's not something that is good for goldfishing with, so I would expect both SDT and Magma Jet to slow the clock down by about half a turn.

Lifegain will probably add an extra turn or two to the calculations, although if a Batterskull hits the field without an answer, we're probably dead anyway.

[RPS]

My LGS is finally doing Legacy once a month and I'm going to take Burn. We're playing for a FOW. Anyway, I have no idea what the meta will be since this is the first event they're having. I have a feeling I might face a few Burn mirrors. Any lists you would recommend? Thanks!

[Brael]

Not quite. It's X+2 damage, not 2X damage.

X+2 is 2/4/6/8 which if you add up total damage done between all copies of the card is 2/6/12/20. Bolt is a simple 3/3/3/3 or cumulative 3/6/9/12. So it takes 3 copies to overtake Bolt.


Regarding your analysis on Magma Jet vs Vexing Devil vs 4th Bolt, it's quite interesting. What sort of conditions do you have for the deck, both in terms of land count and mulligan conditions? (I'm assuming a base of 20 lands (8-12 fetches, rest Mountains), and mulligan 0/5/6/7 land hands) It would make some sense that the deck with less 2-drops would in theory have to mulligan less, just based of the average CMC of the deck being reduced.

After posting, I started looking at things more indepth and saw some stuff that didn't make sense in the data with mulligans that I didn't catch in reading log output before. As a result I redid the tests tightening up the mulligan logic. After doing so, the results changed slightly, but because they were only over 1000 games variance can easily be at play. I'm not going to repost all of the mulligan stuff but more or less mulligans happened in 1/3 of hands. So 1/3 of the time you go from 7 to 6, and 1/3 of that you'll go from 6 to 5, and so on.

Wins this time were 5.423 turns for Bolts, 5.57 turns for Jets, and 5.258 turns for Vexing Devils.


Lifegain will probably add an extra turn or two to the calculations, although if a Batterskull hits the field without an answer, we're probably dead anyway.

A couple more tests I'm going to run are an all out burn deck vs a very heavy creature list. Because of how the tests are set up though, it's easiest to add these to the list, and then test all the life changes at once after that since I added a way to automate a few specific deck lists at once, since that seemed more useful than broad categories of decks.

My land counts so far have been using 19 lands, 11 fetches 8 fetchables. After I test these creatures I can try some other land counts too. To give some idea on mulligan rates (not every mulligan reason is being recorded, but the land based ones are). Across the 4 decks chosen (so Top data is included here) there were 783 mulligans to 6. In that, 67 were for too much land (defined as 5 or more) and the other 715 were to too few lands (defined as 1 or fewer lands). 1 was for an undefined reason which could have been too many tops (2+) or too high curve of a hand (total hand costs above 10).

I suspect that creatures will heavily out perform burn spells though due to the fact that there's no opponent to block/kill them.

Eventually, in order to eliminate variance I'm going to have to do a few more rewrites and try to get some optimizations in, but for now it's good enough.

-------------------------------------------------
Edit:
It comes to mind that I have enough data now to compare the effectiveness of Goblin Guide vs Monastery Swiftspear and quantify how much damage one does over the other.

In this dataset Guide swung 8562 times dealing 17,124 damage or 2/turn on average. Swiftspear after Prowess did 18,316 damage over 9981 attacks for an average of just 1.835 damage/swing. This is very notable, because I was convinced enough in Swiftspears power that in the event a choice had to be made on casting Guide vs Swiftspear, Swiftspear came first, which is why it has 15% more attacks. Swiftspear looks to start a game strong, but peters out once your hand is empty and with these games going an average of 5.5 turns the hand empties fast. That's the best explanation I have. My turn tracking sadly didn't work (if you look at the screenshot I posted yesterday you can see in the turns table where currentTurn always reads 0) so I can't tell exactly what turn Swiftspear gets bad on but I can say that out of the 9981 attacks, 4707 of them involved prowess so the damage split involved 8335 prowess triggers or 1.77 triggers/turn. This information would suggest that Swiftspears power drops off radically after turn 4.

In fact, this is interesting enough that I'm adding another test case to the creature deck, one with Swiftspear and one without (going back to Hellspark Elemental instead).

All in all, these results are way off from what my spreadsheet has predicted.

-----------------------------------------------------------
Edit 2:
Figured I would just edit the data into here rather than triple post again. This post is new enough that no one has read it yet.

Finished running the dataset on three more decks, a creature deck without swiftspear, a creature deck, and an all burn deck. No Jet or Top in either. All with the same 11/8 manabase.

Creatures with Swiftspear
5.226 average turns

Creatures without Swiftspear
5.165 average turns

All burn
5.490 average turns

I'm going to run one more test before playing with different amounts of land and life, and that's using the closest analogue for the deck I usually play (and I'll just edit it into this post when it's done).
------------------------------------
Well, that was disappointing, my usual deck performed so bad it's not even worth listing, over 6.0 for the average turn.

[Brael]

My LGS is finally doing Legacy once a month and I'm going to take Burn. We're playing for a FOW. Anyway, I have no idea what the meta will be since this is the first event they're having. I have a feeling I might face a few Burn mirrors. Any lists you would recommend? Thanks!

Proxies allowed? Not allowed? Local ringers who already own good Legacy decks?

In my experience, new Legacy metas often revolve around cheap combo decks. That means you need good no mana interaction like Faerie Macabre. It also means that your opponents are probably going to play more fetches/duals than they should (especially if it's proxy) and not enough basics. Price of Progress preys on these scenarios.

If I knew for a fact that I would be facing multiple burn mirrors I would splash white off a Plateau for Lightning Helix. Also Searing effects and Lavamancer are very strong in these situations. Leaning towards more instants so you can try to get some free value in bouncing Chain Lightnings is also a strong play.

[Speedbump]

X+2 is 2/4/6/8 which if you add up total damage done between all copies of the card is 2/6/12/20. Bolt is a simple 3/3/3/3 or cumulative 3/6/9/12. So it takes 3 copies to overtake Bolt.X+2 is 2/3/4/5, 2X is 2/4/6/8. If it were actually a Bolt, it only overtakes cumulative damage on the 4th card.

[Brael]

X+2 is 2/3/4/5, 2X is 2/4/6/8. If it were actually a Bolt, it only overtakes cumulative damage on the 4th card.

Oh, you're right. I was completely misreading the card. That makes it even worse.

[Brael]

Sorry, I know this is a bit spammy, but I'm a red mage so I like finding inventive ways to count to 20 and talking about them.

More results, I'll only post details on the top 3 decks. I ran another 1000 games with each of the 8 decks tested so far adding some lands going up to 22 from 19. This second batch used 13 fetches/9 lands while the original was 11 fetches/8 lands. The average kill turn went down pretty dramatically, almost a full half turn. The lists were pretty stock minus the specific cards changed.

The best performing deck was a creature based list without Taylor Swiftspear. Here's the list it used:
fetch = 13
land = 9
eidolon = 4
hellspark = 4
guide = 4
marauder = 2
vexing = 4
flamerift = 4 (the first 4 in this category are usually Price of Progress for 2 lands in a real list)
fireblast = 4
atarka = 4
bolt = 8

It had an average win turn of 5.044

One other list was close to this (within the margin of error given the sample size) which was creatures with swiftspear. it was the same thing just with Swiftspear over Hellspark at 5.131 turns. The other 6 configurations were all atleast .2 turns slower ranging from 5.28 turns to 5.96 turns, in order they were, based on my comments for their names (the general configuration should be apparent from the name): Devil/Top, Stock/Bolts, Burn, Stock/Jet, MyList, Stock/Top

When it comes to mulligans the 19 land set had the following rates:
19 lands
7 - 5593
6 - 1640
5 - 551
4 - 158
3 - 42
2 - 10
1 - 4

22 lands
7 - 6090
6 - 1446
5 - 361
4 - 77
3 - 25
2 - 1
1 - 0

I've known for awhile that more lands were better, but I think info might convince me to run a couple more Barbarian Rings, depending on how I feel about Wasteland. Sadly, I can't (yet) include Barbarian Ring into this simulator because I'm not tracking graveyard information and that's pretty far down my list of priorities so we'll have to make do with fetches and fetchables.

Next up for tomorrow is these same 8 lists with total damage needed of 17 and 24 rather than 20.

[Brael]

More data. Over the next day or two (depending on how long they take to run) I'm going to run a few more tests to determine optimal land counts, and then I'll take a break from it for a bit. There's a few bug fixes and features I would like to add for additional data mining (still think SDT is bugged rather than bad data), and a few optimizations I would like to try to speed things up.

If all goes well it will be several times faster with some more complete features like turn tracking which initially slipped through the cracks so that I/we can look at things like which cards in an opening hand most strongly correlate to the fastest wins, and which correlate to the slowest wins. And with increased speed comes more accurate reporting and reduced variance. So far I've been limited to 1000 game sets, which is rather small. I would like to increase them to 100,000 game sets at a minimum which I think is doable with some tinkering.

Anyways, for the life information that I ran last night and today.

Taking the decks as a whole (8000 games per set), the 24 life set used 48,559 turns for an average of 6.07 turns per game. The 17 life set was 39,531 turns for an average of 4.94 turns per game.

Against the 24 life decks the best performer was again a creature list without Swiftspear at 5.543 turns. Creatures with Swiftspear were right behind it at 5.724 turns, showing that across tests Swiftspear is consistently slowing the deck down by .1-.2 turns, and the creatures with Vexing Devil were 6.010 turns. The three burn focused lists were all around 6.2 turns with Magma Jet performing the worst, and the SDT lists came in behind that.

Against the 17 life decks everything killed faster, but the order for the fastest and slowest decks was the same but the gap closed slightly.

The take away from this is that the last 7 damage is worth about 1 turn, so in a life gain heavy meta a Skullcrack or Atarka's that stops some life is worth a lot for your clock.

At this point I'm pretty confident in the deck hierarchy so my next few tests which will involve land counts are going to use a smaller sample of decks. I'm going to use a Magma Jet deck on the theory that scry gets better with more lands, a creature based deck without Swiftspear, and an all Burn deck without Jet. I'll also go back to testing with 20 life. The reason for this change is that I can test 3000 games in an hour right now so a 12 hour test will let me test everything between 16 and 28 lands. Also, this upcoming land test will be without fetches. The optimal fetch count is the second step after narrowing things down to what land count appears to work best.

[Brael]

Results for a manabase without fetchlands are either 2/3 in or 1/2 in depending on your perspective. I'm about halfway done with the second of the three decks, but the info for the second deck is pretty clear, making the rest of it a formality for that deck.

Unlike the previous tests that showed the deck speeding up when going from 19 to 22 lands with fetches, the fastest results I had without fetches were at 16 lands every time (my starting point) and the deck slowed down from there with each additional land added.

This is pretty interesting because it contradicts all previous work on the subject and my only explanation is because the curve is so low. Interestingly at 16 lands the Magma Jet deck was almost equal to the max Bolt deck (well within variance) but as the number of lands increased so did the gap. I was expecting the results to be the exact opposite with Jet improving as land counts went up because it would be able to scry away lands.

There's still the creature deck to run to see if anything changes, before I do any indepth analysis here such as looking at mulligan rates but the initial feedback is very puzzling. My initial reaction is that it's due to a small sample size, but it's very consistent across both decks as the land count increases. Eventually when it's all done I'll present things as a graph, I think that's probably the most friendly way to do things.

Does anyone have suggestions for fetchlands? Unless I limit things to one deck, it's too many results to test every combination of fetch/land at every land count that seems interesting.

--------------------------------------------
Edit: The creature deck without fetchlands was optimal at 17 lands.

Given that previous data sets have shown that a 13/9 manabase is superior to an 11/8 manabase either deck thinning is having a much bigger impact here than previously believed, or I'm being too conservative in not using fetchlands to keep known good cards on top of the library. In order to eliminate the latter possibility the next test will fetch as soon as possible in all circumstances. It makes Magma Jet slightly worse, but I don't think that's a big deal since Magma Jet isn't looking like a hidden gem.

Also worth pointing out, the winner of this round by a full half turn was the creature deck at 4.281 turns. The decklist for that configuration would basically be:
17 taiga
4 eidolon
4 hellspark
4 guide
4 marauder
4 vexing devil
4 price of progress
4 fireblast
4 atarka's command
11 bolt

Considering the fact that 17 Taiga's aren't possible, I'm curious how it will look with fetchlands.

This deck had a very high mulligan rate, out of 1000 games the keep information was
7 - 626
6 - 249
5 - 71
4 - 37
3 - 11
2 - 3
1 - 3

After fetchlands, would there be any interest in me looking at the impact of 0 mana cantrips like Bauble/Probe on the deck in terms of what it does to deck speed? It would involve me adding a new card type which I was trying to avoid, but a 0 mana cantrip is a pretty simple one to add.

[Brael]

Made the fastest/easiest optimization last night in between running these. It went from running 1000 games in 18 minutes to 1000 games in 58 seconds. That speed increase let me drastically increase the number of games being run in my overnight trials. Last night involved running 20 decks at 20,000 games each for 400,000 games total in order to determine manabases. What I was trying to see is how fetchlands affected the optimal land count, and what the right number of fetches were. It was all the same version of a single deck (the Jet one), just with different land counts.

I tested 18, 19, 20, and 21 lands at fetchland counts of 16, 13, 11, 9, and 6 with other lands filling in the rest for a land count. This means everything from a 16 fetch/3 land deck to a 6 fetch/16 land deck was tested with 20,000 games in each configuration.

Yet again the 19 land deck proved the fastest, but because 19 was the minimum tested the optimal amount could be even less. I think the curve is too low and that's why the optimal land count is appearing so low. The data however consistently showed that in all cases the medium fetchland value which was 11 fetch/8 to 11 land gave the best performance by 0.02 turns. I'm currently running some followup tests at 10, 11, and 12 fetchlands in order to determine which is best and should have those results in 1.5 hours or so.

Next up after that will probably be some cantrips tonight, that or adding Exquisite Firecraft. Given the optimal land counts looking to be so low, I want to see how Firecraft changes the numbers.

----------------------------------------
Edit: More detailed fetch manabase results are in (for this specific list)
10 fetch 9 land had an average turn of 4.842 turns
11 fetch/8 land was 4.826 turns
12 fetch/7 land was 4.839 turns

Each of those was the average over 20,000 games.

It's marginal, but the sample size is high enough combined with the other data that 11 fetch/8 lands looks optimal at 19. Though there's still issues that 19 doesn't look optimal in a list without 3 drops.

For now, I'm going to move forward with the idea that the optimal land count is around 60% fetch, 40% land and make some lists that include cantrips to see if they're any better.

Also, one additional bug was found. Fireblast was never firing. Kind of a big deal, as a result I'm redoing several land counts. It doesn't impact previous tests, but it does impact being able to fire these things off.


-----------------------------------------------------
Ran a larger test on mana tonight, found a flaw in my previous one (that's what I get for writing code without testing it). I threw the data in a chart so that those who don't like numbers can easily trace how the average win turn drops as you add lands. For reference with this build (used the Magma Jet build, it didn't really matter which I picked) the optimal land count was 19.

http://imgur.com/MLvMQUF

What I find most interesting is how quickly the average turn drops as you add land until you get to the optimal point, but how slowly it rises if you go past that point. So the lesson to take away from this is that if you're not sure, go a little high on lands, you won't regret it. Also, keep in mind that the higher you go on lands, the better the cards are that you're cutting. The 28, 29, and 30 land decks had cut the bolt count to the bone going all the way down to 8. I suspect that if I had cut everything else first the curve up would be even more gradual, but I wanted to leave Guides in and I felt taking out Jet for some of them would skew things so there wasn't much else to remove.

Ran a set with Gitaxian Probe too. The end result was that at all land counts (and thus burn counts) the deck was slower with Probe or other 0 mana cantrips than without it, but I didn't record the numbers because mulligans weren't being taken properly.

The next test for probably tomorrow is going to include Exquisite Firecraft because it's a very common sideboard option, and given how little the deck appears to punish having extra lands, I want to figure out what the optimal number is with them.

-------------------------------------
Edit vs spamming posts I guess.

Here's the chart with Exquisite Firecraft from 2 to 30 lands, same decklist as the previous chart except Magma Jets were turned into Firecraft
http://imgur.com/jkmJGX1

You'll notice that the fastest turn happens at 21 lands, but the curve back up from that minimum point happens much slower. The gap between 18 and 21 land is bigger than the gap between 21 and 28 land.

So again, this leads towards the idea that if you're not sure, go a little higher on lands.

Also worth noting is that the lowest time with Magma Jet was 4.94 turns while with Firecraft it was 4.89 turns, so Firecraft beats out Jet.

[RPS]

Just completed Legacy Burn for a tournament this Sunday! I have one question though. Should I play any copies of Sensei's Divining Top? If so, how many would you recommend? Thanks!

P.S. If you want to give me any tips, please do so!

[Sidneyious]

Just completed Legacy Burn for a tournament this Sunday! I have one question though. Should I play any copies of Sensei's Divining Top? If so, how many would you recommend? Thanks!

P.S. If you want to give me any tips, please do so!
I run a very different deck than those here and I would not run top.

For me any spell that costs 1(which is 24, 8 of which are creatures), I'd rather it be damage potential.

Top smooths out draws at the cost of slowing down a deck that wants to be fast.
For me every 1 open mana I better be doing damage, I am looking into some land changes, 21 is way to many and even with barbarian ring it's counterproductive with glm.

My list for reference
http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/legacy-burn-12-09-12-1/

[Brael]

Just completed Legacy Burn for a tournament this Sunday! I have one question though. Should I play any copies of Sensei's Divining Top? If so, how many would you recommend? Thanks!

P.S. If you want to give me any tips, please do so!

The theory is that SDT speeds you up because it finds damage spells, it also operates as a mana sink which lets you go higher on lands more safely. I would say the jury is still out on it (my simulator doesn't play it perfectly, but my spreadsheet really likes it). In practice I've found myself really liking SDT but the data I've gathered so far shows that it and Magma Jet slow things down. Of course, library manipulation to get your sideboard cards is a bit of an intangible that can't really be measured.

The card seems defensible, but I'm starting to come around that it may not be optimal.

-----------------------------------
Ran another simulation on a Probe vs non Probe deck.

The base list was
11 fetch
9 land
4 eidolon
4 swiftspear
4 goblin guide
4 price
4 fireblast
4 atarka's command
8 bolts
4 exquisite firecraft

Then it ran either 4 additional bolts or 4 probes

Each ran for 5,000 games and the probe deck came out ahead by about 0.03 turns. I then repeated it and it came out at about the same.

Next I decided to use the data to compare Swiftspear again. With the Probe deck Swiftspear dealt 23,192 damage over 11,262 turns it was on the board making it 2.059 power. With the Bolt deck Swiftspear dealt 21,593 damage over 11,108 turns making it 1.944 damage.

So neither Probe or Swiftspear appear to be good enough on their own, but the combination is slightly superior to neither. So I guess the question is how much damage you want to deal to yourself. It could be an option for mono red decks that aren't taking the fetch damage. There's also the possibility of a different 0 mana cantrip being used instead like Mishra's Bauble (effectively the same thing in the simulation).

That's probably the last simulation I'll run short of an interesting suggestion until I make a few changes to the program. Originally I didn't build in turn tracking because I figured I could just take the rowID in a database query, but I've found a few places where it's useful so I'll be adding in some turn tracking. For the non technical explanation, this will let me link data such as hands on turn 1 to games that ended on turn 3 or 4 and that's something I think could be pretty useful to evaluate opening hands.

Are there any sideboard/MB cards people would like to see added that I'm not currently using? Given that I've been doing more focused testing I'm not as concerned with limiting the number of card types that a more broad approach testing all combinations requires because of math. Because of my approach not every card can be implemented (this program isn't DotP or MTGO) but if the card sounds useful enough or easy enough I'm willing to include it.

Right now Sulfuric Vortex sounds good. I would like to include Grim Lavamancer but because I'm not tracking the GY it's a bit bigger of an undertaking, though not completely impossible to implement, I would just have to add a GY. If I add a GY I could try out Barbarian Ring as well. If I do add Barbarian Ring I'll also add a pain index tracking how much damage we deal to ourselves per game, though the Price of Progress/Flame Rift category won't accurately add damage.

Would there be any more cards people are curious about?

[grokh]

Hi,

This new creature has been recently spoiled :
http://media-dominaria.cursecdn.com/avatars/thumbnails/125/630/200/283/636035704808310583.png

Thoughts ?

[Brael]

Getting 6 instants/sorcery into the yard is actually pretty difficult. Getting them into the graveyard before your opponent is dead is impossible.

What's your realistic outlook with this card? If you cast all 1 drops and hit all your lands the earliest you can cast this is turn 4 (and you'll have done 18). It doesn't have haste. At this point, when it swings assuming it lives (you'll have had no other creatures) it's 3 damage, so that's an incinerate.

While it's powerful, the outlook isn't so hot. It can represent a lot of damage, but it's also quite slow. You want your creatures to get in under blockers, not try to go over them.

Honestly, I question whether this card would even be good enough if it had haste, I think Incinerate would be stronger.

[Brael]

Knocked a few points off of my to do list. Gitaxian Probe, Sulfuric Vortex, Grim Lavamancer, and Barbarian Ring were all added and a bug with Fireblast was fixed.

My approach has some flaws though since I'm starting to get some slowdown in the program. Run time has doubled since I added the extra logic for those cards so I probably can't add anymore until I find some ways to optimize things (which I've been tinkering with).

The decks are also winning a little slowly, not quite sure what's up with that (it's probably just my card choices) but it's fine to just say one deck is faster than the other, so it's not really all that important.

I recently ran a few thousand games with some varying decklists. They were all some variation on this. Everything from 1-4 GLM, then some 2 GLM's with different land counts filling in more Burn as stuff came out.

11 Fetch
9 Fetchable land
2 Barbarian Ring

4 Eidolon of the Great Revel
4 Goblin Guide
3 Vexing Devil
2 Grim Lavamancer

4 Price of Progress
4 Fireblast
9 Lightning Bolt (or Lava Spike if you would prefer)
4 Gitaxian Probe
4 Exquisite Firecraft

Not the best list, I admit but I was looking at some specific things that those cards would show rather than going for raw speed.

As I said, it's slowing down so over the 7 decks I played 1000 with each deck for 7000 games total.

With the above deck the fastest wins were on turn 4, 13/1000 games had a turn 4 win.

Oddly enough, there wasn't a single 7 card hand that won that early, they were all mulligans. The average hand size for a turn 4 win was 5.92 and the average hand was
1.42 Fetch
0.50 Land
0.00 Barbarian Ring
0.50 Eidolon of the Great Revel
0.42 Vexing Devil
0.75 Price of Progress
0.08 Fireblast
1.42 Lightning Bolt
0.58 Exquisite Firecraft
0.25 Grim Lavamancer

So roughly 1.9 lands, .8 creatures, 2.9 burn spells, and anything else. So without the decimals that would imply the opening ideal hand on 6 cards is 2 land, 1 creature, 3 burn, and 1 of anything.

Opening the dataset up to all 7000 games there were 80 games which had a turn 4 win, and again there were no 7 card keeps and almost no 5 card keeps. It's interesting enough that I'll have to look into the why of this further as there were plenty of turn 5 wins that kept 7 cards. The hands were all on the play so I don't think it has anything to do with going 8 cards deep with a mulligan scry on the draw. Because of the differing decklists I don't think average cards are all that useful but there are a few trends that I see as peculiar. There were no Goblin Guides in any of the fastest hands and no Swiftspears. It was almost always looking for 2+ bolts, an additional 3 damage burn spell, and a 4 damage. Exquisite Firecraft featured rather prominently in the fastest hands and had a significantly higher presence than Fireblast. Lavamancer showed up from time to time, and when he was around Barbarian Ring never fired but I find it very odd that Lavamancer, who should in this situation be strictly worse than Goblin Guide would show up when the Guide made 0 appearances in thousands of games.

Some data on Lavamancer: He appeared in 11,295 turns and activated 2571 times for a grand total of 13,866 damage or 1.23 per turn.

[Speedbump]

Hi,

This new creature has been recently spoiled :
http://media-dominaria.cursecdn.com/avatars/thumbnails/125/630/200/283/636035704808310583.png

Thoughts ?While the ceiling for Bedlam Reveler is incredibly high, I don't think that Burn is the most suitable deck to utilize it.

The best-case scenario for Burn is being able to cast this for 2-3 mana, and drawing 3 Burn spells, and then surviving long enough to either dome them that turn, or the turn after that. This requires 5-6 spells in the graveyard (theoretically 15+ damage dealt at this stage), and 2-3 lands in play (less demanding, but sometimes 3 mana just doesn't happen). The worst-case scenario is that it gets stuck in your hand, either by not hitting enough mana+spells to get there, or something like Deathrite Shaman/Rest in Peace thwarting our plans.

The real question is, what sort of Burn deck do you think is most suitable for Bedlam Reveler to fit in, while also not supplanting better cards in the process?

[somethingdotdotdot]

@Brael,

I'm not quite sure how your simulation is currently programmed--ie is it a set of rules to govern a burn deck to count to 20 damage or is there another deck/set of rules that will interact with it. However, in either case, I think it may be appropriate to look at the standard deviation in turns (some histogram information might also be good with regards to how deck performance is distributed) along with the average kill turn. I feel that the current metric you use completely forgoes the concept of stability for speed, leading you to want to test more aggressive probe/bauble builds. However, as deck builders/players we need to consider both, especially if the deck doesn't try to win on t0-1 (where you can almost just reduce opponent interaction to a percentage of them having disruption).

[Brael]

@Brael,

I'm not quite sure how your simulation is currently programmed--ie is it a set of rules to govern a burn deck to count to 20 damage or is there another deck/set of rules that will interact with it. However, in either case, I think it may be appropriate to look at the standard deviation in turns (some histogram information might also be good with regards to how deck performance is distributed) along with the average kill turn. I feel that the current metric you use completely forgoes the concept of stability for speed, leading you to want to test more aggressive probe/bauble builds. However, as deck builders/players we need to consider both, especially if the deck doesn't try to win on t0-1 (where you can almost just reduce opponent interaction to a percentage of them having disruption).

There currently isn't another deck to interact which skews things towards creatures. It was written in such a way that it can be added, and is in fact coming up on my to do list (I have to add player life tracking first). I've been thinking about the implementation for a week now, mostly I've been stuck on the combat zone because attacks/blocks are extremely complex, but I think I have a way to do it quickly but at less than optimal efficiency if I treat the combat zone as an implementation of the stack. Though that means implementing a stack in the first place (I don't think that's too hard though, it's literally just a list that acts as a holding zone).

I could include some graph information similar to what I did for the land counts and mana curve a couple posts back but because most of my posts have involved decks that aren't all that different I've been holding off as the curves would look extremely similar.

All of my output gets written to a database (though I've been discarding old data as I make changes to the logic), and from there I can pull anything up with a combination of SQL and occasionally writing the tables to a spreadsheet so providing graphs of win turns at different turns is pretty easy to do in order to create something of a curve. I've been using the average though because a single number is a little easier to express than pictures and I've been trying to not drown people in data, and just provide the interesting stuff.

Do note, that I'm only posting the averages, but I'm already looking at all of this stuff so it's somewhat filtered before I post. Despite my past few tests all being done with 0 mana cantrips, the data has been quite clear that it's a bad choice. I've just been playing with the Probe data because I'm trying to answer several questions at once such as if it's possible to use these cards as a budget replacement for fetchlands when it comes to things like filling the graveyard for Grim Lavamancer and Barbarian Ring, or if it could ever be relevant for Spell Mastery in a build that leans closer to sligh than burn.

[somethingdotdotdot]

I see. Combat would definitely increase the program's complexity, but I don't think it can simply be an extension of a stack. It can probably be boiled down to a pretty straightforward algorithm by using maximum damage output of all iterations of attackers/blockers as the choice moving forward.

However, a simple solution may be to add a decaying factor to the creatures' damage output that will drop creature damage to 0 based on some randomly generated noise, turn #, and number of creatures. This may also account for why swiftspear is giving you less average dmg in your simulation--goblin guide's dmg output is a static 2/turn, whereas swiftspear's is far more frontloaded and falls off.

Similarly, how is the PoP and eidolon damage output calculated without an opponent to play them off of?

I am curious what a typical histogram (kill turn) of a simulation would look like though, if you have one available.

Regardless, good job in creating this simulation. It seems like a sizable project to have undertaken.

[Brael]

Lots of info this time, only tested 2 decks but there's lots to say because of the turn tracking implementation. I used a burn deck and a sligh deck. I can give decklists on request, the lack of any sort of spoiler tag on these boards makes me not want to post them since I can't hide them. It would be ok in this case since it's just 2 decklists, but gets to be really problematic with 30.

What I really want to talk about here is the average opening hand, starting with the Burn deck. I ran 10,000 games with each deck. The simulator had no games that ended on turn 3 but several that ended on turn 4. Out of the turn 4 games the average number of each card showing up in the opening hand was
2.35 Fetch
0.57 Land
0.10 Barbarian Ring
0.24 Vexing Devil
0.91 Flame Rift
0.20 Fireblast
2.06 Lightning Bolt
0.36 Exquisite Firecraft

So the best performing hand was 3 Land, 2 Bolts, and a 4 mana burn, and then a 1 of 3 or 4 mana burn. Or to put that another way, 3 lands 13 points of Burn (more specifically: 13.42).

With the Sligh deck there were fewer games. The hand information for them was
2.36 Fetch
0.57 Land
1.14 Flame Rift
0.07 Fireblast
0.29 Atarka's Command
1.64 Lightning Bolt
0.07 Gitaxian Probe
0.78 Exquisite Firecraft
0.07 Grim Lavamancer

So what you're looking for here is again 3 Land, and some 3 and 4 mana bolt spells. Once again coming to 13 points of burn (13.75 average in this case) I find it extremely telling that the best performing hands in the creature deck involved no creatures at all and that even though my card choices were clearly pushing Eidolons, there were no Eidolons involved in the fastest decks.

Taking the suggestion of posting a standard deviation on turns and other statistical data, I'm going to one up that (partly because it's easier for me) and I'll provide a graph of the turns.

Do note, I cap the games at turn 12 so there will always be a spike on that turn.
First, here's the burn deck, the average was 6.02
http://imgur.com/lGbRbWf

Second, here's the sligh deck, the average was 7.57
http://imgur.com/vd97MKx

Based on this information I'm going to try putting a list together that's just the best performing cards.

I'm going to put off adding in self damage for now as well as interaction. Instead I'm looking at a new way to make my card decisions. I have a general system mapped out in my head but implementing it will take some time as I've never had a class on AI or ever really attempted it before. It doesn't help that I don't know the name of the type I'm trying to add so Googling examples has been less than helpful but I do think it will work.

Until it's done, any further analysis will just be with what I have right now. There's a lot things to check out with turn tracking and opening turns. Most notably I would like to make a comparison on the amount of burn in your opening hand with various decks, and the chances of winning on each turn with that much. I think that 13-14 points of burn information is a solid piece of data. At a minimum, it's not something I had ever read about in a metric for evaluating an opening hand. There's a lot of information to be gleaned from how things are now, most notably everything I've done has been on the play but with a couple keystrokes I can change it to be on the draw and build that info.

Something I'll probably do tonight after our Saturday night tournament, is take the above hand information and look at the frequency of each card compared to how many are in the deck in order to try and determine what is under/over performing. From the looks of it right now Bolt/Firecraft overperform and everything else underperforms.

One last thought, I find it very interesting that the fetch/land distribution was near identical in the fastest hands though it could just be coincidence.


I see. Combat would definitely increase the program's complexity, but I don't think it can simply be an extension of a stack. It can probably be boiled down to a pretty straightforward algorithm by using maximum damage output of all iterations of attackers/blockers as the choice moving forward.

The reason I say I can use it stack like, I can make each creature attack, put a blocker if it exists on the biggest one, and then assume a trade happens. Alternatively, I can make a couple categories of blockers like big/small, the small ones trade and the big ones never go away. It's not perfect but it's good enough without calculating clocks, counter attacks, and so on. Which is probably beyond my ability, and also increases computational complexity beyond the point where it's viable. It's important to keep speed up in order to generate enough data.


However, a simple solution may be to add a decaying factor to the creatures' damage output that will drop creature damage to 0 based on some randomly generated noise, turn #, and number of creatures. This may also account for why swiftspear is giving you less average dmg in your simulation--goblin guide's dmg output is a static 2/turn, whereas swiftspear's is far more frontloaded and falls off.

I included something like that in my spreadsheet and it worked well enough. I'm actually running into the situation with the simulator though that creatures are under performing compared to burn spells even without any removal for them. It's a bit of an interesting problem and I'm not sure why it's happening yet because it defies all logic. I've read and reread the program a good 10-15 times now, and poured through over 100 games worth of log information looking for some indication that creature damage isn't being applied, but I haven't found anything yet. My best guess though is that I broke something when adding Lavamancer because I had to tweak the combat function.

Generating a set of data with Swiftspear and comparing how much damage it does each turn is on the list of things to do. It should perform better as the average turn goes down. If you notice, most of my simulations run for 6-7 games and by that point Swiftspear peters off but still, the data hasn't been kind to it which I find very odd because it runs completely counter to both the theory behind it and my experiences.

I'll throw it onto the list of stuff to do.


Similarly, how is the PoP and eidolon damage output calculated without an opponent to play them off of?

Just estimates based on experience. PoP deals 4 on the assumption the opponent figures out our deck and only gets one non basic (this is why it's lumped in with Flame Rift right now, they're both effectively 4 damage for 2 mana). Eidolon swings once per turn and triggers once per turn.

Part of this stems from my original approach which I've since abandoned due to run time, which involved giving a range of every single card and testing every permutation that made a valid deck. Then looking at that massive database for results. This approach required grouping similar cards, as time has gone on though I've been moving away from that and adding more cards. Adding new cards still has some cost though because of how I'm choosing which spells to cast when. I need to develop a new, more dynamic AI. I have an idea of how to implement it, but it's going to take me some time.


I am curious what a typical histogram (kill turn) of a simulation would look like though, if you have one available.

I actually posted some for you last night, but it looks like my post got eaten in the forum database errors. See above for some simulations I ran today. I think it's what you were asking for, it's another piece of data that becomes easily available now that turn tracking is in (technically it was available before, but hard to get).


----------------------------------------------
Edit: Ok, after some searching I found the bug. When I added Lavamancer I accidentally disabled every creature other than Lavamancer from dealing damage. That explains a lot.

[HdH_Cthulhu]

While the ceiling for Bedlam Reveler is incredibly high, I don't think that Burn is the most suitable deck to utilize it.

The best-case scenario for Burn is being able to cast this for 2-3 mana, and drawing 3 Burn spells, and then surviving long enough to either dome them that turn, or the turn after that. This requires 5-6 spells in the graveyard (theoretically 15+ damage dealt at this stage), and 2-3 lands in play (less demanding, but sometimes 3 mana just doesn't happen). The worst-case scenario is that it gets stuck in your hand, either by not hitting enough mana+spells to get there, or something like Deathrite Shaman/Rest in Peace thwarting our plans.

The real question is, what sort of Burn deck do you think is most suitable for Bedlam Reveler to fit in, while also not supplanting better cards in the process?

I can see it(him) with gitaxian probe... And who plays Rip against burn? And well DRS is a strong card so you probably bolt him anyway. So if they counter/discard/chalice for 1/DRS -> in other words if the opponent plays magic it can be a really nice topdeck.

He looks bad if you only goldfish; but might be turn out very solid in a real game. But I kinda doubt it, he is really bad when you flood lands.

[RPS]

Taking Burn to my LGS's first Legacy event today. I've been playing some matches on MTGO to get the feel of the deck (I come from playing Burn and Aggro decks in Modern) and have done pretty well. My question is what sideboard do I bring to a brand new meta? This is what I'm thinking at the moment.

4 Exquisite Firecraft
2 Ensnaring Bridge
4 Leyline of the Void
3 Smash to Smithereens
2 Pyroblast

Here are my questions.
Is this a decent sideboard for an open meta?
What would you change?
(Or) What sideboard would you bring?

[Brael]

Taking Burn to my LGS's first Legacy event today. I've been playing some matches on MTGO to get the feel of the deck (I come from playing Burn and Aggro decks in Modern) and have done pretty well. My question is what sideboard do I bring to a brand new meta? This is what I'm thinking at the moment.

4 Exquisite Firecraft
2 Ensnaring Bridge
4 Leyline of the Void
3 Smash to Smithereens
2 Pyroblast

Here are my questions.
Is this a decent sideboard for an open meta?
What would you change?
(Or) What sideboard would you bring?

I take it you're playing mono red? I find I prefer Faerie Macabre to Leyline of the Void simply because it doesn't force as many mulligans. 4 seems like too many though, we have a reasonable enough game against Dredge as it is, and Reanimator is almost a never win. Your graveyard hate is usually at it's best against decks like Storm who rely on bouncing/counters and random combo decks (especially the budget decks like No Spells). In those a 1 shot that's virtually impossible to interact with short of a Stifle is good enough.

Instead of Smash I prefer Destructive Revelry, it hits slightly more targets and the green splash is solid because it also enables Atarka's Command in the MB.

I like Lavamancers in the side for the Delvers of the world, never cared much for them MB but I think they strike a good balance between board control and aggression. Another one I like is Volcanic Fallout. It's strong against most aggressive decks, and it pulls double duty against Miracles. My sideboard (keep in mind that despite what my computer toy says, I'm still using top) looks like this:
2 Volcanic Fallout
2 Faerie Macabre
4 Exquisite Firecraft
2 Destructive Revelry
2 Red Elemental Blast
1 Sulfuric Vortex
2 Grim Lavamancer

[Brael]

Creature bug found and fixed in the program, it's amazing what 1 line being bumped slightly out of place can do.

Reran the previous two tests, same lists, same number of turns, just looking at a Burn deck vs a Sligh one

In the case of the burn deck it came out to 14 points of burn in hand being the average in the fastest winning decklists (vs the 13.5 last time). The best average hand was

1.30 Fetch
1.51 Land
0.15 Barbarian Ring

0.90 Eidolon
0.15 Vexing Devil

0.68 Flame Rift
0.32 Fireblast
1.49 Lightning Bolt
0.36 Firecraft

So an optimal speed hand is 3 lands, 1 creature, 1 3 damage burn, 1 4 damage burn, 1 misc burn

The average kill turn was 5.42 turns. There were still no turn 3 kills, though it should be theoretically possible. In chart form the turn curve looked like this:
http://imgur.com/8XcqvvP

With the Sligh deck there were a handful of turn 3 kills, but they were very rare. The average hand for turn 3's was
1.50 Fetch
1.75 Land
0.25 Swiftspear
1.25 Guide
0.25 Fireblast
0.75 Atarka
1.00 Lightning Bolt
0.25 Gitaxian Probe

So again, 3 lands, 2 1 drop creatures, 1 4 damage spell, 1 3 damage spell

The average hand for a 4 turn game was
1.34 Fetch
1.69 Land
0.73 Eidolon
0.12 Swiftspear
0.40 Guide
0.53 Flame Rift
0.28 Fireblast
0.28 Atarka's Command
0.85 Lightning Bolt
0.06 Probe
0.42 Firecraft
0.11 Lavamancer

So 3 land, 1.5 creatures, 1 4 damage burn, 1 3 damage burn, 1 misc

The average kill turn for this deck was 4.85 turns. The curve looks like
http://imgur.com/VIjfN2f

The data here between both decks is pretty clear, the ideal opening hand looks like
3 Land
1 4 damage spell
1 3 damage spell
2 creatures (or 4/3 damage spells)

I'm doing a test tonight, 100,000 games each on the play vs draw with the same deck that's basically just a pile of cards that have performed well so far. I'll be busy tomorrow though, so it will probably be rather late when I get that data posted.

[Speedbump]

I can see it(him) with gitaxian probe... And who plays Rip against burn? And well DRS is a strong card so you probably bolt him anyway. So if they counter/discard/chalice for 1/DRS -> in other words if the opponent plays magic it can be a really nice topdeck.

He looks bad if you only goldfish; but might be turn out very solid in a real game. But I kinda doubt it, he is really bad when you flood lands.Who runs Gitaxian Probe in Burn? The card is incredibly sub-optimal in it. Also, I've seen quite a few Miracles players bring it in for Game 2, to counteract both Grim Lavamancer and Exquisite Firecraft, both of which are typically hard for Miracles to deal with.

Bedlam Reveler just looks bad in general in Burn. Even with your ideal situation, which is tapping out on Turn 3 (getting 5 Burn spells in the GY by then requires an act of God, even with them all costing 1 mana) and drawing into 3 more bolts. It doesn't speed up the fundamental turn, it doesn't interact with your opponent (who will have larger creatures out by then), and forces Burn to play a more goldfish-heavy game of Magic. To get this out reasonably reliably by then in Burn, you'll need to run cards that are bad in Burn. Your only 'realisitic' cantrip is Gitaxian Probe (as the other 0-cost ones are artifacts), and cards like Gut Shot just aren't what you should be playing. In spite of this, there's still no realistic room for it. For decks running 19-21 lands, 10-13 creatures, and 3-4 Sulfuric Vortex+SDT, that leaves you 22-25 spells to play around with, which is nowhere near enough to consistently cast it on Turns 3-4.

Bedlam Reveler looks even worse if you actually plan on interacting with your opponent. It is antagonistic to how the interactive builds play out, as you're forced to run more Burn spells in lieu of creatures. This also means you can't run Grim Lavamancer if you want to reliably cast Bedlam Reveler, as those two cards cannibalize each other; sacrificing a decent percentage of Miracles/DRS/Delver matches to run an at-best win-more card isn't the strategy Burn wants to be facing. IFF you give zero fucks about interaction with your opponent, and just want to windmill slam every single Burn spell, then Bedlam Reveler gets better.

What cards are you removing from Burn to put Bedlam Reveler in?

[Brael]

More data, and an update.

I have an idea to move away from the current spell casting system which is basically just trying to cast spells in a given order if possible to one that can better make situational decisions such as being more likely to cast a creature if it will speed up the clock, but a spell if not when there's a choice between the two or being able to recognize that it's better to play 2 2 drops at 4 mana than a single 4 or a 3 and a 1, and prioritize that line. AI programming isn't really my thing though, so it may or may not work out, what it has going for it though is I think I figured out how to implement it.

Now for an update, a poster PM'ed me their decklist and asked me to run an analysis on it. It was essentially 21 land, 4 guide/lavamancer, and the rest burn. So I took this and tested 11 decklists using everything from the base list -5 lands to the base list +5 lands. When removing land I first added a Firecraft, then I added 4 Swiftspears. When adding land I removed Lavamancers followed by a Lightning Bolt.

The data indicated that in this case, more lands were not necessarily better
http://imgur.com/66dNeNO

That's the graph at various land counts. The lower the land count got, the faster the deck got. I suspect part of this is due to Swiftspear being more powerful than a land

The base list had the following turn graph
http://imgur.com/Qgj5Neo

The fastest list looked like this
http://imgur.com/nacN4Wp

Across all 11 decks the average opening hand that won on turn 4 was
1.38 Fetch
1.47 Land
0.02 Swiftspear
0.34 Goblin Guide
1.02 Flame Rift/Price
0.34 Fireblast
1.95 Lightning Bolt
0.04 Exquisite Firecraft
0.26 Grim Lavamancer
0.17 Sulfuric Vortex

So rounding stuff off that's 3 Land, 1 Creature, 11 Burn as your ideal opening hand at 7.

The fastest hands on a mulligan to 6 were
0.96 Fetch
1.50 Land
0.01 Eidolon
0.03 Swiftspear
0.36 Guide
0.85 Rift
0.21 Fireblast
1.63 Bolt
0.05 Firecraft
0.25 Lavamancer
0.14 Vortex

So that's 2-3 Land, 1 Recurring threat (creature/vortex), and 10 points of Burn.

Basically the same thing as the 7 land.

Going down to 5 the data starts getting a little thin but the average optimal 5 was
0.58 Fetch
1.31 Land
0.02 Swiftspear
0.42 Guide
0.69 Rift
0.14 Fireblast
1.51 Bolt
0.05 Firecraft
0.22 Lavamancer
0.06 Vortex

Here you want 2 land, 1 creature, and 8 points of burn with no 3's.

So if you want to apply this information to mulligan decisions, a 6 with less than that would be better off as a 5. Interesting to note, 5's that won on the earliest turn possible were about half as common as 6's that won on the earliest turn possible, so that would suggest you want to mulligan pretty aggressively on 6.

I'll probably start trying to incorporate some of this mulligan information into my mulligan decision process both IRL and in this program once I have a bit more data.

[AIRchrist]

I recently got back into Magic after a 13 year hiatus, but have been playing since Legends. I've always loved playing Burn(and Stasis/control decks), and have been playing Modern Naya Burn recently with success. The power of Legacy has been calling my name and I'm building Legacy burn deck, but a lot has changed since I stopped playing. This is an excellent thread with invaluable information, but there seems to be some variance in what the most efficient build is.

Here is my current build:

Lands
4x Scalding Tarn
4x Bloodstained Mire
2x Arid Mesa
9x Mountain

Creatures
4x Eidolon
4x Goblin Guide
4x Swiftspear

Instant
4x Lightning Bolt
4x Price of Progress
3x Fireblast
2x Searing Blaze
1x Thunderous Wrath(I'm aware this is janky as fuuuuu)

Sorcery
4x Chain Lightning
4x Lava Spike
4x Rift Bolt


Enchantment
2x Sulfuric Vortex
1x Molten Vortex

_____________________
Sideboard
3x Pyroblast
4x Exquisite Firecraft
1x Grim Lavamancer
2x Smash to Smithereens
1x Shattering Spree
3x Ensnaring Bridge
1x Pithing Needle


Now let me give you my reasoning behind my particular build/go on the defensive. My meta consists of a good deal of Eldrazi, Merfolk, Delver, etc. So essentially a critter heavy meta, but not without some Miracles, Dredge, Lands. Chalice sees a LOT of play in my meta as well. While I love me some GLM, he always seems to be killed off immediately and I often feel like playing him is slowing me down, which is why he remains in the SB. In his place I've put in 1x Molten Vortex. It's a weird(and probably wrong) substitution, but I've found that I really only need 3 mana to win, so I'd rather pitch the excess lands and deal some damage instead. It also saves me from taking Eidolon damage while speeding up the clock. I only run 3x Fireblast because I draw 2 in my starting hand or draw them back to back way too often, and that just feelsbadman.jpg. Can I justify cutting one, or am I doing it wrong? The Thunderous Wrath is so dumb, and so bad when you're not topdecking it, but I've had a really great experience with it as a one-of in Modern and want to see if it has a place in Legacy. I'll cut it with great haste if it proves to be the garbage everyone thinks it is. This brings me to a couple of questions about card choices.

- Since I've read numerous articles about fetchlands not being all that helpful in mono-colored builds, would it behoove me to run straight mountains(and maybe a Ring or two) to avoid life sacrifice for a negligible benefit? Mind you, I'm not in love with GLM, so I don't really care about filling my graveyard.
- SDT is a card I'm interested in running as a 1 or 2-of, and I would think it would be rad with Thunderous Wrath as well. Is SDT considered an added benefit to Burn(outside of the obvious pros), or should I focus more on spells that actually play towards our objective?
- I noticed that our old staple of Flame Rift has been cut. While I know it doesn't feel great using it with Eidolon, wouldn't it be a good addition to Burn, even as a 2-of?
- Do you feel that I need to even keep GLM at all?
- I'd like to run 1x Volcanic Fallout, but don't see many sweepers in SB's across the internet. Is there an argument against boarding a sweeper?

Since this is my first post and an extremely dense one, I'd like to thank you all for the great discussions and help.

[Chatto]

Hi AIRchrist, and welcome back. I'm no expert with Burn, but I've been playing the deck off and on for some time now. I do however have some ideas regarding your questions:


- Since I've read numerous articles about fetchlands not being all that helpful in mono-colored builds, would it behoove me to run straight mountains(and maybe a Ring or two) to avoid life sacrifice for a negligible benefit? Mind you, I'm not in love with GLM, so I don't really care about filling my graveyard.

IMO it is not necessary to play Fetch, so going for all mountains is a valid option.


- SDT is a card I'm interested in running as a 1 or 2-of, and I would think it would be rad with Thunderous Wrath as well. Is SDT considered an added benefit to Burn(outside of the obvious pros), or should I focus more on spells that actually play towards our objective?

SDT helps you set up your draws. If you are planning to play SDT, however, Fetch comes in handy to give you a fresh three cards to look at.


- I noticed that our old staple of Flame Rift has been cut. While I know it doesn't feel great using it with Eidolon, wouldn't it be a good addition to Burn, even as a 2-of?

I have cut it entirely from my deck. I think it is a matter of preference.


- Do you feel that I need to even keep GLM at all?

Again, preference. I change my main from time to time. Sometimes there are two, and sometimes I split them between main and SB. I like how it can be the last bit of damage, takes down little critters, and cleans up your GY.


- I'd like to run 1x Volcanic Fallout, but don't see many sweepers in SB's across the internet. Is there an argument against boarding a sweeper?

Big creatures are everywhere, and swarm decks are not always present. This is also meta-dependant: if you have lot of Grixis or Elves, well, a Volcanic Fallout is an option.

PS: Thunderous Wrath is bad indeed, and 'good in Modern' does not mean it is a valid card for Legacy perse :smile: I would trade it for a 4th Fireblast.

[Brael]

- Since I've read numerous articles about fetchlands not being all that helpful in mono-colored builds, would it behoove me to run straight mountains(and maybe a Ring or two) to avoid life sacrifice for a negligible benefit? Mind you, I'm not in love with GLM, so I don't really care about filling my graveyard.
- SDT is a card I'm interested in running as a 1 or 2-of, and I would think it would be rad with Thunderous Wrath as well. Is SDT considered an added benefit to Burn(outside of the obvious pros), or should I focus more on spells that actually play towards our objective?
- I noticed that our old staple of Flame Rift has been cut. While I know it doesn't feel great using it with Eidolon, wouldn't it be a good addition to Burn, even as a 2-of?
- Do you feel that I need to even keep GLM at all?
- I'd like to run 1x Volcanic Fallout, but don't see many sweepers in SB's across the internet. Is there an argument against boarding a sweeper?

Since this is my first post and an extremely dense one, I'd like to thank you all for the great discussions and help.

Fetchlands in mono colored builds are mainly used to fuel Grim Lavamancer and Barbarian Ring, it's tough to hit threshold without fetches. I think they're worth using if you have SDT (a card I favor) but otherwise you probably don't want them in mono colored builds.

I do really like SDT, my recent project I've written volumes on so far suggests that SDT isn't very good but I'm not accepting of those results yet. SDT makes Thunderous Wrath better, but Wrath isn't all that good in the first place. It requires a lot to go right and it's just 1 mana more than your other options. Unlike Modern we have more 4 damage spells than we can possibly play, Wrath is just 1 point more with significant downside.

I'm a fan of Volcanic Fallout, I use it when sweepers are good such as against Goblins or Delver, but I also like it against Miracles. It not only messes up Monks but it's uncounterable Burn. I play 2 in my SB.

[AIRchrist]

I really appreciate the responses. Ok, alright, I'll drop the Thunderous Wrath :cry:.

SDT seems like it could either be really good or really bad, depending on the meta. I'll probably throw a couple in and give it a whirl, but what would be the acceptable number of SDT's, 1-3? I imagine that it would be terrible to draw multiples. To those of you who use SDT, do you feel that it slows you down at all? Also, I'm really wanting to bring in Flame Rift, as it's incredibly powerful and I feel like it plays around Leyline of Sanctity pretty well(even though not all decks side it in against burn). If I cut the TW, one Fireblast and don't run GLM, would running 3 Flame Rift's be a viable addition to the deck?

And lastly, what is your take on Molten Vortex as a 1-of MB? Does it hurt or help Burn?

By the way, I've really enjoyed reading the statistical breakdown that some of you have been updating the thread with. Great information.

I promise I'll stop asking so many questions! Thanks again.

[Brael]

I really appreciate the responses. Ok, alright, I'll drop the Thunderous Wrath :cry:.

SDT seems like it could either be really good or really bad, depending on the meta. I'll probably throw a couple in and give it a whirl, but what would be the acceptable number of SDT's, 1-3? I imagine that it would be terrible to draw multiples. To those of you who use SDT, do you feel that it slows you down at all? Also, I'm really wanting to bring in Flame Rift, as it's incredibly powerful and I feel like it plays around Leyline of Sanctity pretty well(even though not all decks side it in against burn). If I cut the TW, one Fireblast and don't run GLM, would running 3 Flame Rift's be a viable addition to the deck?

And lastly, what is your take on Molten Vortex as a 1-of MB? Does it hurt or help Burn?

I promise I'll stop asking so many questions! Thanks again.

The biggest problem with Flame Rift is that you can only deal so much damage to yourself. With all the stat stuff I've been running lately, I would like to add in a self damage component but making a better AI has taken priority. In general though I think that you can really only afford to run either Flame Rift or Eidolon. I would definitely max out on Fireblast before Flame Rift though. If you find yourself looking for more 4 damage spells, I really like Atarka's Command or if you want to stay in mono red, Exquisite Firecraft is pretty fantastic and Sulfuric Vortex is always solid too.

I would stay away from Molten Vortex. There's just better mana sinks you can be using like Grim Lavamancer, SDT, more 3 mana cards, Barbarian Ring, or if you're trying to stick to a budget even Hellspark Elemental. Also, do you really want to hold lands in your hand on the off chance you draw your 1 of if the game goes long? Perhaps it's a playstyle thing on my end, but I would much rather get those lands on the board so I have the resources in the event I need to make a long string of plays in one turn. Games typically only go long if the opponent has some way to lock us out like a Chalice on 1, Counterbalance/Top, Chill, and so on. In those situations I don't want to be sitting on a 1 mana card that costs me resources. I want to play out my cards, so that I can end the game in a flurry of spells where I can get several cards to resolve.


By the way, I've really enjoyed reading the statistical breakdown that some of you have been updating the thread with. Great information.

Glad to hear people like the information. I don't want to completely flood the thread with it though as I know it really only appeals to a subset of players so I'm taking a few days off from posting more, and with any luck getting a better more dynamic AI built during that time (a real challenge, but I've got another 6 weeks of summer to try and make it work).

[Brael]

Since the fetchland questions were coming up, I started looking at them in my program. I tested 20 to 24 lands builds with 16, 12, and 8 fetchlands (and the remainder being fetchables) over 1000 games each on a list that I thought was optimal with 22 lands.

The optimal build was 21 lands with 8 fetches. The next best build however was 22 lands with 16 fetches, and then at 22 lands as the fetch count decreased the deck speed decreased as well. I don't really have any rule of thumb to suggest here, but it looks pretty clear to me that the fetch count can be tweaked to make an optimal land count deck. If for example the optimal point is above 21 lands but below 22 lands, 22 lands with lots of fetches gets you closer to that point. The tradeoff is in mulligans, I've started tracking this number quite a bit and as the mulligan count increases the ratio of fetch:fetchable that you want to see in your hand changes. Obviously this only applies to Burn because we have little to no color fixing to worry about, but lands are much better than fetches when you go to 6 and 5.

If I could think of some good representative lists this is actually a project I would like to do. It's becoming very clear to me that the value of each card changes as the hand size changes. Creatures hold less value at 7 than they do at 5 (I think most had already figured this out), but the value of Burn spells also change and it appears the same is true of lands.

This most practical application of this is that the ideal list contains a mix of everything, so that you always have a chance of drawing to the higher value cards. I also suspect that there's some tuning that can be done here on the play/draw when sideboarding such as taking out one creature on the draw and bringing in an extra spell or taking out a spell for a creature on the play.

[Brael]

Got curious about a bit more deck manipulation. Since I already have ways in my program to scry and to cantrip I combined them together to try out Serum Visions. Preordain would perhaps be a little more relevant to Legacy but Visions sees more play so that's the question I wanted to answer. Currently, Ponder and Brainstorm are beyond my simulators ability to play because they require a more detailed way to rate cards than I can currently calculate (though the method I'm using for AI, should it work, will eventually enable them)

21 land (no fetches), 4 eidolon, 4 swiftspear, 4 guide, 4 price, 3 fireblast, 8 bolt, 1 firecraft, 2 sulfuric vortex. The remaining 8 slots depending on deck were 4 probe/4 serum visions, 4 serum visions/4 lightning bolt, and 4 lightning bolt, 3 vexing devil, 1 land.

The 8 cantrip list took 5.25 turns to win, the 4 cantrip list took 5.18 turns to win, and the 0 cantrip list took 4.96 turns to win.

Not much else to say here other than this being another nail in the coffin of cantrips in burn. When I looked at the average hands for the turn 4 games (nothing won on 3) the best hands had no cantrips in them, which is particularly telling since the mulligan decision doesn't bias against cantrips in any way (it actually considers them on par with Lightning Bolt). This data is starting to reinforce my opinion that SDT is working properly in code, and that it's just not that strong since similar cards are all evaluating poorly too.

[Brael]

Built a new AI to play the games, it runs a little slower but it's more versatile and the games themselves are a bit more representative of the average. Not only does it play better but the creature bias is tempered a bit because the AI considers things like over extending and not playing a creature if it doesn't increase the clock. It's not perfect but it works pretty well.

Giving the new system for a spin I had it experiment with Fireblast a bit. While more Fireblasts did lower the clock and enable earlier wins, the average turn didn't go down by very much between 0 and 4. This either suggests the cards I put in, in place of Fireblast are equal to it in power (I added Flame Rift) or that the sample size was too small. I'm going to run it again tomorrow with 25,000 games vs 5,000 to rule out the latter.

When it comes to deck manipulation, Serum Visions was superior to Magma Jet, which was superior to Gitaxian Probe but they were all worse than aggressive cards. There's been enough testing with deck manipulation at this point that I'm pretty skeptical of all of it.

I meant to get self damage in tonight but other things took my attention. So hopefully, starting tomorrow self damage will be a category that gets tracked and a number can be put to how much life we're giving up in each game to various cards.

[subzero]

hi guys!!

it was really long time from my last post here

btw burn is my pet deck, i play it from 2011 ,
i changed many thing
i played with all possible splash


but now, i have problem

my match up against eldrzi is really bad!!
when he start with chalice at 1 and maybe a thron , i lose at 99%

when side in, i put bridge, smash etc and go better..

but main deck very very very hard,

i start think to cut 1 playset burn (for example lava spike) for start paly main, something defensive cards...

maybe is crazy because we lose damage to fire opponent, but play maindeck something against bad match up, can be interesting...


i m crazy??

but for example
play maindeck bridge, can be good against many match up...
against eldrazi
against sneak attack
if even darck depth..

what do you think?

[Jon]

Have you ever cast the card Price of Progress ? Try that.

Sent from my XT1080 using Tapatalk

[Brael]

but now, i have problem

my match up against eldrzi is really bad!!


Price of Progress is what you want.

---------------------------------------------------

Ok, so I figured out something else I can do with this dataset that's perhaps more useful than measuring games. I figured out that I can actually use it to measure cards, this is something of an offshoot from my previous few posts where I mentioned being able to track the average opening hand in the best performing lists. Using a little bit of math (and a spreadsheet to make life easy), it's possible to create a value that scores a card based on how much it over/under performs. In my system these results range from -1 (over performs the most) to 1 (big under performer).

I'll be breaking a rule I've tried to stick to with posting these simulator results, and I'll be giving more numbers than usual this time, mainly because I'm not quite sure of a good way to graph them. I started running various tests looking for more optimal lists. Currently I'm on the following list:
7 Fetch
16 Land
1 Barbarian Ring

4 Eidolon
4 Swiftspear
4 Goblin Guide
4 Vexing Devil
1 Grim Lavamancer

2 Price of Progress
2 Fireblast
1 Atarka's Command
9 Lightning Bolt
4 Exquisite Firecraft
1 Sulfuric Vortex

This list has an average turn of 5.19 which is down a bit from previous decks. But one thing you'll notice is that it's a bit creature heavy. While the new AI does limit this somewhat (it stops over extension) it's still something of a symptom of goldfishing rather than having real opponents.

The chart for the turns is
http://imgur.com/yuizCUc

A bit over 70% of games end on turn 5 or sooner.

Using the T3 information (about 1% of games) I'm able to generate the following score for each card in the deck. A lower number means the card is over performing relative to other cards in the deck, and a higher number means it under performs. It's a relative rather than absolute ranking, and should always sum to the average of 0 (minus rounding)
-0.75 Lightning Bolt
-0.47 Price of Progress
-0.43 Land
-0.23 Goblin Guide
-0.18 Atarka's Command
0.02 Grim Lavamancer
0.02 Sulfuric Vortex
0.07 Vexing Devil
0.12 Barbarian Ring
0.23 Fireblast
0.32 Fetch
0.37 Monastery Swiftspear
0.47 Eidolon of the Great Revel
0.47 Exquisite Firecraft

The T4 information changes a bit, which should be no surprise. As games go longer the value of each card is going to change.
-0.17 Land
-0.14 Eidolon
-0.11 Price of Progress
-0.05 Atarka's Command
-0.03 Bolt
-0.02 Guide
-0.01 Exquisite Firecraft
0.00 Fetch
0.02 Swiftspear
0.03 Barbarian Ring
0.04 Sulfuric Vortex
0.08 Fireblast
0.09 Grim Lavamancer
0.29 Vexing Devil

Finally, the T5 information
-0.36 Land
-0.19 Eidolon
-0.04 Fireblast
-0.03 Firecraft
-0.02 Fetch
-0.02 Ring
-0.01 Atarka's Command
0.00 Rift
0.00 Sulfuric Vortex
0.05 Swiftspear
0.06 Lightning Bolt
0.09 Grim Lavamancer
0.18 Guide
0.29 Vexing

Now, to turn all of those numbers into the useful information I'm sure you're waiting for I'm weighing each turn win by how common it is.
-0.05 Land
-0.04 Eidolon
-0.04 Price
-0.02 Atarka's
-0.01 Swiftspear
0.00 Bolt
0.00 Fetch
0.00 Firecraft
0.01 Barbarian Ring
0.01 Vortex
0.03 Fireblast
0.03 Lavamancer
0.09 Guide
0.09 Vexing

So we can see here that most cards are actually performing pretty close to the desired average. In a perfect world every card here would be near zero and that would indicate that the numbers are right on every card in the deck. We're not that far off though. I find this to be a pretty damn good case against Atarka's Command which is a card I've supported. It's just barely overperforming as a 1 of, but 2 gives the results that it's too many copies. Considering what this suggest the optimal fetch count is I see no way that the green splash is viable. Vexing Devil also looks to be slightly over rated at 4 copies. Removing one copy should increase the value of Guide and Lavamancer since they won't be competing as a T1 play. In exchange for that cut I'll add an additional price which is over performing and suggests it needs more copies. I'm hesitant to go up another land here and I think increasing the mana curve slightly will accomplish the same goal of balancing out the lands.

There's also a possibility that a 5th Eidolon in the form of a Pyrostatic Pillar could be a worthwhile addition over the Lavamancer. But, Pillar isn't in my simulator (yet) so that remains an unknown.

The biggest surprise to me here is that Exquisite Firecraft out performs Fireblast so consistently. With them both being 4 damage, I really thought Firecraft would be the weaker of the two.

What I'll probably do is run this simulation again on the draw (this was on the play) and figure out what should be done from there. And then make the suggested change and try again.

---------------------
On the draw results are in. -1 Vexing Devil for +1 Land looks like the highest recommended change. It also suggests -1 Lavamancer for +1 Bolt.

Just for fun, because I'm curious in how far apart the formulaic spreadsheet approach is from the simulation approach. I put this deck into my spreadsheet. The results are actually rather impressive. It comes in over budget on damage and under budget on mana, though it averages 1 turn slower than my sheet calculates. I think that's a point in favor of this simulation approach being somewhat representative of reality. Though I should stress that both are tuned for a goldfish. No promises as to when, but eventually there will be an opponent or two to choose from and at that point I expect to see cards like Searing Blaze (which is effectively just Incinerate here) and Grim Lavamancer increase in value.

[Jon]

You are doing all this math and typing but show me the results that back up your numbers.

Sent from my XT1080 using Tapatalk

[AIRchrist]

In response to your latest analytical results, the Vexing seems to be a generally "not great" card for burn, but if these numbers are to be believed, it might have a place in creature heavy builds, in limited quantities. Does your simulator take into account life loss from fetches? Just curious. I'm honestly really interested in the Fireblast to Firecraft usage. While Fireblast has always been the card of choice(and I don't dispute its strengths), I'm wondering if some mix of the two would be better than 4 of Fireblast. In my latest real world testing, I've noticed that I've had better luck with Firecraft against the vast majority of my meta. I see a lot of Merfolk, Grixis Delver/Control, some Miracles and way too much Eldrazi. There have been a lot of games where I felt crippled by having 4 Fireblasts MB, but welcomed seeing a Firecraft from T3 on. I understand the power of FB, but it too often gets countered(feelsbadman) or stuck in my hand. Hitting a Thoughtnot or weaker Goyf without sacrificing lands and/or getting countered just feels like a safer bet in my current meta. I'm obviously not basing this off of hard numbers(I'll leave that to you), but I've noticed an uptick in my wins. If that means anything...

[Brael]

You are doing all this math and typing but show me the results that back up your numbers.

You wouldn't like my results, I only play small local tournaments, I don't go to anything large. And at that I only play Legacy about once every 2 weeks, and it's split between two decks that I like (Burn and Nic Fit). Even if I had some real results though, we're mostly talking about making changes that adjust the decks win turn by fractions of a turn. Some of those games you'll lose and of the ones you win, any typical tournament has you seeing between 10 and 50 games. Most of this stuff is really only apparent if you're tracking it, and even then over many thousands of games.

Bottom line, any results would be too small a sample size to say one way or the other. However, in my defense I'll say this: Frank Karsten came up with a near identical mana curve here (http://www.channelfireball.com/articles/frank-analysis-finding-the-optimal-mana-curve-via-computer-simulation/), my spreadsheet suggests the build is good, and my simulator says the same. I probably don't have things perfect yet, but that's 3 independent sources that are all coming to the same conclusions through three different methods.

As far as being wordy, I can't help it, I have a real problem with being succinct, particularly when I'm talking about things I enjoy.


In response to your latest analytical results, the Vexing seems to be a generally "not great" card for burn, but if these numbers are to be believed, it might have a place in creature heavy builds, in limited quantities. Does your simulator take into account life loss from fetches? Just curious. I'm honestly really interested in the Fireblast to Firecraft usage. While Fireblast has always been the card of choice(and I don't dispute its strengths), I'm wondering if some mix of the two would be better than 4 of Fireblast. In my latest real world testing, I've noticed that I've had better luck with Firecraft against the vast majority of my meta. I see a lot of Merfolk, Grixis Delver/Control, some Miracles and way too much Eldrazi. There have been a lot of games where I felt crippled by having 4 Fireblasts MB, but welcomed seeing a Firecraft from T3 on. I understand the power of FB, but it too often gets countered(feelsbadman) or stuck in my hand. Hitting a Thoughtnot or weaker Goyf without sacrificing lands and/or getting countered just feels like a safer bet in my current meta. I'm obviously not basing this off of hard numbers(I'll leave that to you), but I've noticed an uptick in my wins. If that means anything...

Life loss from fetches, PoP, Flame Rift, Eidolon, Barbarian Ring, and so on is not currently implemented. I've been saying for a week now that I would add it (maybe it's been two weeks?) but other little things always seem to pop up such as getting a new AI to run or in the case of the past 2 nights working the kinks out of the card by card analysis.

I too am surprised by the Firecraft numbers, the next time I get a chance to play Burn in paper it's something I'm certainly going to experiment with. Right now I have 4 MB but this program seems to suggest wanting them MB. Interestingly, 4 looks to be the right number so there's no Flame Javelins waiting in the wings as a 5th Firecraft. The land counts it suggests though I'm not at all shocked at (well, the fetch count a little), the 22-23 range is in line with every other test I've done on other decks that suggest a land count higher than conventional wisdom is typically a good idea. I am surprised at the Barbarian Ring count though. I really thought it would suggest more of them.

On the subject of Vexing Devil, it has actually scored quite well, it just doesn't score well as a 4 of. It could be an instance of my code being unfair to Vexing Devil or it could just be a proper reflection of the cards power. It doesn't get cast very often, and when it does it doesn't do very much. In my code on turn 3 or later, I assume it hits the board and then dies so it's a low priority to cast, on turns 1 and 2 though it hits the board. Problem is, Guide/Swiftspear are higher priority to cast because they have haste. So Devil is ideal on turn 1 and ok on 2, but bad beyond that. Devil will get more accurate representation once there's an opposing deck rather than a goldfish. But for now my program likes it most as a 2-3 of.

Edit: Played with some things a bit more. This deck scores near 0's across the board which is an indication that the numbers are all right.
7 Fetch
16 Mountain
2 Barbarian Ring

4 Eidolon
4 Swiftspear
4 Guide
1 Lavamancer

4 Price
2 Fireblast
11 Bolt
4 Firecraft
1 Vortex

Obviously, it needs some interaction, but goldfishes aren't very good at finding interaction. Short of an interesting question for this to generate numbers on I probably won't do too much more with it for the next few days/weeks as I'm going to be making some big changes to it for an actual opponent. I'm not quite sure how long that will take but it will probably keep me busy for a while. After that I'll almost certainly have to figure out some optimizations as well because an opponent means double the calculations, which means half the runtime and I'll want to get some of that time back.

[Brael]

10 days with no post in this thread, time to fix that. I've had a few RL setbacks lately like my good computer getting stolen in a home invasion, and lots of travel time. But, I had the software backed up online and I'm still working on it. Though a larger project I had running that would take 3 weeks of dedicated running in order to test a huge range of decks has fallen apart since I don't have the computer to do it anymore.

Currently the next version of this simulator has an opponent that's mostly capable of interacting, but as I add more cards I keep having to reimplement large blocks of code to account for how they work. Right now I would say I have the counterspells working 100%, attacking/blocking 80%, and other spells 90%. There's just the odd bug that needs tracked down and fixed. Other than that, I just have to alter the database design so that it can record when the Burn player wins vs loses the game.

Once that's done I'll start posting a few more lists against a dummy deck that can interact and counterattack (I ended up going with a modified Delver deck based on what cards are easier than others to implement).

[Sidneyious]

Terrible to hear, hopefully they can't get in the PC and find your personal data

[Brael]

Terrible to hear, hopefully they can't get in the PC and find your personal data

Naa, they got all that stuff... quite an ordeal to get straightened out. My PC security was non existent on my desktop because I never considered someone would break in and steal it.

Anyways, it's taken me a bit but I think I finally have some working AI to make two decks interact. About every 2 days I've written and then rewritten it until I finally settled on something that's a good mix of simplicity (important for debugging) and solid strategy. I can't even begin to go into how much reading I did between articles on basic/advanced aspects of combat, to computer algorithms, I even looked at 4 different AI's others have already made trying to make something reasonable at combat.

In the end, my AI is pretty simple but I think it has a solid strategy behind it. Where most AI's look for reasons to include cards in an attack/block, which leads to millions of permutations that have to be compared I took the opposite approach. Everything that can attack, attacks. Everything that can block, blocks. Once a card has been identified as a potential attacker/blocker I look for reasons to exclude it. Mine is pretty simple but I think it has a solid strategy behind it. At a minimum I think it's good enough to beat novice players, and the beauty of my approach is that it only requires a quantity of games, not quality. 10,000 games worth of data generated by Finkel playing Budde is as good as 1,000,000 games of two brand new players, so simply generating more data makes up for any deficiencies in the AI's skill.

I was able to speed things up a bit too, it takes about 2 hours to run 100,000 games where previously that would take 5 hours.

The opposing player used is a generic Delver deck. For reasons I won't explain (PM me if you're really curious) certain cards are more difficult to program than others, so that limits my card pool a bit. Basically, on action triggers are still beyond my programs capabilities which excludes Young Pyromancer, in depth card evaluation is too time consuming (in particular shuffling away bad cards) which excludes Ponder and Brainstorm, and alternate costs are close to impossible to do in an elegant fashion which excludes Force of Will. This causes the test deck to be some weird hybrid that falls between Legacy and Modern legality. It also doesn't really impact testing because counters, removal, and blockers are still counters, removal, and blockers even if they exist at a lower quality, and really it's the interactions as they come up that are being measured. The "final" UR Delver list being used is
8 fetches
10 fetchable land

4 Monastery Swiftspear
4 Stormchaser Mage
4 Delver of Secrets

4 Flame Rift
2 Fireblast
6 Lightning Bolt
4 Gitaxian Probe
4 Preordain
4 Serum Visions
1 Exquisite Firecraft
1 Cryptic Command
3 Counterspell
2 Force Spike

After looking at the data, and filtering the results to only the games Burn won (it won ~67% of games btw), using the previous list I gave which was the optimal performing goldfish list we get the following results, looking only at T3/T4/T5 wins (9339 games over the initial dataset):
0.37 Fetch
-0.62 Land
-0.01 Ring
-0.13 Eidolon
0.15 Swiftspear
0.15 Goblin Guide
-0.06 Rift
0.01 Fireblast
0.05 Bolt
0.01 Firecraft
0.07 Lavamancer
-0.01 Vortex

So from this we can say that the big under performer was fetchlands, the card the deck most wanted was lands (note that it's already running 25, and this says that even more are still optimal), another Eidolon would be fantastic (already running 4, but maybe a Pyrostatic Pillar?), and the 1 drop hasted creatures are a little over represented.

So I think that for the next test I'm going to try -1 Fetch, -1 Swiftspear, -1 Lavamancer, +2 Land, +1 Eidolon (for now it will just be 5 Eidolons, I'll downgrade to a more accurate Pyrostatic Pillar in the future, the next time I add new cards to the pool).

As an aside, for a bit of trivia, I expect Eidolon to consistently overperform in the future. In fact, my original test deck for the opposition was 40 lands, 20 Eidolons and it won 80% of games despite the mulligan code almost always forcing it to 4 card hands.

[Chatto]

@ Brael: out of curiosity, could you also build software to test certain configurations vs Miracles? Or better, test hypothetical decks which whoop Miracles, and at the same time have a decent game vs the rest of the field? Just out of curiosity, not to derail this thread.

[Brael]

@ Brael: out of curiosity, could you also build software to test certain configurations vs Miracles? Or better, test hypothetical decks which whoop Miracles, and at the same time have a decent game vs the rest of the field? Just out of curiosity, not to derail this thread.

Maybe eventually. Miracles is a very different sort of deck though. I chose Delver as the test deck because it does a little bit of everything. Attacking, blocking, removal, burn, counters, and it's aggressive enough that it uses a fairly similar AI all while having cards that are either good/bad regardless of context.

Miracles is a very different sort of deck. It involves lots of Top (which I've since broken in my program), alternate costs (Snapcaster/FoW), and at any given time the power level of a card is very contextual. It's a bit beyond my abilities right now and it wasn't really even registering as a long term goal. My very long term goal is to make a generalized AI, hook it up to a group of draft bots, and see if it can solve a limited format before a PT so I'm primarily looking at decks that like to attack and block.

For what it's worth though, I think Burn has a pretty reasonable Miracles matchup. Especially if you apply one of the big takeaways from this program which is that Exquisite Firecraft is 4 of MB material.

Also, for what it's worth since I know people do like having real world results to back up theory. I played my current list (posted below) which is very heavily based on what this program said was goldfish optimal, for 12 hours straight the other day against a couple willing test subjects with them using a mix of Shardless BUG, BUG/RUG Delver, Nic Fit, S&T, and Miracles. I didn't keep precise numbers, but I played each matchup for about 2 hours split 1 hour preboard/1 hour post board. The deck performed very well. The biggest thing I noticed was that Barbarian Ring only turned on once the entire time, but the time it was on, it won me a game that no other card could have won.

Additionally, in the past couple weeks I've played 2 small local events, 3 rounders and went 2-1 and 3-0. I'm either on a hot streak or the build is matching the theory behind it.

Here's what I played
25 Land
16 Mountain
8 Fetch
1 Barbarian Ring

4 Goblin Guide
4 Monastery Swiftspear
4 Eidolon of the Great Revel
1 Grim Lavamancer

4 Lightning Bolt
4 Chain Lightning
4 Price of Progress
3 Searing Blaze
4 Exquisite Firecraft
1 Sulfuric Vortex
2 Fireblast

Sideboard
3 Ensnaring Bridge
2 Volcanic Fallout
2 Red Elemental Blast
1 Flame Rift
2 Faerie Macabre
2 Sulfuric Vortex
1 Fireblast
2 Skullcrack

[ESG]

Additionally, in the past couple weeks I've played 2 small local events, 3 rounders and went 2-1 and 3-0. I'm either on a hot streak or the build is matching the theory behind it.

Here's what I played
25 Land
16 Mountain
8 Fetch
1 Barbarian Ring

4 Goblin Guide
4 Monastery Swiftspear
4 Eidolon of the Great Revel
1 Grim Lavamancer

4 Lightning Bolt
4 Chain Lightning
4 Price of Progress
3 Searing Blaze
4 Exquisite Firecraft
1 Sulfuric Vortex
2 Fireblast

Sideboard
3 Ensnaring Bridge
2 Volcanic Fallout
2 Red Elemental Blast
1 Flame Rift
2 Faerie Macabre
2 Sulfuric Vortex
1 Fireblast
2 Skullcrack

The thing that boggles my mind about your list is your high land count. How are you not flooding out ~30 percent of the time? There is no library manipulation in Burn, barring half-measures like Magma Jet, so you get what the deck gives you. I played Burn for about six months straight when I started playing Legacy eight years ago, and the optimal number I found for my deck was 19.5, so I ran 20. Looking at your mana curve, it's almost the same as the one I ran. My curve may have even been a hair higher.

[Brael]

The thing that boggles my mind about your list is your high land count. How are you not flooding out ~30 percent of the time? There is no library manipulation in Burn, barring half-measures like Magma Jet, so you get what the deck gives you. I played Burn for about six months straight when I started playing Legacy eight years ago, and the optimal number I found for my deck was 19.5, so I ran 20. Looking at your mana curve, it's almost the same as the one I ran. My curve may have even been a hair higher.

I've done a bit more testing with additional decks, that was the optimal amount in a goldfish, but in actual gameplay the fastest deck was at 24 lands (I mostly post these results as I find them, so sometimes after I write something I find new, more reliable information that contradicts it... though I usually go back and edit in these instances).

I've been thinking about your question for a while though, for a month actually, because I've seen the high land count thing before. My best explanation is that curving out is simply worth having more land. Note that I'm including 3 drops in the deck. Having more land represents more resources, this is basically a turn 5 deck (it has some hands that win on 3 and 4, but the highest number is at 5, at least with my software playing... it plays slower than a real person does). With a low land curve, you're expecting your mana to develop along the lines of 1-2-2-3-3 but with more land you can expect it to go 1-2-3-4-4. Over 5 turns that's a difference of 11 vs 14 mana to spend, or 27% more resources. In practice it works out to a bit more than 27% because 4 land turns on Fireblast #2 (which you'll also see I was finding diminishing returns on). Getting 27% more mana means that until you're out of cards you're also playing your hand out 27% faster. In order to do so you're only giving up 8% of your deck.

Having more mana, means that until you're out of cards, you're also getting damage out faster. In addition to that it means your hand is larger because you're taking fewer mulligans.

This isn't something I've seen exclusive to Burn either. This simulator is my third attempt at such a project (the first two played other decks), and in every case they all came to the same conclusion, more lands than traditional wisdom dictates is better. I've since applied this to a fourth deck with Infect and it also came to the same results. I'm not 100% sure on the reasoning for it, but I've run literally over 100 million games of Magic now across multiple decks, with different logic sets and they all come to the same conclusion.

Though Burn remains my only deck where I've actually used an opponent rather than a goldfish (and the opponents are still pretty new at that). Interestingly, adding the opponent reduced the optimal land count slightly I think, but it also could have been because I cut the fetches entirely (~12 fetches seem to be worth -1 land).

As far as not flooding out goes, I think it's mostly just a matter of perception. When people play an extra land, say 21 over 20 the times they flood stick out in their head, but in reality they're only seeing an additional extra land in 1 in 60 cards and many of those flooding instances still would have happened with 20 or 21. Humans are very bad at simply observing statistics in action, it's really only in measuring this stuff over many thousands of games (and even my results are cutting the number of repetitions needed short) that a true pattern can be seen.

To give an example of this, a couple hours ago I ran a set of 1000 games at 23 land and a set of 1000 games at 22 land (1 Ring the rest Mountains). The 23 land deck had an average turn of 4.162 but the 22 land deck had an average turn of 4.172. From a handful of games even if you're very observant, you simply don't have the sample size to definitively say that 1 fewer land is leading to your deck being slowed down by 1/100th of a turn.

There are other considerations as well, it's something I haven't gotten into much yet with Burn since adding an opponent, but often times cutting a land for a silver bullet can be very beneficial, because that 1/60th chance of drawing a super relevant card outweighs the 1/100 chance of ending the game a turn sooner. This is something that most frequently comes up with modal cards, but because I'm playing with a limited card pool I don't have any of those... yet. It's in this area that I think the best arguments for cutting lands come into play, and the sort of reason I'm a fan of Atarka's Command... but RG is wholly inferior to mono red. But even with non modal cards it's important to keep in mind for 1 drops, and a large part of the logic behind why I like to play a 1 of Grim Lavamancer.

I have a few ideas in mind for why I'm getting the results I am, which I'm trying to rule out or confirm 1 by 1. I've tried to keep the topic of my posts on the subject on the results themselves instead of the whys behind them though, because I don't want to spam the thread with theory more than I already am and the math/cs process underlying what I'm doing isn't really the sort of thing people are reading the thread for.

[Lyle Hopkins]

Because of Miracles' prevalence in the meta-game right now, I'm curious what everybody is doing to combat this match-up. I was watching Joe Lossett's stream the other day and he mentioned that Legacy Burn should be playing four copies of Exquisite Firecraft.

[Speedbump]

Because of Miracles' prevalence in the meta-game right now, I'm curious what everybody is doing to combat this match-up. I was watching Joe Lossett's stream the other day and he mentioned that Legacy Burn should be playing four copies of Exquisite Firecraft.In the maindeck, I have 1 Sensei's Divining Top and 1 Barbarian Ring. Barbarian Ring is pretty good as the last source of damage underneath a countertop lock, and Sensei's Divining Top is very efficient at digging for more Burn spells.

In the sideboard, I have 3 Exquisite Firecraft, 2 Vexing Shusher, and 2 Pyrostatic Pillar which can come into the match-up. Exquisite Firecraft is self-explanatory, and probably the best card in the match-up. Vexing Shusher is nice on Turn 4-5, assuming that they're not on the Legend build, where you can just burst through if necessary. Pyrostatic Pillar is useful to try and get under Counterbalance with, especially considering how often Miracles players like to cantrip or tap and replay Top.

[mistercakes]

has there been any sampling done with the new 4RR bedlam reveler? i know a lot of the issues with burn is that they "flood out" or maybe they had to use some resources on creatures/planeswalkers.

has anyone tested him at all? i would like to, but don't have burn built as i'm missing the guides. (got rid of mine a while ago)

(not to hear arguments about why he's bad, i just want to know who has actually tested this guy...thanks)

[Brael]

Because of Miracles' prevalence in the meta-game right now, I'm curious what everybody is doing to combat this match-up. I was watching Joe Lossett's stream the other day and he mentioned that Legacy Burn should be playing four copies of Exquisite Firecraft.

He's 100% correct. I started off SB'ing them, I run all 4 MB now. It's a very strong card.

[Gollus]

The last tournament i played in i had 2 Exquisite Firecraft in the main and 2 in the sideboard. The thinking behind that is that they replaced the Sulfuric Vortexes because lifegain isn't that often seen in Legacy but counters are. And if you cast Vortex on turn 3/4 it takes 2 turns to deal the same amount of dmg as Firecraft does and at this stage the game should be over anyway. So i deals the same amount of dmg just slower and counterable/destroyable (sideboardhate against enchantments - Eidolon).
From the tournament i can say it was totally worth it and i was thinking about putting all 4 mainboard.

[Brael]

Some more updates to my program. Going to keep this one as brief as I can. I finally got around to adding Searing Blaze but due to some issues that I found extremely interesting I couldn't just take the quick and dirty approach to it. I actually had to do things the right way and create a targeting system. This comes with a few benefits. Most notably, Lightning Bolt is actually Lightning Bolt now rather than mimicing Lava Spike. I was even able to do it in such a way that the logic is generalized, which means one function of targeting logic can equally let Burn, Delver, and Miracles all find targets for their spells. The downside is it made card creation a little more unwieldy. Right now I can make cards that target, creatures, players, or creatures and players or not target at all but i cannot make cards that target two creatures. This means no Electrolyze. In theory I can do Searing Blood but I don't really have an event trigger system so it would require custom logic (which I don't want to do) rather than just parsing targets and numbers on the card. Searing Blaze however was doable. Based on the results, I'm glad I worked Blaze in but I don't think I'm going to need to work Blood in.

The list I have right now is not the optimized list against the opposing AI, because I think optimizing for a bad deck is a poor idea. Instead I'm just looking at various card values. With my current list (posted below) over 10,000 games Searing Blaze looked optimal at 4 cards (score of 0, so perfectly balanced).

Firecraft is looking pretty damn good as a mainboard 4 of as well. It does work out poorly in turn 3 games where it's over represented as a 4 of, but in the turn 4 games it's only slightly high and in turn 5 games it's under represented. Depending on the expected meta I could see an argument here to only play 3 MB if you expect things to be fast.

Guide and Swiftspear are starting to climb the charts of over representation now that there's an opponent with blockers and the ability to kill them. According to the numbers Guide is a little better than Swiftspear, but Prowess gets exponentially more powerful (just think about it, it's way better when you trigger on two creatures at once) as you put more of it in your deck so the real weaker card might be Guide.

Lands show up as under represented still.

Finally, here's the list and it's worth noting that this is the first list to go through my program (ever) that had more turn 4 wins than turn 5 wins, despite the fact that the opponent has blockers. Searing Blaze is just that good.
22 Mountain
2 Barbarian Ring

4 Eidolon of the Great Revel
4 Monastery Swiftspear
4 Goblin Guide

4 Price of Progress
2 Fireblast
4 Lightning Bolt
1 Rift Bolt (program actually just uses 5 Lightning Bolts right now)
4 Exquisite Firecraft
1 Sulfuric Vortex
4 Searing Blaze
4 Chain Lightning

One last comment, over the past few days I've been thinking about how to implement Bedlam Reveler because he's new, topical, and I bet a lot of people would like some extra data before Louisville in 5 months. Bad news. I'm not sure I can implement him. I'm going to try, but given my limited knowledge of AI programming I'm not sure how to write a variable cost. It's a really difficult concept to explain to a computer. I have some ideas, one is a really ugly way to implement it but would work. The other would probably require expanding my trigger system but would be a little more sustainable. If I implement it that's the direction I'm going to take.

If I'm being honest with myself though, the card I really want to know about is Collective Defiance. I like this card more in Modern but I think it has some SB potential here against Miracles and combo. Sadly, modal spells are way beyond me. Modal spells are 500x harder than variable mana costs. Spells with both of those combined are probably impossible given my current approach.



The last tournament i played in i had 2 Exquisite Firecraft in the main and 2 in the sideboard. The thinking behind that is that they replaced the Sulfuric Vortexes because lifegain isn't that often seen in Legacy but counters are. And if you cast Vortex on turn 3/4 it takes 2 turns to deal the same amount of dmg as Firecraft does and at this stage the game should be over anyway. So i deals the same amount of dmg just slower and counterable/destroyable (sideboardhate against enchantments - Eidolon).
From the tournament i can say it was totally worth it and i was thinking about putting all 4 mainboard.

I agree with that logic. They're good on their own though even without the lifegain. They're fast, and while not the most mana efficient they are very card efficient. I think that's something we take for granted too often when playing Burn. One of the approaches to the deck is that we're a combo deck, we try to resolve 7 3 damage spells to win the game. If we can add just a single 4 pointer to that list we're trying to resolve though, it's an entire card less that we have to throw at our opponents face. Would you rather try and resolve 7 spells for 10 mana or 6 spells for 11?

[Brael]

A few more results, I wanted to get a large amount of data in with the AI so I ran a 100,000 game set while I slept last night.

It had an average game length of 4.678 turns.

Turns games ended on
T2 - 3 (I am confused by these)
T3 - 4250
T4 - 41458
T5 - 36238
T6 - 12884
T7+ 5167

One of the things I really wanted to test here was to evaluate Swiftspear. Previous goldfish games were coming in with Swiftspear ranking slightly better than Goblin Guide even though the damage queries show it to be strictly worse in damage output. I have no explanation for this yet. Swiftspear ranks as the better card, despite putting out less damage and being able to swing less often and the Guide downside can't be the explanation because my Guides don't have the attack trigger on them (yet).

Anyways, the observations from this. I added a T6 comparison to the chart to weight for an optimal deck. Similar results as before. Lands are too low, 1 drop creatures are too high. I might try out a Marauder.

My next project will be cleaning up the code and adding proper documentation, it's been a while since I've posted it publicly so once it reads as something fit for human consumption I'll be doing that for anyone interested.

Worth pointing out though is that Searing Blaze came in with 4 as the perfect number in all games from T3 to T6 with an opposing deck that has 12 creatures.

If anyone has requests for decks I can try running them.

[ParkerLewis]

You're posting update after update after update on huge sample sizes but as mentioned the high land count is extremely suspicious. You're running control-deck level of lands, which is absurd given this is burn we're talking about.

FYI, and since you mentioned his experiments (which yours are similar to), FK did converge to the conventional wisdom of 20 lands for an optimal aggro deck (http://www.channelfireball.com/articles/frank-analysis-finding-the-optimal-aggro-deck-via-computer-simulation/). Now, that's for an optimal goldfishing (no opposition), but still.

This kind of approach via numerical simulation is most certainly justified and valid enough for "simple" decks like Burn/RDW. Yet as with any tool, results can only be useful if the tool behaves as intended, and it's obvious something is not right when you can announce up to 26 lands.

Edit : the T2 wins you are confused by are another indication that some things are not right. This particular point might be of a totally separate issue to the land count one, but it serves as a pointer that there are some significant bugs still in the tool.

[Brael]

You're posting update after update after update on huge sample sizes but as mentioned the high land count is extremely suspicious. You're running control-deck level of lands, which is absurd given this is burn we're talking about.

FYI, and since you mentioned his experiments (which yours are similar to), FK did converge to the conventional wisdom of 20 lands for an optimal aggro deck (http://www.channelfireball.com/articles/frank-analysis-finding-the-optimal-aggro-deck-via-computer-simulation/). Now, that's for an optimal goldfishing (no opposition), but still.

His other posts came to different conclusions on land. Most notably, once he got away from a linear system of 1 mana 2/x, 2 mana 4/x, 3 mana 6/x. In that situation a mix of 1 and 2 drops actually performs optimally. You don't gain enough card equity from having more power in one card because the game is ending before you empty your hand. That's not quite the case with Burn though because there's more one shot effects and fewer recurring ones.

If you drop the curve the land count goes down, an all Bolt deck wanted I think it was 21 lands. but after having been playing with this stuff in Burn for 2 months now, and having played with it in other decks I've attempted for about a year now... the results have always been the same. Faster decks want more land, slower decks want fewer land with some card draw. That sounds backwards to how most people build decks but it actually makes perfect sense. With more lands you have a better chance of curving out, and when you curve out you have more options, gain more tempo, and can play your cards faster. It also leads to having more cards in hand overall because you mulligan less. Yet with fewer lands, your draws (particularly aided by card draw) smooth out and still provide a steady 1 land/turn.

Another way to look at this, is that his deck had the luxury of playing all 1 and 2 drops. Burn these days though is often times interested in 3 drops, if not in your MB then in your SB. Cards like Ensnaring Bridge, Exquisite Firecraft, and Sulfuric Vortex are very good, and there's little to no debate on that. Once you accept that you will be running some 3 drop, you then have to add enough lands to reasonably cast those 3 drops and 20 just doesn't do that. If you force the simulated deck to include some 3 drops, you'll see your land count rise by quite a bit.

One thing I do need to do though, is do the same thing I did early without an opponent and churn through decklists using every land count from 18 to 30 and then looking at what land count is fastest and not necessarily the most well balanced (which appears to be at 27 lands). In fact, I'll see what I can do about doing that tonight. But in my rewrite for an opponent I lost the ability to easily que up a bunch of decklists at once so I'll have to tinker a bit for that.


This kind of approach via numerical simulation is most certainly justified and valid enough for "simple" decks like Burn/RDW. Yet as with any tool, results can only be useful if the tool behaves as intended, and it's obvious something is not right when you can announce up to 26 lands.

I'm not sure I agree, and this doesn't just come from this program. It comes from experience building decks, I've always been the sort of person who plays 1 or 2 lands extra (which raises the question of if I'm right, or if it's a bias inherent to my approach). Having the mana to play your cards is the single most important thing in the game. I'm not actually playing 26 lands right now, but I have played 26 lands in aggro decks in the past and it worked out well and probably will again in the future. Usually what you're looking for in those last few lands are mana sources that are also mana sinks. Unfortunately the mana requirements in Burn (lots of RR) prevent that from easily happening. 26 Mountains is probably less than optimal but 26 lands could be, in fact as I write this I'm testing a 27 land.

Also, I think this approach can work for any linear deck eventually. Burn is one of the easiest starting points but decks like Jund, Maverick, and Delver aren't much different. It's when you get into non linear decks (anything tutor heavy) and combo decks that it ceases to function, though I suspect I could make AI's specific to each combo deck with enough time and practice.


Edit : the T2 wins you are confused by are another indication that some things are not right. This particular point might be of a totally separate issue to the land count one, but it serves as a pointer that there are some significant bugs still in the tool.

It's not an issue that things aren't right, it's just an issue with looking at the results (seeing a T2 win) and not being able to see any lines that lead to that result to explain it. I ended up looking a bit deeper into those games, and discovered the lines. All three were slightly different but basically involved something like this sequence.

Burn T1 Goblin Guide
Delver T1 Fetch, Gitaxian Probe, Gitaxian Probe
Burn T2 Flame Rift
Delver T2 Fetch, Flame Rift
EoT Fireblast

That sequence, or something very similar came up 3 times in 100,000 games which is where the T2 wins came from. You could chalk that up to either a poor decision in deck construction giving it a PoP/Flame Rift type spell, or a poor decision on the AI's part to cast it in that situation (I don't know what other cards it had to pick from when deciding on a play). It's an example of where interaction actually speeds things up. With Delver which burns it's life total in various ways between Probes, Fetches, and Flame Rifts most games are actually faster than a straight goldfish.

-------------------------------------------------
Edit: I looked deeper into land counts and win turn using 1000 games per land count. I'm going to rerun the test tonight with 10,000 games. The 1000 game dataset suggested little to no effect on the average win turn between 17 and 34 lands.

Here's the chart of win turns
http://imgur.com/5PHPI78

In the dataset, the fastest deck was 4.51 turns at 22 land and the maximum was 4.646 turns at 23 lands. Everything between 17 and 34 lands fell within that range. Therefore the conclusions are either that the sample size is too small to say anything (and if you look at that chart, there's no curve to suggest a range for the optimal count), or that it simply doesn't matter. The sample size can hopefully be ruled out soon.

----------------------------------------------------
More edits: The reason the 17 deck set showed very little difference with land counts is because of a bug I had. Nothing to do with the logic of how it plays games, but when I would reset my deck stats at the start of the turn it would reset the deck to the initial configuration. So even though I fed it 17 decklists to try each one 1000 times it tested the same decklist 17,000 times.

That's fixed and the 10,000 game set is running tonight. Before setting it up I ran a 1000 game set. I don't see any point in posting those results since a better dataset will be available tomorrow. Suffice it to say, there's an actual curve on the win turn again, though it's somewhat minor (about .4 turns between the fastest and slowest deck). Because if that small difference between the fastest and slowest, I went through the extra trouble of tuning each list to it's mana curve. This results in 17 different lists rather than 17 very similar lists aside from mana count. I'm hoping it works out well since it took something like 3 hours to set up as it's a rather labor/time intensive process.

[Brael]

Ran the program, looked at the results. Here's a chart of the average win turn, only taking into account games won/tied.

http://imgur.com/Hoec9ku

The curve isn't quite as clear as I was hoping for, but oh well, it's still clearly there, and you can see where the av

The fastest deck was the 19 lander, and the next fastest was at 23 lands, and everything else was atleast .1 turns slower than that. Oddly, 26 lands proved to be the slowest by a big margin (I was expecting it would be 33 lands). The 26 land deck also had the lowest win rate of all decks, it was so far out of line that I reran that deck two more times, each time tuning the deck to something better and each time returned the same result, it was losing about twice as much as the other decks. I don't really have an explanation to that, but it's odd and consistent.

So I ran the tests again and this was the chart
http://imgur.com/qnlr71I

Basically the same results with 23 performing best. 19 was good but still not quite as good. The over 30 lists repeated their odd decline in turns. My best explanation for that is in those higher lists I started playing a bunch of Keldon Marauders and they still seem to be quite good even though we've kind of forgotten about them.

The difference between 19 and 23 lands is basically Firecraft. Here's the lists those two decks used (for now Searing Blaze is always 3 damage which has a slight effect):

19 Mountain

4 Eidolon of the Great Revel
4 Monastery Swiftspear
4 Goblin Guide

4 Lightning Bolt
4 Chain Lightning
4 Rift Bolt
3 Lava Spike

4 Price of Progress
2 Rift Bolt
4 Searing Blaze
1 Exquisite Firecraft
2 Fireblast

1 Pyrostatic Pillar


22 Mountain
1 Barbarian Ring

3 Monastery Swiftspear
3 Goblin Guide
4 Eidolon of the Great Revel

4 Lightning Bolt
2 Rift Bolt
4 Chain Lightning
4 Price of Progress
2 Flame Rift
4 Searing Blaze
4 Exquisite Firecraft
2 Fireblast

1 Pyrostatic Pillar

With the 23 land decks performing best in both average turns and number of games won against Delver as an opponent , that's probably what I'll focus on trying to optimize for a bit.

[rufus]

A few more results, I wanted to get a large amount of data in with the AI so I ran a 100,000 game set while I slept last night.

It had an average game length of 4.678 turns.
....

I'm a little unclear. What is the simulation here - Burn AI vs Delver AI, or Burn AI goldfishing or something else?

[Brael]

I'm a little unclear. What is the simulation here - Burn AI vs Delver AI, or Burn AI goldfishing or something else?

Burn vs Delver AI's

[Brael]

Added a new card to the card pool today, Forgotten Cave. On first glance this isn't really something Burn is interested in because we don't want to use CIPT lands, but I'm always on the look out for cards that double as mana sources and mana sinks, so I was curious.

The 27 land test deck with 4 Caves substituted in for Mountains performed about equally to the 22 land test deck, with none. 25 land with 4 was very close to 23 land with 0, but slightly worse. So as people probably could have guessed, it just wasn't good enough. It was much closer than expected though so I'm probably going to look into this a bit more and see if there's an optimization I can make to the list somewhere.

In mono colored decks fetchlands have been poor performers, so having another land based way to get some cards into the GY for Lavamancer/Barbarian Ring could be nice. It will require a build designed to take advantage of it rather than a generic list though. I don't expect much, because as I said before CIPT is really not where we want to be, but I'll likely play around with it over the next day or two and see if anything interesting shows up. Conditional mana sources could be part of what we need to make Bedlam Reveler work.

Sadly, my card rating spreadsheet that has so far done a great job of identifying correct numbers for each card, doesn't quite work with this one (in the games we want to optimize it's almost always being played as a land, which basically just makes it a strictly worse Mountain). That system works by comparing how common a card is in our opening hand to the average we should see on a given turn. If it shows up above average, then it's more powerful. That doesn't actually work with something that's intended to be played out later in the game, so I'll have to retool the system a bit to see if it says anything.

It's also very possible I'm just wasting my time on a card that's already been rightfully dismissed, but I'm curious. If anyone can suggest any other interesting cards that might be out there, I'll try and take a stab at quantifying them assuming it falls within the realm of what my software can either do already, or do with some small tweaks.

[mistercakes]

I've been working on a bedlam reveler burn list for a few days now. going to test it with some fetch lands today to see how it changes the deck.

will post list with my findings later today. (in eu right now)

[ESG]

In mono colored decks fetchlands have been poor performers, so having another land based way to get some cards into the GY for Lavamancer/Barbarian Ring could be nice.

Or just don't play those cards if your deck has no fetchlands.


It's also very possible I'm just wasting my time

Going to stop the quote there. You have a lot of enthusiasm for programming, but I fail to see what meaningful results can be drawn from your experiments. You aren't testing against real opponents, and your simulations are, by your own admission, lacking. I want to give you the benefit of the doubt, but when you've gotten to Forgotten Cave, the posts are starting to seem like spam. Well-intentioned spam but spam nonetheless. What would be more helpful is if you posted your findings from playing the deck at real tournaments.

[Brael]

Going to stop the quote there. You have a lot of enthusiasm for programming, but I fail to see what meaningful results can be drawn from your experiments. You aren't testing against real opponents, and your simulations are, by your own admission, lacking. I want to give you the benefit of the doubt, but when you've gotten to Forgotten Cave, the posts are starting to seem like spam. Well-intentioned spam but spam nonetheless. What would be more helpful is if you posted your findings from playing the deck at real tournaments.

There's just not that many locally. I get a 3 round Legacy tournament roughly every other week and I split those between multiple Legacy decks (though when school starts back up, we might be able to get our weekly tournaments going again as people come back into town). I get games in where I can, but that can only tell you so much, and I've posted about those and had good results. A string of 15 or 20 games where I win 2/3 of my constructed matches just doesn't mean anything though because that's the results I get with any of my decks in Legacy, and the sample size just doesn't exist to glean any real information unless something just clearly doesn't work. I live in southern Ohio so it's reasonable to travel to the majority of big tournaments in the US (especially SCG's) but my schedule/budget just doesn't allow it, I prefer to use that money to buy cards instead. Though, there's a good chance I'll be going to Louisville (but I haven't locked on a deck yet). On top of all that, anecdotal evidence just isn't reliable.

Forgotten Cave is there just to try. My tone may not have been clear, but I'm not expecting anything from it results wise. I think it would have a potential spot if we had lots of 3 and 4 mana spells to cast, but we don't. There's very few 4's that seem worth it. When I looked through the list as part of trying to optimize the higher land count decks Collective Defiance and Fiery Confluence were the only ones that seemed remotely interesting, and I'm pretty sure they're not good enough.

Anyways, the card is probably more interesting to me than it is to you because while I'm testing Burn I'm also making a note of how it plays into general manabase construction. Maybe it's place isn't here, I'm going to play with it further to decide that though. I'm just going through the various possibilities. The strongest T4 hands have been the ones that hit 4 lands, but obviously if you hit too many lands your hand gets weaker. So I'm trying various things that can let you hit your land drops but still have the needed number of cards to kill the opponent. Fetchlands don't have much of an effect here (they have some, but at a high life cost), and Barbarian Rings are of some but limited value, so I'm looking at other possibilities. They may or may not pan out after testing. It's really no different than having tested Cantrips, Magma Jet, and SDT in the past... and none of those worked out (though I could have sworn from my paper results that SDT was working.... that's the difference between a tournament report and recording a million games to evaluate a card).

I think you misunderstand the point of having an opponent as an AI. It's not to create the highest quality of play possible, even as a goldfish it doesn't do that. The point is to have something that's capable of blocking, interacting, and counter attacking. Recording 1000 games of Jon Finkel vs LSV will give you a high quality dataset, but high quality plays aren't what's important. Seeing how the cards react in the majority of situations is, and for that something less skilled works fine as long as you play enough games, because my goal is ultimately to create a deck skeleton and evaluate some cards against each other, not a specific list. My biggest limitation on this front though is simply having faster hardware. I say the AI isn't very skilled, but when I say that I'm judging it by the range of possible player skills, I would put the AI up against the DotP AI any day.

As far as spam goes, that may be true, it's even something I take into consideration when posting, but part of discussion is bringing up cards that were never before considered. Regardless though I can stop posting about that card if you wish. My classes start back up in a week anyways and I have to comment everything and make it presentable to make the code available to all again, so once that happens this project won't get any work until winter break because I just won't have the time.

[mistercakes]

been testing this for a few days now. here's the list i've been running on modo with moderate success.


4 gitaxian probe
4 manamorphose
4 faithless looting
4 lightning bolt
4 chain lightning
3 rift bolt
2 lava spike
3 fireblast
3 exquisite firecraft
3 price of progress
1 searing blaze

4 eidolon of the great revel
4 bedlam reveler

9 mountain
2 scalding tarn
2 wooded foothills
2 bloodstained mire
2 arid mesa


here's the cards i've been testing in sb, nothing too crazy here:


3 grafdigger's cage
1 surgical extraction
1 exquisite firecraft
1 searing blaze
1 price of progress
1 ensnaring bridge
2 red elemental blast
3 smash to smithereens
2 pyrostatic pillar




this deck sacrifices a little bit of speed, but has been a blast to play. give it a shot if you like playing with the overpowered bedlam reveler. best play for this deck feels like casting reveler and with ability on the stack casting fireblast.

the deck can reasonably cast reveler on turn 3-4, especially with a faithless looting. looting also functions as a way to fix the draws late game where burn usually falls apart.

one thing to note is with this deck i don't mind firing all of my spells at their creatures as i know i will be able to refill later on. don't be afraid to use your hand at their guys....it's going to play different than bolting their face 7 times.

[Speedbump]

been testing this for a few days now. here's the list i've been running on modo with moderate success.


4 gitaxian probe
4 manamorphose
4 faithless looting
4 lightning bolt
4 chain lightning
3 rift bolt
2 lava spike
3 fireblast
3 exquisite firecraft
3 price of progress
1 searing blaze

4 eidolon of the great revel
4 bedlam reveler

9 mountain
2 scalding tarn
2 wooded foothills
2 bloodstained mire
2 arid mesa


here's the cards i've been testing in sb, nothing too crazy here:


3 grafdigger's cage
1 surgical extraction
1 exquisite firecraft
1 searing blaze
1 price of progress
1 ensnaring bridge
2 red elemental blast
3 smash to smithereens
2 pyrostatic pillar




this deck sacrifices a little bit of speed, but has been a blast to play. give it a shot if you like playing with the overpowered bedlam reveler. best play for this deck feels like casting reveler and with ability on the stack casting fireblast.

the deck can reasonably cast reveler on turn 3-4, especially with a faithless looting. looting also functions as a way to fix the draws late game where burn usually falls apart.

one thing to note is with this deck i don't mind firing all of my spells at their creatures as i know i will be able to refill later on. don't be afraid to use your hand at their guys....it's going to play different than bolting their face 7 times.Mate, deck's awful.

No Guide, no Grim Lavamancer, 4 too many copies of Bedlam Reveler/Gitaxian Probe/Manamorphose/Faithless Looting. Not a Burn deck.

[mistercakes]

I might be able to find room for lavamancer, as I would be good in this list. I haven't tested him yet.

I'm fairly certain based on your comment you haven't tried the list yet. that's fine. I'll post some videos of my matches and let them speak for themselves.

edit: i'm sure there are some questionable plays, but this should show the power of this deck, and why i'm making concessions with probe+manamorphose+looting for reveler.

first match vs miracles: 2-0 (this was in casual tourney practice room)

https://recordings.join.me/v0VRvuuaw0SwmKoQMADI4Q

2nd match vs junk nitfit: 2-1 (this was a 2 man event)

https://recordings.join.me/jvosveXq5E6hqOFBl6pf1w

[Brael]

I might be able to find room for lavamancer, as I would be good in this list. I haven't tested him yet.

I'm fairly certain based on your comment you haven't tried the list yet. that's fine. I'll post some videos of my matches and let them speak for themselves.

edit: i'm sure there are some questionable plays, but this should show the power of this deck, and why i'm making concessions with probe+manamorphose+looting for reveler.

first match vs miracles: 2-0 (this was in casual tourney practice room)

https://recordings.join.me/v0VRvuuaw0SwmKoQMADI4Q

2nd match vs junk nitfit: 2-1 (this was a 2 man event)

https://recordings.join.me/jvosveXq5E6hqOFBl6pf1w

I know I try some weird stuff, but your deck is too far out there for me. The goal of a deck like Burn is to kill on the fastest turn possible, and spending your turn doing something like Faithless Looting just isn't conducive to that.

I remember a couple years ago a friend of mine had some success with a Delver/Storm hybrid that would play a typical delver game but use cards like Manamorphose and Probe to also chain into some large Grapeshots. It feels to me like you're trying to do the same thing, but then you don't have the support cards for it.

On the whole cantrip idea, I think cantrips are in general pretty overrated. If you search back some posts here, I did some pretty extensive tests with Magma Jet, SDT, Probe, Serum Visions, Preordain, and now Forgotten Cave. They all turned out pretty much equal, which is that they were just a little worse than simply putting more good cards in your deck.

4 Reveler definitely seems like too many. The card reads to me like a 2 of at the most because it's going to be prone to clogging your hand.

I watched the 2nd match you posted, Nic Fit vs Burn, those happen to be my two most played Legacy decks (and the two I usually keep put together) so I know both decks well, and how they play together. I would caution against trying to glean too much info from that match. That Nic Fit player really screwed up, among other things Veteran's come out in games 2/3 and that player didn't do that. That alone strongly tilted the match in your favor, to say nothing of the many other errors I saw on their side of the table. Then again it was tournament practice which isn't really known for high level play.

-------------------------------------------------------
And a little more simulator info. Cave didn't test well enough, it's something I'll keep in the back of my mind in the future but it's great for T6ish decks, we're looking to end the game on 4 though so it's just not where we want to be, just like every other cantrip (worth noting though, it did outperform Gitaxian Probe).

Instead, I went back to testing fetchlands. The previous fetch test in a goldfish scenario, and I wanted to see how much the life mattered. I tested several lists at 23, 24, and 25 lands (23 optimal, a couple extras because of thinning). Similar to what I found previously, 12 fetches suggest you want +1 land in the deck.

The optimal count ended up being 24 fetches split 11 fetch/11 land/2 ring. The win rate went down slightly doing this but the average win turn also went down by a lot. The difference between 21 Mountain 2 Ring and the fetch manabase was nearly half a turn on average over 5000 games).

The change in win rate was 82% with Mountains, 80% with fetches (the Burn deck is pretty favored in these games).

So in the end fetches will increase your number of T3/T4 wins but slightly decrease your overall rate. Meaning, in a faster meta, play more fetches. In a slower one play fewer.

------------------------------
One more bit of information on lands. Using the optimal manabase I listed above, I ran a 3000 game set and looked specifically at decks that won on T4. Here's the lands they had on the board, to give some indication of how they curved out (note, this information gets recorded after Fireblast is cast for the turn)
0 Land - 3
1 Land - 11
2 Land - 151
3 Land - 373
4 Land - 652

So out of 3000 games 1,190 ended with a victory on exactly T4, and of that about 61% of games hit 4 lands while 38% of games hit 3 lands.

I think this is some good evidence in favor of my argument that Burn really wants to curve out and not just operate off of 2 lands.

[mistercakes]

I was going to rant on this, but to allow a thread to be conducive for testing I will start a new and developing thread and if they eventually merge then so be it. I appreciate the feedback, but it doesn't feel very constructive at this point in time.

-Rob

[Basara]

Some guy got 5th place in the last SCG open , with an interesting list :
2 Exquisite Firecraft
4 Eidolon of the Great Revel
3 Searing Blaze
1 Scalding Tarn
2 Arid Mesa
4 Goblin Guide
4 Rift Bolt
4 Lava Spike
4 Bloodstained Mire
4 Wooded Foothills
3 Grim Lavamancer
9 Mountain
4 Price of Progress
4 Fireblast
4 Chain Lightning
4 Lightning Bolt

Sideboard
2 Exquisite Firecraft
1 Searing Blaze
3 Smash to Smithereens
2 Sulfuric Vortex
4 Pyrostatic Pillar
3 Ensnaring Bridge


Discuss

[BigMana]

Some guy got 5th place in the last SCG open , with an interesting list :
2 Exquisite Firecraft
4 Eidolon of the Great Revel
3 Searing Blaze
1 Scalding Tarn
2 Arid Mesa
4 Goblin Guide
4 Rift Bolt
4 Lava Spike
4 Bloodstained Mire
4 Wooded Foothills
3 Grim Lavamancer
9 Mountain
4 Price of Progress
4 Fireblast
4 Chain Lightning
4 Lightning Bolt

Sideboard
2 Exquisite Firecraft
1 Searing Blaze
3 Smash to Smithereens
2 Sulfuric Vortex
4 Pyrostatic Pillar
3 Ensnaring Bridge


Discuss

Weaker to Miracles than someone running Swiftspear, but Firecraft is the right call right now.

No out to Reanimator seems to be a concession.

I feel like 3x lavamancer can be too much.

[dudedusty]

Weaker to Miracles than someone running Swiftspear, but Firecraft is the right call right now.

No out to Reanimator seems to be a concession.

I feel like 3x lavamancer can be too much.

I also run 2x Firecraft main, and I love it. I still run Swiftspears, the Firecrafts replaced 2x Vortex.
I don't see 3x Ensnaring Bridge to be a concession to Reanimator. Their GY doesn't matter if they can't attack you, and they won't be digging for answers to it with Griselbrand, even if they didn't take the life hit from Reanimate.

[mistercakes]

http://www.mtgthesource.com/forums/showthread.php?30931-Bedlam-Burn&p=966577&viewfull=1#post966577

lost handily to jund (0-2) and burn (0-2), then some really close games lost to miracles (1-2), and dredge (1-2). beat esperblade (2-0), BR reanimator (2-0), infect (2-0), storm (2-0), and painter (2-0). (all not necessarily in that order)

full report on other thread.

-rob

[Dr. No Face]

I've been considering getting burn built again, after I finish UG Infect. Do you think this is a good plan for right now? Will the increased prevalence (at least, temporarily,) of D&T make it a bad choice? I mainly want it as something to shake up with after casting berserks and invigorates.

[Brael]

I've been considering getting burn built again, after I finish UG Infect. Do you think this is a good plan for right now? Will the increased prevalence (at least, temporarily,) of D&T make it a bad choice? I mainly want it as something to shake up with after casting berserks and invigorates.

D&T probably helps us. They're a fair deck that has pretty good matchups against our bad matches. At the same time though, we tend to have a pretty good matchup against D&T. The games are a little slow but they definitely favor us because we have instants to play, Port, Wasteland doesn't lock us out, and blowing up artifacts is amazing for us. The only thing I would worry about is the new 2/2 Chalice creature. That has the potential to cause us a lot of problems.

[Lyle Hopkins]

I also run 2x Firecraft main, and I love it. I still run Swiftspears, the Firecrafts replaced 2x Vortex.
I don't see 3x Ensnaring Bridge to be a concession to Reanimator. Their GY doesn't matter if they can't attack you, and they won't be digging for answers to it with Griselbrand, even if they didn't take the life hit from Reanimate.

I've also cut Sulfuric Vortex for Exquisite Firecraft and I think it might be a good idea. Considering Miracles is playing Wear // Tear and Monastery Mentor, Exquisite Firecraft seems like a better option right now. Furthermore, I've been playing four copies of Smash to Smithereens in the sideboard for Chalice of the Void and equipment, and since most other life gain is through equipment, it may be safe to cut Sulfuric Vortex entirely.

Concerning graveyard decks, I think if you have to choose between graveyard hate and Ensnaring Bridge, I'd choose the utility of Ensnaring Bridge. It's strong against Sneak & Show, Reanimator, and RUG Delver.

Here's what I've been testing:

4 Lightning Bolt
4 Rift Bolt
4 Lava Spike
4 Chain Lightning
4 Goblin Guide
4 Eidolon of the Great Revel
9 Mountain
3 Arid Mesa
2 Scalding Tarn
3 Bloodstained Mire
3 Wooded Foothills
4 Fireblast
4 Price of Progress
1 Sensei's Divining Top
4 Exquisite Firecraft
3 Searing Blaze
SB: 4 Smash to Smithereens
SB: 1 Searing Blaze
SB: 4 Ensnaring Bridge
SB: 3 Pyrostatic Pillar
SB: 3 Searing Blood

I typically play Grim Lavamancer but I thought I'd try and play more searing effects and minimize the permanents in the deck. I'm not sure how many fetch lands to run though. I've gone between 11 and 12 with Grim Lavamancer, but fetching also helps with Searing Blaze and Sensei's Divining Top.

[dudedusty]

I've also cut Sulfuric Vortex for Exquisite Firecraft and I think it might be a good idea. Considering Miracles is playing Wear // Tear and Monastery Mentor, Exquisite Firecraft seems like a better option right now. Furthermore, I've been playing four copies of Smash to Smithereens in the sideboard for Chalice of the Void and equipment, and since most other life gain is through equipment, it may be safe to cut Sulfuric Vortex entirely.

Concerning graveyard decks, I think if you have to choose between graveyard hate and Ensnaring Bridge, I'd choose the utility of Ensnaring Bridge. It's strong against Sneak & Show, Reanimator, and RUG Delver.

Here's what I've been testing:

4 Lightning Bolt
4 Rift Bolt
4 Lava Spike
4 Chain Lightning
4 Goblin Guide
4 Eidolon of the Great Revel
9 Mountain
3 Arid Mesa
2 Scalding Tarn
3 Bloodstained Mire
3 Wooded Foothills
4 Fireblast
4 Price of Progress
1 Sensei's Divining Top
4 Exquisite Firecraft
3 Searing Blaze
SB: 4 Smash to Smithereens
SB: 1 Searing Blaze
SB: 4 Ensnaring Bridge
SB: 3 Pyrostatic Pillar
SB: 3 Searing Blood

I typically play Grim Lavamancer but I thought I'd try and play more searing effects and minimize the permanents in the deck. I'm not sure how many fetch lands to run though. I've gone between 11 and 12 with Grim Lavamancer, but fetching also helps with Searing Blaze and Sensei's Divining Top.

Yeah, I think Vortex is pretty much useless at this point in time. I'd rather have the 4 damage immediately, and we have more efficient ways of negating lifegain. I don't like giving up on graveyard hate though. I generally run some number of Grafdigger's Cage, Faerie Macabre, and Surgical Extraction.

[AceOfJacks]

I am adding 2x Bedlam Reveler to my list, just to try it out.

Decklist:
4 Lightning Bolt
2 Destructive Revelry
3 Price of Progress
4 Fireblast

3 Lava Spike
4 Chain Lightning
3 Rift Bolt
2 Exquisite Firecraft

4 Monastery Swiftspear
4 Goblin Guide
4 Eidolon of the Great Revel
2 Grim Lavamancer
2 Bedlam Reveler

2 Bloodstained Mire
4 Wooded Foothills
4 Arid Mesa
2 Taiga
6 Mountain
1 Barbarian Ring

Sideboard:
4 Leyline of the Void
2 Sulfuric Vortex
2 Pyrostatic Pillar
2 Krosan Grip
2 Exquisite Firecraft
3 Sulfur Elemental

Taiga and Revelry is to stop game 1 Chalice of the Void and just in case someone is running a problematic enchantment. I have seen people run maindeck Leyline of Sanctity ... confuses the hell out of me. Krosan Grip comes in when they expect Revelry, so that they can't stack Wear//Tear for Counterbalance.