Quote Originally Posted by lochlan View Post
I stopped working on this deck awhile ago, but one of the things I tried out a couple months ago before I moved on to new brews was Sol lands. I think that with a mono red deck you kind of need them (your spells are so expensive, after all--which is surely why you went for the Medallion).
My thought process at least wasn't "do I need them" it was "would they help", and they obviously would. A turn 1 Medallion is the best, but with or without Medallion there's a lot of colorless mana costs available to soak up the . Ditto for Medallion. Over the course of a combo turn it can "produce" something like 5-10 mana which is a pretty nice ritual, especially since the cost of the Medallion itself will often have been paid in a previous turn. There was an old mono-black Storm combo deck with Jet Medallions that people were playing with a few years ago which is where I got the idea. I was trying to add Bosium Strips to it at the time to simulate Yawgmoth's Will, but now that they actually reprinted Yawgmoth's Will for us with flashback it's a lot more straightforward. :)


I completely agree. The problem is that it doesn't have enough card draw/selection. When Wild Guess was spoiled and subsequently released I tried it out in this deck. It was awesome...except that I had a hard time hitting consistently with the Sol Lands. And I need the Sol Lands to have any hope of being fast enough.
Wild Guess doesn't look efficient enough, though I didn't test it. But yeah, that's the same problem I had when I was tinkering with R/u builds. If you could play 8-10 Manamorphose then maybe it could work, but otherwise most of your Rituals don't make blue, which means you suddenly have to make your blue mana up front, which doubles your initial colored mana requirements or worse (the mono-red version has no trouble going off from a single red mana).

Edit: Did I mention how broken Ruby Medallion is with Manamorphose? It goes from just a cantrip to the best ritual in the deck (and probably ever printed).


Yep. It's a bad deck name too Honestly, though, this thread is all over the place. If you keep working on your mono-red brew you should probably just start a new thread.
The best title for the thread would probably just be Red Storm Combo. But I'm definitely not putting the kind of effort into this to justify a new thread, it's just a little tinkering for fun.


Quote Originally Posted by Vacrix View Post
Entomb could be potentially be more Gambles if you want to specialize and just run a singleton PiF to save space. Also, Catalyst Stone seems like it could be better than Ruby Medallion. Catalyst Stone is fantastic versus Dredge as well as against Snapcaster Mages, Cabal Therapies, etc.
I don't think I want more Gambles. Gamble is one those unsastisfying cards the deck is forced into playing because red doesn't have anything better. So it's definitely not worth splashing black for a worse version of it - if any color is worth splashing then it's blue.

Catalyst Stone is a novel idea. It would be better than Ruby Medallion for the flashback of Faithless Looting and Past in Flames, and for Seething Song after you're already in Flames, and the rest don't require more than a single colorless mana. But it does nothing for anything the first time you cast things, and God forbid if you want to combo (mini-combo) without the graveyard. I think Medallion is definitely better, but maybe it's worth testing a copy or two of Catalyst Stone in addition to it. (The fact that it messes with your opponents' flashbacks seems like only an ancillary benefit. If this were a deck that wanted to interact with its opponent then it wouldn't be combo.)