Actually you would not fetch the singleton Volcanic Island before Turn3-4, by then if your deck does not have enough to support the delve your probably doing it wrong. Neither Wasteland nor PoP do matter in the slightest way there.
"Cruise does not Belong in Burn, you should play UR if you want to run it." -> Why? The deck runs out of gas regularly which is what cruise would fix.
You are right, and of course the delve should not be a problem. But still, a cruise and a volcanic in starthand and no other land is just a thing that could force you into a mulligan, if your opponent runs wasties. The theory is good, of course, but it can still create some messy situations regarding wastelands, mulligans and not being able to play PoP, because you are maybe also on 2 - 4 life and can't finish because of that. Just my thoughts, id stay mono red
Jim Davis just missed the top eight of SCG Worcester. It's great to see an excellent player like Jim piloting Burn. I'm really digging Relic of Progenitus right now, especially with these delve cards making a splash.
http://sales.starcitygames.com//deck...p?DeckID=74784
So, I took my Red/White brew, with full playsets of Guide and Swiftspear, to an 8-man sanctioned legacy tourny today. I won the tournament at 3-0, so the deck works fine. But, my pairings were... well.... you'll see.
ROUND 1 - Win 2-0 - Jund
Game 1 I have a grip with two mana and lots of burn spells, and keep drawing gas. He gets burned out quickly. The only disruption he shows is a Thoughtseize, which is more or less fine with me. I think the game ends with Boros Charm + Fireblast.
Game 2 he leads with a Deathrite. I don't like pointing bolts at dudes, but this dude in particular must die because it gains him life. So he plays another one. I bolt that one, too, getting in with Guide. He slows things down with Hymn to Torach, but my beats keep coming and he has taken too much by the time Goyf arrives.
ROUND 2 - Win 2-0 - Doomsday (Menedian's version)
Once I realized what this guy was doing, I cheered him on but watched him crater fantastically just like I did last time I tried to play this beast. A deck that needs to halve its life total to win is not where you want to be against Burn.
ROUND 3 - WIN 2-1 Jund
I think this was a carbon copy of the 1st list, but it was a more aggressive pilot and he had the benefit of knowing what I was playing before we started. He was much more tight with his play and the games each came down to our last measly points of damage on each side. During the last game, I flipped a burn spell to hit for for exactly lethal when I would have died to beats next turn. Thunderous Wrath was MVP here. If I hadn't flipped that earlier and gotten in for 5 early on, I would have been toast when he stabilized later.
IMPRESSIONS:
Yeah, winning against the best possible decks you could play with Burn doesn't mean a whole lot. But I did notice a few things:
1. Thunderous Wrath adds variance but sometimes you want that.
I loved it all day. Once I had Wrath and two lands in my opener, so I just shipped it back for six better cards. Worked out fine. Whenever I flipped Wrath, it was amazing. 1 mana for 5 is just so important when your opponent can stall you out midgame.
2. Wasteland? Who cares?
My white splash never felt like a liability. I just waited to fetch White until I needed to, and despite facing lots of wastelands, I was never pressured on mana. I won several games sitting on a singleton mountain until the last turn when I needed to cast Blast.
What does everyone think of Dragon's Claw? I've seen it in a couple sideboards on mtgtop8.com. The card seems like it might be decent against the new incarnation of U/R Delver. It also obviously helps the mirror match.
I'm pretty sure more Searing Blood in the board is better vs UR delverOriginally Posted by Lyle Hopkins
You're probably right. I'm just trying to figure out the advantages of running Dragon's Claw.
New Jim Davis article on Burn:
http://www.starcitygames.com/article...ew-Jersey.html
I have 4 slots to fill and am not sure about what card(s) to run.
Whats the best out of this 4 in a legacy burn deck or what are the advantages and disadvantages of them? Hellspark Elemental, Keldon Marauders, Monastary Swiftspear and Flame Rift.
Also I read some pages ago about adding a Keldon Megaliths to the landbase.
What do you guys think about utitilty lands like Keldon Megaliths (etb tapped) or Barbarian Ring (conflicts with Lavamancers) in Burn? Are there more reasonable options?
"is not easy
for me
u r a champion, it is easier" - some cockatrice guy
Played in yesterday's Open in Oakland. I went five and three, coming in at thirty-seventh with this list. My only losses were to Dredge decks. I swept away everything I played against except for a D&T player and that came down to three games and to the wire with both of us hiding behind hate cards: mine behind Bridge and his behind two Chalice and a Batterskull in hand. I think I will up Relic or Tormod's to two, cutting Extraction down to one. The main and side for everything else was great.
How do I sideboard against Dredge? I've only played against this deck three times in my life, so I don't know how to navigate against this thing. Help? I know I should kill one of my own creatures if there are Bridges in the grave, but when do I do it? On my turn? On theirs? One Bridge or more?
[deck]4 Goblin Guide
3 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
10 red fetches
Sideboard
1 Tormod's Crypt
1 Relic of Progenitus
2 Surgical Extraction
3 Vexing Shusher
1 Mindbreak Trap
1 Shattering Spree
1 Smash to Smithereens
2 Searing Blood
3 Ensnaring Bridge[/deck]
For the most part these questions have already been answered throughout the thread but I understand it is a very long thread and in case anyone else is wondering lets go over them. Flame Rift out of the four for the first question has mostly been replaced by Searing Blaze. Hellspark comes in at a crucial spot needed for better plays, Keldon adds to the clock - does not provide garunteed 5 damage - and feeds shaman (as well as hellspark possibly), MS adds to the clock - does not provide garunteed = dmg as GG - and forces your turn 2 plays which again is a crucial moment better suited for other things. Though to give you my opinion of the best card for the slot I'd need your full list, but the current meta'd deck can be found on various top X sites or you can grab the shell from the first post.
Not personally a fan of utility lands, aside from the GL reason there are the PoP, Wasteland, and Fireblast issues. The deck has the ability to run a lot of sustained damage that wasn't previously available and I don't see the need to make the deck weaker ( imho ) for a concept that already has better replacements.
1 Tormod's Crypt
1 Relic of Progenitus
2 Surgical Extraction
3 Ensnaring Bridge
Those 6 cards are the only with any application against Dredge.
I would probably go -4 Price of Progress and -2 Sulfuric Vortex for everything above but 1 Bridge (and I'm very curious to see what others here say!).
Keep in mind that Lavaman can target himself if you need to remove Bridge from Below.
When to try to remove Bridge from Below depends entirely on what their board and graveyard looks like. You can usually survive them having 1 bridge. Generally you want to do it in response to a Narcomoeba trigger (before they get to flashback Cabal Therapy or Dread Return) or an Ichorid Trigger.
Awesome. I believe I will be adjusting the SB to either another Tormod's Crypt or Relic and dropping an Extraction. I thought of Bridge, but I never found my hand emptied by turn two, which is where I find their most craziest turns are at. I didn't think of the triggers being the best time to kill my guys. I probably should have mulled better, but I have a hard time just mulling for hate pieces because the higher chance of having a slow hand with a hate piece always happens to me. Thank you!
I'm a huge fan of using Faerie Macabre, because my preferred Burn list is designed for speed and to be ready to take massive advantage of good variance instead of running a list that maximizes consistency.
Why do I like Faerie? Because it's the most difficult hate for dredge or renimator to fight, and ideally you only need to put up a roadblock in their way in order to win the game while they try to find another way to go off. It's an activated ability from your hand, for free, so they can't counter it or remove it. It is guaranteed to stymie their first attempt to go broken (none of these enemies use Stifle) and it doesn't slow you down at all as the burn player while you do it.
Extraction works very well, too, but since it's a spell it can be Forced. That makes it less great against reanimator.
That said, if your list is slower you might want something more permanent like Cage or Leyline. I don't think anything else works because of the mana commitment involved in other hate pieces.
So, I took my White/Red Burn deck to another Legacy tournament, and went 4-0, winning it for the second time in a row. This time the matchups were against a wider variety of decks.
Round 1 - Win 2-1 - Faerie Control? I guess? I saw a lot of Bitterblossom, Jace, Counterbalance, Scion of Oona, etc. His best cards were spell pierce and flusterstorm, which he used to 1-for-1 me on burn until he could use Jace or something to out draw me. In two games, I had to play through a resolved Counterbalance -- and did so. Thunderous Wrath, Rift Bolt, and Lavamancer all gave me many outs to the horrid enchantment.
Round 2 - Win 2-0 - Jund. This was one of the same opponents from last week. He never really got off the ground, only seeing one Hymn in two games, no Shaman, and more Bobs than Goyfs.
Round 3 - Win 2-0 - Miracles. I was worried here because I figured that between Counterblance and whatever blue/white hate he had post board, I was going to get hosed. Not so. I guess this deck doesn't run card draw engines that cost less than Jace, and 1-for-1ing me on spells is a losing idea for him. Resolved Swiftspears are insane in this matchup, allowing me to close both games with monster turns where several Rift Bolts and burn spells from the hand overwhelm his countermagic and force him to make impossible choices about what to stop even while they all pump the Spear.
Round 4 - Win 2-0 - Show and Tell. Game 1, he never finds his combo in the four turns he is allowed before being burned. Game 2, I board in Red Blasts. Goblin Guide shows me a Show and Tell on top of his library, so I wisely hold back my burn in favor of keeping up RR for two Blasts. He goes for SNT with Force backup... but only one Force backup. He dies shortly after that. Post game he suggests I should have boarded into Disenchant preemptively because combo decks like his will use Leyline. Perhaps? He didn't mull to it in game 2, though, so maybe I just got lucky.
CONCLUSIONS
I am still in love with the 4x Spear 4x Guide plan. Almost every game I get a ground pounder going immediately who starts multiplying my burn or giving me a peek at their next draw.
Still like me some Thunderous Wrath. Saw it in my opening hand twice and topdecked it turn 1 once (durrr) but I also flipped into it twice for massive damage.
I faced several decks using Wasteland, and every time they used it to attack my manabase, I could have cared less. I can operate on one mana for the most part, and the tempo the opponent loses trying to keep me off of Plateau is totally worth it for me when I've got hasty 1 drops doing my dirty work. I NEVER felt like the splash color was a liability, even when burning myself a little with Price.
Very little feels as good as having your opponent fetch into shock into Thoughtseize against you on turn 1 when you play burn. How sweet it is.
What is your last build Maximum C ?
also why disenchant over wear//tear in side ?(talking about build on previous page)
Congrats for going 4-0. However, I wanted to point out that playing any number of Thunderous Wrath (TW) in a monored burn shell is always wrong.
Here is why (considering you play 1 TW maindeck for the sake of simplification):
A single card (note: card, not spell) in our deck does ~ 2 damage on average (40 Spells, which do ~3 damage each plus 20 lands) .
Given the fact that TW rots in your hand forever, when you draw one with your initially seven equals an expected value of ~ 7/60*(-2)= -0,233
If you are on the draw it gets even worse. Its basically 8/60*(-2) = -0,267
Now in most games with burn, you will draw about 2-5 cards during the course of a game. Let's say 4 on average.
So your ev of drawing into TW for its miracle trigger is: ~ 4/53*(5) = 0,378
That combines to an ev of ~ 0,13
Now, lets assume we play a single Shock instead of TW. Do the same calculation and you will find out that the ev of shock is way higher than 0,13.
We all know that no one plays Shock in a burn.deck for good reason, so why would we want to play an even worse card then?
Variance at the top end.
Let me explain. The guiding principle in my build is to play Burn like a combo deck; one that uses burn spells to kill the opponent without interaction as quickly as possible. Each turn that the game progresses, burn gets weaker and weaker while the other deck gets stronger and stronger. I want to gamble on getting the game done as quickly as possible. I feel like a consistent burn deck is fine, but that deck will also LOSE consistently to faster combo decks or decks with lots of particular hate pieces. By building in more variance into the deck, there is at least a shot you get lucky and win the game against these decks. It's the same reason you might sideboard in less lands when you play a particularly rough matchup; you know you're increasing the risk of a no-land hand, but you're also increasing the risk of a nuts draw and you need that additional possible top end to win.
Your analysis seems plausible, but all you are really saying is that one is more likely to have a Wrath in the starting 7 or 8 than you are to draw it in the first four or five turns. That's fair. But you neglect that Wrath only matters when it is the last burn spell in your hand. For example, compare the following groups of, say, 12 cards you see during a game arranged as they start in your library before you draw your initial hand from top to bottom:
Mountain
Mountain
Jeskai Swiftspear
Lava Spike
Chain Lightning
Chain Lightning
Thunderous Wrath
Fireblast (D1)
Rift Bolt (D2)
Mountain (D3)
Mountain (D4)
Skullcrack (D5)
What effect does the Wrath have? Well, in goldfish land:
T1: Mtn, Swiftspear, attack (1 damage)
T2: Mtn, Lava Spike (prowess), C.Lightning (prowess), attack (total 10 damage)
T3: Suspend Rift Bolt, C.Lightning (prowess), Fireblast (prowess), attack (total 20 damage)
In this scenario, drawing the Wrath didn't make a lick of difference because the opponent was dead before it was the last card in your hand. There are lots of ways you can randomly arrange burn cards where this is the case.
Mountain
Mountain
Jeskai Swiftspear
Lava Spike
Chain Lightning
Chain Lightning
Fireblast
Rift Bolt (D1)
Thunderous Wrath (D2)
Mountain (D3)
Mountain (D4)
Skullcrack (D5)
Let's rearrange it this way. Now how does it play out?
T1, Mtn, Swiftspear, attack (1)
T2. Miracle T.Wrath (prowess) Lava Spike (prowess), attack (12)
The deck is lethal in the same amount of time, but if your opponent has assembled some kind of disruption by turn 2 -- and that's very reasonable since Hymn and Counterbalance are 2 drops that are quite dangerous for burn -- you're ahead.
My point in these examples is to suggest that it's not as simple as saying Wrath has negative expected value. You have to consider that it does not always matter when you draw it initially but it DOES always matter when you draw it later. Does that make sense?
It's probably just plain wrong; I didn't see my Wear//Tears when I was brewing. Well, that's an easy fix...
Anyway, this the build to the best of my memory:
Creatures (11)
-----------
4x Goblin Guide
4x Monestary Swiftspear
2x Grim Lavamancer
1x Eidolon of the Great Revel
Sweet Burn (16)
------------
4x Lightning Bolt
4x Lava Spike
4x Chain Lightning
4x Rift Bolt
Big Burn (16)
--------------
4x Boros Charm
3x Skullcrack
4x Fireblast
3x Thunderous Wrath
2x Price of Progress
Lands (17)
-------------
3 Arid Mesa
2 Bloodstained Mire
1 Wooded Foothills
1 Plateau
2 Sacred Foundry (lol)
8 Mountain
Sideboard (work in progress)
-------------
4 Faerie Macabre
3 Stingscourger
2 Red Elemental Blast
3 Disenchant
1 Erase
2 Smash to Smithereens
1 Grim Lavamancer
Congrats on going 4-0 Maximum C.
But yet again I feel it's important to point out that you're trying to justify using worse deck because you had success at a local event where you admitted several times throughout your matches that opponents were also using a worse version deck or even a non competitive deck. There is an enormous difference between playing against 4 other people than going to a 250+ person tournament. And you have also commented several times about how your deck can go off with one land. That statement alone tells us any deck that runs soft counters automatically beats your deck. Long story short, I'm glad you're winning at your locals but I don't want others to feel like this is something that should be mimicked as it's already been discussed in length over the thread why not to do everything you're doing.
My experience is no substitute for the combined experience of the community, sure, but I do take issue with the idea that a deck running "soft counters" beats burn on a single land. Spell Pierce / Flusterstorm / Daze are one-for-ones against us. They are fine cards if the pilot using the countermagic is able to follow up with some form of game-ending combo or card advantage, like Jace, but trying to go one-for-one against burn on counterspells seems like a losing proposition.
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