Eldrazi or Miracles?Originally Posted by JohnBell
I see this 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?
Grixis Delver, Eldrazi Stompy, UWr Miracle, BUG Shardless, Infect, ANT, Team America...
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.Grixis Delver, Eldrazi Stompy, UWr Miracle, BUG Shardless, Infect, ANT, Team America...
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.
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?
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.
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?
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:
[deck]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[/deck]
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
Last edited by TonTo; 04-16-2016 at 02:59 AM.
Hello, this is my burn list. 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
I'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
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.
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=WUl6...ature=youtu.be
Podcast: https://archive.org/details/LegacysA...atrickSullivan
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.
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.
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.
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/
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