[Deck] Goyf Burn

[Zilla]

Man, a Rancor and some Kird Apes here would be killer.

I thought so too, and the original build had the Apes, at least. I could never bring myself to run the Rancors because there's simply not a high enough creature count to support it with just Apes and Tarmogoyf. To make it playable, you'd have to add even more creatures, which would bring us back to the problem of RG Beats losing to the kinds of decks that Burn wins against (i.e. board control).

Zilla: I didn't quite get your justification of why Spark Elemental was a bad choice, there were a lot of "him"s and "he"s, not sure what each one refers to. Can you clear up and elaborate on your reasoning?

You're right... looking back, the explanation wasn't quite clear. I tested Sparkie in the original build of the deck in place of Street Wraith. He wasn't bad, per se, but most of the other cards in your deck are better. Street Wraith draws you into those cards, and you don't have to invest any mana to get him to the yard for Goyf.

As previously stated, the deck has a very fine balance of creatures/fetchlands/artifacts/instants/sorceries to maximize Tarmogoyf's effectiveness. If I were to run Spark Elemental, it would ideally be in place of one of the other creatures. In a very agressive meta, you could run him over Street Wraith and negate its lifeloss drawback. In a metagame without a lot of Goblins, you could run it over Fanatic, since Fanatic is primarily there because he's so good in the Goblins matchup.

In a general sense, I'm not a big fan of Spark Elemental, simply because of his fragility. There are times when you really need that extra 3 damage to win, and giving your opponent something to aim his Darkblast at in those situations isn't that hot.

As I said though, this deck is largely untested. He very well could be better than Fanatic or Street Wraith in certain metagames.

[HPC]

What about including Terravore in the deck? It fits the 'goyf' theme and with 8x fetchlands and 4x FireBlast getting 4 land into the grave on your own shouldn't be too hard and it would give you something large to push back with after the 'goyf' has been chump blocked into mid-game.

[Zilla]

It's a possibility. I don't think I'd run a full 4, but 2 might be justifiable. It's a bit slow at 3cc though. We'll see. I'll give it some testing.