I've been having great success with this list:

lands//24
4 mishra's factory
1 island
3 grove of the burnwillows
4 underground sea
3 volcanic island
3 tropical island
3 flooded strand
3 polluted delta

board control//12
4 innocent blood
4 punishing fires
4 pernicious deed

draw//11
4 brainstorm
4 standstill
3 jace, the mind sculpter

permission//12
4 force of will
4 counterspell
4 spell pierce

life from the loam//1

sideboard//
3 krosan grip
3 firespout
4 extirpate
3 blue elemental blast
2 red elemental blast


The deck has a lot of removal, as well as threats, permission, and draw. Punishing fires really changes a lot of difficult MUs, and makes the deck's midrange aggro MU incredible.

This list does not lose to merfolk. After boarding it gets even worse for them with the addition of firespout, which dramatically effects their ability to deny mass removal with wasteland.

Vengevival has at least 20 creatures that die to punishing fires, and most of their critters usually die to two punishing fires. If they allow you to go to the mid-late game you can keep them on a clear board forever. Spell pierce usually eats up early survivals game one and forces them to either slow roll them or go for the much slower, much more vulnerable fauna shaman in games 2 and 3.

Spell pierce also slows down counterbalances by enough turns to let you land standstill or deed under them, dramatically decreasing it's impact on the game.

I play extirpate in the board to help in the survival and ichorid MUs... People seem to disagree with this for some reason, but I find that if I remove bridge from below I can usually beat ichorid with landstill of any color combination. The addition of punishing fires can really slow down a bloodghast/ichorid beat down plan, and can clean up any left over zombies.


I am in dire need of a good goblins player and a good combo player to test against on MWS, so if anyone would be willing to test with me that would be awesome.


The deck has been struggling with knight of the reliquary in the midgame, as a bunch of 1cmc guys deprive innocent blood, and they are usually far to big to punishing fires, which opens zoo variants up to a nice timing attack around the turn 4-6 mark for a massive amount of damage sometimes. Firespout comes in postboard, but I think the deck needs a bit more than that, does anyone have any ideas to solve that problem?