The Other Side of Red: Cannonballing into the Deep-end of the Mana Pool of Magic’s Most Chaotic Color

Red – what comes first to your mind upon mention of the color? For me it’s fire, heat, lightning, swift flowing lava, and flame-belching dragons. The most successful red decks usually feature quick, cheap threats: hasty little goblins and pinpoint burn spells. But there is more to Magic’s favorite color to splash – the side relegated mostly to the mentally unstable (or deficient). There is the chaotic.

Red has always been the color of the unpredictable from the stellar Alpha rare Chaoslace through Legends’ Chain Lightning and Fallen Empire’s Ogre Taskmaster to current heartbreakers Karplusan Minotaur and Lightning Storm in Coldsnap. Point in case, take a moment to pore over the back-catalogue of coin-flipping classics and see how many non-red, non-artifact cards you find. Don’t worry, you won’t need more than one hand to count them. Luckily for the impecunious, the central card of today’s discussion does not involve coin flipping – and it’s not too hard to pick up a playset for less than a dollar. So what is the reject rare of the month? It’s a little number from Ravnica called Warp World.

Okay, so at this point I need to take a time out and clarify who the target audience of this piece is. Actually, I am just going to spell out why I am writing this because I will be happy if anybody reads it. I decided to start writing about Magic because I love reading about Magic and usually devour all my favorite weekly articles still a little bit hungry. Since I like to write, I thought why not write about Magic, contribute to the community, and maybe even get a little bit better (at writing at least, I may be woefully stuck at my current Magic level…). My favorite formats are all kinds of limited and Standard constructed. However, I do not like proxying or buying cards that cost more than two dollars apiece so this leaves me a little bit on the short end in terms of constructed. I am aware of the current metagame and try to build with it in mind for the most part, but to some extent all my decks would probably classified as “casual” just due to the lack of access to the key top quality cards. But all the ideas I put in to crafting decks should still provide a good framework for thinking about deck-building in all formats – except I will never be too worried about the degenerate brokenness inherent to extremely large card pools. I’ll leave that to people crazy enough to play those kinds of formats.

So Warp World. Let’s take a moment to admire this beauty before getting our hands dirty trying to break her. Warp World is an eight mana sorcery requiring three red and five colorless. Alright, you can toss out any hope you might have had about using this card in a competitive deck. But wait, don’t leave (unless you need to go playtest for your next PTQ). There’s still plenty here in this card to satisfy your competitive side. We are going to try to build the most competitive deck we can using Warp World. This is the sort of challenge I wish could be incorporated into organized Magic somehow. Unfortunately, the most competitive deck running Warp World is probably your favorite deck from last year’s worlds with four cards taken out for four dead Warp Worlds…. Also, evaluating the best deck would be quite difficult – if you made people play each other with their decks you’d have quite different, the Warp World mirror has got to be insane! But I digress….

So Warp World is an eight mana sorcery that requires each player to shuffle all permanents he or she owns into his or her library and then reveal that many cards again and put all the permanents revealed in to play. As I said before, a heavy red eight mana sorcery – forget about competitive play. If you cast this spell and it resolves, then probably every deck played at every PTQ this year could have already beat your opponent and been shuffling up for game two. Yes, there is a standard deck featuring red that regularly spends eight or more mana on a single turn (ie U/R Tron) but there is no way of working Warp World in to any part of that deck’s strategy.

Here are my initial deck-building thoughts concerning this card. First off, forget about the match-up against permission based control. If you can resolve an eight mana red sorcery against a deck packing counterspells, either something is very wrong with your opponent or you already won the game and now you are just rubbing it in. This means that before even reading those nine lines of text we need to be thinking about aggro and tempo matchups. Now this is a card that rewards you for having lots of permanents. This means you probably want to be playing lots of permanents. It also means that you want to deny your opponent as permanents as possible…. Also, I have harped on this point already, but this spell costs eight mana. It is going to take some serious acceleration to play this card out at any relevant point in the game.

Okay, so we decided we are going to be R/G at least. I didn’t mention green yet? Well, even in the age of signets, green is still the go-to color for acceleration and mana fixing. Since we have already narrowed ourselves down to two colors with hardly any consideration of strategy or specific cards, let’s run through a few possibilities we might want to keep in mind before we over-commit to one of them.

One strategy would be the token stragey: put a whole bunch of tokens into play and try to win through the massive card advantage generated by cashing those tokens in for real cards when you warp. A bunch of cards touching green fit this bill: Patagia Viper, Supply // Demand, Vitu-Ghazi City Tree, Selesnya Guildmage, the hunted creatures from Ravnica (technically you “own” the tokens that get put into play under your opponents control), Forbidden Orchard (this is one of many cases where a card should probably make the deck but I don’t have any so it’s not really up for consideration), etc. A problem with a lot of these cards is that they are all over the place in terms of mana requirements and produce fragile tokens that could get wiped out before you warp.

This first strategy also clashes a bit with a second strategy: wiping the board. If we are really already in green, then we access to a card that is usually pretty good at creating card advantage: Savage Twister. Ramping up to Warp mana, we are going to be taking some hits in the early turns and twistering the turn before warping would probably go a long way towards whatever warp strategy we go for. Red also has some other board wipers to choose from: Pyroclasm, Martyr of Ashes, Wildfire, Bloodfire Colossus, etc. We need to be careful though – we don’t want our non-permanent count to get too high or warping won’t really be to our advantage.

This concern brings up a good point in relation to determining our strategy – how exactly is warping going to be to our advantage? The average deck probably runs about two-thirds permanents, maybe a little less not counting pure control decks (which we decided not to count, right?). That means that Warp World will effectively be a Pox for our opponent, leaving him or her with a third less permanents and hopefully less useful ones at that. If we are decent at board wiping, those should be mostly lands so after the warp our opponent’s land count will have take a bit of a hit. It might interesting to go for the all-out land base nuke deck – Annex, Confiscate, Barbarian Riftcutter (yeah), etc. We could use Annex and Confiscate to accelerate early and disrupt our opponent and then again to steal our opponents few lands should we flip any over post-warp.

Another strategy is more combo oriented – playing Izzet Chronarch and Anarchist gives you eight ways to return Warp World to your hand after it resolves…plus when it resolves your newly revealed lands come into play untapped, setting you up to cast Warp World again assuming you can produce eight mana. Revealing eight mana new mana producers might not be all that likely statistically, but it’s probably not too hard to hit four and there’s this little used rare in Kamigawa block called Heartbeat of Spring that might make that be enough…. A bonus of the ideas so far is that they are hovering around blue, and maybe, just maybe, we could sneak some counter protection in and even have a chance against a permission deck (okay, playing Warp World counter mana open’s probably not going to happen). We need to watch out for non-permanent count but Seething song is also an option (and would be a nice target if we hit two Chronarchs and need a second target). This sounds like a pretty wacky deck and even has some synergy with the Annex/Confiscate discussion above, but a hard look at the specific numbers plus some playtesting would be necessary to see if this deck is at all consistent enough to play for fun: it might be possible to cycle Warp World enough to build up mana and hit a big Blaze or at least make your opponent shuffle until he or she has no permanents in play but it might be just as likely that you always end up with pants down after three or four iterations with no Anarchists or Chronarchs to show….

Another strategy altogether is to go for card quality (ignoring casting cost). I love playing reanimator decks, mostly for the fun of actually getting to try out all those big quirky monsters that fill up the dollar rare bins of most card dealers. I mean, when was the last time you saw someone hardcast Sisters of Stone Death (the last time for me was at the Dissension pre-release when I got wrecked by them – I was doing so well too…I even almost pulled the game out when I had one white source in play, Transluminant, and a Devouring Light in hand, but he killed my spirit token with some spell so I couldn’t convoke (I guess he did it so that so that the token couldn’t chump the sisters), I was crushed!). There are actually a bunch of options available for massive beaters. First off, Autochthon Wurm: how can you deny the awesomeness of warping into multiple 9/14 tramplers? Okay, he’s kind of hard to cast, if possible we might want to put in some sort of discard outlet in the deck. Another option is Ryusei. For one thing, he’s on color. For another, he’s a fairly efficient 5/5 flier for six that gives the deck some chance of winning without Warp World. Plus, if we warp into two, that should be enough to wipe whatever our opponent warps into (unless he or she has a bunch of fliers). In the same boat as Ryusei is the aforementioned Bloodfire Colossus, whose only downside is that by the time we can cast Warp World those six life points might be pretty near and dear for us. With all this board wiping, we might toss Phytohydra into the hat for consideration. We are going to want some kind of threat that will live through our Ryusei/Bloodfire Colossus/Savage Twister board wiping suite. Phytohydra and Autochthon Wurm seem like pretty good candidates. Protean Hulk seems like another. He may not live through the rain of fire, but at least he can tutor out another Ryusei….

I am sure there are still more strategies and interactions out there that are worth considering, for one thing I haven’t even discussed black (Sins of the Past?) so far, but I think we gone over enough ideas that it’s time to throw together a decklist and see what happens. So here goes:

Lands (24):

7 Forest

1 Snow-Covered Forest

1 Snow-Covered Plains

3 Mountain

3 Snow-Covered Mountain

2 Highland Weald

1 Sacred Foundry

4 Boros Garrison

1 Gruul Turf

1 Mouth of Ronom

Creatures (19):

4 Sakura-Tribe Elder

4 Bloodfire Colossus

4 Ryusei, the Falling Star

2 Martyr of Ashes

2 Autochthon Wurm

2 Phytohydra

1 Protean Hulk

Artifacts (4):

4 Sensei’s Diving Top

Spells (13):

4 Savage Twister

4 Warp World

1 Undying Flames

3 Into the North

1 Farseek

So I went the fattie strategy – I’ve already tried to appeal to Spike and Johnny so far, might as well give something to Timmy. This deck is not completely tuned. The spell count probably seems a bit high at thirteen, but I think the spells are necessary. The Warp Worlds are a given. The Savage Twisters are there so that you can stay alive during the early game and get maximal benefit out of Warp World. I could see subbing them out for more Martyr of Ashes or Pyroclasm and I’d definitely try those out, but I like the Twisters because on turns two and three you are probably ramping up mana and letting them amass twister victims any way. Plus, I worry that too many decks build their curves around Pyroclasm; the martyr can completely whiff against some decks too.

The other sorceries tie in to the deck’s main engine: Sensei’s Diving Top. The land tutors could be subbed out for signets to up the permanent count and using Coldsteel Heart it’s possible to build the deck R/x with the same number of on-color accelerants, but the deck would likely be nowhere near as consistent. The card selection afforded by the top is the main reason I leaned more toward the fattie strategy over blue control. Eight mana is a lot for one spell and barring Tron really hard to achieve quickly even with acceleration. Sensei’s Diving Top can assure that you never miss a land drop except the turn you need a Savage Twister. It can also make sure that a deck built around Warp World usually hits a Warp World without any direct tutor for it. What’s more it makes sure you don’t draw Autochthon Wurm, which would be some serious card disadvantage. I considered Allosaurus Rider to go with the land tutors and give you something to pitch the Wurms to, but instead I decided that with four tops and only two wurms you really should be able to avoid getting any in your hand.

All these Top driven effects only really come in to their own when you can shuffle your library every turn or every other turn, and land tutors help ensure that. Plus, when you are ramping up, you will be using the top to hit all your land tutors so they really shouldn’t be that big of a problem when you warp. The singleton Undying Flames is there because it’s awesome. It is another red sorcery you can build a Top-driven deck around, but I didn’t want it to steal the limelight so I only included one. Sometimes though, you’ll activate the top and see the flames and the wurm and you’ll forget that Warp World is even in the deck.

A note about the wonky mana base: it’s mostly based around the cards I have. I was lucky enough to crack a foundry at Limited Champs and I make sure to use it. I have only played Coldsnap at the pre-release but I got some nice green-red in my sealed packs and then drafted G/R once after that so I have the Into the Norths and the wealds…. The karoos are there to up the total land count (when you draw one, it’s like drawing two). When you play a bunch of tutors, you can usually get by as long as you have enough green (this is speaking from my long history of casual decks with wonky mana bases using green to power out reject rares).

Playing the deck is fun. Who doesn’t like game altering effects, massive destruction spells and playing out huge wurms? I played a bunch of games against U/G stompy, B/W husk, R/B rakdos, and U/B mill and came out with a little bit below 50% wins which is pretty decent all things considered. Mulligan if you get the Wurm. Don’t mulligan if you get the top. I think this article is quite long enough but perhaps at a future date I will update with some tunings that give it a better chance against different decks or I’ll come up with a blue list using some of the ideas above.

I hope the style hasn’t been too pedantic. Hopefully future write-ups will be shorter but personally I will admit that I learned some things just writing this article so I think it was worth the excruciating detail.