Against the Odds: The Jankiest and Most Expensive Burn Deck Ever (Brawl)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Against the Odds! One of the Through the Omenpaths cards that I find most interesting is Duskmourn's Claim. The enchantment basically burns our opponent (and also us) equal to the mana value of our library's top cards on our end step. This got me wondering if it's possible to build a burn deck looking to win by playing as many high-mana-value cards as possible, rather than the most traditional efficient burn, like Lightning Bolt and friends—and the answer is...maybe? Let's get to the video and find out, and then we can talk more about the deck!
The Jankiest and Most Expensive Burn Deck Ever
The Deck
As I mentioned before, Duskmourn's Claim is this deck's inspiration. While I considered trying to build the deck in Standard (and you can definitely build a deck with four Duskmourn's Claims and hope for the best), too many cool cards that I wanted to play with don't exist in the format. Plus, Standard is pretty dead at the moment as we wait for the bannings. As such, I decided pretty quickly that Brawl was the right format for the deck, and that Vial Smasher the Fierce was the perfect commander for what we are trying to do since it burns our opponent based on the mana value of the first card we cast each turn. After that, Kraum was added as a partner just so we'd have access to some really important blue cards. Plus, hitting for four in the air with haste is occasionally a good way to close out the game.
The Burn
The rest of the deck is every card I could find that burns based on mana value. Here's the list!
- Caustic Bronco burns equal to the mana value of our top card, assuming we can saddle it. If we can't, it's super risky because we burn ourselves and our deck is full of super-high-mana-value cards.
- Sin Prodder reveals a card on our upkeep, and we either draw it or mill it and burn our opponent equal to its mana value. Awkwardly, our opponent gets to choose, which means if we reveal a super-high-mana-value card, it's unlikely we'll get the damage.
- Yuriko, the Tiger's Shadow reveals the top card of our library when it deals damage, puts it in our hand, and then burns equal to the damage.
- Hidetsugu, Devouring Chaos's three-mana ability burns equal to the mana value of the top card of our library, as does Twilight Prophet on our upkeep, assuming we have the city's blessing. And it even gains us some life!
- Hidetsugu and Kairi burn equal to the mana value of the top card of our deck when it dies, and its Brainstorm enters trigger lets us control what's on the top of our deck to maximize the burn.
- Combustible Gearhulk is one of my favorite cards in the deck, letting our opponent choose to have us mill three cards and then take damage equal to their combined mana value or have us draw three cards. Our deck has enough expensive cards that if our opponent chooses to mill, they might just die on the spot! Palantir of Orthanc works similarly, letting our opponent choose to either let us draw or mill on our end step. And if they choose mill, they get burned equal to the mana value of the milled cards.
- Chomping Mastasaur loots when it enters or attacks, and then deals damage to any target equal to the mana value of the card we discard. Ninja's Blades does essentially the same thing but when the equipped creature deals combat damage.
- Riddle of Lightning is super risky, but it lets us scry three and then deals damage equal to the mana value of the top card of our library, which can be as much as 15 if we get lucky!
So, those are our burn cards. Not exactly Lightning Bolts, but when things go well, they can deal absurd amounts of damage because the rest of our deck is filled with...
The Most Expensive Cards Possible
The rest of the deck is full of the most expensive cards I could find, with an eye toward cards that have incredibly high mana values but can be cast on the cheap. There are a few tricks to making this work. For example, split cards tend to have high mana values because both of their sides count toward their mana value, so we've got a bunch of Rooms and Aftermath cards where we can often play one side for cheap if we need to but have massive mana values, as far as our janky burn spells are concerned.
Meanwhile, creatures like Shadow of Mortality, Elder Deep-Fiend, and Mirrorshell Crab (among others) have high mana values but can often be cast for much cheaper thanks to various abilities. The same is true of delve cards. I mentioned adding Kraum, Ludevic's Opus as a partner specifically to get blue cards in the deck. This is because cards like Treasure Cruise and Dig Through Time are exactly what our deck wants. We can usually cast them for one or two mana thanks to delve, but they'll burn our opponent for eight since their mana value is so high!
Stacking the Deck
The final trick of our deck is a handful of cards that help us control what's on the top of our library because so many of our janky burn spells care about having an expensive card on the top of our deck to reveal or loot. While there aren't a ton of these cards, we have a few, like Liliana Vess, Insatiable Avarice, and Scheming Symmetry. They are especially good once we have something like Duskmourn's Claim on the battlefield, which lets us tutor up our most expensive card, go to our end step, trigger Duskmourn's Claim, and likely burn our opponent out of the game on the spot!
So, Did It Work?
The answer is a solid yes-ish. Overall, we ended up winning 54% of the time with the deck, although we were playing Brawl, so the record isn't actually that important. What is important is that we had some absurd games with the deck. Because of the variance built into the deck, it's super fun to play because every time we trigger something like Duskmourn's Claim, Yuriko, or Combustible Gearhulk, we can deal an absurd amount of damage and maybe even win the game on the spot, or we can reveal a land and do nothing. (See: the time we revealed a land to Riddle of Lightning.) These moments are just super fun and super exciting. With a normal deck, they might happen once every several games. But this deck is built to make those moments happen as often as possible, so win or lose, there's always a big splashy moment happening when you play the jankiest and most expensive burn deck ever!
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
