Allrighty.... first post of my new MtG Blog, so I might as well cover my current tournament deck. It's a Red/Green deck that has, like my last tournament deck, been modified and rebuilt over the course of several months as a result of several playtests with other people. The current build is as follows:
3 x Hellkite Charger
4 x Fire Servant
3 x Ondu Giant
3 x Cunning Sparkmage
2 x Omnath, Locus of Mana
3 x Sylvan Ranger
3 x Protean Hydra
3 x Harrow
3 x Comet Storm
3 x Khalni Heart Expedition
3 x Lightning Bolt
3 x Burst Lightning
4 x Rootbound Crag
12 x Mountain
8 x Forest
The first main point of the deck is that it employs a fairly large amount of land production. This is because the original purpose of the deck is to generate a lot of land fairly quickly, to fuel my burn spells and other red cards. To this end, normally the ideal setup for getting out land is:
Turn 1: Land
Turn 2: Land, then Khalni Heart Expedition
Turn 3: Land, then Harrow. Pop Khalni Heart at end of opponents turn.
Turn 4: Protean Hydra, Omnath, Fire Servant, or Hellkite Charger
Of course, this leaves me kinda defenseless, which is why Sylvan Ranger and Ondu Exist. Their entire purpose is to fetch lands and then simply act as meat shields, attacking whenever it's convenient. Perhaps the key card in the deck is Fire Servant, who's effect happens to stack if multiple copies are in play. This means that with two copies out, a lightning bolt would suddenly inflict 12 damage. However, a lot of the people I play against realize this, and as a result Fire Servant dies rather quickly. Of course, while burn is my primary win condition, I've also included Hellkite Charger, Protean Hydra, and Omnath, Locus of Mana as alternate win conditions. Hellkite Charger has performed admirably, and is an excellent addition by nature of being a 5/5 flyer with haste. Protean Hydra.... was pretty much a gimmick idea back when I originally added it to the deck; It has the potential to get big, but ultimately never seems to do much for the deck. There's a fair chance that it could be removed for something faster. Omnath, on the other hand, actually exists primarily as a way to stockpile mana to fuel future summons or to fuel Comet Storm. The only problem with it is that it's prone to creature removal, which often results in me losing all of that mana.
Unfortunately, the deck seems to be rather slow and frail at the moment. I ran it through the Goldfish Test, and it averages out to winning in seven turns, which is decent, but still far too slow for my liking. At the moment I'm trying to come up with new ideas for creatures and possible support spells. I have a few ideas, but a fair bit of them are expensive, and aren't exactly the fastest of cards....
Anyways, yeah. Hopefully I'll get better at this as time goes on.
