Mizzix's Mastery .dec

I did a nice mono red build around of the namesake the other day and thought it would be a brand new deck. What I realized is not only that I had just built another deck, it was that this so called other deck is fundamentally every novel red deck I have done over the last couple of years. Basically the underlying theme of these decks is all the red looting spells and all the red ritual effects. Now these will vary from build to build based on what synergies work best and how deep you need to go on such things. Regardless of the exact balance all the many lists run at least 25% of the deck as these two broad groups of cards, usually more like 40%. Every deck contains Desperate Ritual, Pyretic Ritual, Tormenting Voice and Cathartic Reunion and a few more. Most decks contain most of the other good cards like them which we shall get to. How you actually win with these cards is really quite up to you it would seem. You can pack your list with beaters and have a Runaway Red style of deck. You can have prowess dorks or ones that trigger on casts. You can go for the storm wins with Grape Shot and Empty the Warrens or the pseudo storm wins with cards like Sentinel Tower. You can go big burn with Pyromancer's Goggles or you can go wide burn as this list will show. You can just play big solid threats like Chandras and Dragons and Titans or you can play Mr No Fun and pack all the prison cards and win very slowly. I have even tried to win with Fling although that is the only dodgy build so far using this base. On top of all these red builds you can also dip into other colours for more Rituals, Looting or otherwise ramp and discard synergies. I was too caught up in the method by which the deck won and not the route to it. I thought we had many different mono red and base red decks on our hands but in practice it is one archetype with many possible garnishes and finishing touches that can be made to it. They should probably all come under the umbrella term of ritual red decks. I kind of count Hollow One lists in this group too although they don't want rituals much beyond the Manamorphose. Hollow One decks do at least go nuts on the looting side of the archetype.

The garnish for this list is the casting of Mizzix's Mastery as the title might have given away. The idea is to go through your deck fast and power off a Mastery that will provide enough gas to freely one shot your opponent with burn spells. The lovely thing about this deck is that the burn keeps you highly safe and interactive on your way to going off. There are actually two other more distinct builds using the Mastery and so that is why I am doing this deck tech more about the broader style and less about the mechanism of winning. You can do an Izzet burn style deck like this but focus on control elements rather than speed. Alternatively or additionally to the control route you can go a more combo route and use devastating spells like Time Stretch or Cruel Ultimatum. This plan leans less on the Overload function of Mastery and will happily fire it off at four mana for the one game winning spell. It is the pure combo build as opposed to this, the aggressive combo and the Izzet, which is the control combo. At least it showcases the impressive design of Mizzix's Mastery in that it can have so many distinct uses with their own styles.

Below is a fairly extensive list of the more commonly used tools for these mono red ritual decks. Most lists run most or all of the top five cards from each category and then round out using a selection of the most suitable cards from the rest of the list. Most also lean on a couple of lands, artifacts and even the odd dork to empower everything. Chrome Mox, Lotus Petal, Steam-Kin and the Medallion effects are the most powerful and most commonly seen along with Ancient Tomb and City of Traitors. These supporting ramp cards are so common they are pretty much staples. Being a Mastery deck this list has to focus on the instants and sorceries and cannot have too many cards outside this group. That will largely dictate which ramp and looting cards are used. There are some builds that have a bigger focus on the artifact synergies and so forth.


THE LOOTING


Faithless Looting
Tormenting Voice
Cathartic Reunion
Pirate's Pillage
Wild Guess
Magmatic Insight
Goblin Lore
Burning Inquiry
Gamble
Wheel of Fortune
Collective Defiance
Incendiary Command
Reforge the Soul


Sarkhan, Fireblood
Tibalt, the Fiend-Blooded
Daretti, Scrap Savant
Jaya Ballard

Dismissive Pyromancer
Bomat Courier
Bedlam Reveler


THE MANA


Manamorphose
Pyretic Ritual
Deperate Ritual
Seething Song
Rite of Flame

Chrome Mox
Mox Diamond
Mox Opal
Ruby Medallion
Helm of Awakening
Lotus Petal
Mind Stone
Pyormancer's Goggles

Simian Spirit Guide
Vessel of Volatility
Runaway Steamkin
Wily Goblin
Captain Lannery Storm

City of Traitors
Ancient Tomb
Sandstone Needle

Chandra, Torch of Defiance
Koth of the Hammer
Jaya Ballard




A few other commonly seen cards used in this ritual red archetype;



Lava Dart
Overmaster
Past in Flames
Recoup
Bonus Round
Thunderous Wrath
Firestorm
Sonic Burst
Act on Impulse
Light the Stage
Experimental Frenzy
Flame of Keld
Risk Factor
Maximize Velocity



Here is my list;

25 Spells

Chrome Mox

Faithless Looting
Rite of Flame
Sensai's Divining Top
Lightning Bolt
Firebolt

Cathartic Reunion
Tormenting Voice
Ruby Medallion
Helm of Awakening

Runaway Steamkin
Pyretic Ritual
Desperate Ritual
Manamorphose

Seething Song
Bonus Round
Act on Impulse

Fiery Confluence
Pirate's Pillage
Past in Flames
Experimental Frenzy
Mizzix's Mastery

Incendiary Command
Jaya Ballard

15 Lands

13 Mountains
Ancient Tomb
City of Traitors




Despite trying to maximize the instant and sorcery count in this deck it only manages to make it to 45%. You could push it a bit further but too much and you compromise on power. We are already having to play cards like Incendiary Command in the instant/sorcery slots while amazing cards like Torch of Defiance and Lotus Petal sit out unplayed. Jaya Ballard seems like the most appropriate planeswalker to give the slot to what with being both a ritual and a loot. This deck is a perfect Steamkin deck as well. Often I would shy away from running just a single dork in a deck. You can so easily make cards dead if you skip playing creatures, they are so common these days most decks dedicate multiple slots for creature specific answers. The thing is Steamkin is so good and so out of nowhere that it is still worth playing. You can abuse it right away so it can be held until safe to deploy. It also takes mana and thus time to kill creatures and so you will be buying yourself time by playing it regardless of what might happen to it. The tempo in magic is such a big deal these days that playing something so good it forces a response is often to your advantage.

Experimental Frenzy is a bit of an odd one in this deck. It is a bit of a liability a lot of the time and utterly nutty when you also have the Divining Top. Sadly that is exactly the situation we find ourselves in when looking at Wheel of Fortune. I was playing the Frenzy (and the Act on Impulse) as a way of trying to loosen the dependence of red combo decks on Wheel. It was one of the only strong red card advantage cards for ages but times are now slowly changing which is nice to see and fun to experiment with. The reason Frenzy is a liability is the sequencing primarily. Either you play something when it is on top or you draw it and lock it away for some time. It makes hitting one of your looting cards a bit scary as you will draw and thus lock away random cards. It can work out when you just fire off some rituals early on but mostly you want the Top. It is also a draw your whole deck combo with Helm of Awakening in play as well which is all the more reason to play it. It is hard not to win when you have all your rituals in hand and all the rest of your gas and a Helm in play. Losing then means you played wrong or built wrong almost all of the time.

Past in Flames is a common element in the more combo and spell orientated versions of the red rituals list. It is surprisingly close to Yawgmoth's Will in potency in unpowered singleton formats. It even works from the bin giving it a significant edge over Will. Past in Flames is what keeps you safe and consistent, all you need to do is work through your deck without dying and you should be able to win just out of the bin. Bonus Round is a newer addition that is working its way into the spell heavy combo iterations of ritual red. Things just get wildly out of hand very fast with it. It is not unlike when a mono blue storm deck flops out the High Tide. Your spells scale a lot more purely and directly with Bonus Round. Pyretic Ritual suddenly costs two and makes six! Tormenting Voice is two mana for four cards (still at the cost of one plus the Voice). Your deck becomes better than Black Lotus and Ancestral Recalls! With these great scaling cards like Frenzy, Steamkin and Bonus Round combined with burst mana the deck can win at any time almost out of nowhere. It can win with a couple of mana and a couple of cards or it can win with like five mana and no cards if it gets lucky. A few more resources in any pile and the luck needed rapidly falls off. Bonus Round also take a lot of the strain off the Past in Flames. You used to struggle to graveyard hate and running out of gas but a well placed Bonus Round gives you all the gas you need without ever having to touch your bin.

This list is super simple in its plan. Go through as much of your deck as quickly as you can and find 20 points of burn along the way you can aim at face. This can be 10 with a Bonus Round or it can be all 20 from the bin with a Mizzix's Mastery allowing you to aim it at enemy threats the first time round so as to stay alive. The deck might look like it has limited burn and might struggle against lifegain but given you have the ability to flash all your burn back and the Bonus Round as well if you time it all perfectly you have I think six times the total burn count in the deck (I think as a flashed back bonus round in the same turn would itself be forked and thus give three active bonus rounds for all your flashback spells, that would be four times the value for all them plus two times the value on them first time round. What looks like not enough damage to kill someone is actually enough to kill comfortably through anything other than infinite life gain. The list only has 15 to 17 burn initially depending on how you count the Firebolt but we can put out upwards of 75 and comfortably manage forty in a game.

Part of why this ritual red archetype is so successful in cube relative to other formats is redundancy. While the black rituals are much better than the red ones there are only two of them in singleton. Blue might have the better card quality but when it comes to looting effects red is taking over rather, or rummage effects at least. Blue has better creatures for the job but worse planeswalkers and fewer spells. Blue is also less flexible than red and despite having a lot of good filtering and looting finds it a lot harder to convert that into a win. Blue normally needs to pair with another colour for the win conditions. Red has multiple ways it can go about winning and it has the appropriate looting and rituals all in house. This adds consistency all over the shop. Blue card quality does a lot of different things, some mills to the bin, some back into the library, some loots from the hand. Red basically all loots, mostly rummages. Yes, Chart a Course is way better than Tormenting Voice but having access to multiple Tormenting Voice effects lets you really focus on synergies. What does a blue deck do with a graveyard full of Mental Note, Frantic Search, Chart a Course, Careful Study and Strategic Planning do? Probably play red to capitalize....

It would seem in cube that base and mono red decks come in two broad forms. The aggressive ones that take advantage of the effective tempo and modal reach properties of burn to win games and those discussed in this article which use rituals and looting to power out some winning synergy. Both are great starting points for making top rate cube decks. Both are surprisingly consistent and redundant and both also have a surprising range within that broader plan. The former gives rise to classic RDW lists, burn lists, go wide weenie decks, most forms of tribal goblins as well as some flavours of prowess/Kiln Fiend decks. I would also argue that midrange red decks are an extension of this plan but that is getting to be more about semantics than anything else. The latter style of red deck with the looting and ritual base gives rise to all those I mentioned at the start of this essay ranging from red storm all the way through to Runaway red passing by all manner of quirky decks on the way like prison and Goggles! Even Hollow One and Goblin Welder have strong roots in the same base support cards. Red is an impressively diverse colour these days, arguably the most diverse. This list is a good example of a ritual / looting build but there are many more! Just scan back through the .dec articles of the last few years, well since Kaladesh really, and you will find multiple examples of more looting / ritual decks in red. I even have another one in draft form due for publication soon.

I am a little caught up in this new found understanding of red builds, not because it changes anything much about the decks, the games or anything like that. I just find that obtaining a fundamental understanding of how things go together, scale or any thing like that to greatly improve my understanding of the game. It will help me in almost every aspect of Magic from reviews to conceptions of fun things to do. This is a big part of why I do some obscurely specific top X lists. I find by comparing a bunch of cards with similar effects that you really distill the function out. By doing them I gain a fuller appreciation of the strengths and weaknesses of the card. Good examples of this have been my top X lists on groups of removal spells, card quality spells and the three mana green value dorks. I have found it useful because it forces me to come at the cards from a different direction. Generally we all learn new cards in a top down way. We know how to play magic and probably to some extent the kind of deck we are playing. Whenever we encounter a new card in play and are forced into considering it we are doing so in a context we already understand. We are fitting that new thing into that rather than understanding it fully as what it is. Top X lists force me to look at cards in a more isolated way and consider what they are doing generally. You build up a picture of why you play a card and what you want it to do and from that it becomes far clearer which cards are the best in a group for doing that. It also illuminates why some cards are so much better in some settings than others. Card quality has perhaps been the most stark in change. I thought I knew the difference between a Ponder, a Brainstorm, a Serum Visions and a Sleight of Hand having played with such cards extensively and competitively but not until I tried to put it into words did I really appreciate the nuances. These cards are some of the most prone to top down learning not being revealing. When you cast a Serum Visions you are entirely thinking about the cards you are looking at, facing down and that are elsewhere in the game. You are not thinking about the Serum Visions itself. When you think about casting it in the first place all you are really taking into account is when you want to spend that mana, sometimes at a push when you want to trigger prowess or storm count but again it is not so much about what it does. You would cast a Sleight of Hand guided by the exact same logic, it is only when you are faced with a choice of playing either Sleight or Visions that you really think about what the cards do. A great example of this is a recent change some pro players made to a Dimir Death's Shadow deck in legacy. They replaced one, perhaps two Ponder with Preordain. Their reasoning was a low land count and no desire to go above two lands. This meant that a Ponder done with two lands in play would be far less likely to freely benefit from the shuffle of a sac land and so lost value as a result. This kind of subtle improvement that might even go in the face of commonly conceived ideas is only possible with that deeper understanding of what you are trying to do with a card and how that card is able to do that for you. The main takeaway in cube is that most people overrate Brainstorm and Ponder because they are the premium card quality spells in other formats due to abundance of free shuffle effects. So, a massive tangent there simply to try and highlight why it is useful to understand things like core deck structure and how archetypes are linked even if you are perfectly capable of building those decks well without that knowledge. I don't yet know how my new found appreciation of red archetype foundations will improve my game, analysis, or creativity but I am confidant that it will.