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Chris VanMeter won the tournament, and Tom Ross came up with an elegant new take on Heroic, but the deck that showed up at the SCG Open in Syracuse this weekend showcasing a potential sleeper was In Hyuk Hwang's Rakdos deck featuring three maindeck Kolaghan's Commands.
Rakdos Deck Wins
The deck runs a little creature light, which helps to turn Monastery Swiftspear into the killing machine that it is. There's definitely incentive to making Swiftspear good in your deck, as returning it to your hand with Kolaghan's Command is the deck's best avenue to doing a lot of surprise damage out of nowhere.
I'm not sure that this deck needs to maindeck three copies of Roast, but the only slot that I would immediately change without testing is the maindeck Thoughtseize. It's true that there are cards that you would rather that your opponent never cast, such as Siege Rhino, but mostly you just need to play things that get them dead, as your strategy will often leave your opponent with plenty of cards in their hand at the end of the game. Filling out the rest of the Wild Slashes, the last Lightning Strike and basically anything else that could deal damage to an opponent strikes me as a positive change.
I'm really interested to see if this archetype takes off. There's definitely a lot of raw power here, and Kolaghan's Command looked great every time that In Hyuk Hwang cast it on camera. Granted, I only saw him playing it in red mirrors, but even still the card has a niche and prior to this weekend was largely undiscovered.
Im also running rakdos right now but using blood-soaked champ, flamewake phoenix, ash cloud phoenix at 4 of and then 3 alesha who smiles at death and 2 brutal horde chiefs. I can see the merits of swiftspear and going more burn but I like the red/black build too.
I will try to post it later so you can critique it. I own all the cards for the burn engine but they’re in my jeskai deck right now. I can definitely take them out though because i’m strongly thinking about using this in the tournament tomorrow
This deck is good, but gaining card advantage is an issue when there aren’t either outpost sieges or creatures in the grave to enable kolaghan’s command.
Defeated blue/white control and a jeskai deck. I lost to blue white heroic. I feel like the match would have been easier with mardu due to the non targeted removal (crackling doom). But the kolaghan’s command put in work killing creatures and making them discard a lot of the time.
I should have been ready with board wipes but I didn’t have crux of fate’s on hand at the tournament and the heroic player had an extra god’s willing or other method of protection for every method of kill spell that I had