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Seven decks featuring white spells made the Top 8 of the Baltimore Open, though it should come as no surprise that my favorite deck in the mix was the red and blue one. Todd Anderson came up with a pretty sweet Thing in the Ice brew, which earned him a fourth place finish. You can find his deck tech with Nick Miller here.
Izzet Control
Most of the games that Todd won happened in rather dramatic fashion with massive 7/8s turning sideways, though there is a lot of subtlety to the deck as well. Perhaps my favorite element is Drownyard Temple, which is really sweet to discard to Magmatic Insight. This sequence allows you to ramp from three to five for a Pyromancer's Goggles in addition to enabling Chandra, Flamecaller a turn early.
Todd says that his weakest matchup is Ramp, though with Ramp putting up poor numbers I imagine that this deck will become a major Standard contender. With humans being the most represented winning deck and likely to continue to be present in the format, some number of Fiery Impulse would go a long way to shoring up that matchup. Meanwhile this deck is able to generate enough value to go toe to toe without about anything, with not dying being the primary obstacle against aggressive decks.
The major players in this deck- Goggles, Chandra, and Jace- are already quite expensive. Looking for specs in this deck, Fall of the Titans is a fine penny stock, and if the deck continues to be present and play two or more copies there could be some small gains. I will say that I was very impressed every time I saw the card cast. The other card that I like picking up is Wandering Fumarole. I've been on this card for a while, though now it's clear that we have a very good four Fumarole deck.
I have a question about goggles. I had goggles aND 5 lands. I taped the goggles for red and floated it, used my 5 lands to case a second goggles, then used the mana from the first and second goggles to case orienting voice. Am I right and get to draw 6 cards?
Oracle text “If more than one red mana produced by a Pyromancer’s Goggles is spent to cast a single red instant or sorcery spell, the delayed triggered ability associated with each mana spent will trigger. That many copies will be created. It doesn’t matter if this red mana was produced by one Pyromancer’s Goggles or by multiple Pyromancer’s Goggles.”