Card/Deck Single Card Spotlight



This is a card I have been avoiding thinking about because it's pretty complicated. It's basically a tutor if your cube is built around redundancy and recursion. At 3 mana and instant speed, it's really tempting!

I'll post a few piles to see what can be done, I'd love for you to share your own + other experiences with the card.

I image a lot of the piles will look like
1. the thing you are tutoring for
2. a similar effect to what you are tutoring for OR a piece of recursion
3. another piece of recursion OR recursion for your recursion

Land tutor



Spell tutor



Cheap creature tutor



Artifact tutor



This artifact one is glacially slow.

Selfmill package



Zombies



Combo



(casting Intuition again for LED + Brain Freeze)

Hit me with your favorite piles!
 
Finally able to bring in a cool design I wanted to try out for a while:



There are obvious synergies with Gravecrawlerand cards with Flashback, in addition to cards like Inti, Seneschal of the Sun and Containment Construct which allow for rare card advantage through exile. More ways to trigger the return is always useful and these are becoming more and more common with each new set. But what really got my gears turning was the printing of Gau, Feral Youth.



This is the kind of card that brings further definition to the B/R aggressive archetype and allowing it to further differentiate itself from other blends of Aggro. I've found that when it comes to defining two color pairs for aggressive decks that it's more about showcasing what makes that pairing unique than anything. I have cards that can bleed across the Mardu wedge for most aggressive decks that come together in my cube, but the eternal conundrum is figuring out how to clearly signal a subtheme or play pattern.

Gau lets the recursive B/x creatures clearly cement themselves in Rakdos where you also get big aggressive curve toppers in Falkenrath Aristocrat as well as additional recursive avenues with something like Alesha, Who Laughs at Fate. Take advantage of the expendable bodies with cards like Morbid Opportunist or Sephiroth, Fabled SOLDIER and throw in some looting effects to fill the grave and there is a lot of depth and resilience to these decks. I see a very nice fleshed out core for these decks nowadays:

 
I like this idea enough that I'm brain-dumping what I know that you didn't post! I assume you know most of this but heck, I just learned about the [ ci = small ] tag from you, gonna use it.

Individual cards for at least one of the two of Gau and Poxwalkers:


Plus an embarrassment of red two-drops that cast things from exile at some random time:

(Don't sleep on Party Thrasher, it's got a lot of synergy with all kinds of random stuff.)

Entire mechanics, mostly for Poxwalkers, but some for Gau too:


Malevolent Hermit and its Disturb wins the "great mechanic, wrong color" award - there's Covert Cutpurse in black and literally nothing in red - so if you want to bleed into Grixis:


Cards I omitted from the above lists based on power level assumptions - these sure do synergize, but I assume they're, as someone here memorably once posted, "I put Fable of the Mirror-Breaker in to support the token and goblin decks :)" situations:
 

Chris Taylor

Contributor
Cards I omitted from the above lists based on power level assumptions - these sure do synergize, but I assume they're, as someone here memorably once posted, "I put Fable of the Mirror-Breaker in to support the token and goblin decks :)" situations:
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Having never seen that before, it's actually a pretty cool design - although I wish it used counters so you could proliferate it (coolness counter confirmed for standard legal in 2028?!)
 
I want someone to spotlight me a card, that's a transitive verb right? Spotlight me!

Red noncreature spells. Burn, looting, Through the Breach/Sneak Attack... and that's basically all I can think of. The Wildfires of the world are not where I want to be on power level (too low).

Here's my current 450 list!
Just the current red spells:


I could shrug and add Incinerate.
I could pretend to support Calamity of Cinders.
I could add one or two more specifically good attackers for Through the Breach (which is harder than it looks even when I'm supporting Reanimator, and might involve going all the way to the Stifle package because it works well with Corpse Dance).
Might be able to support Legion Extruder but I worry that it tricks people into thinking I have an artifacts theme rather than just clues/food/blood/treasure.
Snort is probably coming in, but maybe I should go straight to Wheel of Fortune?

But, all that said, there's nothing satisfying feeling. I want like, two spells that you would not be ashamed to cast (really as many as five, Chainsaw and Pyretic Charge and Demand Answers don't thrill me either.) Any advice is much appreciated because all I know is "it ain't Jokulhaups even if it makes me sad to admit it".
 
A few suggestions (in order of preference)



Often considered only a combo card, I've found that if your curve is low and you have a GY/discard theme, you can often get value from this. Kind of a Regrowth effect where the ceiling is win the game if you have the combo for it (or a bunch of burn I guess).



Give stuff haste and smash. Utility lands tend to slot easily into decks so you get to virtually increase number of deck slots.



"Draw 3", ramp next turn, create some fodder or anything in between. This is a versatile card that most Red decks can use effectively.



You have some high impact 1-3 drops that it would be a shame to steal, attack with and sacrifice.
 
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