August 24th Deck Tech [Mono Red Goblins]

August 24, 2012

More Building on a Budget this week. I try to keep the costs low so you can build the deck for around $20.

It’s a crazy first week of classes, time to run my emergency fall-back deck, Red Deck Wins. And what better way to win with red than with Mono Red Goblins.

I love aggro decks, they’re my magic therapy. After a few long a stressful games with complex combo and control decks, it’s good to relax and smash face with a few straight-forwards quick rounds. Do 20 damage as quickly as possible, consequences be damned.

It’s Goblins all the way down. We start with plenty of aggressive 1 drops, up to a capstone of Krenko, Mob Boss.

We start off with a medley of pests, Goblin Arsonist , l damage wherever we want it upon death is a pretty useful ability, it lets us get in damage or work as removal against the plethora of small utility creatures littering the format. Goblin Fireslinger let’s us keep pinging around blockers and letting us squeeze in the final points of damage when needed. Spikeshot Elder is another generic 1 drop, though it works as a late game mana dump especially with the pump from Battle Cry and your Goblin Lord.

Our two drops are much more aggressive and more apt for combat. Mogg Flunkies is a good value 2 drop able to topple most competing creatures at this mana slot. And since we’ll be turning plenty of our creatures sideways anyways, the “downside” isn’t to hard to satisfy. Goblin Wardriver has Battle-Cry and makes your whole team hit much harder, when you swarm the field with little goblins, making each of them hit harder can bring a lot of pain.

Three drops are back to utility. Arms Dealer lets us trade up small goblins for removal spells; it unfortunately does not allow us to fling our creatures at their face, but since we can do it at instant speed, so we can fling our blocked/blocking creatures into other creatures for more damage. Goblin Chieftain is an awesome lord, surprise haste-smash better goblins! Additionally we can utilize Krenko the turn he comes down for an army of more hasted goblins. As a fifth de-facto Chieftain there’s a single Fervor just because of the overall usefulness of the haste benefits.

Krenko is our curve topper, you can keep growing our army to push through a big enough wall of dudes. It combo’s especially well with Haste to dramatically increase the size of your army of Goblins. Unanswered Krenko will create an unstoppable army of far-far-FAR to many minions for your opponent to deal with.

When your goblin army just isn’t enough, you’ve got some good-ol fashioned burn spells. Shock is that instant speed 2 damage staple. Incinerate is the instant speed 3 damage staple, preventing regeneration makes it strictly better than Searing Spear, but both do about the same job here. Arc Trail does a decent job of clearing away groups of small creatures (*cough* Lingering Souls *cough*). Flames of the Firebrand does a similar job, they each have their merits and detractions. Flames can be a Searing Spear if you need to do damage to something big, or kill three 1 toughness monsters. Arc Trail is cheaper and lets you kill weak and small creatures a turn earlier, but is much more strict about damage allocation.

Goblin Grenade is probably the ditry-est most awesome-est most flavorfull-est goblin card ever. You’ve got plenty of goblins, and they’re all totally expendable, especially Arsonist. It’s 5 damage wherever you want it, to the dome or to a particular threat, and you’ve got plenty of goblins ready to die for you.

There’s not a whole lot to sideboarding, a few options for specifics, but mostly you keep with the go-go goblin smash-face plan.

There aren’t a whole lot of extra options to expand this deck with more of a budget. Hellrider is pretty good and can make your goblin force that much scarier able to do damage around defenses. Rootbound Crag to set up Ancient Grudge flashback out of the sideboard is an option. There are other options for a very different variety of Red Deck Wins.