Much Abrew About Nothing: Blistering Rage (Modern)

Tweet by SaffronOlive // May 23, 2016

video Much Abrew About Nothing

Hello everyone! Welcome to the new and improved Much Abrew About Nothing. This week we are going to do something we've never done before, revisit an old deck! Nearly a year ago, Budget Magic featured a deck called Blistering Rage. While it was super fun for its price, as time went by I forgot about it. This past week, someone managed to 5-0 a Modern League on Magic Online with the deck, which brought the list back to my attention. I made it into an Instant Deck Tech, which ended up being the most popular deck of the week. As such, this week on Much Abrew About Nothing we get to play Blistering Rage!

Also, for some of the runner ups of Instant Deck Tech, we've been streaming them on twitch.tv/mtggoldfish. We just started releasing 5-10 minute highlight videos for those without the patience to slog through a full three hour league. You can check out the first one, Naya Superfriends.

We'll have some notes on Blistering Rage after the videos, but first a quick reminder. If you enjoy the Much Abrew About Nothing series and the other video content on MTGGoldfish, make sure to subscribe to the MTGGoldfish Youtube Channel to keep up on all the latest and greatest.

Blistering Rage: Instant Deck Tech

Blistering Rage vs Affinity

Blistering Rage vs Mono-Green Stompy

Blistering Rage vs UR Storm

Blistering Rage vs Grixis Delver

Blistering Rage Wrap Up

Thoughts

The deck is super budget, being only 23 tix online and $75 in the paper world. If you are interested in trying it out, you don't have much to lose.

The matches in our videos did a pretty good job of showing the good and bad of Blistering Rage. The good is that it wins fairly consistently on turn three, and can win on turn two with the nut draw. It also does a great job of putting the opponent to the test in the early part of the game. If they don't have a removal spell, they just lose. Even if they do have a removal spell, we can still win thanks to Apostle's Blessing.

The bad about Blistering Rage is that it has a tendency to lose to itself. In the match against Grixis Delver, we never found a creature or resolved a spell. Since we only have 12 creatures in the deck, sometimes we just won't find one. As such, if you decide to play the deck, mulligan aggressively for creatures. While going to four (like we did one game) might be a bit over-aggressive, going to five is usually correct. The second issue is that a single Abrupt Decay or Path to Exile can blow us out if we don't have Apostle's Blessing.

The sideboard could probably use some work. In most matches we didn't bring in anything. The deck plays a bit like a Storm deck; it's really hard to cut things from the main deck. However, there has to be some better options available that could be helpful in some matchups. I'm just not sure what they are at the moment.

Overall, Blistering Rage plays in the same space as Infect. Blistering Rage is the more explosive of the two decks, and it's much more likely to close out a game on turns two or three. On the other hand, Infect is the more resilient option thanks to Inkmoth Nexus and the various Blue cards.

I think Blistering Rage could be an appealing option for two types of players. It's great for anyone who wants to try something different since it's so cheap to put together, especially on Magic Online. While I wouldn't want Blistering Rage to be my primary Modern deck, it's certainly a deck I want to have around to pull out on occasion, both because it's fun and because it has the "wow" factor of winning on turn two. The second group of players who will like the deck are people looking for a budget substitute for Infect. While it's possible to build budget Infect, Blistering Rage is the more competitive option once you start cutting cards like Noble Hierarch and Inkmoth Nexus from Infect.

Conclusion

Anyway, that's all for today. As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.