Kuldotha Red: Post Beseiged

Red Deck Wins. It has been an ever present menace in multiple formats spanning years of Magic tournament play. It is always changing and yet remains the same. Red Deck Wins will kill you faster than any other archetype. (There have been exceptions in certain formats over the years but primarily RDW is usually fastest.) This is going to remain true for Standard post Mirrodin Beseiged as well. I am traditionally a control player. If I do play an aggro strategy it is usually running four Vengevines. But, this deck might make me consider it for an at least an FNM. When the worst opening hand for the deck is Mountain into Goblin Guide and attack for 2 you know it is packing a punch. Here is the list, check it out for yourself:


Main Deck

Creatures:
4 Goblin Bushwhacker
4 Goblin Guide
4 Memnite
4 Ornithopter
4 Signal Pest
2 Goblin Wardriver

Spells:
3 Chimeric Mass
4 Devastating Summons
1 Flayer Husk
4 Kuldotha Rebirth
2 Lightning Bolt
4 Mox Opal

Lands:
4 Contested War Zone
16 Mountain

All the artifacts ensure that you are going to have metal craft for your Mox Opal and more importantly a sac outlet for Kuldotha Rebirth. Kuldotha Rebirth is the name sake of this deck for a reason. Look at this line of play:

Turn 1: Ornithopter, Memnite, Memnite, Mox Opal, Moutain, Goblin Bushwhacker with Kicker, attack for 9.
Turn 2: Constested Warzone, attack for 9
Turn3: They probably already scooped :)

If you are doing that on the play there is no deck that can answer a play like this. The deck has vulnerabilities to sweepers the worst being Pyroclasm. Slagstorm, Day of Judgment, and Black Sun Zenith are most of the time too slow. Even if you get hit by a sweeper the deck can come back the next turn with a Devastating Summons and a Bushwhacker kicked. This should be the nail in the coffin as you have likely dealt a fair amount of damage before you were hit by the sweeper.

Coming up with a sideboard for this deck is fairly difficult. It is similar to Valakut in the sense that it has elements of a combo deck. If you take out the 0 drops you totally ruin the strategy of the deck and the bigger "reach cards" like Hero of Oxid Ridge and Koth are just slow enough that other decks can deal with them. Here is one possible configuration but it is probably not the best.

Sideboard:
2 Goblin Wardriver
3 Tuktuk the Explorer
4 Jinxed Idol
1 Lightning Bolt
2 Goblin Chieftain
3 Forked Bolt

The Tuktuk are great against decks with sweepers. Forked Bolt and Goblin Wardriver help out in the mirror match. Jinxed Idol is for the control decks. Lightning Bolt and Goblin Chieftain are for Black Red Vampires.  As I said before, this is only one rendition of the sideboard and could be built several different ways.

This deck WILL DESTROY any deck that is not prepared for it. It is too fast powerful for you to have any legitimate hope of recovering and stabilizing if you have been hit for 12 to 18 over the first two turns of the game. This deck is extremely budget too so expect some of the new players to wielding it. But, beware that an experienced player might be piloting this deck trying to beat the meta. If that's the case I would expect them to able to play around cards like DoG, BSZ, Slagstorm, and Pyroclasm to an extent. I say you can only play around Pyroclasm to an extent because the deck has to be aggressive to win and sometimes you have to go all out and just hope they don't have it. If you don't believe the potential of this deck check out the websites in the Links section. Lots of people are talking about it.