Standard Rotation 2013, part 4

So, I was thinking again, that I’m looking at the gods a bit wrong. Maybe I should try and look at them as enchantments, which can turn into creatures, rather than creatures that are sometimes hard to use.

There’s a school of thought known as Philosophy of Fire. The idea behind Philosophy of Fire is that you can put a life value on card. Then, if you figure that out, you only need to figure which cards you need to use to get above that value and kill the opponent with minimal amount of cards. This is the basis for burn decks. Maybe we can use this.

So, let’s forget for a minute that Purphoros is creature and see what we can do with that.

[scryfall]Purphoros, God of the Forge[/scryfall]
Legendary Enchantment Creature – God 6/5
Indestructible
As long as your devotion to red is less than five, Purphoros isn’t a creature.
Whenever another creature enters the battlefield under your control, Purphoros deals 2 damage to each opponent.
2R: Creatures you control get +1/+0 until end of turn.

That’s great for a token strategy. Sadly, we won’t have cards like [scryfall]Krenko’s Command[/scryfall] or [scryfall]Thatcher Revolt[/scryfall], but we do have [scryfall]Molten Birth[/scryfall] and [scryfall]Goblin Rally[/scryfall], along [scryfall]Young Pyromancer[/scryfall] which should be great with those. Also, [scryfall]Hammer of Purphoros[/scryfall] can produce creatures and gives all my creatures haste.

Now, all we need is some support, such as [scryfall]Ogre Battledriver[/scryfall], maybe [scryfall]Wild Guess[/scryfall]es to let us put some redundancy in the deck without extra copies cluttering our hand.

[cardlist title=Red Tokens]
[Creatures]
4 Young Pyromancer
4 Ogre Battledriver
4 Purphoros, God of the Forge
[/Creatures]
[Other spells]
4 Molten Birth
4 Goblin Rally
4 Wild Guess
4 Hammer of Purphoros
4 Magma Jet
2 Mizzium Mortars
[/Other spells]
[Lands]
22 Mountain
4 Mutavault
[/Lands]
[/cardlist]

Other possible cards include [scryfall]Dynacharge[/scryfall] for alpha strikes, [scryfall]Chandra, Pyromaster[/scryfall] for extra card advantage and maybe even more looters (but we’ll lose most of those too in the rotation).

Reaching Devotion of five is going to be a rare occurance, but there’s a lot of synergy. It might be too slow, though. It could kill on turn five with a really good draw (turn one mountain, turn two mountain and [scryfall]Young Pyromancer[/scryfall], turn three mountain and [scryfall]Hammer of Purphoros[/scryfall], turn four mountain and [scryfall]Purphoros, God of the Forge[/scryfall] and turn five [scryfall]Goblin Rally[/scryfall]). Not much consistency, though, since there isn’t enough redundancy for all the cards needed. On the other hand, after that, we’d have all the chump blockers we’d ever need. Maybe this could work… maybe…

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