Budget Magic: I Scorch Standard with $100 Budget Boros Burn
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Budget Magic! Foundations is here, and we kick off our budget exploration of our new Standard format with a deck I'm super hyped for: Burn! One of the best parts of Foundations is the nostalgic reprints. Burn was one of the biggest beneficiaries, to such an extent that we can build a deck that looks an awful lot like old-school, 2015-era Modern Burn but in Standard, and all for just $100! Is Burn real in Standard thanks to reprints like Burst Lightning, Boros Charm, and Lightning Helix? Let's find out on today's Budget Magic!
Budget Magic: Boros Burn
The Deck
The goal of Burn is simple: get your opponent's life total to 0 as quickly as possible by chipping in for damage with aggressive, cheap creatures and then finishing them off by throwing burn spells directly at their face!
The Creatures
We kick things off with eight one-drops: four of the Modern staple Monastery Swiftspear, along with two each of Kellan and Hired Claw. Monastery Swiftspear is legitimately great. Our deck is full of cheap spells to trigger prowess, which, combined with haste, allows the one-drop to hit for a ton of damage out of nowhere. Meanwhile, if I were building the deck today, I'd play four Hired Claw (which felt great) and zero Kellans (which felt very medium).
I was hyped for Kellan, Planar Trailblazer in the deck as a weird Standard-legal, level-up version of Ragavan, but after I played with the card, it seems to function much worse on the battlefield than it looks on paper. The problem with Kellan is that the card you can get from leveling it up almost always goes to waste. Let's say we play Kellan on Turn 1 and level it up on Turn 2. If we connect with the one-drop, we'll impulse draw a card, but since we already spent all of our mana on Kellan, we won't be able to use it. The same thing happens on turn three: if we level up again and connect, we'll impulse draw two cards, but both will go to waste. Yes, if Kellan lives until Turn 4, it can start generating value, but I'm pretty sure that happened once in like 10+ matches with the deck. Meanwhile, Hired Claw just consistently chips in for damage while also giving us a mana sink if we have nothing else going on, which I think makes it a straight-up better card in the deck than poor Kellan, which somehow managed to show up in every set without ever being very good.
Rounding out our creatures are Viashino Pyromancer, which offers two direct damage and an okay body for two mana, and Screaming Nemesis, which is sadly only a three-of because it's so expensive. (The three copies are roughly half of our budget.) Screaming Nemesis in particular is super important to the deck thanks to the prevalence of powerful lifegain spells in Standard like Beza and Sheoldred. These cards can beat our deck almost by themselves. But Screaming Nemesis solves this problem by shutting down our opponent's lifegain forever. If you have the budget, add the fourth copy. It's that good.
The Burn
We've got five different burn spells in our deck, four of which were arguably Modern staples in the past. Boltwave is technically a new card, but really it's Lava Spike, which is still a four-of in Modern Burn. Meanwhile, Boros Charm offers four damage for two mana, which is an absurdly good rate. Lightning Helix offers three damage along with some life, which can swing a race against aggro, where we'd really prefer to be burning our opponent's face rather than their creatures. As for Burst Lightning, it might be a stretch to call it a former Modern staple, but it did see play in the format thanks to kicker. More importantly, it represents a huge upgrade to Shock in Standard, where, in the late game, we can kick it to double its damage and close out the game. Finally, we have Lightning Strike, which is very much not Modern playable, but it's as close to Lightning Bolt as we get in Standard and, considering Standard is a bit slower than Modern, is still good enough to get the job done.
One big note on our burn spells if you decide to pick up the deck: their default mode is hitting our opponent's face. While it might be tempting to throw them at our opponent's creatures (and this is sometimes necessary), in general, we need to be damaging our opponent with our burn, or else we won't have enough damage to close out the game. As a result, don't be afraid to burn the opponent aggressively and trust that you'll be able to race their creatures. The biggest exception to this is lifelink creatures, which must die because they undo our burn spells, or if we are literally going to die to our opponent's board. In that case, staying alive is better than dying, even though it still hurts to waste damage on creatures.
Card Draw
When I first built the deck, it only had two Case of the Crimson Pulse, but I pretty quickly went up to the full four copies because it's incredible in the deck. Since our curve tops out at three, we are very good at emptying our hand. This solves the case and then starts letting us draw three cards a turn, which is a great way to draw enough damage to close out the game within a turn or two. Sure, we also have to discard our hand each turn, but this doesn't really matter since we'll be playing whatever we draw anyway.
One trick to keep in mind here is that while typically two copies of Case of the Crimson Pulse don't do much (since you draw with the first one and then discard the card you draw to the second one), we have enough instants in our deck that we can occasionally get value out of multiples. Just make sure to set a stop on Magic Arena so we can cast whatever instants we draw with the first Case before discarding them to the second.
Wrap-Up
Record-wise, I'm not 100% sure about my overall record with the deck. It was the first deck I played once Foundations was released, and my tracker hadn't been updated yet, but the deck generally felt solid. Lifegain can be an issue, but we have decent answers, between Screaming Nemesis in the main deck and Sunspine Lynx in the sideboard. Thanks to all the new Foundations cards, I think we might actually have a real Burn deck in Standard, which is super sweet!
The biggest question for the deck is how it compares to the pump-spell red decks that are popular in Standard. Overall, Burn is slower—you won't accidentally get a Turn 2 kill with Leylines and Flings—but it's also more resilient. One of the upsides of Burn is that we technically have a ton of cheap removal, which is something the pump spell decks can't do. It will be interesting to see how things shake out with red aggro in Standard. Is it a Monstrous Rage deck or a Boros Charm deck? Could some hybrid exist that mashes the two decks together? I guess we'll find out in the coming weeks, but the idea of having multiple playable red aggro archetypes in the same Standard is pretty exciting!
So, should you play Burn in Standard? I think the answer is yes! If you are a fan of old-school Modern Burn, this deck should feel pretty nostalgic. Plus, there's something special about just throwing spells at your opponent's face and watching the world burn around you!
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.
