PDH tech week 4: Young Pyromancer.

Full list here.

Burn baby, burn. 

Young Pyromancer is regarded by many as red's late entry into the overpowered 2-drop cycle, making his contemporaries with Tarmagoyf and Snapcaster mage. Whether or not he deserves this slot, Young Pyromancer does a very good job heading up this deck. A backbone of burn with a token finisher, this is a highly aggressive, compact list chock full of all your favourite things to do in Red. The four sections of the deck I'll be highlighting here are the Burn (duh), the Buff and Falter cards that let you take advantage of your tokens, the synergistic effects and the utility cards.

As always, these categories aren't entirely separate, and I'll only be highlighting a few cards for each category.

Burn:

I bet y'all thought that was gonna be a picture of lightning bolt.

Not that there aren't a ton of bolt-effects in this list, cards like arc lightning that have the potential to kill more than one creature at a time are the most valuable burn cards in the deck. You want to keep the field as clear as you can for your final charge, and being able to direct that extra damage at someone's face makes your job easier. Burn trail and electrickery are also good inclusions here.

Buff/Falter effects:

As you may or may not remember from our mono-white deck deck, permanent anthem effects are thing on the ground at anything below rare. Every once in a while uncommon will get a slightly nerfed lord, (see, chief of the edge/scale in Khans for a recent example) but for the most part this category is instants and sorceries. Other effects that benifit us that we can find at common are the goblin war drums type effect that make it more difficult for opponents to block, and a few cards like trumpet blast or weapon surge which double or triple the damage you're dealing in a single turn. Be careful with those effects though, those cards are your win conditions more often than not, only fire em off if you can knock someone out of the game that turn.

Synergies:

God this card is so good. You should have no difficulty whatsoever getting this card up to 9 or 10 damage in a single shot, and makes a good finisher too. Kiln fiend combos with all your spell slinging, and a card like raid bombardment makes you even scarier than you were before. Have fun.

Utility:

In the lad of common only, repeatable effects are king.

Even if you have to pay mana each time you use it. Shattering pulse also fits in this category, confirming buyback as a rediculously powerful mechanic, not that we needed anyone to tell us that again. Rain of rust is like this too, but slightly worse. It's nice to have the ability to destroy lands too, because at common only, the mana fixing does kind of suck, and your able to really punish people playing 3 colour decks.

This week on "I can't believe they printed this at common":

They keep doing it, and I don't understand. Why is this card a common. No. This card's existance warps formats and nearly single-handedly makes red viable in modern. This card should not be a common. I'm suddenly very grateful that I've never played in a limited format that includes this card, jeez.