Red players are now celebrating, including me, on the revealing last night of the latest Red burn spell named Skewer the Critics. The card is the latest addition to the direct damage spells in Standard and today we will discuss on how it will look in the Rakdos Burn deck that has been seeing in the metagame as a Tier 2 archetype. But first, here below is the card.

At most, it is a Sorcery-speed Lightning Bolt but it won’t really be a hindrance. Spectacle can be easily triggered as mostly you have your ways to have the opponent lose life in the nature of Red being cheaply costed and aggressive. The current Standard Mono Red aggro deck will surely be glad to have this in their burn lineup. For the Rakdos Burn version, we have a sample decklist below.

16 Creatures
4 Electrostatic Field
4 Fanatical Firebrand
4 Ghitu Lavarunner
4 Viashino Pyromancer

24 Spells
4 Lightning Strike
4 Risk Factor
4 Shock
4 Sovereign’s Bite
4 Sword-Point Diplomacy
4 Wizard’s Lightning

20 Lands
4 Cinder Barrens
1 Detection Tower
4 Dragonskull Summit
8 Mountain
3 Swamp

Skewer the Critics is an easy addition to the deck as we will just replace one set of creatures. I am thinking on replacing the Lavarunners and sacrificing partially our one-drops. I won’t think of it as a disadvantage since basing from my piloting experience of Mono-Red, the Lavarunner is easily answered by other decks and ineffective in the late game. This is very noticeable in this build since we aren’t relying much on creatures to do our damage.

On the positive side, we can maintain our low-cost aggro plan by retaining the Lavarunners and cutting a few of the expensive spells to fit the Skewer the Critics. Our current options are Sword-Point Diplomacy, Wizard’s Lightning and Risk Factor. The diplomacy is probably the top choice here as conditional cards can be inconsistent, or we can just cut two copies and one copy of Wizard’s Lightning and one Sovereign’s Bite. The bite doesn’t interact with creatures so having three copies is fine.

The updated decklist would look like this one.

16 Creatures
4 Electrostatic Field
4 Fanatical Firebrand
4 Ghitu Lavarunner
4 Viashino Pyromancer

24 Spells
4 Lightning Strike
4 Risk Factor
4 Shock
4 Skewer the Critics
3 Sovereign’s Bite
2 Sword-Point Diplomacy
3 Wizard’s Lightning

20 Lands
4 Blood Crypt
4 Cinder Barrens
4 Dragonskull Summit
6 Mountain
2 Swamp

In addition, the deck gains access to Blood Crypt which helps refine the mana color curve. We also have other Rakdos card options to include in the sideboard but that will just be discussed in a separate blog post.

To conclude, Skewer the Critics is very relevant in the current metagame and will surely define the Red decks’ aggressiveness in the format.

That is a wrap. Until the next blog post.