Burning Vengeance control

I have to thank a guy on YouTube for the original idea: Rogue Deckbuilder.  His deck served as an excellent starting point for me.

Here's my list... At least for now with no testing:

(my version of this deck was trash.  After goldfishing a few hands, it became clear that the deck was a piece of garbage. I will toy around a bit to try and work out something better without just running the list he uses).




Let's start with the (seemingly) obvious 4-of's.  Burning Vengeance, Snapcaster Mage, and Pillar of Flame.  Why the last one?  The main reason is that BR aggro is the flavor of the month.  I'd be much happier using a harder hitting burn spell or some extra card draw, but dying to Gravecrawlers and Geralf's Messengers (and Falkenrath Aristocrats, oh my!) is very little fun.  Countering their Falkenrath Aristocrats can really help out your burn spells since BR aggro will no longer have a sac outlet to prevent their Gravecrawlers and Geralf's Messengers from biting the dust permanently.   Geralf's Messengers a little less of a concern because we have more reach than they do generally speaking.

I suspect decks that rely pretty heavily on the graveyard like this one aren't popular because of Tormod's Crypt being in standard... But there were a grand total of 2 in all of the sideboards of the top 16 decks at GP San Antonio.  At the moment, there is no reason whatsoever for this deck to fear graveyard hate since Tormod's Crypt is not a hard counter to the deck.  There is plenty of reach to not have to rely on Burning Vengeance triggers.

The popularity of aggro affects the build a lot, as already mentioned.  It would be a whole lot of fun to build toward a massive Epic Experiment endgame, but aggro makes those early burn spells and random Bears with Benefits extremely relevant.