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Most unattractive deck of the month. The decks it's supposed to beat compose my FNM (I.E. RG ramp and Delver variants). It doesn't give me enough feel of control over these decks. Add in the fact that control takes the fun out of how I play, and I doubt that I'll actually build/play this.

Decks I'd like to see:

Hatebrew
Suicide Phyrexians, I.E. this: www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.a... 
Rage Extractor deck
Splinterfright deck (you've been doing this a lot recently, but not since DAK was released.)
Agree/disagree with any?

Great article. Thanks for including a loss in your results   It was useful to see where the deck fell down.

The Burning Vengeance deck is probably too fragile to be highly competitive (once enchantment removal has been sideboarded in, that's usually the end of it), but I find it to be a very fun deck to play. There's a lot of card draw (who doesn't love drawing cards) and lots of meaningful decisions. A lot of my wins are cases where I'm at 4 life and my opponent is still at 20, but I've set everything up and locked them down between creature clearing Burning Vengeance s and saved up Dissipate s along with Snapcaster Mage s. That always makes for an exciting win.

One useful card to combat the faster decks is Silent Departure . It slows down the opponent and provides fuel for the Burning Vengeance . Against a deck like RG Ramp, with a lot of ETB effects though, it is probably a detriment. Most of my games with the deck are Innistrad block games, so obviously it's an entirely different metagame.

Feb 15, 2012 -- 8:15AM, Reylance wrote:

I drew Altar of the Lost and cast it. My opponent cast a Huntmaster of the Fells. I used my Altar of the Lost and a land to flashback my Desperate Ravings

It looks like you flashed back Desperate Ravings on your opponent's turn immediately after the turn when you cast Altar of the Lost. Altar of the Lost enters the battlefield tapped.

Heh... I had just come back to the thread because I realized I forgot to mention this in my post. My guess is that someone didn't read their card closely...

Gotta say, this is a hugely disappointing article. He already made pretty much this same deck already a while ago, except now with metgame choices and inconsequential cards like Thought Scour . He also misread Altar of the Lost , so in order to not tap out for it you need 5+ land already.

I do agree with his land count though. I would agree even more if he had Faithless Looting to dig for them.

Oh how very, very wrong he is about Faithless Looting and "maximizing value". So many times I find myself wanting to play a Burning Vengeance , but then realizing it's not worth it when there's nothing in my graveyard yet (and I can't both play & flashback anything with only 4 mana). Faithless Looting lets me curve out much better, Mana Leak something, and still get an early vengeance in play with a threatening flashback card in the graveyard already. It's also much more efficient than Thought Scour or Ponder at pushing through a mana flood.
Besides that, the card advantage isn't even necessary. Really you just want to be flashbacking cards to deal damage, and it's convenient that they provide you more cards to flashback (I don't like Secrets for the same reason). I'd much rather a couple Vengeance in play, nothing in hand, and a couple Ravings to flasback than a full hand, 2 Vengeance... but no graveyard. The latter takes a lot of mana to use fast.

[/rant]

I agree about having a couple copies of Silent Departure . If you're racing, I'm more than happy to bounce even a Titan for a coule turns if it means getting another ~4-8 damage in to kill them.

Personal preference: I like having 4 Delvers in either the main or the sideboard, depending on what you expect opponents to have in their maindeck. It flips >50% of the time (another benefit of low land count), and it requires very different answers than the Vengeance (besides Oblivion Ring , for which we now have Ray of Revelation to go along with our Ancient Grudge , if you feel like adding a third color).

All that said, it's hard to know all this for certain without online testing, instead of just relying on my few offline games. But I'll be very surprised if JVL turns out to be right about Looting.

I was surprised to NOT see Dream Twist or Devil's Play in the original. The latter is only a dollar. I am not a professional player, but I agree that more land may be better. I'd suggest 22-23 like in the original version someone on here reposted. Perhaps running some creatures like Delver of Secrets or Armored Skaab? They might be good to block large creatures and therefore buy time for a win? Armored Skaab is a common that might combo well with Burning Vengeance.