Red Deck Wins (RDW) - A Burn/Kuldotha Comprehensive Primer
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Hi guys, my name is Selkcahs (https://twitter.com/selkcahs) and I’m an Argentinian MTG/MTGO Grinder that has played competitive Magic for the last 10 years and enjoys writing MTG Primers. While i have dabled myself in a multitude of formats, I've been always pulled back to Pauper due to it’s unique qualities and characteristics.
I’ve also played a lot of Archetypes but I've had modestly successful results in the competitive scene with the infamous Red Deck Wins (https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/300634#paper). While a great many players see themselves above the simplicity of playing Red Aggro, choosing more complex and colorful options; I've always respected the core idea behind it: finding the faster and most efficient way to kill your opponent.
“A harmony of mathematical precision” - The Architect expressing his thoughts about the efficiency of Red Deck Wins.
That being said, i think it was about time for me to immerse into what is the most dominant Red Aggro Archetype that has ever been seen in the Format; so I hope you enjoy the reading as much as I've enjoyed the writing.
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A bit of history first...
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A long time ago, when extra Mana in the Pool burned you and Combat Damage used the Stack, a man made history and revolutionized the whole idea of Deckbuilding in Magic forever. That man was called Paul Sligh, who made 2nd Place in the Atlanta PTQ in 1996 with a deck that by all standards (old and new) seems lackluster and not suited for competitive play.
https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/3858668#paper
The deck itself wasn’t fancy at all and it didn’t play the best cards of his time (it even broke the Golden rule in Magic, to not play more than 60 cards), but it did 1 thing particulary well: It curved with Creatures and Spells from Turn 1, which allowed it to maintain the Tempo advantage with early board presence and pressure. This game plan was helped by Red damage spells that served both as Removals to control the board and Burn to damage directly the opponent’s life totals.
The results obtained by Paul in the tournament were so impactful in the Magic competitive scene that from that point on the new decks that followed the same game plan were named “Sligh” in honour of the man that started a new era of building and playing Aggro strategies (even if the original deck idea was designed by another famous player, Jay Schneider).
While we have come a long road from that 1996 Atlanta PTQ, the core concepts of that first Mono Red Archetype sticked trough almost all formats: efficient and cheap creatures, combined with Burn spells that focused on closing the game as fast as possible, was a perfectly sound plan to achieve victory in the game of Magic.
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The Red Menace
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Since the beginning of the Pauper format, the Red Aggro Archetype has existed because the best Burn spells in the game are commons (Fireblast, Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning and all the subsequent and weaker iterations). Despite that, Red Aggro in Pauper historically lacked cheap and efficient creatures to complement their game plan, which meant that it existed as a 2nd Tier deck at most that could only achieve good results sporadically.
But that is the past brother, because in the year 2022 Wizards released Double Masters; an expansion focused on reprints that made the fatal mistake of downgrading to common one of the best Red creatures ever printed:
She’s beautiful, isn’t she?
The moment Monastery was legal on Pauper the entire metagame warped around it, classic Burn decks started playing very similarly to their Legacy counterpart thanks to now having an efficient and hard-to-answer creature. In a few weeks, the format gave birth to a new iteration of Red Aggro called Hot Dogs; which used Monastery, Kiln Fiend and Festival Crasher; paired with various cheap and “free” spells, to deliver One Turn Kills before Turn 4.
- Hot Dogs: https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/5058490#paper
When the meta adapted and started efficiently countering the fragile game plan of deploying few early creatures and going all-in for the OTK, Red Mages commited themselves to explore other nefarious ways to abuse their new Prowess girlfriend until someone hit the jackpot when he realized that a combination of Red/Colorless Artifacts allowed you to play Kuldotha Rebirth in a Red Aggro shell with few concessions thanks to cards like Great Furnace, Chromatic Star, Implement of Combustion and Experimental Synthetizer.
The most important of those Artifact cards was Synthethizer because it provided something that was unkown to most Burn players until then: Card Advantage. Since that first Sligh deck, Monored has caracterized itself for being all about the Tempo advantage, trading at most 1 for 1 while abusing the early game pressure to nullify the extra cards that your opponent would have in hand until you managed to kill them.
With the adition of Synthetizer players started searching other Red cards that provided some sort of Card Advantage when they realized that effects like Reckless Impulse were essentially “Draw 2 cards” when you have that many cheap spells that can be easily deployed during the course of 2 Turns. And thus, the abomination was given birth:
- Kuldotha Red: https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/5094195#paper
When the deck was in its apogee, Wizards decided it was a good idea to print another Reckless Impulse; this time named Wrenn’s Resolve. This meant that while Kuldotha continued as a perfectly consistent game plan, Red Decks now had enough card advantage to not even need to play the board with small creatures and focus on more Burn Spells and “Ping” creatures that, if left unanswered, will usually mean a swift and violent death.
- Mono Red Burn: https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/5626897#online
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The Primer itself
Okay, this storytelling until now has been nice and fun, but i promised you a Primer (which usually means an explanation in depth of the Archetype itself) and so i shall deliver:
- The Rations
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Yeah you guessed it, we will be playing the best lands a Red Aggro deck can wish for: untapped Basic Mountains. While the most important thing about that beautiful Red mana generator is that it comes Untapped, the Mountain Type is extremely important whenever you are playing cards like Fireblast or Lava Dart. In adittion to those, we also have some more interesting options at our disposal for different purposes:

• Mountain: Everything we really need to be honest.
• Great Furnace: Oh boy do i wish i could play 18 of this bad boys, but being able to use 4 in any interation of Burn that abuses Artifacts is good enough.
• The Autonomous Furnace: the only tapped land that we can afford to play because it allows us to increase our chances of not getting screwed in the early game while also cycling itself in the Mid/Late stages of the match. You will usually see it as a 1-of and sometimes as a 2-of.
• Forgotten Cave: A card no longer used in most lists because it can’t be cycled when revealed with “exile” effects.

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- The Troops
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As we already discussed, a fundamental part of RDW is having efficient creatures to put pressure in the early game, and this are the best options avalaible right now:

• Monastery Swiftspear: Nuff said, it’s so good that its played in any format it’s legal. While to the inexpert eye it may not seem that oppressive, you will soon realize that Prowess triggers with EVERYTHING that is not a creature and that it’s almost impossible to safely block because it can always be pumped in various ways during the Combat Phase. In all intents and purposes, a busted card.
• Voldaren Epicuren: a seemingly inoffensive 1/1 that does A LOT of things, which are dealing direct damage when it ETB and giving you a token Artifact that allows you to cycle useless cards (usually extra Lands). While the card is good by itself, it will always be played in iterations of the deck that can abuse the Artifact Blood Token in various ways.
• Goblin Blast-Runner: A new 1-drop that can deal a lot of damage when you can consistently sacrifice permanents each turn.
• Kuldotha Rebirth: While Kuldotha is a Sorcery, it represents three 1/1 Creatures for 1 mana as long as you can easily get an artifact to sacrifice. While it may seem not that broken, anyone that has played with or against it knows how much of a powerhouse it is.
• Goblin Bushwacker: A monster of a card that multiplies the damage of your board unexpectedly, allowing you to deal massive amounts of damage; used specifically to abuse Kuldotha Rebirth.
• Dwarven Forge-Chanter: The best Red Prowess card besides Monastery, having to deal 2 damage to kill it with a spot removal makes it feel like a common Eidolon of the Great Rebel sometimes.
• Kessig Flamebreather: A “Ping” creature utilized in more Burn focused lists.
• Thermo-Alchemist: Another “Ping” creature like Kessig, used to complement it.
• Burning-Tree Emissary: Another beast of an infrequent downgraded to common. Multiple copies of her in the early game can give you an unfair Tempo advantage while also being decent in the Midgame when combined with other cards.
• Underworld Rage-Hound: A creature that has seen little use but that has a lot of potential in grindy matchups.

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- The Guns
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One fundamental component of Red Aggro is playing cards that deal direct damage to the opponent, to their creatures or both; here are the best options in today’s Pauper:

• Lightning Bolt: The best red damage spell ever printed, period.
• Chain Lightning: The next best thing after Lightning Bolt, a bit tricky to play against decks with easy access to double Red.
• Galvanic Blast: An extremely powerful burn spell as long as you can consistently have Metalcraft; in the worst cases it works as a Shock which usually gets the job done.
• Lava Dart: The bane of Faires and most 1 thoughness Creatures while also providing 2 triggers in 1 card of Prowess/Ping. A monster of a card in the right situation.
• Fireblast: 0 mana for 4 damage? Well yes we’ll take it. The small detail of having 2 sacrifice 2 Mountains is usually little relevant in the Mid/Late game.
• Searing Blaze: An historic 2x1 card for Burn. While it usually shines in formats with Fetchlands, it’s still good enough when played on your turn with the natural landrop.
• Lava Spike: 1 mana for 3 damage to the face is usually all you really need when playing a list focused on burning your opponent directly.
• Rift Bolt: One of the “worst” 1 mana burn spell due to having to wait 1 turn to work or costing 3 (which is sub-optimal to say the least).
• Skewer the Critics: The least used “Bolt” of the pack due to how hard can it be to cast for 1 mana in a lot of situations.
• Firebolt: A sorcery Shock with an expensive Flashback, rarely used.
• Seal of Fire: Another niche card that has it uses when you want to use Trigger effects while saving the “shock” for later.
• Needle Drop: A tool from another time when Red Burn decks didn’t had any real access to card advantage, rarely used this days.
• Goblin Grenade: A niche option for decks that heavily use Goblins creatures.
• Shock: Just don’t play this, please.
• Curse of the Pierced Heart: If i find you playing this card we gonna have problems okay? This is from a bygone era when Burn was desperate for a way to maintain damage-over-time; this is no longer the case now that we have access to card advantage mechanisms.

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- The Ammo
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While for classic Burn players the adittion of non-land cards that don’t efficiently deal direct damage or inmediatly increase the board presence may seem strange, they are the sole reason why Burn stopped being a Tier 2/3 deck and become the undisputed master of the format.

• Reckless Impulse/Wrenn’s Resolve: Both cards do exactly the same effect, they exile 2 cards until the end of your next turn; for all intents are purposes, in a low curve Burn deck, this effectively is “2 mana, draw 2 cards”. This type of card advantage allows Burn to not be afraid of play the value game and it’s common nowadays seeing Red Aggro outgrinding their opponents thanks to this kind of tools.
• Experimental Syntethizer: An absolute beast of an Artifact, when correctly played it represents a 3x1 card advantage that is extremely hard to deal with. Do take in mind that the card exiled must be played the same turn or it will be lost; but then again, this is usually an easy endeavour in a low curve deck.
• Chromatic Star: A card that cycles itself while providing an Artifact. Usually used by lists with Kuldotha Rebirth.
• Implement of Combustion: A cousin of Chromatic Star, it deals damage when being manually cycled but it doesn’t provide mana. Depending on your approach to the Archetype you may sometimes find more value in the extra point of damage instead of regaining the invested mana when cycling with Star.
• Mutagenic Growth: A “free” pump spell specially useful in Prowess based lists.
• Manamorphse: A card that allows “free” triggers of Ping and Prowess creatures.

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- The Garrison
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Sometimes people don’t like being burned to death, so they will try to employ strategies to prevent us from doing that; and while when choosing between only Red card our Sideboaes options may seem limited, we have more than enough tools against most decks in the format.

• End the Festivities: It allows us to deal with 1 thougness creatures for 1 mana while also doing a bit of damage to the opponent. An extremely efficient sweeper that is sometimes Mainborded.
• Electrickery: Instant sweeper that can very relevant against Faeries or Bushwacker + Kuldotha.
• Pyroblast/Red Elemental Blast: The anti-Blue hate cards by default, they come in handy specially to counter opposing Hydroblast/Blue Elemental Blast. You will always find youself using Pyroblast over REB (unless you want more than 4 copies) because Pyro can be played against any permanent/spell even if it’s not Blue, thus allowing us to get a Prowess/Ping trigger if needed.
• Gorilla Shaman: A monkey that hates Affinity almost as much as you, while useless against Bridges it can get a lot of value against normal Artfifact Lands and other pesky permanents. Ironically, it can be sided in sometimes against Kuldotha based lists trying to punish their heavy Artifact use.
• Smash to Smithereens: Destroying an artfact and dealing 3 damage? You are playing Burn, what else do you really need?
• Shattering Blow: In a format plagued by indestructible Bridges, Shattering Blow can win some games by itself in the right situations.
• Relic of Progenitus: The best Graveyard hate in the format, as long as you are not heavily depending on your own Graveyard to play.
• Raze: We will usually have far more Lands that we need to comfortly operate, which allows us to trade 1x2 to destroy powerful enemy Lands like Bouncelands, Basilisk Gate and Lands enchanted with Utopia Sprawl/Abundant Growth.
• Molten Rain: Paying 3 mana to destroy a Land is a lot for us, you are probably better with Raze in most situations.
• Flaring Pain: A great way to bypass effects that prevent damage, specially against cards like Prismatic Strands.
• Flame Slash: 1 mana for 4 damage to a creature is great way to clear the board and keep swinging our boys sideways.
• Mine Collapse: A “free” removal spells that can take out most creatures in the format.
• Martyr of Ashes: An old card no longer used due to how hard it is to get good value out of it.

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- The Battle Plan
Von Moltke after he casted 3 Lightning Bolts to the face and the opponent responded with a Weather the Storm.
“A game plan for Burn? Isn’t as easy as just targeting all our spells to the opponent’s face while we swing with our creatures?”
Oh my sweet summer child, you couldn’t be more wrong. While Aggro decks in general (specially Red ones) have a straightforward strategy of killing the opponent as fast as possible, and sometimes you will encounter yourself with “automatic” hands were the road to victory is extremely clear; this also means that the slightest mistake can put you in a position where you lack the resources needed to close the game. Countless games of Magic have been lost because the opponent stayed at 1 life away of lethal only for you to realize that you missed that 1 point of damage in a seemingly unimportant missplay some turns before.
So the central point is: you will probably have to take a lot less decisions when playing Red Aggro than other more “complicated” Archetypes, so you better think things through really well because having few decisions means that the smallest innacuracy will often have dire consequences.
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“Okay, okay, Got it. Just don’t fuck up and point everything to the face then?”
Wrong again, probably the worst play Monored can do today is Turn 1: Mountain, Bolt to the face. While more classic iterations of the Archetype focus on incinerating the opponent’s life total as fast as possible, we have learnt better. While Red Aggro’s goal is to maximize the damage dealt to the opponent, usually the most efficient way to do this is by sticking a few good Threats into the board and using our damage spells to control it and consistently deal damage over time; a plan that is helped by our newfound access to Card Advantage that will keep Creatures and Burn spells flowing turn after turn. Thus, we will only point our Bolts directly to the face when they will allow us to close the game in the immeadiate future.
While in the 2 current iterations of RDW we will see a propensity of Kuldotha caring more on maintaining board control and Ping Burn more focused on burning directly the opponent, neither of this decks can afford to mindlessly waste their Bolts.
…
“So you mean that i have to THINK when playing Monored?”
Sadly yes, besides the nut draw where you will win the match effortlessly you will need to find the right balance between board development, card advantage and burning the fuck out of your opponent’s creatures/life points. Playing correctly will usually allows us to neutralize the few ways our adversary has to counter us:

• Did the opponent chained 2/3 Weather the Storm and went up to 60 lifes?

No problem mate, they have just lost those cards because we will be grinding them out with card advantage and our creatures will eventually drain their life attacking, even if it takes a good couple of turns.

• Is the opponent holding multiple Blue mana open with potential Counterspell effects?

Easy peasy lemon squeezy. If they are leaving a lot of mana open and unused, they probably won’t be able to advance their game plan either, we can just gather our cheap resources and play them all together baiting their responses. If we play something and it resolves, we call it a win and continue to let them waste their Tempo; if they do decide to user their Countermagic, we then have an opening to resolve a potentially more powerful spell, which should be something that provides card advantage that would then allows to happily trade one of those extra resources to their Counterspells later.

• Are they killing each and every creature we put on the Board?

Well after all we are called Burn for something and while we do like to use our creatures to push damage, we are more than happy to go the incendiary route when needed. Also, as long as you don’t walk into a sweeper situation that allows the opponent to trade 1 big removal for several of our resources, we should be able to eventually utilize our card advantage to put into play more threats than the amount of removals spells our opponent have.

• Is the opponent drawing a lot of cards, gaining life and also pressuring us?

Well give me a break, you can’t win them all. Sadly sometimes you will lose no matter what you do, specially if the opponent is well prepared and teched against Burn. With all the positives we have discussed here, in some situations playing a Monocolor Aggro deck that everyone is expecting is not the smartest choice; but even then, current RDW is so powerful that with a bit of luck you can even get good results against the harshest of matchups.
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Burn samples:
https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/5654255#paper
https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/5654242#paper
Kuldotha samples:
https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/5654243#paper
https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/5641081#paper
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Conclusion
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Okay, that’s been a long one for me and i hope that everyone that read it had a good time. As of June 2023, and since the release of the Lady in Red in June 2022, we have experienced an undisputed dominance of the different variants of Red Deck Wins that shaped the format around it; basically, if you are playing a deck that is too slow to withstand an early Monastery/Kuldotha opening you are setting yourself up for a rough time in Pauper. This have forced the players to choose between 3 main option if they decide to play the format competitively:

1. Play a Burn variant.
2. Play an anti-Burn Archetype.
3. Play a “Combo” deck that tries to ignore being set on fire while it does it’s own thing.

As the Pauper Format Panel (PFP), who’s in charge of monitoring the “health” of the metagame, has stated multiple times that they think there are no changes needed in the format; we are left with the only option of basking in ther infinite knowledge and enjoy being constantly burned to death if we want to continue playing Pauper in the foreseable future.
If you enjoyed the reading be sure to check my other Primers:
https://www.reddit.com/Paupecomments/w5td9k/faeries_primer_a_comprehensive_guide/
https://www.reddit.com/Paupecomments/wxzd8e/uw_cawgate_prime
I also have a Patreon that, while mainly focused on the UW Caw-Gate Archetype right now, provides anything related to the Pauper format; including decks discussion, metagame analysis and coaching services.

i have gotten this error message after launching my modded version on vortex. i am using the epic games version with all dlc, if you know any fixes or suggestions i am open to hear them.
oh shit!