Wacky Wednesday: Red Is The Wackiest Color

Red is my favorite color and it just happens to be the wackiest. Total coincidence, I swear! Shades of crimson are also my favorite in real life for deeply-held political and aesthetic reasons that are more deliberate. Therefore, it's fitting  I talk Red for the first installment of Wacky Wednesdays on the new blog...at least until I come up with something less cheesy and impulsive than "Wacky Wednesdays".

Yesterday I alluded to the fact that Lightning Bolt is my favorite Magic card of all time.  It was one of the first cards I ever saw and truly hit me like a bolt of lightning.  I bolted to the nearest games hobby shop to pick up my first two 4th Edition Starter decks and was so happy to pull a copy from both packages.  From then on, I've always loved this wacky game and bolting critters in the ass and opposing planeswalkers in the face with cheap burn.  As you can see, I  never even tire of the word, almost to a fault :-)

Little did I know that I was falling for the wackiest color in this already whacked out game!

My first success in Magic at the middle school lunch tables was with Sligh, featuring some classic uncommons like Viashino Sandstalker and Wildfire Emissary.  My God, we made a lot of noise when we were dueling over our bad macaroni and cheese!  Surely everybody thought we were whacked out beyond all professional assistance.

But I didn't care.  I was playing Red!

Later, when I discovered Pauper, I knew I wanted to get started in the Classic format with red decks.  These tend to be inexpensive but remain competitive.  Some might whine that Burn and Goblins are boring, but that's whack!  I like racing and I'm partial to lists that are almost entirely creature-less or almost entirely creatures, both.  Like I said, burning and bashing face are two of things I love about playing Magic no matter what format.  And as a final, fateful bonus, Red does historically well in our favorite format, Standard Pauper.

You just gotta be wacky enough to run Red!  Take off your thinking cap once in a while and throw on your mad cap.  Like so:

Check out at Madcap Skills up there.  That card is as whacked out as the guy on it!  Red isn't supposed to be an Enchantment color, but I guess everybody gets Auras these days.  This is one of the scariest in the format.  And see how Red doesn't just want to use simple evasion like white flyers or blue's dry "unblockable" dudes. Red wants to mess with blocking and attacking to create whacky psuedo-evasion situations.  Now that's just more chaotic and fun. And Red!

And that's just the edge of the flames for Reds random mechanics Paupers can exploit.  There are four, count 'em, four variations on the formerly-uncommon gem, Act of Treason:

Taking control of creatures at common?  And not in boring blue but in bright red!?  Sweet. And dripping flavor like the blood of the Red revolutionaries it implies.  Is it not an act of treason to start a revolution with red flags flying?  Does it not come completely by surprise, take control and untap the current position, and then end almost as soon as it began with everything back to normal but still completely altered, often with blood on the battlefield?  Yeah, Red flavor is wacky alright, but so spot on sometimes.  I used to rock this card in Standard Pauper out of  Boros and Goblin sideboards.  I'm thinking it's time to mess around with this mechanic again.  And with four ways to do so, one could quite literally build a deck chock full of these wacky sorceries .  And Smelt-Ward Gatekeepers.  Stupid Gatekeepers...

And I haven't even gotten to the weirdest of the whacked out stuff Red can do: looting & filtering, blowing up pesky artifacts and lands, making really big explosions - not the mention  the completely wackiest mechanics  of all on common Reds like making fast mana, messing up combat, sac'ing and shuffling, and more!  I guess that means a "Red Is The Wackiest Color: Part 2" post is coming some Wacky Wednesday in the future.  Until then, good luck, have fun, and good games!

Peace,

 - C