Last week we delved into UG ramp, for a slower take on the format, but this week we’re going to speed things up a notch and try to smash through with UR tempo/spells:

This may be my current favourite deck in Hour of Devastation. As I stated in last week’s article, it’s my firm belief that the format is still very fast and nothing we’ve seen in the Full Force videos or on stream has dissuaded me from that viewpoint. With that in mind, a tempo deck with a lot of bounce and combat tricks can race very effectively against the format and the Blue-Red spells list has been a beast almost every time I’ve come across it.

A large portion of the format is about combat tricks, from Brute Strength to Synchronized Strike to Act of Heroism, there is a wide variety of fairly cheap, efficient combat spells and with Affliction, Exert, and Prowess all appearing in the format – on top of it’s aggressive bent – there’s a lot of incentives to run a ton of these tricks. Why do I bring this up? Unsummon, Consign//Oblivion, and Winds of Rebuke. I’ve been very medium on these cards before, but I’m coming around to realizing they just keep getting better. On top of blowing out combat tricks, making races difficult, and negating Cartouches, you even have the added bonus of getting out of a Compulsory Rest or Unquenchable Thirst. It doesn’t make these A+ bombs or anything, but it does a lot of the groundwork for a very nasty low to the ground aggro deck.

What other cards are you looking for? Red removal is a fairly obvious answer here. Magma Spray, Struggle//Survive, Electrify, Puncturing Blow, Open Fire, and Abrade are all fantastic cards to look out for. Anything you can’t burn away, you can save your unsummon effects for. For creatures, you want to build something fairly similar to Amonkhet. Lots of two-drops, preferably with Prowess/Affliction or some form of evasion. Spellweaver Eternal is probably the best common creature for the deck, but be on the lookout for Aerial Guides and Khenra Scrappers as well. Scrapper is great at getting value during combat by forcing bad blocks from the Menace and setting up big plays with pump spells or removal/unsummon.

At this point I’m not sure what can unseat this as my favorite for the format, but I’d love to hear from you! Let me know in the Twitter poll what you’d like to see for next week’s Full Force:

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