Chandra's Inseparable Friends

Okay so I just had a pretty stressful week full of final exams, a trip, and a sick cat to worry about. Sorry for ghosting during the time, I simply did not have the time to keep up the project, but I'm back now. Today we're going to take a look at Chandra Superfriends to test out Sunyveil's conclusion on his tons of hours of playing Brawl that "Green is strong, red is not" and see just how weak the first color I fell in love with when playing Magic actually is. If you don't know who Sunyveil is, go check him out on Youtube and Twitter right now, you're missing out on one of the best resources on Brawl available online at the moment.

This deck looks to run a spellslinger/superfriends style of play, with a ton of direct damage and removal backed up by powerful red planeswalkers to snowball on our opponents and overpower them before we get all our stuff wiped by a more consistent and well-rounded multicolor deck. Mostly we want to play our Chandras, have them stick, gain incrememental value off of them and finish off with a big Sarkhan planewsalker-dragon swing.

Direct damage and removal:

So this kind of THE thing red has to offer, and we're going hard into the direct damage spells. We're going to be spellslinging real hard with this deck, and the best part of all these spells is that every single one of them can be "flashbacked" by Chandra's -2 loyalty ability, meaning that we can use all of these spells twice! Most of these spells can only be targeted at creatures or planeswalkers, so it is especially important when playing the deck to prioritize using your more situational and restrictive damage spells whenever possible. That means trying to hold on to our Shock, Slaying Fire, and Bonecrusher Giant as much as possible to throw them at the opponent's face for damage. But once again, since we have Chandra to reuse them, you don't have to be extremely greedy with them, simply make sure you're not using a damage spell that targets anything on a creature when you have a creature-only damage spell in hand. Electrodominance is another card that works amazingly with Chandra, as it has a CMC of 2 when in the graveyard, meaning that Chandra can give it "flashback" with her -2 as well.

Card cycling and advantage:

This is red's major weakness historically, as there are very few ways of getting actual card advantage in these colors. Instead, we have multiple ways of drawing cards by discarding cards that are less than useful in the current situation, as well as "impulsive draw" mechanics, in which we exile the top few cards of our graveyard to be played that turn. This means that getting the cards we actually want might be a bit complicated, as we will have to think of how much mana we'll have left after exiling these cards, to make sure we don't end up exiling one of our awesome planeswalkers away forever. The "discard package" of the deck has been proven to work pretty well, even if we're not running the more expensive creatures that make up that set. Bag of Holding holds it all together by letting us hold onto those cards for later, while Chandra's Regulator lets us both double up on our Chandra planeswalker abilities and freely discard a mountain or red card to draw a new one. The discard package really gets going when Glint-Horn Buccaneer is in play, hitting our opponents for 1 every time we discard a card. Special mention goes to Syr Carah, the Bold's ability to transform our direct damage instants and sorceries like Shock and Chandra's Pyrohelix into potential card advantage, as long as we have the mana to cast those cards that same turn.

Planeswalkers:

Oh my that's a lot of red planeswalkers to go with Chandra's first 0 loyalty ability! We run almost all of the available red planeswalkers, and definitely all of the available Chandras in standard right now. Tibalt, Rakish Instigator is an annoying little guy that'll keep giving us board presence in the form of little pinging 1/1s and completely shutting down any lifegain we face against. Jaya, Venerated Firemage is mostly a source of repeatable damage, but also boosts all our other red damage sources, giving our removal and damage that extra oomph. We run Sarkhan, the Masterless because we have so many planeswalkers, if more than one of them stick on the board they're bound to be dealing a lot of damage to our opponents, and Ugin, the Ineffable is the best planeswalker to carry all the janky monocolored deck on his back. Finally, we run the full Chandra, with Chandra, Fire Artisan giving us access to more cards and a threat of a lot of damage, and Chandra, Novice Pyromancer synergizes amazingly with our commander and Chandra's Regulator, as making 4 1/1 elementals with haste and giving them all +2/+0 twice is already 20 damage on the board. Chandra, Awakened Inferno is the Chandra we want to be playing as much as possible, providing the constant threat of damage every turn, while Chandra, Flame's Fury is mostly here for flavor purposes, but it also provides us with good repeatable damage and removal to keep our opponent sweating.

Some extra utility stuff:

Electrostatic Field provides our spellslinging self with a way to consistently ping our opponent anytime we play an instant or sorcery, which works fantastically with our spellslinging, damage-dealing deck. Embereth Shieldbreaker is both an artifact hating sorcery and a body that can help us defend our precious planeswalkers from the opponent's creatures. Repeated Reverberation is a pretty cool card in this deck as it can not only copy one of our spells twice for a lot of damage, it can also give us more copies of paneswalker abilities, making for some very powerful turns giving our ooponent a ton of Chandra Emblems, dealing a bunch of damage, or making a ton of dragons. It's pretty expensive, but also rather cool when we pull it off. Torbran, Thane of Red Fell gives us a ton of reach on all our red damage sources, and should be quite useful to remove enormous creatures or put a ton of pressure on our opponents with damage on the board. We run Finale of Promise even though we will rarely cast it for X=10, but it allows us to reuse our removal and damage spells, and can also be brought back with Chandra to flashback two more spells in a turn. We'll be casting instants and sorceries a lot with this deck, so pay attention to the graveyard, and don't be afraid to use your removal early on.

Mana:

Alright, so red really sucks on ramp and we're not doing that much to make it any better here. In terms of "ramp" we only run Runaway Steam-Kin, which I've never seen survive a single turn in Brawl but at least it's a decent removal magnet, and Arcane Signet, because it rules. We run 25 lands, mostly mountains, but we have room for some utility due to being a monocolored deck. Blast Zone provides us a way of dealing with annoying enchantments and planeswalkers, something the deck really struggles against, and Karn's Bastion works amazingly with all of our superfriends. Emergence Zone is a cheeky way to get one of our big cards in at instant speed on top of Electrodominance, making this deck a lot more capable of surprises than it looks like at first glance. We run both the Eldraine red lands because they're basically free and give us very marginal utility, and Mobilized District can easily be activated for free if we get enough planeswalkers to stick on the board.

And that's it, that's the deck! When I started writing this I was still taking my exams, now they're done and I'm going back to the daily grind. Wish me luck!