Freezing Point: 5/32 - Red

Hello everyone, and welcome to the fifth installment of Freezing Point! In this series I'm going to brew a 75% EDH deck of each color combination from the ground up. The intended meta for these will be a casual meta, though while not built competitively they will be spiked as hard as possible. You may be confused seeing some pricier cards in here like Imperial Seal and Mishra's Workshop but if those help the particular deck they're in then so be it. Really expensive cards supporting really bad strategies. It's like the bully you had at school who is tough and belittles you but then you realize there's something terribly wrong with his family like every night when he gets home from work the bully's dad listens to Nickleback.

The title of the series is good and all, but what does it mean or stand for? Well, if you look at the number of possible color identities for decks in Magic then you will notice that there are 32 (one colorless, five single-color, ten two-color, ten three-color, five four-color, and one five-color). I wanted a title that could represent that idea. I wanted to go with calling the series 2⁵ but some websites wouldn't display the superscript properly. Instead of that, I chose Freezing Point as the name as water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit. It seems to fit well.

While I haven't really ever wanted to be one of those people that had one of each color combination of EDH decks I did get inspired to brew them. I've looked at a lot of lists in my time and I usually enjoy seeing other people's established works and then working off that, either by improving it or making it suit my own style. I've learned a lot about EDH in recent history and decided that I would at least like to make each color combination of deck so that I have one that I can say is my deck and is not just 'the one that I play.'

With that being said, let's get into the deck. (complete list at end of the article)

Overview

Tasty, tasty spear.

For me, some of the red commanders stand out much more than the rest. Some are established to a degree like Daretti. Some are very commander-dependent but could be a lot of fun like Grenzo, Kiki, and Feldon. Some are goofy and therefore very fun like Zada and Squee. Some are just pure mean like Heartless Hidetsugu, Purphoros, and Zo-Zu. The newest member of the team, Neheb, could also be fantastic but I don't want to rely on him too much if I can help it even though the group damage could still do well. Finally, I have a Norin deck which while it could use an update and is very fun is not mine, though is definitely a seemingly fun underdog until you cast Confusion in the Ranks. Go ahead, take some time to see how evil that is.

In the end, I decided to brew up Hazoret. Hazoret is like Purphoros in function but not form, requiring some different tools and methods to work. Hazoret was also chosen over Purph for the opposite reason as I chose Heliod from before; Hazoret is always a creature while Purph isn't necessarily. There's a few times when we can take advantage of that, which I will explain when we get there.

Due to our color restrictions I didn't find a fantastic way of using Hazoret. There's some ramp with artifacts, there's little additional card draw, and there's not a lot of tutors. I've added cards to this to address all of those as well as adding some additional strategies that both work with the main strategy of death-by-Hazoret as well as by themselves. I'm going to go through the though process that I had while brewing this deck to show how it all came about. I'm hoping that explaining this logical progression it will inspire you to think in a similar way and hope that it helps with your deck construction.

Now we'll go section by section and discuss what all these cards do for the overall strategy.

Commander

Since my theme this time around is the commander and her ability, unlike where sometimes the theme is build in to the deck and the commander is mostly/partially irrelevant, I will build from the top down keeping her ability in mind. Let's read her and see what she does. Like I mentioned not even a hot minute ago Hazoret, unlike Purph, is always a creature. So what things can we play that take advantage of the fact that there's +1 to the creature count on the board at (hopefully) all times? Well, Pyrohemia seems pretty sweet. Why not clear the board every round? Speaking of clearing the board, Blasphemous Act and Chain Reaction both appreciate our Goddess. Some equipment could also be very useful, like Pariah's Shield and Basilisk Collar. By far my favorite one though is Grafted Exoskeleton, because why NOT crank up the danger level to 11?

What else does our commander do? She allows us to discard cards in order to shock each opponent. Damaging each opponent simultaneously is pretty interesting too, so what can we do with that? Are there any other things that we can do with discarding or damaging each opponent? Let's find out!

Discard

All aboard the grave train!

What kind of things would we want to discard? Well Squee doesn't have that big of a downside when we discard him. Even though the rate at which we utilize him it's perpetual until someone wastes a Bojuka Bog on us. Anger doesn't seem all that bad to discard either. Eventually we're going to have to discard other things, so there's some recursion in there for those in the forms of Crucible of Worlds, Feldon, and Daretti. The recursion is much more powerful in this deck since we basically need it to operate until we find Squee or other things we don't mind discarding. Plus recursion gives us some reach into the later points of the game. Otherwise we just discard the worst things for us in any given situation.

For red, their draw tends to come with discard. Effects like Faithless Looting, Wheel of Fortune, and the aforementioned Daretti all want their form of blue's looting (known as rummaging). Can we ever draw more cards? Alhammarret's Archive allows us to draw approximately twice as many cards as we would have. Plus that happens to go well with any lifelink we may or may not give a creature!

Group damage

One-sided is the best sided

We spoke of lifelink and infect already being pretty sweet with Hazoret. Is there anything or anyone else that could do with having those abilities and doing mass damage? Purph seems pretty good, though he will only sometimes be able to hold equipment. Heartless is also very good with these keywords (if he survives) and Coalhauler Swine is really good with these damage-based board wipes!

We want to deal damage to everyone (of our opponents) at the same time, mainly with Hazoret. Is there a good way to increase that damage output? Red's damage doublers! Gratuitous Violence, Furnace of Rath, and Dictate of the Twin Gods all seem really good and maybe a little dangerous, but that's what makes it fun! Neheb gets a tingly feeling from all of this damage too.

Protection

"What's a Hidetsugu?"

With the nature of the deck I don't care for the usual commander protection like Lightning Greaves. In this case, our protection comes in the form of hate and disruption. Both Blood Moon effects are here because it hardly does anything to us and will hopefully heavily disrupt others. Multiple wheel effects including Memory Jar help to disrupt people and help us. Pariah's Shield put onto Hazoret protects us from all of our own damage that we may incidentally hit ourselves with. Both Red Elemental Blast and Pyroblast can be political and stop a slew of things. There's a bit of mass land destruction as well, which still isn't bad because we have Crucible. We have the mass artifact destruction spells with Vandalblast and Shattering Spree. Strangehold also stops a lot of stupid stuff that people may want to attempt. Our previously-mentioned board wipes also act as a form of protection, and Chaos Warp can pull us out of a bad situation.

The rest of the good stuff

"No, see, my Blood Moon is actually
mana ramping you right now."

In a sense, Vedalken Orrery gives us a good amount of reach and is a form of protection since nearly everything we do it done at sorcery speed otherwise. Braid of Fire gives us mana for honestly nothing in particular aside from Pyrohemia, but Orrery helps to mitigate that. Kiki-Jiki and Zealous Conscripts are also in here because sometimes you just need to end the game, plus both also happen to be good in a number of situations. Duplicant should probably be in the deck for Kiki, Feldon, and for other artifact synergies so make that call if you'd like.

Playing the deck

Being that there's few draw and tutor sources, this deck is very reliant on what you happen to top deck. Do you want to wait to do anything and then slam a couple damage doublers and then voltron up Hazoret before dumping your hand? Do you want to grind out people with some land destruction and just live with your indestructible creature(s)? Do you dump your hand and cast a wheel to do it all again? Do you accidentally kill everyone on turn 8? Did your opponent cut your deck at just the right spot to where you don't see anything good for a while? I find that red is somewhat of a glass cannon in what it does, especially this deck. It needs to assemble at least a couple different cards to start to do amazing stuff but is still lightly poking at people until them. Keep in mind also the recursion cards in this deck. It's okay to not only wait for Squee before you start shocking your opponents because we can get lands, creatures, and artifacts back from the graveyard.

Conclusion

And there we have it! Click on the fourth word in the next sentence to go to the full deck list. While not as slow as my FP Black list, I still expect this to be a bit grindy. Unless I can put myself way ahead I try to not to make myself too big of a threat too early on. Then again, there are times when you can just slam a damage doubler alongside a Collared Hazoret and be well off for a while. Please feel free to add more hate dependent on your meta. Thank you for taking the time to read this article! Check back in next time for the next episode of Freezing Point!

All cards owned and all rights reserved by Wizards of the Coast. I'm just some nerd who spent too much time staring at them.