Finally, my super secret tech deck is complete!

As the title suggests, it's a monored deck for Prismatic Singleton.

What is Prismatic Singleton?

It's a format where you have a minimum deck size of 250 and have to play at least 20 cards of the 5 colors in Magic. Also, with the Singleton rule, you can only play a maximum of one named card that isn't a basic land.

Not to keep the suspense, here is the entire decklist in its rawest form to let you roughly look at (it's not easy to understand here so you can choose to ignore it now):

As much as you can now guess, this deck was only possible when Eventide was released. The inspiration of the deck came when I first heard in a podcast somewhere that Devin Low, a guy at Wizards (of the coast, of course), played a prismatic deck that was more than 1000 cards jam packed with red cards. The deck ran mountains and somewhat ignored the prismaticness of the prismatic format.

When I saw that, I told myself: one day, I'm going to do something that will beat that.

And when Eventide was slowly spoiled with enemy hybrid, I started planning a mono-red deck knowing that the blue and the white cards were going to be very tough to fill up unless Eventide would give enough playables. In fact, the whole concept of the deck was banking on this possibility.

The idea of the deck was to fundamentally ignore the prismatic rule and play a mono colored deck that would play subpar cards but would bypass the inconsistent nature of the format. By having a "proper" deck of junk cards mixed with some good cards, it would be possible to win just based on the opponents not having much significant plays.

As for why red was the color of the deck instead of any others, red was historically the most successful color to have utilized "weak" cards to win. Maybe I might get to work with other colors but this is all I have for now.

First of all, I will have to prove that my deck is legal for Prismatic. The next section shows the 20 cards from each of the other 4 colors.

Green

Initially, I had thought that there were many red/green cards for me to utilize but I was wrong. I ended up having to heavily rely on Shadowmoor hybrid cards. I'm not very happy with the fact that I have to play Runes of the Deus but there is a chance that I have a big creature to give double strike to. I can't really think of what to play instead. Maybe Nantuko Vigilante ?

Black

Here are the black cards which I thought would be easy to plan. As you can see, there are 3 black cards in there, two of which that morph and one that cycles. Street Wraith is there solely to cycle away but Putrid Raptor is somewhat special. If I'm really lucky, I might see it together with some changelings or another zombie card to morph up.
On the other hand, Zombie Cutthroat is just cool because it does everything it did in limited (trick people and eat free cards) and people are indeed afraid of morphs.
 

Blue

For blue, some of the cards are plain bad but I don't have much space to move around there. Vedalken AEthermage can search for red wizards or Changeling Berserker. I removed Force of Will for Shaper Parasite which was supposedly there to counter a free spell when another blue card shows up but I figured that I might as well have a morph creature instead. As to why Shaper Parasite was chosen, I was just hoping that its built in removal spell might come in handy every once in awhile. The rest are assorted Eventide cards.

White

For white, I cheated by using Transguild Courier since it was by its nature, white as well. As a side note, Transguild Courier is more than just a typical Hill Giant. It gains the full +2/+2 boost from every liege! 

I couldn't stomach the idea of playing a 3 mana 1/2 flying first strike goblin and so I have cards like Wave of Aggression over it. Spectral Procession is the only off-color card of its cycle played. It was hard to evaluate the others because I didn't really want to pay 6 mana for those effects (maybe Beseech the Queen might be ok) but I felt that this one was rather decent and white was really lacking in card quantities.

A card I want to mention is Balefire Liege. It has the potential to deal tons of damage without doing much. It's definitely worth trying out in Singleton100 but probably not Singleton since there are quite a number of better cards in the faster format.

When choosing which cards to play, there was one card that I considered for a very long time but ended up not playing at all. The card was Reaper King. It was a card that would let me cheat a slot in any color and would be castable at at least 9 mana for a 6/6. If lucky, I believe that casting this at 7 mana, 3 colored and 4 off-colored, is possible but unlikely.  So in the end, because of the the extremely low probability of actually casting Reaper King for profit, I decided against it.

Lands (not basic Mountains)

This portion of the deck is relatively simple and straightforward. Access to all 5 colors if needed, lands to help get different colored mana. Pendelhaven to pump 1/1s, man lands, Forgotten Cave and lands that deal damage but produce red mana are the rest of the cards. I tried as much as possible not to put in cards that didn't produce red mana because there are many RRRRR cards in the deck. This is probably the bare minimum the deck can run I guess. Maybe I should run filterlands too.

The Rest of the Deck?

It's nothing much. Pretty much every card ever played in a mono red deck, with some exceptional cards that would tend to win when cast like Rorix Bladewing, his descendant from Future Sight or Arc-Slogger. As a backup, some cards like Thunderscape Battlemage and Tin Street Hooligan, which need green mana to use their abilities, were added as well. Fetchlands and other types of lands were added to let some cards work if required. Below shows the deck with the deck editor screen expanded fully. The mana curve is highest at 3 and is rather concentrated at casting costs of 1-2 but because there are so many cards of casting cost 4 and above, I tried to maintain a relatively high concentration of lands. The current concentration is 39% which I am rather satisfied with.

Some of the more interesting cards were probably Flamekin Harbinger and Goblin Matron that have multiple search targets for different situations. A card I was rather happy to have was Jaya Ballard, Task Mage although I have yet to use her in my games since she could convert "dead" or weak cards into Incinerates. Magus of the Moon and Blood Moon are also in hopes to win random games since I'm almost unaffected! *insert evil laghter*

------------------------Rant Time!!!----------------------------

Rant? Yeah! I have something to rant about! I'm sure I have clearly shown why this deck is legal and the stats tab says it's legal as well as seen below.

However, I can't start a game in the Prismatic format!!! Urgh!
After all the effort put into making the deck I can't play it in the format it's made for?

Games?

Fortunately, I did manage to play a few games by initiating games by using chatting with people who posted up prismatic singleton games. I was more than happy that they would accept my challenge in the Classic format (not Singleton also since Umezawa's Jitte is banned there). Playing in the Classic format put me in a small advantage because my opponents could not make use of the free big deck mulligan that would have been otherwise available so I might have won some games because my opponent did not see a need to lose a card. While it does apply to me as well, my deck was based on greater consistency so I would naturally have some advantage under such rules. I have to say that I didn't want to abuse that fact.

Anyway, here are some screenshots of replays to see how the deck played out:

There were times where I could get very nice starts

 and in this game, the draws got much better.

The deck hopes to win early on before the opponent starts to recover from the mana setups. The deck lost its fair share of games when my opponents slowly regained control of the game or when I ran out of gas and just drew lands.

I'd say the deck has more than 50% chance of winning games because of its inherent characteristics that defy the nature of the format (playing a relatively fast deck in a slow environment is good) and the sheer power of some cards that cost tons of red mana to cast. However, when paired up against a very strong defensive deck, it would probably suffer quite abit since there aren't many cards in the deck to get card advantage out of the situation while the opposing deck can. The fact that the creatures are relatively weak doesn't help there as well.

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All in all, I believe the project to be a successful one but the deck itself can definitely be tuned more. MED II has Pyrokinesis which is think is a perfect addition to the deck because it can throw away the weaker "red" cards away for a strong effect so I hope to get one soon.

Red spells are so good! 

Until next time, this is Tarmotog, casting more and more red spells!

tarmotog@hotmail.com