Eat or be Cooked

A  few days ago, Wizards released the following card, to little fanfare:

Brimstone Trebuchet comes from a long pedigree of pinger walls, with Wall of Forgotten Pharaohs and Electromatic Field before it, as well as Thermo-Alchemist.  Each of these cards plays effective defense while chipping in for a few points over long games, and often earn a valuable spot in Limited decks.  Like Brimstone Trebuchet, these cards usually have some sort of condition attached to make them more effective.  Here, we're asked to just put some Knights in our deck, and we'll be rewarded with a free point of damage (or even two in 2 Headed Giant) every time we do so.  I didn't think much of this card until I saw the following card, spoiled today:

Syr Carah, the Bold is quite the unusual uncommon.  It's legendary, which is obviously different for an uncommon, and it effectively draws a card each turn as well.  We also don't see many creatures these days that deal damage to other creatures each turn.  Remembering our first card, Brimstone Trebuchet, Syr Carah is a Knight, but triggers off of Instants, Sorceries, and itself rather than other Knights.  It's certainly a bit of a reach, but I think Red decks based around incidental damage done to the opponent over longer games than usual could be a major player in this set.  Red is an incredibly binary color in every Limited format thus far; it attacks, and it kills creatures with damage based spells.  If this archetype comes to fruition, more controlling red decks might be a feature of Throne of Eldraine.  Here's another cherry-picked piece of evidence:

I expect Searing Barrage to be an ideal removal spell for any controlling Red strategy.  5 damage should be enough to kill anything, but it's the 3 damage to players off of Adamant that really intrigues me here.  If you're already pinging your opponent repeatedly with Brimstone Trebuchet, any time you can deal additional incidental damage to your opponent will be much scarier.  I expect lots of games to end with a combination of Searing Barrages and Brimstone Catapult pings.

There's one obvious wrench in this plan, and that's the prevalence of Food tokens.  As this will be a readily available source of life gain available to basically everyone, it'll be a lot more likely that you'll have to deal 26+ damage to opponents before you can finish them off, making the ping plan a lot slower and less likely to work.  I think due to the presence of food, it'll be more likely that these Red pinging and incidental damage cards will serve more as a check to opposing Food than their own strategy, although the plan still works great against hungry opponents.

Until next time, (tomorrow, again!)

Kevin

@sealedawaymtg on Twitter