Imagine a black night sky, not a star in sight. Look to your left, look to your right all you see is black. Suddenly the sky lights up with a beautiful red light. Suddenly there is a loud boom, the earth and sky shake. Fireworks explode into the night, it’s a celebration of some sort. What could it be? Why it’s the return of your emperor, Dong Zhou, the Tyrant and his intimidating army coming home from defeating Yuan Shao. Leading the way into town is none other than the greatest warrior of our time: Lu Bu, the adopted son of Dong Zhou. Sitting upon his mighty steed, Red Hare, the hot tempered giant is a force to be reckoned with. Dong Zhou, known for being a tyrant in the romance of the Three Kingdoms, was given a rather nice ability as a Magic card. The only thing I don’t like about him is that he doesn’t have Horsemanship or any additional abilities. His power and toughness leave some room for improvement as well. But, if he did have another ability or bigger P/T he would have been broken. In keeping up with the story and history, his “adopted son Lu Bu is way better. Given both haste and horsemanship, with P/T of 4/3, he could easily go head to head with Dong and win. In this article, I am going to share with you my final deck, using the legends of Portal’s Three Kingdoms. This deck is built around the typical Red deck: burn, land destruction, a few creatures, and some “capture” spells. In building a good Red deck, I had to carefully consider what cards I wanted to use and why. Here’s the end result.
Commander: Dong Zhou, the Tyrant
Chinese New Year
Click the arrow to download the above deck in .txt format(To load a .txt deck into Magic: Online’s Deck Editor, click “Load”, select “Local Text Deck”, find the location of the downloaded deck file and double-click the deck.)
Deck Breakdown
You may ask why use Dong Zhou as the commander in comparison to Lu Bu who is a better choice? Well, in staying true to the storyline of the Three Kingdoms, Dong Zhou was above Lu Bu. So like my other decks, I kept that up. For those of you familiar with the story line, Dong Zhou “adopted” Lu Bu, who later betrays him for the love of Diao Chan (who didn’t come online (Diaochan, Artful Beauty) and I am very sad). When I made this list, I was going for more of a direct damage approach, to parallel Dong’s ability. I have come to learn that fast creatures can sometimes fizzle out, and most of my decks have limited creatures. I find that instants and sorceries are more likely to hit than creatures. As you can tell by this list, I abuse X spells. One of my favourites would have to be Rolling Earthquake. I t deals X damage to players and creature without…YES WITHOUT Horsemanship. WOW! I love this card. With enough mana pumped into it, I can wipe the board and kill everyone. Why do this you ask? Well, why not? The whole point of most Red decks is to deal a lot of damage as fast as possible. Since EDH is a 40 life per person game, I had to rethink my strategy. Doubling mana output is a must for Red, and being so that Red doesn’t have mana fetch, artifacts and a few enchantments that fetch, produce, and double mana is very vital to this deck. Gauntlet of Power, Extraplanar Lens, and Mana Flare can help out quite a bit. However, with the cards you have to be very careful. They do help out your opponents and the last thing that you want is to lose to your own card. I like to be stingy with my mana help and card draw. My motto is: Help no one!
Another thing you may notice is my abundant LD. Some people think that Land Destruction is not cool in EDH, but I am not one of them. If using LD can help me win, I will use it. Keep your opponents down while you win in the sole purpose of FFA. Anywho, I digress, on to my spells. Kaervek’s Torch is another good X burn spell. This one is kinda Blue protected with the additional cost of 2 for any spell that targets it once its on the stack. This can come in handy when facing those pesky blue decks. Speaking of which, I recently added in Active Volcano, Reign of Chaos, Boil, and Flashfires, all of which are rather nasty in any format, but are especially nasty and funny in EDH. One thing I like to do when I have enough mana is play Firecat Blitz, attack with them all and then play Predator Dragon, devouring all of those cute lil’ kitties into one very big, mad dragon. I have gotten Fred (yes I named him and yes he’s a he.) to be 64/64, yes that is 30 kitty tokens, which against non flying creatures is very, very sick. One card I like using with Blitz is In the Web of War. Each token gets +2/+0 as it comes into play. This can be a very devastating blow to anyone. I considered Coat of Arms, but again that helps out the opponents and I’m not down for that. I don’t want to die to my own card.
One thing I like about Red are “copy” spells. Heat Shimmer, Radiate, Shunt, and Wild Ricochet can really throw your opponents off, especially against a Control type Blue deck, or a destructive Black deck. These cards are tide turning in my book.
Now lets move on to my mana base, shall we? Notice how I went big this time, 40 lands. I had to consider the fact that Red has no land fetch and very little card draw. Not wanting to be mana screwed, I added as much as I could. 40% is a good number to be at when running the spells that I do. Looking back at playing this deck, I cannot remember a time where I have been mana screwed, although I have been flooded which can be just as bad. I’ve played around with the land count a few times and have found it to be comfortable with 40. One land I found to be fun is Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle. This land can be very effective when dealing with creatures or opponents who just wont die. Only down side to this is that you have to have 5 or more Mountains out to activate the ability of it. Sometimes turn six can be too late.
Outro
Well, folks that is the last of my Three Kingdoms decks. What am I going to do next? Well you’ll have to tune in and find out. No, I’m not going to give you any major hints. All I will say is get your original decks ready! I’ll be looking for inspiration!Thanx for reading and be sure to catch Chaos EDH, every Sunday at 2PM Eastern!
Til next time, EDH fans!
~Kaya, DarkPrincess83
Good god, couldn’t they have dodged the variform inappropriate implications this general brings to mind?
Lol! I love Donging people. Too funny!
I have just recently watched a movie that covers the story of the Three Kingdoms. I couldn’t stand the English dubbing and switched to Chinese with English subtitles – so much better! Pretty interesting twists. Recognized most characters from their Magic cards (how geeky is that?!).
Dynasty Warriors is a video game that covers the Three Kingdoms. One of my favourite games of all time.
Nice article, gave me some new ideas for some of my EDH decks.
Two of my friends used to play Dynasty Warriors all the time. I always told them the name was meant to be “Die, Nasty Warriors” which is what it sounded like to me. And that seemed to be what they spent most of their time doing in that game anyway!
This list looks like a lot of fun, the only question I have is why did you choose to put the two pain lands in? It seems like just having 2 additional mountains would be better. Am I missing some interaction that makes them better than a mountain?
-byertron
I think she’s been watching me too often with my off color dual lands in my GW deck hehe
Lol, I totally forgot about those. Old list, I have since changed it. My bad! XD