MOM's Daily Deck Tech: Pauper's Reckless Resolve

The general idea of Synthesizer Burn is to take advantage of cheap threats such as or to pressure your opponent. You then use and to push further ahead and push extra damage with and .

got a lot of attention during the preview season as it is a functional reprint of a widely played card from the most popular deck of the format. At the same time people were skeptical how impactful this addition would prove. Does Burn really need to double down on the effect? Generating card advantage is good, but Burn can't always spare mana to set up the next turns lest you enable the opponent to stabilize with , , on a , or just a plain followed by winning the game.

In the Challenge on Saturday, six Synthesizer Burn builds managed to place in the Top 32, in sixth, eighteenth, 21st, 24th, 27th, and 31st position. Four of these lists included a set of Reckless Impulse and Wrenn's Resolve. On Sunday five builds claimed Top 32 spots: seventh, ninth, 20th, 24th, and 27th. Three of these ran the set of the draw two.

This means, of the eleven builds that placed at this weekend's Challenges, 63% were running the new card, but there were two different takes! The tension point is the divide between the board and the stack. How much should you commit to either? was part of the stock lists in the last months and remained popular. You can even delve further into that strategy with cards like or . But you can also ignore all these token lines and run , , or just . This strategy is preferred when fighting over the board becomes too hard due to things like .

Good arguments for and against these approaches can be made. On one side you don't want to exile Rebirth with Impulse or Resolve and not be able to cast it for lack of sacrifices. Maybe as bad, imagine the only thing you have to sacrifice is when you don't have mana to spare. Hurting your ability to chain spells thus making the exile effects worse and slowing everything down. You also need to run more artifacts than a set of Synthesizers, so something like is needed, and this adds yet another card that doesn't deal damage. Going with the stack approach and choosing creatures with triggers seems to be a fine route to extract full value from the exiled cards. But most of these are two-drops and can be slow. Worse, you can risk exiling two and not being able to cast both! Finally you can choose a middle route and run both Kuldotha Rebirth and the Flamebreather.

To help you decide between those paths I selected two different decklists from this weekend and compiled tables with some of the relevant card choices between the versions that graced the weekend Challenges. Interesting to note is that the Kuldotha versions were preferred Saturday but didn't do that well on Sunday! So what are you going to do? Embrace chaos, roll the top of the deck, and go fast? Or mind your time to extract the most value from your effects?

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