The Minotaurs

Last week I wrote a piece on a pre-built Magic: the Gathering deck I had been trying out, Voracious Rage, and stated how it had been saving me from getting embarrased against my work mate. I have now had a good chance to play with this further and to have a go at refining it to improve its performance.

I have played a good number of games using this deck against my colleague's mono-red aggro deck, and so far the win/loss ratio is roughly 50%. The original decklist is as follows:

Lands (25)

• 14 Mountain
• 11 Swamp

Creatures (22)

• 2 Borderland Minotaur
• 3 Deathbellow Raider
• 1 Fanatic of Mogis
• 2 Felhide Brawler
• 1 Felhide Petrifier
• 1 Insatiable Harpy
• 2 Kragma Warcaller
• 1 Minotaur Skullcleaver
• 3 Pensive Minotaur
• 1 Pharika’s Chosen
• 1 Rageblood Shaman
• 2 Ragemonger
• 1 Spawn of Thraxes
• 1 Warchanter of Mogis

Other spells (13)

• 1 Cast into Darkness
• 2 Flurry of Horns
• 1 Lightning Diadem
• 2 Magma Spray
• 1 Pinnacle of Rage
• 1 Rollick of Abandon
• 1 Searing Blood
• 2 Spiteful Blow
• 2 Starfall

The first area for improvement I saw was the lands. I simply decided to drop two each of the mountains and the swamps, and replaced them with 4 Rakdos Guildgates. This makes a nice, straightforward fix to try and limit the chance of not getting the mana needed. It helped that I had 4 Rakdos Guildgates in my collection not doing anything.

I found that the creature list was pretty good, but perhaps a little too thinnly spread, in that there are lots of one's and twos. Also, there are three creatures in the list that are not minotaurs, and several minotaurs that are expensive for what they give you (Warchanter of Mogis, i'm looking at you).
There are a few of really key creatures to how I play the deck, and those would be the Rageblood Shaman, the Ragemonger, and the Kragma Warcaller. These are creatures I am looking to add duplicates of to the deck as they add good value for their cost and synergise well with the other minotaurs.

One area where this deck has really started to shine, compared to the previous decks I was playing, was in its Instants & Sorceries. The cheap removal spells, the Magma Sprays and the Searing Bloods, have improved my chances of keeping my life total high enough to get the minotaurs going. However, amongst these spells there are some that are very high cost, and this limits their usefulness: a good example of this is Lightning Diadem, which has a converted mana cost of 6 for 2 damage to one creature and a +2/+2 to another, at Sorcery speed. Many of these high costs spells are areas I am looking to improve, and hopefully replace them with lower cost removal spells.

I currently have an order placed for plenty of new cards to (hopefully) improve this deck. When I have those, and I have changed round the cards, I will post the new deck list and let you know the results from play.