Tibalt's TrickeryTibalt's Trickery by Anna Podedworna

Each color in Magic has its own strengths and weaknesses. This is one of the first things you learn about the game when you start and is what keeps most people playing for years.

When playing against a white deck, you can expect that they’ll focus on protecting their permanents. The color lends itself to gaining life, exiling threats from your board, and creating far too many tokens for their own good.

Except, of course, if you’re following this series and are looking to do something a little different. Then you might encounter a white deck who is more inclined to sacrifice their own life and permanents than damage yours!

What Is Playing “Out Of Type?”

Despite the fact each color has certain playstyles it doesn’t support, it’s not common for a mechanic to be absent entirely. Green decks aren’t known for their creature removal spells, but there are options available to you. Not to mention alternate methods of accomplishing the same thing.

Playing Out Of Type or “Off-Color” is an exercise finding those technicalities and exceptions in the color pie and making a deck out of them. It isn’t always easy and oftentimes involves cobbling together mismatched mana curves with an odd distribution of cards.

But no one expects it.

A Quick Disclaimer

This (probably) won’t win you any games.

As a part of the Commander Unoptimized series, this is explicitly intended for lower-bracket games where the table is willing to explore flexible deckbuilding. The goal isn’t to make the best engine or unlock the potential of super rare sleeper hits.

That being said, the goal doesn’t preclude you from winning. Just because you’re taking the scenic route to victory doesn’t mean you won’t arrive. It just won’t involve staple cards of the color and your mechanics will feel unorthodox even to the most adventurous of players.

When you see a red deck burning through your life through a string of mana-cheating and impulse-drawing, you might want to change things. Or maybe you want to play the long game, patiently building a web of interconnected pieces that finally come down like an avalanche.

That’s where off-red shines.

What Red Does Well

Gotta Go Fast

Mono-red aggro is a dominant playstyle for a reason. Whether Goblins, Dinosaurs, or Werewolves, there are many different ways for red players to have significant board presence early. Red’s creatures are strong but cheap and often have haste, allowing them to achieve immediate value.

This doesn’t simply involve creating a ridiculous amount of creature tokens, though it certainly can. It also means high-value, low-costed juggernauts. Mana producers. And lots of haste.

No, Seriously, It Goes Fast

Red specializes in generating floating mana, where you have to capitalize on it immediately or lose it. And often, red mana-cheating trails into other spells that continue to mana-cheat, meaning you effectively are playing that turn at a discount.

Combine this with the fact that red is known for impulse draw, exiling the top card of your deck and being able to play it that turn. And not always your own, sometimes you can even impulse draw from other players’ decks!

Direct Damage

When it comes to direct damage, red is second to none. It has a range of effects that damage one, all, or multiple targets. This can affect players to deal enough burn damage it’s reasonable to win by dealing direct damage alone. Alternatively, it can involve discount boardwipes for anything that isn’t indestructible or unreasonably tough.

Sometimes, it even manages to combine damage with other, non-damaging effects. Syr Carah, the BoldSyr Carah, the Bold comes to mind.

But red doesn’t stop there. It also has quite the streak of punishing its opponents for removing its permanents. And sometimes, it doesn’t even matter if your opponent is the one removing them! Primarily for Devils, so long as the blood flows they are happy to deal damage for you.

Artifacts

Red has some of the highest artifact synergy in the game. Aside from strong artifacts that are red-colored, it has abilities to make artifacts cheaper, equip them for free, or otherwise get them onto the board faster and easier than any other color.

This even extends to trashing your artifacts to gain additional value out of them. Generally this manifests by gaining mana, which is always nice. And cards like Trash for TreasureTrash for Treasure give you multiple uses for them! But there's always more than one use for a tool if you're thinking creatively.

Then there’s the many different artifacts you can properly utilize in order to gain value from the above mentioned cards. Some scale off of themselves while others rely on an expanding network of artifacts to bolster themselves.

On top of that, there are mechanics such as For Mirrodin! Bringing an Equipment onto the battlefield immediately equipped is certainly useful, but then you can start playing with them. Alter the stats of your Rebels and suddenly you have a flash-mob armed to the teeth.

Pumping Creatures

Red quite enjoys mid-combat instants that juice its creatures power. Though while white grants indestructibility and green hexproof or reach, red focuses on first strike and raw power.

But What If…
… You Play a Red Deck Where You’re a Scheming Mastermind?

It isn’t sustainable to fuel your deck off of rage and passion, see? You need sustainable mana production. Creatures that stick around. Forget that “direct damage” nonsense, that’s what your creatures are for!

Scaling

The one thing red struggles most with is sustainability. Planning. Setting something up on one turn and capitalizing off of it on another.

You know, core parts of the game integral to formats like Commander?

Whether oil or power counters, red actually doesn’t struggle to find scaling cards. Particularly on artifacts! However, the greatest support red finds is for disposable, flash-value permanents.

Red has enough artifacts and support for them that it’s too close to trad-red for my taste. Enchantments, however, are rare by comparison and therefore fair game. And it actually has a few powerful ones.

Even if most of these revolve around dealing damage, it isn’t as if they’re staples for red. And if you want an alternate means of scaling, try your creatures with cards such as First Day of ClassFirst Day of Class.

Removal

By this, of course, I’m excluding “removal via damage.” Red’s strength is its ability to beat things into submission and burn its opponents down. But sometimes you just need to remove a threat without all the song and dance of damage.

Luckily, red can do this fantastically against artifacts. While that might veer a bit too close to trad-red for the taste of some, given how tied into red’s identity artifacts are, I see destroying them as well-enough out of type to be worth including. Plus, green loves its artifact removal just as well, meaning it’s not only red’s domain.

Copying

This is a feature I honestly wasn’t sure how off-red it truly is. Red has a large amount of cards and mechanics that copy other spells, primarily instants and sorceries. But at the same time, that’s almost never the domain of mono-red, it quite often finds itself the backbone of Izzet decks.

In fact, I would go so far as to say the copying of spells is more Izzet than red, though your mileage may vary. I feel it’s off-red “enough” to include in such a deck. Not to mention, it gives you more flexibility and responsiveness than "slap together some enchantments and buff your creatures."

Chaos

Now, you might be wondering why chaos would ever be in off-red. After all, red is the color of chaos and spontaneity!

But have you ever built a red deck entirely around chaos?

Not only does this delve into a playstyle that isn't seen very commonly, at least not focused on, it also gives your opponents pause. You can't control what's going to happen. Do they negotiate with you? Take you out early? Or do they ignore you?

How big of a risk are you, really, if you're random?

As integral as it is to red from a thematic sense, mechanically it doesn’t show up very often. Which makes sense, as adding randomness decreases the skill required to pilot a deck. But what’s life without chaos?

What’s a game without chance?

Work Smart, Not Hard

On the tails of chaos, red also has quite a few more options to directly interface with your opponents' plans than I expected. This is most obvious in the blue-red dichotomy through cards like PyroblastPyroblast, with them having cards to specifically target one another.

But there are other ways to alter your opponents’ plans. If you use them at key moments during the game, you can turn your opponents' plans against them. Instead of overcoming them with strength, subtly orchestrate their defeat and then capitalize on it.

Red Is Great

It was actually surprisingly difficult to find things that aren't solidly covered by red. Which, for the color of passion and spontaneity, is actually quite thematic! I always think mono-red aggro or a splash of direct damage in a multicolor deck, but it has hidden depths I wasn’t expecting.

Certainly, it struggles with counterspells and permanent exiling is rare, if at all present in red. But it can handle early game with cheap spells it can draw consistently. Mid-game it has enough heft to continue its momentum assuming it pruned threats.

Even late in the game, a patient red player will be able to light the powder keg they set up earlier in the game. Whether this manifests as a massive scaled Dinosaur or a board of near-infinite artifacts, timing is the key to off-red’s success.

Though I suppose it’s much more fun to rush down the first person to deal damage to you, so the choice is yours.

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