Sheoldred, the Apocalypse and other Rakdos legends have joined their forces in the fastest Rakdos aggro deck ever!

Introduction

This is essentially a red aggro deck augumented with the best creatures and spells from black. Additionally, black was added to the deck to increase the number of good sideboarding options, such as Duress. When I picked cards for the deck, I wanted to address a specific lack that red decks often faced, namely drawing more cards. Therefore, I wanted to include as many value creatures as possible, such as Feldon, Ronom Excavator, who gives a card when he is dealt damage. Bloodthirsty Adversary gives you card advantage, when played at five mana, and hence it was a natural choice for a two drop. I added Gix, Yawgmoth Praetor, because I thought he would be great drawing cards with many small creatures and tokens. It also felt strange to play black without Sheoldred, the Apocalypse, so she was chosen as the top end 4-mana drop. And after all, she's pretty good at dealing damage and she also synergizes nicely with the card draw ability of Gix. Lord Skitter, Sewer King was included, because I wanted some graveyard hate as well as someone who generates tokens so that Goddric, Cloaked Reveler would more easily turn into a dragon. Squee, Dubious Monarch is there for the same job: generating tokens for Goddric. So, all in all I assembled a formidable force of legends, which aim at dealing lots of damage, while at the same time generating value and not falling into the trap that all your creatures are killed by Path of Peril or Temporary Lockdown.

Format

• The deck is for the Standard format, as of October 2023, with Wilds of Eldraine being the last legal set.
• The deck should be Tier 1 caliber.
• The deck can be played in both Bo1 and Bo3 but it is designed for Bo3. The deck actually started as an experiment to add good sideboarding options to a mono red aggro deck.
• The deck is pretty fast, and thus it's suitable for quickly grinding a large number of wins in the MTG Arena ladder.

Source

This is my own brew.

Strategy

Goddric, Cloaked Reveler

Goddric requires 2 non-land permanents to enter the battlefield in the same turn to trigger his celebration ability. You can achieve this in a few ways:

• Play Goddric in the same turn as Kumano Faces Kakkazan // Etching of Kumano flips.
• Tokens from Squee, Dubious Monarch and Lord Skitter, Sewer King can help Goddric to transform.
• Channel Sokenzan, Crucible of Defiance when Goddric is in play.
• Play any two non-land permanents normally.

Gix, Yawgmoth Praetor

Gix is good at generating plenty of card draws with lots of small creatures. Phoenix Chicks are great with Gix, because they usually fly unblocked. Tokens from Squee, Dubious Monarch and Lord Skitter, Sewer King are also great with Gix. Goddric, Cloaked Reveler can turn into a flying dragon and generate a card draw with Gix. If you have Sheoldred, the Apocalypse in play when you draw a card with Gix, you will actually gain one life instead of losing one.

Mana Base Statistics

• Total of 23 lands
• 19 lands produce red mana
• 16 lands produce black mana

Starting Hand Probabilities

Bo3 (No Hand Smoothing)

• At least two lands: 83.49 %
• At least two untapped lands: 72.06 %
• 2–5 lands: 82.46 %
• At least 1 red mana: 94.18 %
• At least 1 black mana: 90.08 %

Bo1 (Hand Smoothing)

These probabilities are approximations, since the exact hand smoothing formula is not known.

• At least two lands: 97.27 %
• 2–5 lands: 96.92 %

Other Probabilities

These probabilities do not take into account, which starting hand you keep. The probabilities are for on the play / on the draw.

Land Count

• At least 2 untapped lands by turn 2: 79.57 % / 85.35 %
• At least 3 lands by turn 3: 75.3 % / 82.79 %
• At least 4 lands by turn 4: 58.60 % / 68.28 %
• At least 5 lands by turn 5: 41.67 % / 51.99 %

Color Count

• At least 2 untapped red mana by turn 2: 64.97 % / 72.13 %
• At least 2 red mana by turn 3: 85.35 % / 89.68 %
• At least 2 black mana by turn 3: 76.02 % / 81.66 %
• At least 2 black mana by turn 4: 81.66 % / 86.18 %

Sideboarding

The sideboard cards are meant to be used as follows:

• Cut Down — Good against any aggressive deck. It can deal with Skrelv, Defector Mite, Thalia, Guardian of Thraben, and Raffine, Scheming Seer.
• Duress — Good against control decks and non-creature-spell-heavy combo decks.
• Abrade — Artifact removal. It can be sided in versus Simic Cauldron decks, for example. Abrade also nicely complements Go for the Throat, being able to destroy artifact creatures.
• Parasitic Grasp — Against aggro decks with lots of human creatures.
• Glistening Deluge — Good against white token decks, such as Team Handshake's Azorius Soldiers deck. A nice thing about this card is that it does not kill any of your creatures except rat tokens and goblin tokens.

When I picked the sideboard cards, I wanted to include low mana cost cards that work well in a fast aggro deck. I also tried to avoid spells that have double black mana in the mana cost, since it might be that you don't draw two black mana sources, if you have bad luck.