Streamlined Killing with Big Hasty Flying Creatures

Latest Version Released on 22nd January, 2024

Introduction

This is a Rakdos deck deploying the best creatures and spells of the Standard format, with a focus on providing haste to big flying creatures with Reckless Stormseeker // Storm-Charged Slasher, quickly dealing huge amounts of unblockable damage to the opponent.

There are alternative versions of the deck below in the Deck Variants section, so please see what setup pleases you most.

Format

• The deck is for the Standard format with The Lost Caverns of Ixalan being the last legal set.
• The deck is probably Tier 1 caliber, according to DrSuckIt's testing, who used Lightning Strikes instead of Cut Downs.
• The deck can be played in both Bo1 and Bo3.
• 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.

Deck Variants

The deck can be tuned depending on the metagame you are expecting to encounter. Below there are other versions by other content creators, tuned for a specific metagame they expect to encounter.

1. Original Version

18th January, 2024 

The 4 Cut Downs of the original deck were put there because of the prevalence of mono red aggro in Standard Bo1, and I was hoping that they would be the right cards to get upper hand in that matchup.

2. DrSuckIt's Version

19th January, 2024

https://aetherhub.com/Deck/rakdos-beatdown

Changes

• 4 Lightning Strike instead of 4 Cut Down.

Advantages

• Lightning Strike can kill various 3/3 creatures.
• Lightning Strike can kill planeswalkers with 3 loyalty or less.
• Lightning Strike can damage the opponent.
• Fewer useless cards against creatureless decks.
• Lightning Strike has some use cases with combining damage from two or more sources and with first strike.

Disadvantages

• Lightning Strike cannot kill Raffine, Scheming Seer.
• No 1-mana spells in the deck.

Change Log

22nd January, 2024

• +1 Mountain
• -1 Swamp

This will up the chance of casting Dracosaur on turn 5 to 86.2 % / 89.7 % (on the play / on the draw). The chance of casting 4 mana Phyrexians on turn 4 goes down to 87.4 % / 91.0 % (on the play / on the draw), but it is still greater than that of Dracosaur. 1 additional Mountain will also help casting two red spells on turn 4, which is especially important, if you choose to use Lightning Strikes instead of Cut Downs.