It has been 5 weeks since Ravnica Allegiance came out, and each week I have covered a different budget deck for each guild. Today we will be ending on Rakdos, the perfect guild to put on a show-stopping performance!
Making a budget Rakdos deck was difficult, to say the least. A lot of the powerful and cheap cards that make Rakdos interesting in this set were already used in my previous articles, Priest of the Forgotten Gods in my Orzhov deck and Calvacade of Calamity in the Gruul deck. I didn’t want to retread any ground so instead of focusing on one card, I chose to focus on the mechanic of Spectacle.
Specatcle only cares about one thing, dealing damage. It doesn’t care how you deal it so long as you can hurt your opponent. We have seen Spectacle perform extremely well in the Mono-Red decks this season. One of the best ways to trigger Spectacle is by attacking with a creature, as this allows you to maximize your mana, without having to spend other cards to get the payoff. Thanks to Ixalan, we have another mechanic that cares about attacking in Raid.
One of the best Raid cards that has seen hardly any play is Ruin Raider. A 3 mana Bob that only asks you to attack is really powerful, and with a low enough curve he won’t punish you very much. Because this card hasn’t made any impact in Standard, he is super cheap and is a great card for a budget burn deck. Another raid card that hasn’t seen very much play is Rigging Runner. A first striking 2/2 for only one mana is really competitive but can be awkward if you can’t set it up. Raid and Spectacle do go hand in hand and can let us build a great aggro deck with just the commons and uncommons.
This is a list that isn’t as fast as a traditional burn list, but it can get away with it due to having more interaction. Drill Bit is the closest thing to Thoughtsieze that an aggro list can run in this meta. Thought Erasure is really good, but aggro decks need the utmost efficiency with their mana and Drill Bit is the best thing for both disruption and being cheap. Black gives us access to more sideboard cards than our Mono-Red counterpart, giving us 4 Duress to deal with any pesky Nexus of Fate.
When you splash Black in your aggro deck this usually means you are ok with playing a longer game. Ruin Raider and discard effects give Rakdos all the tools it needs to disrupt the opponent, while simultaneously burning them from 20 to 0. If you want to try a different flavor of burn, give Rakdos a try!
Link to Decklist: https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/1674999#paper
With that, I conclude the 10 Guilds of Ravnica and my budget brews for them! Who knows what kind of cards will come in the next set and whether guilds will even still exist anymore. Thank you all for reading, I hope you have a great week and an amazing Tuesday!
