"Coin Flip" decks: RDW

Flipping coins to win! There are actually decks that revolve around this, a friend of mine had a pretty fun one, they revolve around cards like Desperate Gambit, and as the name suggests, relies heavily on luck. There is a card that increases your chances with the flips, Krark's Thumb, but other than that it's pretty much just dumb luck. Regardless of the amount of fun flipping coins and hoping to win is, I didn't mean it quite that literally. I commented that I play a deck called "RDW" (Red Deck Wins), and sometimes it functions extremely like a coin flip deck. The difference comes on what you get lucky with, instead of flipping a coin you're relying on getting a good opening hand and having the next couple cards be helpful.

In an RDW deck (and somewhat with other fast-paced aggro decks) the idea is to win by turn 3 or 4, if you can't win by then you're probably going to lose. Now remember real "coin flip" decks had Krark's Thumb to increase their chances (effectively doubled exponentially for every Krark's Thumb in play actually), normal decks have another way of increasing their chances of winning their coin flip, have a simple win condition, and play lots of cards that do the same thing. With RDW in particular this is fairly easy since it only needs two things really, as many small creatures in play as possible, and a way to increase their effective attack power. OK, so one more thing, speed, everything must be very cheap to play (mana-wise). Well it's Red, so we automatically get cheap creatures, Goblins, so we're already off to a great start, then we can look at artifacts and we get Memnite and Ornithopter, those are FREE! Since we added some artifacts we get another bonus, Kuldotha Rebirth, now we can turn that Ornithopter into three 1/1 Goblins, all on turn one.

Alright, so we have fast cheap creatures, now we just need a way to increase their Power... it used to be the only real way we had to do this was with Goblin Bushwhacker, which is amazing, because those three 1/1 Goblins we had on turn one are now four Goblins that are all 2/1 and can attack on turn two! This isn't quite enough though, remember what I said about playing lots of the same card. Unfortunately there aren't any other cards that do the same thing as Goblin Bushwhacker, but we do get a new mechanic as of Mirrodin Besieged, Battle Cry. Battle Cry is a mechanic on creatures that says "when this creature attacks all other attacking creatures get +1/+0", so now we have something very similar to Goblin Bushwhacker on cards like Signal Pest and Goblin Wardriver.

So now we have 6 cards that you want play sets of, there's room for 4 more play sets, two go to Goblin Guide and Goblin Warchief. The other two should go to burn cards to keep your opponents board clear. (I use Lightning Bolt and Forked Bolt.) After that it's all about figuring out exactly how many lands you want and maybe having an extra creature or two.

I played my RDW deck at the last FNM, took 3rd place, someone else I know was playing a deck almost identical to mine, he lost almost every round. What it really comes down to is "shuffle shuffle shuffle - 'Did I get a good hand?!' - if you did, yay you win, if not, mulligan and hope for better luck, or just hope their deck is REALLY SLOW". A few games I let someone get up to 6 mana, yeah I lost.