Frenzy

I give you, the evolution of a deck.

3 Sleight of Hand
3 Lava Spike
1 Seething Anger
3 Reckless Charge

3 Psychic Puppetry
4 Reach Through Mists
3 Consuming Vortex
4 Glacial Ray
3 Unnerving Assault
3 Lava Dart 

4 Wee Dragonauts
4 Gelectrode

4 Steam Vents
9 Mountain
9 Island

To keep you from having to look up all the cards, here's a quick overview:

Wee Dragonauts get +2/0 when I play a sorcery or instant, the Gelectrode untaps every time I play an instant or sorcery. So the idea is to swing with a flying insane-o-creature while having pinged with the Gelectrode three times, do it again and my opponent is dead.

The deck can be explosive as hell which is good and it can also sputter and die like last night's Taco Bell, which is less good. Still, I always think of  Groundskeeper Willie and the wee turtles when I play this deck so even if I lose, I get a laugh. There may even be some unwritten rule that says when you play with the Wee Dragonauts, the wee turtles must be referenced. Maybe a judge could look into that for me.

Whenever I build a deck like this, there's the core of fisty awesome that I'm trying to pad around with spikey goodness and sometimes I get that and sometimes I just run out of steam, which is what happened here. Damage; good, drawing; good, being able to reuse spells with Arcane; good but then there's that last section of cards that I don't know what to do with.

Unnerving Assault, I'm looking at you. In theory, this seems great, of course; blunt the opponent's creatures while sharpening your own but there are only eight creatures in this deck and four of them don't want to attack. The Assault really is there to help the Dragonauts or maybe blunt an opposing attack just a little. But spells have to do a lot of the dirty work here and somehow I understood that, which is why the Arcane mechanic matters in this deck. Being able to graft a spell onto another spell and then play the grafted spell means that it's possible to kill someone very, very quickly, if Gelectrode is out to tap thrice, Dragonauts is swinging for seven and the grafted spell is Glacial Ray, that's four more damage. So why bother with the Assault?

The question is, how can I get more mileage out of my spells?

This question has plagued the deck for awhile and even though the card came out two years ago, the answer finally struck me: Pyromancer Ascension. I've been bouncing that card around in my head since it came out because it's just the kind of card nobody cares about-which nobody did for nearly two years. I think that this deck might be a good match for Pyromancer Ascension though and is worth testing.

Aside: this is why players ought to look for cards that seem interesting to them. A year ago, Pyromancer Ascension was the kind of card you could pick up for fifty cents, now it's two dollars. My Money rule. Sure, we can't always have our foresight caps on and certainly not every card-most, as a matter of fact-don't have price jumps like that. When they do, however, and you've been playing with the card for awhile already, it's pretty gratifying to have the experience of using that card/strategy under your belt. /Aside

So I'm replacing Unnerving Assault with the Ascension; how do I make sure I can put counters on it? With the Proliferate mechanic and a lot of duplication. So here's the new list:

4 Wee Dragonauts
4 Gelectrode

4 Steam Vents
9 Mountain
9 Island

3 Psychic Puppetry
4 Reach Through Mists
3 Consuming Vortex
4 Glacial Ray
3 Lava Spike

New cards:
3 Seething Anger
3 Pyromancer Ascension
4 Volt Charge
3 Tezzeret's Gambit

The main plain is still the same: Wee Dragonauts and Gelectrode get bonuses when I play sorceries and instants, so play those spells and use the bonuses to win. Re-use those bonuses by using the Arcane mechanic to help give the deck both speed and reach.

But now, in order to focus on the reach aspect of this deck, I've added in Pyromancer Ascension so I can double my spells for free. To get the Pyromancer online, I've tried to use more of the same kind of spell and I've enlisted the Proliferate mechanic so that I don't have to work as hard in order to get my enchantment active.

The one spell that sticks out is Seething Anger because, like Unnerving Assault it affects creatures. I kept that in there for two reasons: first, it's cheap to cast. I can let it go without buyback and get a huge bonus on the Dragonauts or worst case, even the Gelectrodes. I can cast it with buyback and if I've got an active Ascension then help set up an even bigger bonus. If I don't have an active Ascension, the buyback means that the spell is reusable until I can get an active Ascension. Maybe that's the Glory of Cool Things but what the hell, I accept that TGoCT is a good reason to add a card to a deck.

So now it's time to test it out and see how it works.