Base Deck

This deck can be found in most game stores and online websites for about $30, which is a great deal! Out of the box, the game plan of this deck seems to just be to play a bunch of aggressive creatures, and use your mass of burn spells to kill your opponent as quickly as possible. This version utilizes the synergy between Wizard’s Lightning and a few key aggressive red wizard creatures, which we haven’t seen in Pioneer for a bit, but still theoretically can be effective on a budget. In addition to this change, we can also see four copies of Bomat Courier in the maindeck, a card that is usually not seen in red decks. This card was great in Standard due to how effectively it could be used to generate card advantage, but it has been outclassed in Pioneer due to how slow it is. Courier is also much less effective at generating card advantage compared to what we have now, in the form of Planeswalkers, mainly Chandra, Dressed to Kill. If we look to the sideboard, there are a large amount of changes. Magma Spray, Searing Blood, and Goblin Chainwhirler are all there to deal with smaller threats out of opposing aggro decks, which while good in practice, this is not how I have found to be the best way to approach the mirrors. Let’s go over a few changes I would make if you would be willing to throw a few more bucks at this archetype.

Base Deck +$50

One of the more expensive cards that the base deck is lacking is Eidolon of the Great Revel. This two-mana 2/2 turns a TON of matchups upside down, such as Lotus Field, Phoenix, and Spirits. Taxing your opponent whenever they cast most spells in their deck is well worth playing a smaller body. This card is one of the main draws to be playing Mono Red in this format, and sadly, there is no real suitable replacement. Therefore, because it is a $20+ card, we are only able to include two copies of this card in our deck.

The other changes are just cards that were not put in this deck, that really should have been. These are all super cheap, and should be easy pickups. Let’s run through the most important editions.

• 4 Kumano Faces Kakkazan – One of the best 1 drop ‘creatures’ in the format, it grows your dudes, it enables spectacle, it allows you to exile creatures, this little 1 mana enchantment does everything. Without this card, I do not believe this deck is playable.
• 4 Play with Fire – Basically a strict upgrade to Wild Slash, being able to scry when you target your opponent is an amazing benefit, it will dig you for whatever you need for the following turns. Remember, you can do this in your own upkeep in order to try to find a land
• 4 Skewer the Critics – In a deck with a mass amount of burn spells (and 4 Kumano), this is close to a strict upgrade to Lightning Strike

Lastly, there is a complete redesign of the sideboard, adding Lavacoils and Redcap Melees over Magma Spray and Searing Blood so you can have better matchups against Winota and Rakdos Midrange. 

Base Deck +$100

Now, if you really want to make this deck good, throw in another $50, and what does that get you? Well, the main draw to this is that you get to complete your playset of Eidolons! You also gain access to a much better sideboard, in the form of three Rampaging Ferocidon. This card is an all-star against one of your worst matchups – Rakdos Anvil. This not only stops lifegain, but punishes your opponents for putting more creatures into play! This is a bit better than Chainwhirler in those matchups, where although this one doesn’t kill anything and allows you to swing out in a key turn, Ferocidon allows you to play a much longer game against them. Lastly, we get to add one copy of Sokenzan, Crucible of Defiance. This is a strict upgrade to the first Mountain in your deck, but it comes up very little. 

Base Deck

The original challenger deck list manages to contain all the pieces needed to combo at bare minimum, along with the powerful pair of lands: Lotus Field and Thespian Stage. While the biggest omissions are in the rest of the mana base, the core of the deck is present in the Challenger deck. I would go so far as to say that out of the box, especially with the Lurrus ban, Lotus Field might be the most competitive deck even if you cannot afford any upgrades.

While you are certainly missing some of the powerful spells like Emergent Ultimatum and Bala Ged Recovery the main engine of Sylvan Scrying, Pore Over the Pages, Hidden Strings, and Omniscience are all present out of the box and can beat unprepared tiered decks.

Base Deck +$50

If we start with a $50 budget, the first thing we need to upgrade are some of the spell slots. While most of the primary spells are included, there are some reasonably priced upgrades we can use to quickly power up the deck.

Next up, we move to the other spell upgrades in Emergent Ultimatum, which are thankfully cheap, with three copies only costing a total of $7.05. After that, we can upgrade our filter spell from Strategic Planning to the better Shimmer of Possibility for a total of $0.44. Picking up a single copy of Galvanic Iteration for $0.95 rounds out our main deck.

Starting with three Bala Ged Recover, we can spend $11.25 of our budget to increase our constancy and up our land count without having to splurge on the expensive lands that will push us over our limit. Next up, we want to get a single Botanical Sanctum for $7.56. While ideally, we will end up with four Sanctums, on this budget we want to focus on the best spells possible and fill in the optimal mana-base afterwards.

Now that we’ve cleaned up the spell slots in the main deck, we move to the sideboard. Here we are going to fully finish our sideboard for the S-tier version of the deck. Starting with a Fry for $0.09, adding in three Leyline of Sanctity for a total of $16.32, two March of Swirling Mist for $2.20, two Mystical Dispute for $3.12 and finally two Path of Peril for $0.62. These sideboard cards will remain alongside the Thought Distortions and Peer into the Abyss from the Challenger deck all the way through the final version of the deck.

These upgrades get you all the spells in the deck and the only thing you are lacking are some of the upgradable lands for the ideal version of the deck. These upgrades will run you $49.60 total and puts you just under budget!

Base Deck +$100

Moving on to the $100 upgrade, we are going to keep the same $49.60 from above, since we want to keep all our spells and sideboard intact. The additional $50.40 will go directly towards upgrading the deck’s mana base. We start by getting the other three Botanical Sanctums, bringing the total for those four lands up to $30.24. We can also get the two Otawara, Soaring City to help deal with sideboard hate cards for $24.88. Those two upgrades eat through most of our budget, getting us up to a total of $96.16 cost from the original Challenger deck. We end up short one Breeding Pool and two Boseiju, Who Endures away from the final build we were aiming to reach.

We can also grab a Blast Zone for $3.17 to get us up to the full $100 and swap out for one potential Boseiju that we can’t afford on this budget. With the final Blast Zone, we are up to nearly full power, with just a few channel lands missing given their current exorbitant price tag.

Base Deck

Starting off with the deck right out of the box it’s clear that Wizards hasn’t been paying the grounds keeper, because that mana base is rough. Really? Four Temples and Two Check Lands? That’s the best you can do for us? I don’t know if you’ve looked at prices for Hengegate Pathway lately, but the landscaping bill is going to be pretty steep. Aside from that though, we’re off to a decent start. The deck comes with playsets of both of our lords in Supreme Phantom and Empyrean Eagle, as well as full playsets of two very important two drops in Rattlechains and Watcher of the Spheres. So poor manabases aside, things could definitely be worse.

Base Deck +$50

Alright, first thing’s first: let’s finish the playsets of Mausoleum Wanderer and Spell Queller. Wizards was so kind to already give up two of each, and thanks to this deck existing it’ll cost less than $15 to finish both playsets combined. With those two squared away let’s see what else is missing. A lot of the lands we could upgrade are almost immediately out of our price range. Hengegate Pathway will set us back $15 apiece, Hallowed Fountain is $11, and even the new Slow Land Deserted Beach would run us $40 for a playset. So, while it’s not great we’ll finish off the playset of Glacial Fortress for about $10 total. That’s half our budget gone, but we’ve made great headway. From here I suggest $10 for an additional Selfless Spirit to help out the control matchup, and then a playset of Skyclave Apparition at $15 will use the rest of our budget. 

All combined, I think that $50 really goes a long way to sprucing this deck up. The sideboard and manabase are definitely neglected, but we’ve managed to pick up all our other important tribal pieces. Which means this also takes care of a lot of the groundwork if you eventually wanted to take this deck and make it Bant Spirits by adding Collected Company and expanding on the currently middling manabase. Like all of these decks, if you’re looking for an effective in-road for Pioneer. Finding any of these decks for about $30 and giving them a little love will help you find a decent amount of success at the local level.

Base Deck +$100

Building off our initial $50 I think there are two upgrade paths you can potentially take. The first is to spend some money finishing off the sideboard. $10 to finish the playset of Selfless Spiritfor the control matchup, $20 for two copies of Rest In Peace to replace Remorseful Cleric, $16 for a playset of Mystical Dispute, and then the rest of our money either on Archon of Emeriaor Portable Hole. However, I think that a lot of what the deck already has in the sideboard can really hold us over till we’re ready for further investment. So while it might be a bit of a cop out, I want to use the second half of the $100 budget on a playset of Hallowed Fountain to help resolve some of our manabase woes. A playset of a Shock Lands for $45-50 is pretty good right now and these have several decks they can be played in making them a worthwhile investment as further explore the format. Both options definitely shore up one of the major deficiencies left behind from our mainboard upgrades, but with a deck as color intensive as spirits I think starting with the manabase is the way to go.

Base Deck

Being one of the more complete precon decks, the deck is certainly playable right out of the box. We got a copy of Lurrus (RIP), a copy of Thoughtseize, a playset of the pain lands and fast lands and all of the auras and creatures that you want to be playing. As far as playability straight out of the box goes, it might have been nice to have gotten the Pathways instead of the single Thoughtseize, but for long-term value I was glad to open the Thoughtseize instead.

As far as playability goes now, the base deck is strictly unplayable out of the box. I don’t mean this in a competitive sense; I mean you can not legally play this deck as constructed, since it contains a banned card in Lurrus of the Dream Den.

Base Deck +$50

With $50, we can make the same upgrades I made to the deck when I bought it on release day. A playset of Brightclimb Pathways still runs about $21 for the non-borderless version and are pretty essential to the deck’s fast-paced play style. We’re also going to add a playset of Fatal Push to the deck, which the precon surprisingly left out. The full playset will run about $14. If you want, you can spring for the FNM Promo version (I wish I did when I was buying my first playset) for about $3 extra for the entire playset.

At the time of writing, we definitely want a couple of Grafdigger’s Cages for the sideboard, which will take up $7 of our budget. This leaves us with $8, which we will use to grab a playset of Light Paws, the Neon Dynasty card that resurrected the archetype by allowing us to tutor and cheat out our auras. Four Light Paws will cost $4, and that leaves us free to grab a 50 cent copy of Kaya’s Ghostform for the maindeck and two Fractures for the sideboard (to deal with Weathered Runestone) at $1.50. We’re coming in slightly under budget, and even more so if you sell or trade in the illegal copy of Lurrus that you got in the base deck for $1.50 in store credit and the two copies of Stonecoil Serpent for $1.50 each.

Base Deck +$100

If you’re going straight into adding $100 worth of upgrades to the deck (rather than making the $50 upgrades above and then making another $50 worth of upgrades), I would skip on one Brightclimb Pathway in favor of one $17 Godless Shrine. On this budget, it’s much more advantageous to grab a shock land in your colors, as having more copies of dual lands accessing both colors in your deck on turn one makes for fewer forced mulligans. 

Otherwise, we’re going to make all of the upgrades we made in the $50 version of the deck, as those swaps are essential to  The entirety of the remainder of the budget is eaten up by two copies of Thoughtseize, totaling $35. Nearly half of the budget being taken up by two cards might feel bad, but these are not only crucial to the deck’s post-sideboard games in certain matchups, but will serve you well in the future should you continue to play decks with black mana. Consider it an investment in your Pioneer future.