“Mono-Red Madness is a burn-focused combo-aggro deck that leverages discard outlets like Faithless Looting and Lava Dart to cast Fiery Temper at its madness cost, triggering damage-on-cast payoffs such as Kessig Flamebreather and Guttersnipe to rapidly accumulate lethal damage. Voldaren Epicure provides an early discard outlet and incidental life drain, while the deck chains cheap spells and looting effects to maintain card velocity and keep the damage pipeline flowing. The gameplan is to overwhelm the opponent before they stabilize, using the madness engine to generate mana-efficient damage well above the rate of the spells' face costs. The manabase is only Mountains, so the deck never casts its one blue card, Sneaky Snacker ({U}{B}): Snackers are discarded to the looting effects and return from the graveyard tapped on a third draw. Pyroblast and Red Elemental Blast therefore have no real targets in this matchup and should stay in the sideboard; graveyard exile is the answer to the Snackers. Its creatures are small but not uniform: Voldaren Epicure is a 1/1, Sneaky Snacker a 2/1, Guttersnipe a 2/2 and Kessig Flamebreather a 1/3. A 1-damage sweeper such as End the Festivities or Electrickery kills only Epicure and Snacker, and a 2-damage sweeper such as Fiery Cannonade or Breath Weapon kills everything except Flamebreather.”
Missing sideboard cards? The full 15-card sideboard runs about $70.85.
Buy sideboard on ManapoolThis is a pure race where both decks share the same core, so the player who removes the most blockers and answers Sneaky Snacker's recursion wins. Searing Blaze is a two-for-one that kills Guttersnipe or Flamebreather while hitting their face, and End the Festivities cleans up Voldaren Epicure or a returned Snacker while pinging them for 1. Relic of Progenitus should mostly be used in its {T} mode to exile their Snackers one at a time from the graveyard before the third-draw trigger, saving the exile-all mode for when disrupting their whole graveyard outweighs our own discarded Snackers. We're cutting all three Guttersnipe here since they're a 2/2 that dies to nearly everything they're pointing at us and the matchup is won more by removal and reach than by extra damage triggers; Sazacap's Brew and Highway Robbery are the slowest card-flow pieces and come out to make room.
Dimir Control's main deck plays no red cards, and nearly everything it uses to interact or generate card advantage is blue, so Pyroblast and Red Elemental Blast are excellent here. They hit Counterspell, Dispel, Brainstorm, Lorien Revealed, Spellstutter Sprite, Faerie Seer, Ninja of the Deep Hours and Baleful Strix, which is both blue and black. Countering their Counterspell or Lorien Revealed, or blowing up a Baleful Strix, keeps our damage pipeline uninterrupted against a deck that wants to grind. Their black removal like Snuff Out and Cast Down is not blue, so these spells can't stop it. Sazacap's Brew and Highway Robbery are cut since they're our clunkiest, most reactive-feeling draw spells in a matchup where we need to be proactive before Thorn of the Black Rose and card advantage take over; one Guttersnipe comes out since it's a fragile 2/2 that dies to Snuff Out or Cast Down for no immediate payoff if they simply counter our follow-up spells.
Spy Combo wants to flood its graveyard and either cheat out Balustrade Spy/Troll of Khazad-dum via Dread Return or grind with mana dorks and card advantage, so Relic of Progenitus's exile-all mode is strong here since disrupting their graveyard value matters far more than protecting our own. End the Festivities and Searing Blaze give us cheap, efficient removal for their small early creatures like Elves of Deep Shadow, Quirion Ranger, and Tinder Wall before they can ramp into bigger threats. We're racing a deck with almost no direct interaction, so Guttersnipe's 2/2 body is a liability that trades down against their numerous small creatures; cutting it along with the slower draw spells (Sazacap's Brew, Highway Robbery) lets us lean on more efficient, proactive cards.