Most people I ask would say Kor Firewalker is a good card. Before I go any further, let me show it to you again. This is ManaNation's own exclusive spoiler card.

It's probably a good card since most people agree that it is. But what MAKES it a good card? What does it DO exactly? How does it compare to other similar cards like Vedalken Outlander, Burrenton Forge-Tender, or Silver Knight? This is what I'm going to discuss today.

In order to fully understand a card like this, as deceptively simple as it is, I think an entire philosophy must be understood. This card has a backstory that stretches through much of Magic literature and theory.

It encompasses the battle between White and Red, two enemy colors with a long hatred for one another. White has had many creatures in the past that hate on red.

These have seen play in the past but only accomplish a fraction of what Kor Firewalker can accomplish. What makes Firewalker different? The lifegain aspect? We've seen that in a card, too.

This card has seen frequent use in mono-red sideboards for the mirror. And it looks significantly worse than either of the two creatures above, but it's probably more effective at what it's supposed to accomplish. What makes this card worth running at all? It looks like pure card disadvantage. It doesn't "do anything" other than gain you life.

The Philosophy behind why Dragon's Claw is a good sideboard card against red decks is what Mike Flores and Adrian Sullivan described as The Philosophy of Fire. The Philosophy of Fire, as Flores stated, "speaks about the relationship of trading cards for your opponent's life. Specifically, the goal will be to translate a hand into a dead man." But it can be generalized even further, as I will demonstrate.

To understand the Philosophy, one must understand how a red deck works. The entire goal of a mono-red aggro deck like Red Deck Wins is to use as many resources, as efficiently and as quickly as possible, to get the opponent to 0 life. This means every mana spent, every card spent, and every turn has to get translated into damage somehow in order for the red deck to win. And hopefully after all the resources are spent, your opponent has died.

Taking some common examples from a RDW decklist, I'm going to show how each card translates into a set of resources equivalent to an amount of damage. For creatures like Plated Geopede, the amount of damage translates into a range (if I knew the EV of a turn-two Plated Geopede I would put that in the table). There's no real telling how much damage a Geopede is going to get in for, but we'll see how it compares to the other spells in a bit.

There is an additional cost that I left out from the table. In each of these scenarios, assuming you have multiple options, if you play one card, you lose the opportunity to play a different card given your resources. The option you didn't choose is the opportunity cost you paid to play the card you did choose. "In general", it's just best to maximize your mana efficiency by trying to use as much of your available mana each turn. This doesn't always hold, but if you go by that guideline, you probably won't lose that much in terms of opportunity cost.

Playing creatures is inherently different from playing burn spells when you're under the Philosophy of Fire. Creatures are like the "middle men" of dealing damage. They have to pass a few more obstacles on the ground, namely blockers and removal spells. However they come with a bonus – they have no technical limit to the amount of damage they can do. One Plated Geopede can hit for 0, 1, 3, 5, 10, 15, et cetera, depending on how unopposed it is and how many fetchlands you have to crack.

In essence, a creature that stays on the board has the potential to be equivalent to multiple burn spells. In this way, they act as inherent "card advantage" for the red player. The red player wants to maximize damage using as few possible resources, and creatures are thus a good investment. For a Plated Geopede, you only pay 2 mana and spend only one card, but the amount of damage this one card can produce is "limitless". (In order to unleash this potential, red players often "give up" cards like Lightning Bolt, which normally translate to 3 damage, to use on opposing creatures to clear the way.) Of course Plated Geopede has other limits – you only get one attack phase per turn, and the size of Geopede changes based on the lands that enter your side of the field. It also doesn't have haste, so it takes a turn to start working.

An elegant demonstration of the Philosophy of Fire is encompassed in the card Goblin Guide. A number of players initially shunned the Goblin Guide because of the sickening amount of card advantage it could provide the opponent. But red players following the Philosophy of Fire didn't care. Because it cost them one mana and one card for a huge amount of potential damage starting as early as a red deck can start, turn one. For red decks, this is a relatively good deal. The drawback was real, but it didn't conflict with the red player's main interest – killing the opponent quickly.

Red Deck Wins basically combines all the most efficient card damage spells and creatures and crams them together in a deck. This is how it wins. Now, let's take the same chart and assume a Kor Firewalker is on the field to block.

Of course, Kor Firewalker can't possibly block all of the creatures on the field by himself. So presuming it's not blocking every creature, just the one dealing the most damage, the red deck can get some value out of the rest of its spells. But that doesn't change the fact EVERY spell the red player plays will be reduced in effectiveness by one point of damage.

Every point of life gained with Firewalker is equivalent to gaining a fraction of a red player's card. On top of that, the life gain from Firewalker costs no mana, while the red player is spending all the mana he can to deal damage. The amount the white player has to invest in Firewalker is WW and one card, and for the rest of the game, Firewalker accumulates value with no added input. The red player has to put in multiple cards and lots of mana to negate the life Firewalker gains and damage he prevents.

It's hard to find another card that completely shuts down an archetype's strategy so efficiently. It's possible that the red player can still somehow manage to scrounge up the additional resources to kill the white player even with a Firewalker on the board. This would require a bit of luck, but it might happen. Unfortunately, white, given some time, can stabilize very easily in the mid to late game, when the Philosophy of Fire stops being nearly as effective. Red needs its window of opportunity in the early turns before opposing decks can stabilize. Time is of the essence. Kor Firewalker can start working as early as turn 2, barely giving red decks a chance to get any damage in before all their spells get a little worse for their cost.

So how does Kor Firewalker do against other decks running red, namely Jund?

Jund doesn't really care about the life gain part so much; it never tries to translate its cards directly for damage. Jund would rather accumulate as much card advantage as possible. But a lot of its favorable trades come from being able to remove permanents efficiently. In Jund, the only card that removes Kor Firewalker is Maelstrom Pulse, which costs more than than the little "BearClaw." Given that, there is no doubt the Firewalker can seriously impact Jund's ability to push through damage or its ability to race against a life-gaining, nearly unblockable creature – which, in a white deck may be more threatening than just a 2/2. I expect it to be decent but not game-breaking like against mono red decks.

The answers in general to Kor Firewalker are kind of inefficient. The best option is probably Deathmark if you have access to black mana. For pure red decks, you simply have to run Unstable Footing and hope they block with it. In response to blocks, you can stop damage from being prevented and kill it. For a while, I thought Blazing Torch could be an answer, but in that case, the creature is doing the targetting, so a red creature cannot target a pro-red one, even if the damage is colorless and would kill it. Mono-red may have to resort to splashing another color for a better answer.