"Mike, who are you rooting for? Are you rooting for Sligh?" Lan inquires; my friend of over thirty years apparently knows me so well... In all the ways that matter but loyalty.

"Dan is literally my teammate!" I insist, but after a little more banter, Lan was no longer alone.

"So Mike, are you switching your allegiances off of the team?"

Et tu, Andy Levine?

I mean I love the Red Deck, but not more than Tribe.

Our teammate Dan Sondike was in the Finals of this past weekend's Sacred Torch Showdown against Neal Sacks with an innovative take on Mono-Red.

If you've read about Dan, you know that he's been the Legacy third of my team with Andy Levine for the last couple of years. Dan, Andy, and I finished second in last year's NYCIS Trios tournament, which helped to qualify me for the Championship I was able to take down last winter.

This year, we did one better and actually won Trios.

I was already qualified for the Championship, but now none of us "had" to play the Sacred Torch Showdown, since Andy made Top 4 last year. Andy volunteered to do streaming commentary with Lan D. Ho all day. You should really watch it because they're great.

I wanted to disappoint myself again two weeks after Paupergenesis where I ended at 5-2 and a pretty staggering 11-4 in games... but once again missing the cut. Dan never gets to play Premodern but was game to learn the format.

So, he jammed a thousand Premodern Leagues on Magic Online last week and got Grow-A-Tog coaching from the man himself, my Spike Colony co-host Lanny Huang... all the way to the Finals.

His opponent in the Finals was Neal Sacks, who flew down all the way from Squee's House of Pizza to take some Premodern honor back to New England. While I was in Baltimore for Paupergenesis, local heroes Andreas Voellmer and SWB crashed the Top 8 of the Duress Crew Regional, with Andreas bringing the Massachusetts's trophy back to New York. Though not a member of the Duress Crew himself, Neal was getting ready to turn the tables back on New York.

He stomped on YT on the way!

I started the day 3-0 / 6-0 and won my first game against Neal in Round 4. You should have figured out by now that he was on Mono-Red Burn (the deck of my heart), but surprisingly, had been lobbying for a Feature Match before we sat down. I assumed he knew I was on Dreadnought; which led me to believe that he must have known something else I didn't know.

This felt very much like deja vu. I won my first seven games at Paupergenesis, too; and 2-0'd almost all my opponents... But missed the cutoff after a fourth-round loss that had started on a win.

Sure as anything, I dropped both sideboard games to Neal.

I guess I was on tilt because I managed to lose my next round, to Replenish, as well. Neal got me so fair and square. He really wanted it! But the Replenish match I approached wrong and executed wrong. The paper says I lost 0-2 but I was probably heavily favored to win both games. I just played so badly.

I basically should have done nothing. My opponent had nothing going on (just like all of an Attunement or an Attunement and a Seal of Cleansing) in each game. But I was all casting cards and drawing cards and eventually firing off Brain Freeze.

Brain farted for 3/10 of a second (after playing correctly in the previous game)

Finished 5-2 at Sacred Torch Showdown instead of Top 8. Deck was great, I beat my first two opponents with the MD Brain Freeze

Sadly broke the @grousehaus streak :(

Still #premodernmtg is the best

— Michael Flores (@fivewithflores) July 25, 2026

This is probably technically true; because I did in fact brain fart for a fraction of a second. I could have still played better the other 49 minutes. I didn't Daze my own Vision Charm (which I had the mana to pay for), which would have made my Game Two Vision Charm lethal.

The embarrassing thing wasn't that I cast a non-lethal Brain Freeze in Game One (again, I shouldn't have done anything, but it was a pretty defensible play given the line I did take), it's that I executed the "Daze my own Vision Charm" play correctly in the first game. My worst-case scenario should have been a draw.

That I 2-0'd every other opponent is almost worse than if I had just dropped at 0-2. I put a lot of pressure on myself over these things and I ended up not happy at all with how my day finished up.

But back to Neal.

When I finished licking my wounds for the day, I gave him a compliment that lit him up as brightly as actually winning the Sacred Torch Showdown: I snatched his deck sheet from Andy and took a photo of it. Because I want to play this innovative take at League this week and see what makes it tick.

Burn | Premodern | Neal Sacks, First Place Sacred Torch Showdown III

• Creatures (16)
• 4 Grim Lavamancer
• 4 Jackal Pup
• 4 Mogg Fanatic
• 3 Goblin Vandal
• 1 Goblin Patrol

• Instants (12)
• 4 Fireblast
• 4 Incinerate
• 4 Lightning Bolt

• Sorceries (3)
• 3 Volcanic Hammer

• Artifacts (3)
• 3 Cursed Scroll

• Lands (22)
• 12 Mountain
• 4 Wasteland
• 4 Wooded Foothills
• 2 Barbarian Ring

• Sideboard (15)
• 4 Mogg Salvage
• 4 Overload
• 4 Red Elemental Blast
• 3 Earthquake

Buy This Deck Export text

People say "Burn" or "Premodern Burn" like those words mean something. Look at Neal's deck and compare it against any of the decks you've seen me write or Tweet about for the last handful of years.

It doesn't have any of the big damage spells that Lanny and I like so much. No Ball Lightnings. No Sulfuric Vortexes (Lanny insists on playing four copies of that card main in his 22-land decks).

Even though this is a totally new look a the Red Deck, it is also not the Medvedev version that has been peppering top finishes on MTGO Challenges since Contraption opened up last year. Remember when I went to my first LobsterCon?

This past weekend was chock full of Pro Tour Champions!@OlleRade? probably signed more Sylvan Safekeepers, but I'll now always cherish my set of Urza's Baubles. "Remember Columbus" pic.twitter.com/VVwx7ySPJS

— Michael Flores (@fivewithflores) May 15, 2022

I got my Aaron Dicks-inspired Urza's Baubles signed by Pro Tour Hall of Famer Olle Rade and said I would be an Olle Rade guy for all time... But Neal's deck is going in two wildly different directions; neither one of them in the vein of the classic Aaron Dicks.

First of all, this is a 22-land deck, and there are three very unusual things about that statement:

1. Even though it's 22 lands, there are only four fetchlands. Neal played Wooded Foothills. I have a ton of decks competing for my Wooded Foothills right now but, I think I have a spare set of Bloodstained Mires in the binder. Just sayin'
2. There are only two Barbarian Rings. I can kind of see that. The Red-Green version I've played doesn't run it at all, and the classic Dicks didn't run a full set back in the day.
3. There are four Wastelands. This is the biggest departure from other Premodern Burn decks, and it's awesome. Neal built his deck to beat Dreadnought, and Wasteland allowed him to side in so much anti-blue action for Game Two. They just don't have any targets against a mana base of all basic Islands, but that's okay: He tore up Bryan Gulotta's Replenish mana base in the Top 4 and Dan's City of Brass in the Finals with ease. Jackal Pup + Wasteland was the most fearsome 1-2 punch of the late 1990s and made Dave Price the most popular player in 1998 when he won PT Los Angeles. I kind of love that Neal brought them back with this very convincing configuration.

A slightly higher land count is only half the mathematics here.

Look at that curve. Neal brought back Volcanic Hammer.

Not Urza's Rage like you may have seen at LobsterCon. Again, no Ball Lightning or Sulfuric Vortex. Absolutely nothing fancy like Medvedev's Pyrostatic Pillars, or high upside + high variance plays like Black Vise. Just Volcanic Hammer. Just a terrible, truly terrible, Incinerate.

But Volcanic Hammer and Incinerate are the expensive cards in this high-land deck. This is one of the leanest mana curves I've ever seen, even as a newly-minted Dreadnought main with mostly one mana spells myself.

Neal brought his own Pete Best -- the fifth Beatle -- with one copy of Goblin Patrol supplementing the usual four Jackal Pups. But he wanted it -- he really wanted it -- and ran Goblin Vandal in a main with sixteen one-drop attackers.

This deck just deploys like crazy, chips in a ton of tiny times with whatever awful critters, and then can actually cast so many of its burn cards because it has so much mana and its cards cost so little.

If something goes wrong? He has three Cursed Scrolls to sink his excess mana into.

It worked all day.

But none of that is what makes this deck so effective. None of it is why he was lobbying for the Feature Match. Frankly, I'm lucky we didn't get it, and he was on camera plenty on the way to winning the tournament anyway.

We split games one and two.

In Game One, Neal mulled to five, but I combo'd off on turn three anyway, and from my perspective it was just another Red Deck I was going to stomp on the way to the Top 8.

Neal led on a Goblin Vandal in Game Two, which was annoying, but I didn't think it to be insurmountable. He had nothing in the graveyard and just played out a Grim Lavamancer and a pair of Mogg Fanatics. I did some quick math and waited until my third turn to drop Powder Keg.

I had Phyrexian Dreadnought and Stifle in my hand but thought the Keg would be better. Neal sent everyone, and his Vandal pulled a can of spray paint and a rusty hammer out for my Powder Keg. The real vandalization is that the Weatherlight one-drop can be yours for $.20 but the Powder Keg will cost you.

As you can imagine, I Stifled the Vandal's ability. Neal countered my counter. In for a penny, in for a pound, right? I foiled his Red Elemental Blast with a Flash of Insight, but held back my Dreadnought and a Daze. Neal let that go. He had one mana open. I was salivating at the Overload I thought was coming.

He cast Mogg Salvage.

If people are going to play like this I'm going to have to re-think my sideboarding strategy. Daze isn't good anymore? Are people going to be more like Neal, or more like me and Aaron for the last several years? Daze is going to be a lot weaker in sideboard games if folks are going to adopt Mogg Salvage, that's for sure.

I never found a pair for my Dreadnought but Neal probably would have had something for it.

In Game Three I kept this six:

• 1 Island
• 1 Opt
• 1 Phyrexian Dreadnought
• 1 Stifle
• 2 Essence Flare

My seven was non-functional (remember my philosophy is to keep any lands and spells sideboarding, under the theory that the opponent is going to be able to break up your combo and you have to out-card them instead of out-speeding them, generally). This seemed like a heck of a six on the play.

I hit Neal's first two plays with Essence Flare but ended up discarding to hand size multiple times. It was one of those games where I never saw a second land until I saw several lands in a row, and the game was all but over.

That's the secret of his success; at the Sacred Torch Showdown, anyway.

Neal knew when we got paired he wasn't going to have a great time in Game One -- even with Goblin Vandal in his main. But his sideboard meant it in a way that I haven't seen since maybe Mark Gordon in 1999.

Twelve -- twelve -- cards for Dreadnought. Red Elemental Blast is good generally, and it served Neal well in his Top 4 and Top 2 matchups. Overload is so mediocre in so many matchups, but it certainly kills a 12/12 that costs one mana.

Mogg Salvage though? Overload will at least kill a Zuran Orb or sometimes a Sphere of Resistance, but Mogg Salvage is unsalvageable almost everywhere else.

These cards aren't "wrong" ... They're just for me. Neal wanted to beat Dreadnought after sideboarding and he did. He beat it into the ground in sideboard games, including Our Hero.

Maybe that's the secret of Burn. Burn is so good at beating so many decks but has been like 25/75 against the best deck played by many of the best players. Neal trusted in a lean, hyper efficient, five Beatles-and-a-Wasteland main... And relied on a sideboard that would beat the one deck he thought he would really have to.

He was right.

Can't wait to try this great new deck list.

LOVE

MIKE