Red Strategy

I have been playing ‘mono red’, meaning either all three red heroes or replacing one with River. I have not played codex in awhile but I have been having some ok success. Lets discuss red strategy.

I almost always go to at least tech two and tech in 2xCrashbarrow. If I am not planning on going to tech3 I will often take 1 copy of land octopus which has been great. If I am going to tech3 I usually buy tech lab so I can run gunship. If I am not planning to go to tech3 I will usually plan to win with crashbarrow/octopus/Burn. In this case its useful to start teching in burn spells quickly.

I have preferred plying monored instead of cutting Anarchy for Necro. The graveyard + barrows strategy is powerful but will usually lose to Garisson/Drill/Cadet or Discord/TerasQ. You need to pressure these strategies and potentially go for a burn plan. In this case having an extra gold is very important, especially against aggressive Vandy openings. Finally alot of red cards such as Lobber and Mad Man are powerful but often lead to card disadvantage. Having Zane let you spend gold effectively without spending cards. This has been very useful for me.

Questions:

What red strategies have you friends been using? Are people consistently getting to tech3 (the majority of the time I stop on tech2)? If you plan on teh3 is the techlab too costly? What about strategies that stop at tech1. I beleive stopping at tech1 was common before the sharks nerf. Hotter fire is a pretty powerful strategy imo. Under what conditions do you think it outperforms crashbarrow?

2 Likes

I’m still new to Red, but I’ve found the most success with accumulating 20 base damage over time. Had one game where I went in on Fire for burn spells and nova’d for double digit base damage in one turn to close out. My last game in XCAFS I went for Blood attrition and won by consistently hitting damage in, including one turn of heavy base damage after clearing the board.

I’m trying to remember if I ever went Tech 3 Anarchy for a win, but that’s commonly cited as a strategy for Red if they can’t attrition fast enough.

I’ll see if I can dig up links to said games later today.

This one, I messed up plenty of opportunity for damage, but lots of trickle. [XCAFS18] CarpeGuitarrem MonoRed vs Dreamfire [Discipline]/Feral/Necro

Turn 5 burndown, apparently not double digits, only 9 damage direct burn to finish things off. [CAMS18] CarpeGuitarrem Monored vs. codexnewb [Future]/Peace/Balance - #9 by codexnewb

Crashbarrows are pretty sweet, since they tend to go 2-for-1. I played with Shoddy Glider a bit in one game, and it seems like it might be better at pushing damage or killing priority targets when against a dude-swarm deck.

1 Like