Every set is an opportunity to look at Magic in a new way. If you've been reading my articles for any length of time, you know that I've long been writing a review of the Red cards in new Standard sets, specifically from how they affect things from a "Red Mage" perspective.

Well, there is something unique and exciting about the Core Set 2020 compared to sets in the past: it is actively focusing on Red in a very specific way, by including three different copies of a Planeswalker named "Chandra". I've wracked my brain and searched my memory banks, and I don't think that Wizards of the Coast has actually ever done something like this before, so immediately hopes soar and my interest waxes - can Core Set 2020 live up to this for a Red player?

The Philosophy

What does it mean to base a review of a set from the perspective of a particular color?

In essence, this is about looking at cards from the perspective of a base Red deck, even if it splashes, as opposed to a deck that full on plays two colors.

Let's see these two embodies, with Andrew Cuneo playing a deck that uses Red and Jody Keith with a deck that is Red.

Gruul Aggro | War Standard | Andrew Cuneo, Mythic Championship III

• Creatures (46)
• 1 Ripjaw Raptor
• 3 Legion Warboss
• 3 Skarrgan Hellkite
• 4 Growth-Chamber Guardian
• 4 Gruul Spellbreaker
• 4 Llanowar Elves
• 4 Rekindling Phoenix
• 4 Thorn Lieutenant
• 3 Siege-Gang Commander
• 4 Dire Fleet Daredevil
• 4 Goblin Chainwhirler
• 4 Rekindling Phoenix
• 4 Rix Maadi Reveler

• Planeswalkers (3)
• 2 Domri, Anarch of Bolas
• 1 Karn, Scion of Urza

• Instants (9)
• 4 Shock
• 2 Shock
• 3 Carnival // Carnage

• Sorceries (7)
• 3 Domri's Ambush
• 4 Lava Coil

• Lands (64)
• 7 Mountain
• 9 Forest
• 4 Rootbound Crag
• 4 Stomping Ground
• 1 Swamp
• 14 Mountain
• 1 Cinder Barrens
• 1 Rakdos Guildgate
• 4 Blood Crypt
• 4 Dragonskull Summit
• 1 Angrath, the Flame-Chained
• 4 Duress
• 2 Fiery Cannonade
• 1 Fight with Fire
• 3 Legion Warboss
• 1 Shivan Fire
• 1 Status // Statue
• 2 Theater of Horrors

• Sideboard (15)
• 2 Collision // Colossus
• 1 Thrashing Brontodon
• 2 Dire Fleet Daredevil
• 4 Lava Coil
• 1 Sentinel Totem
• 2 Domri, Chaos Bringer
• 3 Vivien Reid

• Enchantments (2)
• 2 The Eldest Reborn

• Artifacts (4)
• 4 Treasure Map

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One of the key things about a base Red deck is that the vast majority of the spells in the deck should require Red mana. Jody's deck is pre-War of the Spark, and while it has access to Black and he can make use of the power of this extra color, there are only two cards in his main deck that demand that Black mana.

Compare that to Andrew Cuneo's Gruul list from the recent Mythic Championship III in Las Vegas. Even though the majority of Andrew's deck is Red, nearly half of it is Green. This is fully two-color deck.

The philosophy of this series of articles has always been to focus not on how good a card is that is Red, but how good a card is in a Red deck.

Without further ado, let's begin the Core Set 2020 Red Review!

The Card to Watch

This category is always a tenuous one - the card in question could be explosive for Red, but it might just not come together immediately. A card like Ugin, the Ineffable holds a lot of promise for a Red deck, but sometimes that promise isn't necessarily delivered. Other times, a card like Experimental Frenzy shows up and blows up the world.

I've thought about this long and hard, and I think this card has the potential to be truly frightening. By itself, a Red deck is likely to treat this card essentially as an Azor's Gateway, which is a solid enough card on its own. It also is an incredibly powerful card in conjunction with cards you might already be playing, like Experimental Frenzy.

However, when combined with the three very powerful Chandra in the format - Chandra, Fire Artisan; Chandra, Awakened Inferno; and Chandra, Acolyte of Flame - some truly absurd things can happen. Each of these Chandra have powerful abilities, and additional activations of them do not feel reasonable. A one-mana-activation-per-Planeswalker on The Chain Veil is quite intense. It's easy to imagine Chandra, Fire Artisan and Chandra, Acolyte of Flame working together in tandem to just devastate an opponent because of Chandra's Regulator.

This is a max-min card of potentially high returns with a "min" side of a very solid effect. I don't know if we'll see a three-or-more Chandra deck in Standard, but if we do, it will be this card that makes the deck feel obscene.

The Excellent

This card was almost my "card to watch", acting as it does, like a Standard-legal Snapcaster Mage. The first loyalty ability is a very sneaky virtual "+1", and it won't do much else than that in most decks, unless you are going Full Chandra. The second loyalty ability is a very serviceable means to knock down a Narset, Parter of the Veils or knock out a Teferi, Time Raveler that has drawn a card, or to simply get in some quick damage (which, because I'm old, reminds me of Suq'Ata Lancer).

The third ability, however, let's Chandra fight a long fight, or end a fight that is underway. There are plenty of cheap spells to be reused that an opponent has to give a damn about, and since you're already in Red, a great deal of these could start to threaten the end of the game.

Finally, the combination of the last two abilities really just means you can play for a short game much more easily, secure in the knowledge that Chandra, Acolyte of Flame can close that game out. This is a hell of a card, and it took a lot of thinking not to make this one the "card to watch"; in retrospect, maybe I'll look at this like my mistake with Light Up the Stage and Skewer the Critics.

I love this card.

When it was spoiled, my friend and occasional teammate immediate exclaimed out loud about how "Adrian and Zac" this card is. The two minus abilities are excellent at cleaning up a board that is cluttered with opposing garbage, and both can be impressively one-sided; just picture killing most creatures in play while your Runaway Steam-Kin is untouched!

Having played Obsidian Fireheart in old Standard before, I can tell you, the +1 ability on Chandra, Awakened Inferno is a beast. The relentless nature of this damage is powerful, and if you even activate that ability two times, an opponent who hasn't quickly killed you will almost certainly lose.

Have I mentioned that I love this card?

Back in the early part of this decade, "4 Ember Hauler" was a pretty common sight on winning decklists. Ember Hauler put forth a solid body and then the potential to finish the game (much like Viashino Pyromancer adds reach) or control a game. This flexibility was always a huge part of the pull for the card.

Back in those days, it was often paired with Goblin Chieftain; these days we have Goblin Warchief, which doesn't add the same punch, but does potentially mean that the other Goblins who could join in can come to the party all that much faster. Are we at that threshold where Goblins is a deck again? Maybe. And if we are, this is a part of why.

The Good

Filtering through your deck has always been powerful. This is one of the best cards for doing that that I've seen in some time. Not only is the body quite huge, but the ability to potentially give haste to itself and an army is fantastic, and the payoff from when it dies is wickedly impressive. The hardest thing for this card is the sheer amount of competition for good cards at the expensive side of the curve.

This is the removal spell that a more controlling Red deck has been wanting for a while. Really, we've been looking for Slagstorm, but this is about as good as they're going to give us right now, and so for the more controlling Red deck, this is a cause for celebration, in large part because of other Red decks, whose Pirates would always, annoyingly be left behind. No more, Pirates, no more.

Another card that can filter the deck, this card wouldn't make such a high review if it didn't have any single one of its payoffs, including that 4 toughness. Every aspect of this card comes together to make it good enough to be thinking about for both aggressive or more controlling strategies, putting it in pretty impressive company for what it is competing with for deck space.

If Ember Hauler is the card that makes Goblins worth thinking about playing, Goblin Ringleader is going to be the card that makes sure there is enough going on with the deck that you can safely not be worried about running out of steam. It is possible this card is past its prime and should be downgraded, but I suspect it will be a common sight soon.

This card is very nearly a 2/1 for one mana, with the downside of being poor in combat versus another creature. That's enough for it to be a card to think about for aggressive Red.

If it didn't have its first ability, this card might be worth thinking about, but very marginal. However, in a world with Teferi, Time Raveler (and that other Teferi) and a resurgence in White Weenie, this card seems good enough to be thinking about as a potential maindeck card rather than merely a potential sideboard card.

One part "Ringleader", one part "Lord", this is another potential piece of the puzzle for a Goblins deck.

Discarding your own cards is practically a theme for Red, especially in the more controlling decks. This is a great card for any of those decks, especially if used with cards like Neheb, Dreadhorde Champion to cheaply discard cards. What a combo!

The Sideboard Cards

This card may be surprising, but I've used this cards in multiple formats to great effect as a sideboard card. A lot of times, a slightly bigger creature is a problem not only because it takes two cards to kill, but because it takes damage away from the opponent's face; this card fixes both of those problems.

This is a straightforward sideboard card for solving a Blue or White problem, if that's what you have.

Is this a killer card for the mirror? Maybe. It could wildly shift the Red mirror to a focus on permanents, and it has a lot of potency against a control deck as well.

This card might just be below the bar, but if these two affects are needed commonly enough, this is a full-fledged sideboard card.

The hero of Modern, Grafdigger's Cage is a proven anti-graveyard card. However, it also is a secret answer to a problem that Big Red has had for a while against smaller Red decks: how the hell do you beat an Experimental Frenzy from the opponent. Grafdigger's Cage is how.

The Role Players

Looking for a card to ramp to six or 7 mana and excited for it to be a Chandra? Here you go!

If you have enough Chandra and Elemental spells, this is a fine card.

The sheer potential for damage from this card is actually frightening, especially from an evasive body. The downside is that a lot of the cards that will trigger this card are one-use spells.

Sometimes a card like this is basically a 2/2 haste creature with the upside of taking out a blocker on a key turn. If that is enough right now is the question.

A double copy is an impressive thing to behold. While this is less powerful than a "normal" copy spell because of how it is worded with "next" in the text, adding on Planeswalkers makes this card quite intriguing.

Are there enough Red Elementals? Probably not, but if the ones out there are enough, this card becomes interesting.

Both of these lands feel like they are a good way to manage flood. Neither feel so remarkable that you're going out of your way to include them, even if receiving help from other cards.

The Marginal

For less mana or for a more flexible trigger on the effect, this would be much higher rated. As is, if you're running ramp, perhaps this is a card to ramp into (other than Star of Extinction).

A Giant Growth style of effect is occasionally of value in Red; a small and aggressive Red deck might be able to get away with this as a "bad Lightning Bolt".

If this were just a normal review of Red cards, this would be a slam dunk, but in the review of cards for Red, Marauding Raptor has the bad luck to not have enough Red Dinosaurs to back it up to really be the powerhouse a Red deck needs. (Expect this one to be excellent in Red/Green Dinos, though.)

Because it comes with its own built in body, this card is a good enough potential one-of for an aggressive deck that might run out of things to do with otherwise weak bodies or has creatures looking for an excuse to die.

This card is almost certainly going to name "Mountain" for a Red deck; if you are looking for a burst of cards, this could be your fifth Treasure Map.

With Goblin Barrage and Makeshift Munitions, you can stitch together a lot of damage, if you have the time to make that work.

The Splashes

Oftentimes, there are a number of cards which feel important for a splash color for a Red deck. This time around, Lightning Stormkin is the only one that springs to mind, in large part because it can help activate Wizard's Lightning and is a card that could be effective drawn early or late.

The Unimportant

• Act of Treason
• Daggersail Aeronaut
• Destructive Digger
• Dragon Mage
• Fire Elemental
• Goblin Bird-Grabber
• Goblin Smuggler
• Keldon Raider
• Lavakin Brawler
• Pack Mastiff
• Rapacious Dragon
• Reduce to Ashes
• Ripscale Predator
• Scampering Scorcher
• Shock
• Tectonic Rift
• Uncaged Fury

These are cards I don't expect will impact Standard at all, as they are either already available or simply outclassed by other cards.

The Conclusion

Red has a lot of winners all over the place among the various flavors of Red.

One of the biggest winners is almost certainly Big Red, which not only gained a ton of tools to be a stronger deck than ever, but also has a number of cards which are excellent at answering a smaller Red deck.

The most surprising potential winner may be Goblins, which actually looks like it might have finally gotten to the place where there is a coherent deck to play. Ember Hauler, Goblin Ringleader, and Icon of Ancestry are some serious weapons here.

Chandra, Acolyte of Flame feels like it is going to be a great card for more aggressive, burn-oriented Red and more controlling Red alike, but I particularly like how she'll fit in the aggressive shell, giving that deck more resilience for long games while still keeping the deck fit to attack.

This is a great set for Red, perhaps an unsurprising result of a set which chose to focus on Chandra. What an amazing moment for Red!

I'm on the hunt for a great place to go for the Prerelease in New York City. Get at me, NYers! And, Red Mages everywhere, let's all dance with Chandra, and burn some people!

- Adrian Sullivan

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