If you've played just about any major competitive format this year, you'd know just how massive of a presence Red decks have had. The color has provided some of the best aggro decks arguably ever in both Standard and Pioneer, and it has also provided tremendous support to several archetypes in Modern throughout the year as well. All of this is to say that 2024 has been a truly major year for the color. As with the past few colors, I'm here to highlight what I think are five (or in this case: more) of the cards that most strongly defined Red throughout the year. Let's jump in and have a look!

5. Galvanic Discharge

Cards like Galvanic Discharge have a tendency to get written off somewhat, particularly when they don't go through Standard. The reason is simple: it's usually seen as better to utilize burn spells that don't only damage creatures or planeswalkers, but also hit players as well. Galvanic Discharge lacks this ability, but it excels elsewhere instead. Much like Unholy Heat from Modern Horizons 2 played a similar role, yet turned out to be extremely powerful as it easily deals with big creatures and planeswalkers for minimal investment. Galvanic Discharge now does similar for Energy decks, while simultaneously providing players with flexibility that can scale the effect to their needs and possibly leave energy for other things the deck wants to do.

4. Ral, Monsoon Mage // Ral, Leyline Prodigy

If there's one thing combo aficionados love to do, it's storm off. Storm has been a consistently popular deck whenever it's shown up, and that's quite true of Modern as well. The problem is that while the deck has been beloved by many players, it actually hasn't been all that good most of the time it's been around. Modern Horizons 3 changed this somewhat, as both Ral, Monsoon Mage and Ruby Medallion enabled a new type of storm deck: Ruby Storm. This deck has proven to be a strong contender in Modern, and makes Ral an easy inclusion in this list.

3. Artist's Talent

Artist's Talent proved to be a powerful sleeper hit from Bloomburrow as we reached the Pioneer Regional Championship events. As Izzet Phoenix players moved from the Temporal Trespass plan and began utilizing Proft's Eidetic Memory, they also looked for ways to better utilize it. Then right around the time of the US Pioneer Regional Championship, players began to discover and test Artist's Talent as a means of drawing cards and pitching away copies of Arclight Phoenix. The move was a runaway success, with decks that ran more copies of the card notably having stronger win rates as a result. This shift would continue with new innovations to Lotus Field Combo lists taking advantage of the power of Artist's Talent to more easily sift through their deck on a critical combo turn.

2. Amped Raptor

You thought you'd seen the last of energy? You thought wrong! Amped Raptor has unquestionably had a much larger impact on Modern as a whole, proving to be a lynchpin for the various Energy decks of the format. For just two mana, you get to effectively cascade into another spell. As the majority of your spells are two mana or less, the two energy the Raptor provides means you'll often find a target. Moreover, if you have even just two additional banked energy, it can hit anything in the deck period, barring sideboard cards like Obsidian Charmaw. This has made it a genuine standout, and one that will likely continue seeing play over the years to come.

1. The Red Aggro Package (Heartfire Hero, Emberheart Challenger, Manifold Mouse, Slickshot Show-Off, Screaming Nemesis, Leyline of Resonance)

Picking any one card from this pool of cards is practically impossible given the wide and massive impact they've had in 2024. If this list was made up solely based on wide impact across the game, then the whole list would almost certainly consist exclusively of cards from this batch. Instead, I'm opting to put them in one singular umbrella and put a spotlight on some other cards as well. So let's talk about why they were so impactful.

Red-Based Aggro absolutely dominated the competitive space in terms of raw numbers. In Standard and Pioneer, this primarily kicked off last year with the release of Monstrous Rage, but it really picked up with the release of Slickshot Show-Off. Then you were not only seeing Red Prowess-style builds in those formats, but a fresher take on the concept in Modern as well. A few months later came Bloomburrow and the mouse package of Heartfire Hero, Emberheart Challenger, and Manifold Mouse changed the landscape of these decks yet again for some of the most explosive starts the formats had ever seen. Finally, Duskmourn: House of Horror brought both Leyline of Resonance and Screaming Nemesis, further cementing Red's position as a powerhouse in Standard.

If I had to pick one of these personally to be the best, I'd probably put Heartfire Hero as the champion. The card poses such an instant threat that must be dealt with. If left to its own devices, Red pilots can fling it at their opponents for massive damage. This can effectively create a sort of triple strike for Heartfire Hero, or even quadruple strike if Manifold Mouse was in play at the start of combat. This has made the card one of the most deadly around and easily the best Red card of the year by far.

Paige Smith

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