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Magic: The Gathering has some phenomenal cards in red for the Streets of New Capenna. Quite a few of the cards in this color are centered around exiling cards from the game. Some of them can do infuriating things, from late-game orbital bombardment to creatures that can stall the opponent's plans.
Note: As with all lists, this reflects the writer's opinions, and usefulness will vary from player to player in Magic: The Gathering.
Red in Magic: The Gathering has some incredible exile-themed cards
Red is arguably the most aggressive color in Magic: The Gathering, so it needs cards that facilitate that kind of quick-paced combat or cards that can help it come out of nowhere with a game-winning play.
In Magic: the Gathering's Streets of New Capenna, this is done with “Impulsive Draw.” This is a form of card draw where the player exiles the card instead of drawing it and typically has the chance to play it on that turn. Red has some amazing cards in this current expansion and will undoubtedly see use in other metas as the months go on.
Best red cards
- Jaxis, the Troublemaker (Rare Legendary Creature)
- Structural Assault (Rare Sorcery)
- Professional Face-Breaker (Rare Creature)
- Urabrask, Heretic Praetor (Mythic Rare Legendary Creature)
- Arcane Bombardment (Mythic Rare Enchantment)
An honorable mention goes to Devilish Valet. An incredibly fun card, it almost made the cut. It’s a creature with one attack and three toughness. Devilish Valet has Trample and Haste and rewards players for summoning many creatures.
It doubles its attack power each time a creature comes into play for the card’s owner. The card can potentially do some hilarious amounts of damage, but it takes some setting up.
5) Jaxis, the Troublemaker (Rare Legendary Creature)
The writer is a massive fan of Jaxis, the Troublemaker, as a ⅔ for four mana (1 red) in Magic: The Gathering. It helps create aggressive tokens that have haste. You tap one red mana, this card, and discard a card to create a token of another creature you control.
This token gains haste, and “When this creature dies, draw a card.” The token is also sacrificed at the end of the next end step. Sadly, this can’t be done in an Instant, only at Sorcery speed.
For Magic: The Gathering decks that have powerful creatures that players want to push aggressively and safely, here’s the answer. This card also has Blitz for two mana (one red), so it can come out faster but gets sacrificed at the end of the turn. If nothing else, it will be very popular in EDH/Commander.
4) Structural Assault (Rare Sorcery)
Structural Assault is an exciting board wipe for Magic: The Gathering. It destroys all artifacts in play, making it automatically worth sideboarding into virtually every red deck. There are so many Treasure Tokens in the game right now, this can thoroughly batter those.
Structural Assault destroys all artifacts and deals damage to all creatures equal to the number of artifacts that went to the graveyard at this turn.
Tokens briefly hit the graveyard when they left to play in Magic: The Gathering, so they will count towards the damage this card produces. Thanks to this, it could easily destroy every creature in play and all artifacts. It’s costly at five mana, but in the mid-game of Standard, or Commander, it could be a potent card.
3) Professional Face-Breaker (Rare Creature)
Remember that talk of Impulsive Draw? This card epitomizes it. A ⅔ with Menace for three mana (one red), this card creates a Treasure Token whenever one or more of your creatures deal combat damage to a player.
Thankfully, it's not an overpowered ability since it can only create one Treasure Token turn.
But the next ability is the real winner. You can sacrifice a Treasure to exile the top card of your library. By the end of the turn, this card can be played. As long as you have treasure tokens, you can go sifting through their deck to find cards to play. What a fantastic card.
2) Urabrask, Heretic Praetor (Mythic Rare Legendary Creature)
The great thing about the Praetor cards is that they give a powerful, beneficial ability to one player and a harmful, frustrating one to the other. This Magic: The Gathering card has four attacks and four toughness for five (two red) with Haste. To begin your upkeep, exile the top card of your library. You can play that card this turn.
A similar effect hits other players, but the wording is more interesting. At the beginning of each opponent's upkeep, exile that card the next time they draw a card instead.
They can play that card at this turn. This means that the opponent doesn't get to "draw" a card during their draw step. They exile it instead.
Control decks, in particular, will loathe this card, slowing down all of their plans while giving the controller of Urabrask a significant card advantage.
Players can combine this with Drannith Magistrate to make opponents unable to cast spells. Since opponents no longer draw cards in their draw step, and Magistrate only allows them to cast spells from their hand? Locked down, easy.
1) Arcane Bombardment (Mythic Rare Enchantment)
Thanks to cards like this, Blue and Red spell decks aren’t likely dead yet. Sure, Arcane Bombardment is expensive to cast at six mana (two red). But thanks to Treasure Tokens, that’s far more accessible! Whenever you cast your first instant or sorcery each turn, exile an instant or sorcery at random from your graveyard.
Then copy each card exiled with this card and any number of these cards can be cast without paying their mana costs. This will be hilarious and frustrating for direct damage, counterplay, and removal decks. The best part is that this also triggers the other players' turns.
Say, for example, you exile a Lightning Bolt, then another Lightning Bolt, and then a Magma Jet this way. The first time, that's three damage to any target. In the second turn, it becomes six damage to any target.
Thanks to Magma Jet, it becomes eight damage to any target on the third turn. Every single turn, the player exiles more and more spells from their graveyard and then casts them again and again for free.
If you control what instants and sorceries you put into the grave, you can set up exactly what spells trigger routinely at every turn. This card could be a fantastic win condition in a few metas. That's what makes this spell so powerful. It will run primarily on spell-based decks.
The faster this Magic: The Gathering card comes out, the more overwhelming it is. For example, in the late game, you could have ten spells exiled from the game this way, and they all cast every single turn the first time you cast a spell.
Red is looking quite powerful in Magic: The Gathering right now. There are many ways to exile cards, deal direct damage, and create treasure tokens to ramp into powerful combos. Streets of New Capenna look pretty awesome right now, and there’s no telling how these cards will be used in the future.
Disclaimer: This article reflects the opinions of the writer.
