If you’re a long time Standard player, at least within the last 5 or so years, you’ve seen your fair share of bannings. It’s not all that often that we see cards come off the banned list at all, but in the realm of Historic, we’re seeing this very thing. In the Alchemy Rebalance notes that dropped yesterday, we got another card rebalanced and unbanned in Historic, and it’s a doozy!
Lighting a Fire
One of the most fun, but powerful cards in Standard’s recent history is Fires of Invention. This card was the heart of a Jeskai Control deck that leveraged a bunch of planeswalkers and removal as the de facto control deck of the format. It was so strong in Historic that it ended up getting emergency suspended, and quickly banned in Summer of 2020.
Well it’s back, but in a slightly altered state and it may be time for a return of this powerful archetype to Historic!
The can is exactly the same as it was originally printed, but it just costs 1 more mana. What’s beautiful about this is that we can cast this on 5 and immediately cast another spell for free, and as we scale up with more lands, we can continue to make high impact plays.
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The Home of Fires
So right off the bat, I think that the first home for Fires of Invention will be to try and resurrect an updated version of Jeskai Fires. We have gotten some incredible tools from the last few standard sets, and even from other supplemental sets so we have a lot of awesome tools to work with. Here is a sample deck list.
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One very interesting inclusion that we have in this deck that we used to in older versions is Fae of Wishes. This powerful card gives us a 2 in 1 wish effect and creature. With a Fires of Invention out, we can cast the wish half of the spell, and find a silver bullet from our sideboard. Then we can play it for free in the same turn assuming we have the appropriate land count. On the next turn, we can cast the creature half of Fae, and use its ability at instant speed to return it to our hand so we can wish again.
We’ll want to have about half of our sideboard dedicated to silver bullets, with the other half set up allow us to sideboard again various strategies. The Silver bullets section of the sideboard is fairly flexible depending on the metagame. We can also take a proactive approach as well, slotting in power house finishers like Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger, or some huge off color spells like Ruinous Ultimatum.
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Most surely there will be more decks that people will try that will leverage this card. Another deck that may be worth testing is the old Golos Fires deck, possibly with a Guildgate win condition. We’ll have to see what comes up n the next few weeks as people try to break this powerful card once more.
