I’m not sure Burn can afford to have a card in it’s opening hand that it probably can never cast. It also puts you into an awkward spot where you might draw it and may not want to cast it.

I was wondering how you feel about the red miracle Thunderous Wrath? I have been playing around with 1 or 2 copies in my main deck and haven’t been disappointed with it even tough they don’t work well with Gitaxian Probe..

Thanks for the awesome blog and keep ’em burning!

I wasn’t particularly good at explaining the difference so I can see why people are scratching their head. In the matchups where you need to go faster and conserve life, you can sideboard out your probes. You can’t sideboard out all of your green cards in those matchups. Given there are really only a handful of decks I think they’re actively bad against, unless you know your local meta is excessively aggressive I think keeping them in the maindeck helps the most. If you take them out, you probably need to add an extra land, Shard Volley, and Grim Lavamancer.

So I know I said that the reason I don’t want to play green contradicts playing probes but the reality is you can sideboard out all of your probes pretty easily where you life matters a lot. You can’t sideboard out all of your green cards when they don’t matter.

The worst decks to draw probes against are the mirror, affinity, and zoo. Almost every other deck the 2 life is worth a peek at their hand to figure out a game plan.

If you’re playing a turn 1 fetch and not activating it you probably kept a bad hand. Burn is trying to leverage it’s speed and efficiency and if you’re not casting a spell on the first turn you’re way behind. If you want to favor Red fetches, Wooded Foothills is the worst and Scalding Tarn is probably the best in this regard but one deck in particular plays maindeck extractions and needles. If you’re playing against lantern control you don’t want to lose game 1 because games 2 and 3 get so much harder when they remove all of their bad cards.

Seems like a good reason to not run Gitaxian Probe.

I also think your reasoning for running a variety of fetches in faulty since nobody will ever have Pithing Needle or Surgical Extraction against you. You stand to gain more from playing lands that might make opponents think you’re on a different deck in Game 1s where you just play a fetch and pass (Tarn and Mesa are probably the best options; it helps too that they’re more expensive than the KTK fetches, since budget players breaking into Modern with Burn are less likely to get Tarn/Mesa if they just need any 10 red fetches).