MTG’s Phlage, Titan of Fire’s Fury, reignites the TCG’s best burn decks

After a slew of Modern Horizons 3 (MH3) leaks flooded the Magic: The Gathering community, Wizards of the Coast leaned into the unplanned reveals to confirm which of the cards were actually real. Fortunately, despite the size of the leak, plenty of surprises remained for Magic players eager to upgrade their Modern format decks for a new competitive landscape that the MH3 release is certain to usher in.

Among the new cards coming in MH3 is another addition to a small cycle of elder giant titans from the plane of Theros. Today Polygon can officially introduce Phlage, Titan of Fire’s Fury, a new take on a classic burn spell. It’s a card that could potentially be the crucial upgrade needed to revive one of the Modern format’s oldest strategies — especially with the help of the two other cards revealed in the story below!

That’s right: Burn decks could be coming back into fashion, after years on the sidelines of competitive and semi-competitive play.

Templated like the two-color elder giants that were first introduced in 2020’s Theros Beyond Death, Phlage pairs a powerful effect that triggers when it’s first cast, but requires some additional legwork to stick around as a permanent on the battlefield via its escape mechanic.

When it first enters the battlefield, it immediately deals three damage to another creature or player, and gains its controller three life — an effect that already exists on a popular card called Lightning Helix, which for years existed as a cornerstone in Modern’s red/white burn deck. But like its Titan predecessors, Phlage then sacrifices itself and heads to the graveyard until its additional escape cost is paid.

In order to move Phlage from the graveyard back to the battlefield, its controller must pay an additional four mana and exile five other cards from the graveyard – only then does it stay on the battlefield, triggering its Lightning Helix effect again upon entry, and repeatedly after that whenever it attacks.

The legacy and decline of Modern burn decks

Historically, red/white burn decks have been a mainstay in Modern, known for their efficiency, speed, and ability to run over opponents with a mix of aggressive creatures and cheap “burn” spells that perform direct damage to a player’s life total. Thanks to a critical mass of Lightning Bolts and similar spells, burn was considered one of Modern’s fastest-winning decks due to its realistic ability of ending a game on turn three.

However, since the release of Modern Horizons 2 in 2021, traditional burn decks failed to remain competitive while other Modern decks received substantial upgrades and powerful new strategies emerged. Though many burn players continued to register their decks in tournaments, the strategy itself remained stagnant, struggling to keep up as the Modern format’s power level gradually evolved and pushed the deck out of winners’ circles.

Synergies and metagame impact

Not only does Phlage reapply the Lightning Helix effect on a new card type, it also fits well with burn’s current play patterns. Burn decks rely heavily on one-and-done instants and sorceries, which quickly fill the graveyard while executing on burn’s primary strategy, in turn making the titan’s escape cost a realistic endgame after the burn player exhausts their other resources.

Since casting and escaping Phlage presents six damage on its own, it’s easy to imagine the remaining 14 damage needed to kill an opponent might have been done already with the cards used to escape it from the graveyard. If casting the card twice isn’t enough to win the game by itself, each additional attack presents nine more damage, a formidable threat against even the players who managed to somehow gain life back after getting burned.

New outlets for energy tokens

Another exciting reveal from MH3 is the return of energy tokens, a mechanic first introduced in 2016’s Kaladesh, but which hadn’t been used again until earlier this year in the Universes Beyond Fallout Commander decks.

Unlike most other counters in Magic, which are placed on creatures or permanents, energy counters are given to a player directly, often as an added perk of a card’s effect. Once a certain number of energy counters are collected, they can be used as an additional resource to enhance cards that care about energy payoffs.

Case in point: Amped Raptor and Voltstorm Angel.

The long-term playability of energy cards in MH3 remains to be seen, however, since they’ve essentially been nonexistent in competitive metagames in the years since they were first introduced. Although a powerful energy-based deck used to exist when Kaladesh was legal in Magic’s standard format, they never made the leap to more powerful environments such as Modern or Pioneer.

Although Voltstorm Angel is likely designed for games of MH3 draft, Amped Raptor might be worth keeping an eye on if a red energy deck exists.

The raptor’s effect when it enters the battlefield allows the player to cast additional cards for free, off the top of the library, by spending energy counters in place of mana. Pairing it with deck manipulation effects that can put specific cards on top of the library, along with other spells that provide enough counters to cast anything that’s revealed off the raptor’s initial trigger, could let you “cheat” powerful and expensive cards into play before you have enough lands to cast it with traditional mana.

Modern Horizons 3 pre-release events kick off at local game stores on June 7, followed by the official global tabletop release on June 14.