Singleton Shmingleton - Fireball

Fireball | Art by Dave Dorman

Great Balls of Fire!

Hello, and welcome back to Singleton Shmingleton, where I bend the singleton rules of Commander by building decks with as many functional reprints of a certain card as possible. This week's card is one of the most iconic spells in the game, dating back to Magic's first set and even earlier to the iconic D&D wizarding specialty from which Magic drew much of its aesthetic inspiration. It's Fireball.

This card is simple and evocative: channel (or perhaps even Channel) your mana into this spell, and the more mana you have, the bigger it gets and the more things it can kill.

Players loved it. It ended games at all levels of competitiveness, and was part of the iconic Channel Fireball combo that gave its name to one of the most influential brands and testing teams in Magic's history. Alongside Serra Angel and Shivan Dragon, it was the card that ended games.

Fireball has remained a popular design to return to again and again, with dozens of X-spells that deal damage. They've been important role players in Standard combo or ramp decks, and have captivated more casual players for thirty years.

For a long stretch of time, "Fireball with set mechanic" was a good bet to fill a rare slot in any upcoming set. There are so many Fireball derivations that I've limited the search to only cards that can deal damage to creatures and/or players, as these capture the flexibility of offense and defense that made the original Fireball such a force to be reckoned with.

Here are the thirty-eight spells that deal X damage to a target:

The most played of these cards, Comet Storm, sees play in 68,449 decks and is a bit of a throwback. It's similar to Fireball in that you can pay extra mana to do damage to more things, but instead of splitting the damage it just does the full X to everything you target. It's an expensive way to solve any number of problems, from any number of creatures to killing opponents outright, and I'm glad that it still shows up here.

The next most played card is Crackle with Power, which sees play in 59,814 decks and is a finisher for the modern era. If you're dumping mana into it, it scales up fast. Five times X is no joke. Jaya's Immolating Inferno, the third most played card in 46,983 decks, also provides an elegant finisher in a format where there are usually exactly three opponents.

The least played of these cards is Flaming Gambit, with only 172 decks. This is a real stinker; it can only target players, but that player can redirect the damage to their least valuable creature. Even flashback can't redeem it. The next least played card, however, is actually one of my favorites. Illuminate is only included in 193 decks, but it can do everything, hitting creatures and players and even drawing cards! It costs a million mana, sure, but if we're filling our deck with X spells, surely we'll have a plan for that.

Learning From Experience

Looking at all of these cards immediately brought me back to one of the first Commander decks I built: Mizzix of the Izmagnus. She works so well with X spells, because they will always have a higher mana value than your experience, even if we don't put any mana into X, and the amount of discount we can accumulate on spells throughout a game can become ridiculous.

This was the first deck I built where the concept worked too well. I filled the deck with cards like Stroke of Genius and Braingeyser, and basically drew my whole deck every game. Add in Reality Spasm as a way to untap all my lands, a few ways to return Reality Spasm and play it again, and what I thought would be an interactive Spellslinger deck became a solitaire-style Storm deck. Don't get me wrong, I love playing combo decks, but that wasn't my intention, and it wasn't the kind of game I had told my friends I would be bringing.

But today, I have the chance to recreate this deck as I originally intended. The problem with playing fifteen versions of Braingeyser that can all be cast for two mana is that each one becomes more and more likely to find another one, and the chain never ends. Fireball doesn't have the same problem. Each one fuels the next in that it will give you an experience counter with Mizzix of the Izmagnus on the board, but it doesn't also dig for more Fireballs. Mizzix solves the fundamental problem of huge X spells by providing an ever-increasing discount, but the game still feels like it revolves around casting huge spells and interacting with opponents' boards, rather than calculating combo math.

There are a couple other ways I've included to fuel huge X spells for redundancy. Vadrik, Astral Archmage works very similarly to Mizzix of the Izmagnus, but doesn't scale up quite as quickly. Mana Flare accelerates games into the haymaker stage almost instantly, but should benefit us the most since our spells can be as big as we want. And Elementalist's Palette scales to be a crazy mana rock once we've cast a few X spells.

Nuclear Proliferation

Our primary way to power up our X spells, however, is definitely still Mizzix of the Izmagnus. She gives us experience counters, which are very hard for our opponents to interact with, but can be easy for us to manipulate with a little deckbuilding consideration. Cards like Steady Progress, Contentious Plan, and Experimental Augury are all spells that can also proliferate, giving us more counters.

Tezzeret's Gambit is especially powerful, since we can cast it for free if we have three or more experience counters thanks to its Phyrexian mana cost. Flux Channeler goes off in this deck, since we're planning on casting tons of spells anyways. And I wanted to try out Dreamtide Whale as well. Its trigger reminds me of Ledger Shredder, a card that has impressed me a lot (and which seems to trigger almost every turn), and the Whale is also just a huge body for its cost.

Spells that make Treasures are also powerful in this deck as a way to chain spells or build up mana for a following turn. Pirate's Pillage, Big Score, and Unexpected Windfall are all great spells that play even better in this deck, as they can be mana-neutral or even generate mana if we have enough discount. Storm-Kiln Artist remains one of the most powerful enablers for spell-based decks. And I've snuck in Hell to Pay, which, despite only being able to target creatures, is one of the best Fireballs in the deck. Once we've got a good amount of discount, it can be a one-mana spell that kills a creature and gives us tons of Treasures for the next turn.

Oiling the Gears

We need some way to get our motion started if we want to build up to lethal Fireballs. It's a bit disappointing to have to start with a Disintegrate for one just to gain some experience. Thankfully, blue and red have some of the very best instants and sorceries for card selection in the game.

Ponder, Preordain, and Faithless Looting can gain experience counters while also looking for slightly larger spells to trigger Mizzix of the Izmagnus's ability again. Further up the chain, cards that can be cast for free, like Gush and Pyrokinesis, can notch up the experience as well. Lórien Revealed can be a two-mana draw-three while also having the flexibility of just being part of our mana base.

I also simply could not resist adding in some of the explosive elements of the original Storm deck. For the draw spells, I chose to include only the best, which in this deck means only the ones that can be discounted to a single mana. Stroke of Genius, Drown in Dreams, and Ingenious Mastery all join our little package of Expansion // Explosion and Illuminate for draw power. Reality Spasm and Turnabout remain powerful ways to generate mana, and the new Niv-Mizzet, Visionary can draw huge chunks of our deck.

The key with these cards is to make sure they're not the centerpiece of the deck. With only a few of them, we won't have the same chance of chaining one into the other, and our Fireballs can shine as the lynchpin of the strategy.

The Decklist

This deck is a blast to play. Our twenty-three Fireballs give us a high level of consistency, but each individual version brings its own flavor to the game. Bonfire of the Damned plays out totally differently from Fanning the Flames, leading to different games. We can also shift very quickly from offense to defense and vice versa, since Fireball can function either as removal or half of an "I win" button.

Mizzix of the Izmagnus is fundamentally a messed up engine for discounting spells, and sometimes we'll draw two or three ways to build huge card advantage along with our mana advantage, but in this deck it feels more like the classic explosive potential of a Spellslinger deck, rather than a concentrated strategy to end the game in one turn. In terms of reworking the vibe of a prior deck, this was definitely a success.

Until Next Time

One of the best build-arounds of all time, Spider Spawning is a card that has always inspired dreams. But there are now seven versions of this effect. That's enough that we can now base a strategy on finding one every single game, and accumulating masses of tokens! How can we maximize one of the coolest cards in the game? Find out next time on Singleton Shmingleton!