Reign Of Fire (EDH / Commander)

Notice 3/5/21: This mini-guide is outdated, and the cards mentioned here-in do not always appear in the deck any more. At some point I'll come back and re-write this, but for now I'm only leaving it because some of the concepts behind it are still valid, even if it is a bit out of date.

Winning the Game:
This deck has a few different game plans which bring in a game win.

Combat Damage:
The first and most obvious game plan is to fly over the enemy players with a swarm of powerful dragons. There are a handful of ways to get to this point. Having more than a few non-token dragons out at a time can be a scary proposition for your opponents so we should expect to get in the damage when we can by being aggressive. That said, cards like Kindred Charge can quickly take a handful of dragons and turn it into a lethal attack. It allows us to get all of our etb triggers again with the tokens, and while it wont trigger Lathliss, creating copies of dragons is a terrifying move. Any attack with dragons can be made lethal fairly easily by pumping spare mana into Lathliss, and we have no shortage of mana generation with cards like Mana Geyser. Scourge of the Throne and Utvara Hellkite are force multipliers here.

Splash Down with Dragons:
Cards like Scourge of Valkas and Dragon Tempest allow any dragon to become a deadly force on a player. Assuming our commander is out a single dragon card being cast will net us 3 damage. If the dragon being cast is Valkas you can order your triggers and resolutions so that its 12 damage (3 dragons (lathliss, valkas, token), 2 triggering permanents (valkas and Tempest) triggering twice (token and valkas etb)). Cards like Panharmonicon can make that even more deadly at 44 damage (4 dragons, 2 triggering permanents triggering three times each for dragons etb, each of those three triggers is doubled, so a total of 12 etb triggers, 4 damage each time), and of course if you have all of those out simultaneously you're going to win off of only a dragon or two. Cards like Kindred Charge and Conjurer's Closet also contribute to this win condition. Indomitable Creativity used to get rid of tokens in favor of more big bois can make a mess of everything too.

Unsteady Ground
A handful of cards allow us to pump mana to win assuming our opponents have fallen enough in health. Comet Storm is the most well controlled of these, for another option you could swap out Magma Quake for Earthquake if you're less afraid of self damage. Hoard-Smelter Dragon, Steel Hellkite, and Lathliss herself require combat but they're nice places to dump mana for lethal moves.

Build your Hoard
Finally Hellkite Tyrant makes an appearance in this deck, and its a well placed one at that. The deck runs a TON of artifacts on its own, so even without stealing someone's artifacts you might get fairly close to this win. That said this shouldn't be a primary plan as it is very fragile.

There and Back Again:

We're in Mono-red.
Unfortunately Mono-red is a fairly weak mono color in commander. It has gotten better over time, but draw and ramp options are limited and vulnerable. Many groups hate land destruction but few shy from destroying your artifacts and we're very dependent on artifacts to get where we need to go. Eliminating green or red players should be our top priority as they're the most likely to pack the punch that puts this deck down.

Draw
Draw is a bit difficult but not impossible. We have a few different methods of getting those valuable card draws, but many of them require careful resource management. To make every draw effect a bit more effective we run Alhammaret's Archive. The card is expensive and comes along right when we want to be playing dragons but if we don't play it early we wont get much use out of it, and will set ourselves up for a rough late game. Additionally the archive makes several of our lands more useful late game. Turning cards with cycling into "Discard this card, draw two" instead of just replacing themselves.

Spitflame is a great piece to discard for looting effects because you can recur it with ease, not to mention that it repeats itself as removal. Sure its damage, and its not a lot, but its not a lot of mana either.

Avarice Amulet allows us to remind people that exile removal isn't always the best, as the creature has to die for them to get it. Equip it to Lathliss and we no longer have to worry about it at all since if you move her to the command zone you will retain control of it.

Cards like Herald's Horn, Vanquisher's Banner, and Hazoret's Monument reward us for playing the big creatures we already wanted to.

Knollspine Dragon or Dragon Mage can be searched up with our dragon tutors when we need draw desperately, and we run a variety of wheel effects for refilling our hand when we get low. Ultimately we're still making the best out of a bad situation but we're hopefully doing so effectively. A number of our cards also have incidental draw on them such as Mind Stone, and we can use that in the event that we have no other palatable options.

Coveted Jewel is in here for fun and flavor but it both ramps and draws, and if you break down the actual cost of the thing it's pretty worth it. 6 mana, 3 of which gets refunded, which means 3 mana for 3 cards. Insanely efficient, even better when its 6 cards due to Panharmonicon or Alhammaret's Archive. Plus it has a fun political element when you want to make friends.

Ramp
Red also struggles with Ramp, and so we turn again to Artifacts to see what we can find. Sword of the Animist, Burnished Hart, Solemn Simulacrum and Wayfarer's Bauble find us lands, and if you find yourself consistently behind, or even just not going first you could slot in Surveyor's Scope. I'll be evaluating it myself.

Ramp category 2 are mana producing rocks. We have Mind Stone, and Hedron Archive which generate colorless mana, but also can draw us cards if that's where we need them. Dragon's Hoard which does both ramp and card draw, as does Coveted Jewel. We end with the ever present and boring Sol Ring.

The third kind of ramp is discounts. A lot of our spells are expensive, and if you want to cast 2 spells in a turn discounts are far more powerful than rocks. Rocks only give you their benefit once per turn, where as discounts can do it for each spell you cast when your deck is built right. Urza's Incubator, Dragonspeaker Shaman, Dragonlord's Servant, and the previously mentioned Herald's Horn will discount our dragons specifically. Hazoret's Monument will do creatures in general. Both Ruby Medallion and The Immortal Sun will cover us for anything we want to cast.

Finally our Janky non-category ramp includes only two cards: Mana Geyser, and Belbe's Portal. Belbe's Portal isn't really ramp in the traditional sense but once its played it does allow us to play more dragons in a turn which for this deck is sorta ramp. Mana Geyser has so many possibilities but its not really ramp either. Ramp typically sets you up for future turns, where as Mana Geyser is a one time "Time to take my big turn" card.