I played around with a earth-assisted monofire deck, based on the one shown here. I do not use Immolation and Ash Eaters but have lots of burning pillars (10-12) and also 2 Stone instead. From the top of the head (as the server's somehow not responding) the deck looks as follows:
10-12 Bruning Pillars
2 Stone Pillars
2-3 Plate Armor
1 Titanium Shield
1 Hammer (has been replace with Farenheit later)
6 Lava Golems
Deflag, Rain of Fire and Fire Bolt d lib.
(Mark of Earth)
I always change around the number of Stone Pillars, but none or one sometimes is not enough to upgrade your Golems fast enough.
The strategy here is to build and improve your golems fast, the Plate Armour is very handy to prevent the golems (strating with a life of 1) to be killed off immedeately by attack spells (which mostly deal 3 points of damage) and to also make them less prone to being devoured by othyugs (or however this thingy is spelled).
So far it has been quite effective against slower time/raindbow decks from the Top50, especially when you can use the deflag against phase shields etc.
Fire Rain is especially helpful against boneyard-skeletons (if you did not already destroy it with deflag).
Weaknesses I found so far:
- Lobotomizing makes the whole grow strategy useless
- Bone shields (you only have a few powerful creatures, and sometzimes it takes four to five rounds if you're through, enough time for the slow decks to develop. Also, the deflag only destroys one of the shields).
- Weak against fast damage dealing decks, because there's almost no defensive.