Fires of Creation
You draw a card, play an artifact, and create a forgeling. You play the forgeling and put an artifact on top of your library. Rinse and repeat. A few turns later you have five artifacts, five energy on Fires of Creation, and negative five life. Sadly, this is a not-uncommon occurrence.
But why?
What are the requirements?
Fires of Creation is the artifact Path. (Several of you are now thinking, "Spell Path When?"). Fires of Creation grants a Burnable, Ephemeral Minion when you cast an artifact. Playing 10 artifacts in 40 cards allows you to generate an extra card roughly one in every four turns, which matches the baseline of Turn of Seasons. Unlike Rainbow's End and Journey of Souls which grant a benefit for playing the game normally, Fires of Creation, forces you to actually cast your artifacts to gain a benefit. For this reason, Fires of Creation is not normally considered in unless you have at least 10 artifacts with 6-8 artifacts you are very happy to cast.
What makes it good?
The Forgelings created by Fires of Creation have a unique feature; they are Burnable, but do not have a gem colour. By adding to your mana without adding a gem you are able to exceed 10 mana.
It has the highest bonus starting life.
Fires of Creation gives us minions when we play artifacts, so we want to play artifacts that improve our minions.
What makes it bad?
Artifacts do not contest the board. Playing artifacts before developing the board leads to playing from behind.
Due to the high number of artifacts required for the Path to function, there are a lot of dud hands...which leads to playing from behind.
It's a huge mana investment to fully utilize the Path, you must cast both the artifact and the Forgeling. Expending a bunch of resources for minimal gain leads to playing from behind.
Artifact decks are terrible at playing from behind.
What archetypes?
Artifact Control. Outside of this archetype you are almost always better off selecting another Path. Artifact Control makes the most use of the higher starting life total. In addition, the control package allows the deck to actually reach the late game where it can start to make use of its artifacts.
What Powers?
Reconstruct. As mentioned earlier, Fires of Creations is at its best when the artifacts improve minions. Using a Power that creates minions is a great way to gain an extra advantage from the artifacts. Reconstruct is also a great fit for Control decks, giving them both a way to grind out long games and a speedbump for faster matchups.
Impel is a favoured tool of Control decks to re-position minion or to force favourable trades. Depending on the minion package, Impel may be the correct Power.
Playing with Fires of Creation
You don't have to follow the path: sometimes it is better not to put an artifact on top of the library with Forgeling and sometimes the Forgelings should be smelted for mana.
Use artifact stacking or ordering to protect important artifacts.
You have five artifact/brand slots. Playing an artifact when you have no available slots will force you to remove an artifact of your choice. This is not an issue if you artifact can stack on an existing artifact.
Don't forget the activated abilities of your artifacts. They glow, but are still easy to miss. (Matroyshka I'm looking at you.)
Playing against Fires of Creation
Pressure them. They cannot defend the board and progress their path until much later in the game.
Learn the artifact ordering so you always know which artifact is going to be damaged.
Forgelings have a Demise effect that heals their artifacts. Keep this in mind when engaging in combat. Order of attacks can make a huge difference!
All Forgelings are not the same. Keep an eye on their abilities (and names!). Seal of Exile will only exile artifacts with the same name.
Some artifacts have triggered abilities and some have activated abilities. Keep tabs on them so you know what to expect.
Problems with the Path
It is too narrow
There are not enough artifacts (and most are rare/mythic)
Sometimes you don't want to use its effect (you need to draw a non-artifact)
The Forgelings do not scale well
Potential Fixes
Create artifacts to support other archetypes
Add more artifacts at lower rarity (next expansion?)
Change the Forgeling effect to Divination 3
Restructure the mana cost/stats (make them fixed, or increase the cost slower 1/1/2/2/3/3 etc.)
Into the Fire
Fires of Creation is currently the worst Path. It requires too much resource investment for too little gain. If you are looking to build an artifact heavy control deck, this will do the job. Otherwise, steer clear, there are better options elsewhere..