I have gotten incredibly comfortable playing GB Tortured Existence, due to running Evolving Wilds and sideboarding in plains and Auramancers I had no reason to go Abzan or Orzhov.
But like most who love the archetype, I too was swayed by Reckless Wurm. And though it does pain me to run only 3 copies in the maindeck, I think this is the most balanced the archetype gets.
I have written an in depth guide to TE which you might see here:
https://www.mtgvault.com/theswarmer/decks/tortured-existence-essay/
The issue is that this guide deals only with that which I know inside and out and thus only deals with Golgari or GB splashing W.
Rakdos is a completely new area for me, that said let us analyze it for a bit, shall we?
Is this better or worse than GB?
I don't know, as of 3.12.18 it is too soon to tell. It is less flexible, less meta-adaptable, has a smaller toolbox and most importantly: it does not have any cards that dig for TE.
So what does it do better than? It houses Carrion Feeder interactions MUCH better than Golgari. But that is not why I built it, and I sure as hell did not build it knowing it it worse than its Golgari variant.
Its main strength is derived from the fact that it plays much like Dead Dog (a GB madness tempo deck that ran 2x TE as plan B. TE as an archetype evolved out of these decks). It is faster. That is it's main advantage.
That having been said, I am not sure whether I capitalized on this advantage enough. I think the deck wants to run an angler, or a Horror of the Broken Lands. What do you think?
PS: No Death Spark, obviously, the card is a pet card of many people, it is not worth running in most TE decks. But, as every statement regarding this deck: It is meta dependant.
What cards does red lend to TE:
1. Reckless Wurm
This takes the place of Angler as a more defensive creature that ends up coming out sooner and has great potential for being a 2for1 due to being castable at instant speed.
The first disadvantage the Wurm has manifests itself when it is staring down an Angler, but Fume Spitter takes care of that.
The second issue is lack of decent discard outlets. This deck, whilst sporting Faithless Looting, has only TE to give us instant speed wurms. That is not exactly an encouraging number.
And let me stop you before you suggest Vampire Hounds, for they don't deal with the main weakness of our deck: flyers. Fumespitters, turn 3 Scrabblers, edicts and myr deal with that which does not fly well enough. It is Olivia's Dracoon however that is required to deal with Delver and its ilk.
2. Faithless Looting
Not much needs to be said about a card that makes waves in almost every format. Here it nets us X card advantage, where X is between 0 and 2 depending on the number of Brownscales and madness creatures you discarded. Oh yeah, and you get to do it TWICE.
3. Removal (Edict, Bolt, Firebolt, All Sorts Of Bolts)
Most TE decks can't really afford to spend decks slots on non-creature removal, outside of Dead Weight in Abzan Auramancer builds. The reason being that you need creatures for everything you do, bolts are fine and good until you realize you would rather have a Stinkweed than a TE in hand... and that is quite the horrid feeling.
So why make an exception here?
We don't have Spore Frog, we don't have Tilling Treefolk, we don't have Battlefield Scrounger. Out toolbox is simply robbed of great many cards that allowed us to beat Bogles or Elves for instance, that is why Electrickery and Hydriblast are permissible. Because we can't have it all, we can't get lands back from the bin, we can't make our library infinite. Red simply does not aid our grindy, graveyard-centric gameplan well enough to leave us with any other option.