So, I played in a Modern tourney yesterday with the Channel Fireball Storm deck from Worlds. I liked it... except for the fact that I went 1-3. Part of that was that I drew a few terrible opening hands, part of it was some play mistakes, but the majority of it felt like the deck's fault.
In all but one of the games I played, Treasure Cruise felt absolutely useless. The only time I successfully cast it, I was already winning the game and would have done just as well with any other cantrip. As is, Storm just doesn't get enough cards into the graveyard to reliably Cruise to victory.
As a Storm player, I had two options. Either I could cut Cruise and go on with my life, or I could try to build the deck more around Cruise. Here, I chose the latter. Faithless Looting replaced Sleight of Hand as a cantrip to better dump cards into my grave. The biggest change by far, though, is
Ideas Unbound
.
Ideas Unbound
is very similar to Treasure Cruise - it's a draw-three with a pretty large downside. It's useful at two points in the game.
Before we start comboing out, we can use Ideas as a larger Faithless Looting, filtering through our deck and dumping three cards in our grave to enable Past in Flames, trigger Pyromancer Ascension, or feed [[Treasure Cruise.
After we have two counters on our Ascension and we're going off, casting an Ideas wins us the game, as drawing six cards for two mana tends to do.
To better obtain mana for Ideas, I replaced Shivan Reef with Cascade Bluffs. We can use the Bluffs after a ritual, turning one red mana into two blue mana for either a pair of cantrips or Ideas. It works better this way, but you have to plan what order you play your lands in and what order you tap your lands in to a much greater degree.
The white splash is for Wear / Tear in the board. We can also board into Deceiver Exarch + Splinter Twin
, a combo that we find easy to filter to and that is not affected at all by Storm hate cards. We board into it game two, dodging their hate, then board back game three, dodging it again.
If you have any questions or suggestions, please comment and stuff. I do want to make this good.
