Well, this deck certainty seems interesting, but Spanish inquisition is still my favorite Storm deck. There seems to me to be too much mana and not enough draw/tutor. This deck is definitely interesting, though. Squandered Resources is indeed awesome, though it seems underutilized since there's no way to cheat lands out. It might be interesting to have 2x Living Wish in the mainboard and 2 more in the SB, so in any game you can go for storm or a creature.

What, praytell is Spanish inquisition?

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! (because nobody plays it)

Inquisitor's Pact

B/g Storm combo using Cruel Bargain /Infernal Contract for the draw engine. With Goblin Charbelcher as secondary wincon.

Spanish Inquisition is an interesting Storm build (if a volatile one) that isn't exactly dedicated. I've actually tried to run it a couple times, but every build I've tried has had the problem of feeling like it's trying to do too many damn things. Then again, Belcher and I have never gotten along (we have a history). I would actually almost rather run Oops! than Belcher.

The stability of ANT is really what I enjoy about playing it. Capable of explosive openings, but pretty resilient to hate as far as combo decks go. I think this offers some genuine stability due to plan c being completely out of left field.

Belcher is a joke. It's dead to U/x control and a perfect example of a glass cannon. To me, ANT always felt too slow and too much of a one-trick pony since Ill-Gotten Gains is dead in U/x matchups. Plus Brainstorm just feels like it shouldn't be in a fast combo deck.

SI's advantages are unexpectedness and threat density. About 20 cards in every list put cards in your hand. I've gone off T1 despite 2 Forces thrown at me before. It has great mulligans, and can combo out in any number of ways. Also, if you fizzle, you can recover and try again remarkably fast.

The plan C here is a good strength, though. Emrakul seems a bit out of reach, but Obliterator is awesome. Dodecapod is an odd choice. I'd rather go with Obstinate Baloth .

This deck folds to a lone Thoughtseize or Duress and has nothing aside from Brainstorm to protect it.

Removing Past in Flames ups the vulnerability factor greatly - Recoup is nowhere close to a replacement for it. Past in Flames is not in the deck to be relied on - it serves as both an alternate engine and backup when faced with disruption. Removing it is removing the biggest resilience factor the deck has.

The only matchup Emrakul, the Aeons Torn would be even close to playable would be Show and Tell matches, but why would you dedicate 4 sideboard slots to that over something like a Duress ? In all other cases, it's virtually uncastable and a waste of space - and if you could somehow cast it, why wouldn't you just Tendrils for the win?

Act on Impulse is way overcosted for legacy - in a format where Ponder and Preordain exist, this is wasted space.

Not running any numbers of Duress , Thoughtseize , Cabal Therapy = Force of Will GG

Not running any numbers of Duress , Thoughtseize , Cabal Therapy = Daze (usually) GG

Phyrexian Obliterator = Too overcosted, too vulnerable to counterspells/removal. Repeat after me, if it costs 4 in Legacy, it better be Jace, the Mind Sculptor , Bloodbraid Elf , or Sneak Attack .

No answer to Ethersworn Canonist or Gaddock Teeg is wrong.

Squandered Resources is awful in a metagame full of Abrupt Decay , thereby making a fitting name for itself.

No Past in Flames or Ad Nauseam means you are reliant on Infernal Tutor and that alone to find a win condition, meaning a slow, irrelevant clock in 90 percent of games.

TL;DR This deck basically took all of the best things about storm out of the deck and replaces it with garbage. The deck can certainly pull off some wins, no doubt. But against even a half-assed competitive deck, this deck folds as it is literally a glass cannon without any support or protection (which is, ironically the same criticism many people have shown towards Belcher in these comments), with a slow, ineffective and weak backup plan.

If you want to play storm, play ANT or TES, real storm decks that offer both consistency and resiliency, neither of which this deck offers.

It's actually surprisingly resilient to hand disruption due to threat density from the tests I've run. (Aside from that, I also recommended pro-active hand protection if you read the article).

Anyway, the entire point was to bring up something that hasn't seen play. It'll have flaws because it's a fairly raw idea, it's not well refined like ANT or the most played Legacy decks (most of which are old decks with a few new tricks anyway).

If you would like to contribute to the possibilities of the deck, that's cool. However, the response: "this is crap due to x" is irrelevant in Legacy, hell, Miracles basically folds to 12 Post but crushes Delver. It's way Legacy works.

reverendvile777 I understand you have a strong opinion here but please, for future reference, be a little bit more respectful. I doubt you would want someone calling something you built or like "garbage". You bring up great points about needing answers for things but this deck seems to be in the prototype phase (as in needing more testing and fairly new) and as such will need fleshing out.

I've been saying for a while that Act on Impulse is going to get something banned from storm in modern. (Yes I know this is legacy.) It's essentially "draw 3" with no downside in storm. You have tons of mana open and more than likely you will "draw" one or two rituals to cast anything you want.

The problem with your counter-argument, is that this version of storm isn't just bad against one or two big players, it's bad against all of them. It's too slow to fight other combo decks. It's too easy to get put to sleep by control decks. Even Goblins have 11-12 hard responses in the 75 (Thalia, Wasteland , Rishadan Port ).

When considering the viability of a deck, I try to consider how it would fare in common matchups, and I can't think of any that would ever be favored, except maybe lands.dec (before boarded-in Sphere of Resistance ). The deck needs a lot of tweaking to be able to protect itself enough to perform in the metagame. For example, a set of Abrupt Decay and some number of Xantid Swarm in the side is almost necessary to combat hate and permission. Second, lots of inferior cards need to go to make room for better replacements. Act on Impulse for Ponder is a perfect example. Hell, even Rain of Filth is, for all intents and purposes, a better Squandered Resources for this deck. Lastly, running 4 mainboard Tendrils is too much. You don't want one in an opening hand and you really don't want 2. It's better to tutor yourself into a singleton consistently than rely on drawing it when you need to combo. You're already running Tutor+Diamond so running the full 4 Tendrils is largely unnecessary, those spots could easily be made into Duress which would give this deck much needed protection. Move Empty the Warrens to side or get rid of it entirely. And by the lord you need some kind of engine to get the ball rolling. Past in Flames , Ad Nauseam , Burning Wish , otherwise many games will just turn into durdlefest while you dig for the out that may or may not ever come.

Therein lies the big issue in trying to brew storm for legacy - unlike most combos that involve 2 cards to win, Tendrils is essentially a 10-card combo. In order for it to be effective, you have to build with the ten-card combo in mind, and how you're going to execute that. Excluding the storm engines hampers the ability to make that happen, and forces you to rely on dumb-luck and topdeck scenarios. This build of storm just sacrifices all the inevitability that makes Storm worth playing. With some balance tweaks it could perform much better, but until a relevant, format-breaking card is printed for this shell, this storm build will live in the shadow of TES and ANT.

Ohthenoises, I have to disagree on Act on Impulse . Reason being,

Serum Visions , Sleight of Hand , Faithless Looting , and even Desperate Ravings are playable turn 1, 2, 3, etc, all the way down to the combo turn.

Act on Impulse is only good on one turn, the combo turn.

For that reason alone, it will probably never see play, much less get anything banned.

All of the following comments are said with 2 years of storm experience in modern, 3 different versions of storm. There is a big difference between the cards you linked.

SV and SoH both take U and during the combo in modern it can be very hard to get U if you had to use your dual sources to kickstart the combo. I have often fizzled out because I didn't have the U to cast my draw but had 15 or so R in the pool. (This includes a full set of Manamorphose , and enough U/R lands in an attemt to mitigate that.) however those two provide true card advantage, so that's fine.

Faithless Looting provides hand filtering, that's all, hand filtering isn't card advantage, it's card quality. Like scry in hind sight. AoI allows you to "refill" an empty hand where FL doesn't, in fact, were you to cast FL with no hand you must discard your hand.

DR is good, it provides actual card advantage but it's random kicker can kick your combo in the nuts. Draw a land and your Grapeshot ? Wouldn't it be a shame if you dropped it in the graveyard?!

You can usually start your combo with any random cards in hand but without a RELIABLE source of card ADVANTAGE you will fizzle out.

Faithless Looting doesn't net any literal card advantage, you are correct. And Desperate Ravings ditching a key combo piece does really suck. If only there was some way to make use of things in the graveyard...

...oh yeah, you have Past in Flames , one of the two core cards this entire deck is currently built around. Many builds also play Thought Scour , milling themselves to take advantage of this. So in context, yes, that's card advantage, and more importantly, these allow you to dig for Past in Flames and Pyromancer Ascension in the early turns, which Act on Impulse doesn't. These cards are essential for this reason - no PiF or PA = no combo, period.

Stumbling on blue is a thing, which is why I go to great lengths to prioritize casting order to get the most value out of Manamorphose , aka, not casting it without an active Ascension unless absolutely necessary. Also, Gitaxian Probe is another card I forgot to list, and it doesn't care about blue sources. Drawing 2 with an active ascension for 2 life is pretty amazing, doing it 6-8 times in a single game usually does it.

My point is, Act on Impulse is literally a dead card until the combo turn, and at that point, it's simply a win-more card that takes up precious space for the engine. It's not good enough to see any major play, and certainly does nothing to break the deck in any way that would require bannings. It would be fine as a miser but anything more than that is taking up precious wiggle space a Storm deck doesn't have.

I'm not going to keep this conversation going with the tone you're using in this thread, there's no point.

Act on Impulse is fine as it turns out. It's actually proven damn explosive during my test piloting of the deck in question. I am honestly working on fitting it into my current Modern Storm build due to the results that this deck has given me running it. Is it the fastest card in the format? No, not really, but it does enable kills like no one's business without the possibility of accidentally smoking yourself.

As such, while hand sculpting is necessary, in this case, it's not exactly what Act on Impulse was meant to do. I think that any deck with 0 cmc ramp and 1 cmc rituals is exactly where this card wants to be.

As an aside about Modern Storm: Honestly, during the time when I was piloting Modern Storm, I would've rather punched myself in the nuts than use Desperate Ravings , Wild Guess or Faithless Looting , but that's a story for another time.

What tone am I using exactly? An in-touch, informed one? Like I've played Magic before? I presented a real argument, can you present a real answer? I have played Storm for years in Legacy, Vintage, and Modern, and Act on Impulse lacks the versatility of being able to dig for your combo that other cantrips and filtering spells do. If you run 4 AoI and end up with 2 opening hand, you have pretty much lost most games before ever taking a turn, whereas all the aforementioned draw spells are still usable to dig you into a winning scenario. It's a cute card when you're comboing off, but like I said, 95% of games, properly piloted, you are already winning without this card, and the 5% of games where you might fizzle for lack of a blue mana is not worth diluting your deck with dead cards that don't do anything until you combo. It's just not what a competitive storm deck wants in the 75.

As for the deck on topic, after running a few test runs, it lacks consistency. After a few dozen goldfishes, the only winning scenario I was ever able to produce was Empty the Warrens for 5 - rather unimpressive by legacy standards, but most likely a winning scenario nonetheless. Everything else before t5 was either a complete fizzle or wasn't enough damage to end the game (you don't get second chances when running storm). Legacy is a turn 3 format. And this isn't taking into account opposing disruption, either. Past in Flames , Ad Nauseam , Burning Wish , and the missing cantrips all reduce or eliminate this dependence on luck by enabling a streamlined path to victory. Even the inclusion of singleton Ill-Gotten Gains would add a great deal of inevitability to this deck that it desperately needs - you need more effective ways to generate lethal storm count. Otherwise, this is usually a t4-5 deck at best, in which case, you might as well run UR Storm and play modern. In testing, having Act on Impulse in over half of my opening hands instead of a Ponder or Preordain was just morbidly depressing. It lacks resilience (4 copies of Tendrils isn't considered resiliency), it lacks explosiveness, it lacks consistency, and it's not even a budget deck after all this sacrifice. You could spend far fewer dollars just making mono-black storm that's far more consistent than this, for less than 500 bucks, less than 100 if you exclude the Lion's Eye Diamond package. If you're gonna drop over a thousand dollars on this deck anyway, why not just spend the extra 50-100 bucks on a good version? This deck just doesn't stand the test of reality, and the changes necessary to balance it leaves you with either ANT or TES.

Cool your jets, boy-o. Condescension is not welcome.... ever. Again, if you've got a constructive idea, sweet, if not "this sucks because x is better" is against the point. I would quote the adage about winning an argument on the internet, but it would probably rub you the wrong way.

The idea is to promote constructive thought and innovation through interesting interactions, not "check out what I'm bringing to SCG on Sunday." Frankly, I could do a set of articles on the decks that have the highest winning percentages in Legacy, but that would be boring as hell (and I'd never get to go share some of my favorite decks). I'd rather keep it interesting with decks that aren't played often but have ideas that have potential. There, I said it, I'm not writing about what deck to invest in next if you want to invest in the format, I'm writing about what decks amuse me, I'm writing about the interesting ideas that I'm finding through playing at watching Magic in my favorite format.

Asides:

1) If you think this deck is a pile of crap, I can't wait until you see the write ups I have primed and ready to go on Greg Hatch's Mono U Martyr, Legacy Birthing Pod (Nic Fit) and Turbo Depths. Why write about these decks? Because people take the game too damn seriously and forget to have fun sometimes.

2) Burning Oath or TPS?