Your first goal in the early turns is to find a spell discounter.
Goblin Electromancer
is generally best for this, but
Curious Homunculus
is slightly better if you play it on turn 2 and have a
Gifts Ungiven
in hand (casting Gifts on turn 3 will put three spells into your graveyard on its own, which flips Homunculus on turn 4). Ideally, you find and play one in the first couple turns of the game.
In this ideal situation, you are casting
Gifts Ungiven
on turn 3. Gifts is a pretty unique card in that it lets your opponent choose which of the four (or fewer) cards will go into your graveyard; Storm decks play off of this feature by searching for
Past in Flames
, which makes any cards that get dumped into the graveyard from Gifts fair game. The first time you cast Gifts, the pile you want to search for is
Desperate Ritual
,
Pyretic Ritual
,
Past in Flames
, and
Grapeshot
.
Your lines of play branch off a little bit here, as they're dependent on what your opponent chooses and your board state. From the other side's perspective, their choice depends on your land count most of the time: if you have 3 or more mana available, someone who's experienced in the matchup will give you the Rituals and dump the PiF and Grapeshot in the bin, which makes it more difficult kill them (a storm count of 9 with Grapeshot in hand and Past in Flames previously cast is lethal since you can cast Grapeshot twice. Putting it in the graveyard gives you only one Grapeshot cast, which means you need a storm count of 19 to win). If you have less than 3 mana available for whatever reason, they might give you the PiF and Grapeshot and gamble on whether you have a Ritual in hand or not.
For now, we'll assume you were given the two Rituals and the Past in Flames and Grapeshot were put in the graveyard. From here, the process is fairly simple:
-
Make mana with Rituals.
-
Cast
Past in Flames
from hand or graveyard.
-
Make more mana with Rituals from graveyard.
-
If the Storm count isn't high enough, use lands or
Wild Cantor
to make blue mana and cast
Gifts Ungiven
from graveyard.
-
Search for another pile (
Desperate Ritual
,
Pyretic Ritual
,
Gifts Ungiven
,
Grapeshot
).
-
Repeat from step 3, cast
Grapeshot
s once the Storm count is high enough.
Note that you should use your blue mana very sparingly, since you'll need it to recast Gifts (or whatever other blue draw spells) to refill your hand/graveyard with spells.
